Recipe for Disaster (6 page)

My mother never came back, not for any length of time. A week here, two weeks there, with longer and longer separations between. She missed my high school and college graduations, neither of which I bothered to attend myself, in her defense. When she came back for Grand-mère’s funeral, I hadn’t seen her at all in over five years, and hadn’t spoken to her for over two. She flew in from Scottsdale, where she lives with her current husband, Alan, a septuagenarian of apparently significant wealth and even more patience; he and my mother have now been married for nearly seven years, a record for her. She stayed just long enough to put the house on the market furnished, transfer the money and bonds into her own accounts, and empty the house of the few bits and pieces of jewelry and the cabinets of any family heirloom trinkets, the Bavarian china my great-grandmother smuggled into the country wrapped in bed linens in a false-bottomed trunk, the good silver. Before it even sank in that my grandmother hadn’t specifically left me a single thing, my mother loaded her goodies into Grand-mère’s impeccably maintained three-year-old Cadillac sedan, and headed back for Arizona. We had spent approximately seven hours together, five of them at the funeral home. I got Schatzi by default; apparently Alan is allergic. Lucky me. I regret daily that I didn’t just drop the dog off at a shelter.

I look around, taking in the glorious bones of this decrepit pile. Grant is right about one thing, we’ll clear some serious cash when we’re done. But in part because I’ve called in every favor I’ve banked with my favorite subs. Nearly every specialist I’ve brought in has done the work at cost, or even sometimes for beer and pizza. I may be prickly, but I am respected, and a lot of the guys I’ve worked with over the years in the trades appreciate my style, as long as they aren’t on the receiving end. This place is full of overage materials collected from their other jobs, salvage from their clients who didn’t want to bother to try to sell the perfectly good stuff that was simply not their style. Conservatively, I’ve probably saved nearly fifty grand already on the backs of their generosity, and while I know some of that is because they genuinely like me, a lot of it is because they like the work they get from MacMurphy, and they know it keeps them on the top of my preferred list when they show up on their days or nights off to help me put this place back together. If I hang my own shingle? I’ll be a very small fish, and on all of their back burners, and for sure I’ll be paying full freight on everything. This house will be one big score, but the rest of them will likely have a much narrower profit margin, and I think I need to explain that to Grant before he gets much more flippant about my career path. If he thinks I’m going to be making this kind of money all the time, he’s sadly mistaken.

Joe once told me that the reason I was going to be a great homebuilder was that I never really had a home. I assured the big old bear that I absolutely had, he’d given me the best home a girl could ask for, and that was the reason I was going to be great. Because I learned from the best, and got to live with him to boot. It’s the only time I ever saw him actually cry. He swore it was the fumes from the stain we were using, but he had that smile he had when he was really pleased about something. And I know that he was right; I am a great homebuilder. But would I be a great independent businesswoman? It was one thing when we worked together; he was yin to my yang, salt to my pepper. Without him by my side, to temper my temper, as it were, I’m awfully doubtful.

I push aside the floor plans to make some space on the six-foot folding table I use for a desk-slash-dining surface, and fetch one of my coffees from the fridge. I put down the plastic bag the food came in for a placemat, and gingerly peel the sodden paper from my sandwich. Most tourists, having done some research on Chicago delicacies, order their Italian beef sandwiches “wet,” meaning that a slosh of extra meat gravy is dumped over the beef once it is in the bread. They think it means they are in the know, much as they do when they order a Chicago hot dog and tell the seller to “drag it through the garden.” Chicagoans, almost to a person, order their dogs simply with “everything” if they want the classic seven toppings, and their Italian beef “dipped,” meaning that the whole sandwich, once assembled, is grasped gently between tongs and completely submerged briefly in the vat of jus. This results in a sandwich that isn’t just moist, it’s decadently squooshy, in a way that sends rivulets of salty meaty juice down your arm when you eat.

This is the sandwich that necessitated the invention of the Chicago Sandwich Stance, a method of eating with your elbows resting on your dining surface, leaning over to hopefully save shirtfronts and ties from a horrible meaty baptism. Dipped Italian beef sandwiches in Chicago require a full commitment. Once you start, you are all in till the last bit of smushy bread and shred of spicy beef is gone. It requires that beverages have straws and proximity. Because if you try to stop midway, to pop in a French fry, or pick up a cup, the whole thing will disintegrate before your very eyes. You can lean over to sip something as long as you don’t let go of your grasp on the sandwich. Fries are saved for dessert.

Most people wouldn’t suspect how good iced coffee would be with Italian beef and French fries, but it is genius. My personal genius. Bringing sweet and bitter and cold to the hot, salty umami bomb of the sandwich and the crispy fries—insanely good. You may borrow it if you like. I also like hot coffee with potato chips in the morning. Do not judge me.

I check my watch. I have a good four hours to work before I have to head home to shower for the girls. I pull my ragged legal pad of notes over and look for a small project, something I can complete. I won’t be back here for at least a week, maybe longer. The Manning job will start full throttle on Monday, and that will mean long days of meeting with subs, and long nights generating budgets and lists of tasks, and there will be nothing left of me to bring here. I spot, way down on the second page, a small note.
Pantry shelves-lip-chalk
. I had seen a gorgeous pantry online where each shelf had a decorative strip of wood creating an inch-high lip, just high enough to prevent canned goods and other items from accidentally sliding off the shelf when caught with an elbow or moved aside to reach for something in the back. Having had many pantry accidents myself over the years, including dumping over an opened five-pound sack of flour, shattering a bottle of molasses, and upending a large jar of rice, I know the magic of this simple idea. And I’ve gone it one better. My idea is to paint the strips with chalkboard paint. Everyone and their brother is going full-on Martha in their pantries these days, with matching jars and containers, custom labels and expensive organization systems. This will feed right into that Pinterest-driven passion, allowing the homeowners to organize however they like and label the shelves themselves if they choose. And if they aren’t part of the cult of pantry, the matte charcoal will still be a lovely design element.

It takes me less than a half an hour to paint the wood strips. I take an hour to go over my lists, cleaning up some items I’ve either finished or rethought, and making a new list of the things it makes the most sense to tackle next, and what sort of supplies and materials I will need on hand. By the time I’m done, the strips are dry, and I measure all the shelves in the pantry and use a small Japanese pull saw in my miter box to create the necessary cuts. I’m allergic to butt joints; that sloppy look of two pieces of wood just slapped up next to each other makes my skin crawl. I like a clean cut, a mitered corner, a dovetailed joint. I glue and clamp the pieces to the edges of the shelves one at a time, tacking them in with finishing nails. I’ll come back after the glue is set to put a tiny bit of filler in the little nail holes and touch up the paint. But for all intents and purposes, the project is done, with ten minutes to spare. I know it is something of a cop-out; the kitchen is so close to fully complete, this little pantry gilding is really the kind of thing I would usually do at the very end. But for some reason I just couldn’t face the idea of starting one of the bigger projects that hang over my head, knowing how little time I will have for this house.

Grant’s words from the other night ring in my ears. “
What if you did it full-time?
” I can’t even begin to imagine how glorious that would be. But I push it out of my head, take a last look at the work I was able to do today, and know that it will get finished. Eventually.

W
hat’s new in the land of nipples?” Caroline asks, putting a forkful of flaky sea bass in her mouth. She’s outdone herself tonight; the fish is seared crispy, with a soy-miso-butter sauce, duck-fat-roasted baby potatoes, and green beans with lemon-chive oil. Everything is absolutely delicious. Not to mention the twenty-year-old Riesling Carl left for us, a razor’s edge of sweet and acid and the perfect foil for the salt and richness of the food. He’s out for the evening at what he calls his “poker night,” a BYOB dinner with his best wine-collector pals. They pick a price range out of a hat at each dinner to guide the next. Apparently this is the most challenging annual 7/11 night. As in, wines cannot cost less than seven or more than eleven dollars a bottle. It’s Carl’s favorite. He can find the most delicious things in that range; you could drink them at the finest restaurants and never know. Plonk is not an option for Carl.

“Must you?” Hedy says, picking up a green bean in her elegant fingers and dropping it neatly in her mouth. Hedy never gets anything on her shirt. It’s maddening. I’ve already had not one, but two potato chunks land in my lap, and my turtleneck sweater is speckled with miso sauce and chive oil. “Do you have to use the clinical term? Can’t you just ask her how work is going?”

Marie laughs her throaty chuckle. “It’s just a word, Hedy.” She turns to Caroline. “All is pretty good in the land of nipples, thank you.”

Marie is a tattoo artist who exclusively works with breast cancer patients. She specializes in faux three-dimensional nipples for reconstruction patients who have lost theirs, giving them small works of art that when seen from the front are indistinguishable from the real thing. The 3-D effect she can get with shading and color is beyond remarkable. I’ve seen photos of women who have had surgery on just one breast, and you cannot distinguish between the real nipple on one and the tattoo on the other. She also does some work on patients who chose not to have reconstruction, and just want something pretty either masking or highlighting their scars, giving them flowering vines or flocks of tiny birds, rushing water teeming with fish, or a fire-flocked phoenix. But mostly, she does nipples. And she does them better than anyone else. People fly her all over the country to get nipples. She once did a pair for a superfamous movie star, and no one ever says the name Angelina out loud, but we have our suspicions. She can neither confirm nor deny; all those medical privacy laws are in place, damn them. “I did one this week with a faux nipple ring in it.”

“I. Am. Eating,” Hedy says, waving a potato at the end of her fork at Marie.

“Relax. She isn’t tattooing people’s labia or sphincters for chrissakes. THAT wouldn’t be dinner conversation.” Caroline is our resident homemaker and mother hen, and seven years older than the rest of us. She was an incredibly successful Gold Coast Realtor when she met Carl six years ago, twelve years her senior and a venture capitalist. They fell in love, got married, and then two of the tech start-ups he had funded merged and did a very successful IPO and he declared them both retired. They moved out of their condo downtown to a gorgeous Victorian house in Evanston on a corner triple lot with a wraparound porch and an amazing backyard. They travel, do good works, and—what I think is the most impressive—they volunteer time and not just money. They are as likely to be on a Habitat for Humanity work site in gloves and dust masks as they are sitting at the board meeting or dancing at the gala. Caroline discovered that the life suits her; she has time for her gorgeous garden, and a passion for cooking, and she’s learning Portuguese. She doesn’t miss the cutthroat world of multimillion-dollar real estate in the least. She makes us soup when we’re sick, and brings us vases of cut flowers from her garden, sources the perfect presents, plans fun evenings.

“JE-SUS, Caroline, why do you make all this amazing food and then try to ruin my appetite with all your nipple talk?” I love the banter between them. They couldn’t be more different, but they’ve been friends forever. Their dads were colleagues and Caroline babysat Hedy when she was little. According to Caroline, Hedy idolized her. According to Hedy, Caroline was a geeky bookish teenager who couldn’t find a better friend than a feisty seven-year-old. But for only-child Hedy, it is clear that Caroline was always the older sister she needed, and for Caroline, the only girl with three older brothers, a little sister wasn’t exactly an unwelcome thing either.

I met them at the same time, at a client meeting eight years ago. Caroline was the Realtor, Hedy was the interior designer, I was still relatively new at MacMurphy, and it was the first project I was managing on my own. We worked late, ended up going out for dinner; two bottles of wine later we were best buds. Marie is my oldest and dearest friend, and until I met Grant, the only person who knew my secret heart. We met when we were fourteen, the one summer I went to overnight camp. Joe had gotten a summer job in the North Woods, renovating an old barn to serve as a new mess hall and kitchen, and agreed to also serve as the camp handyman, in no small part so that I could attend for free, and I think in an attempt to get a bit closer with my mom for a cozy summer in the woods. Marie and I were in the same cabin, she was also one of the freebie kids, her fees paid for by some sort of fresh-air-fund program for city kids, and we were both sort of misfits, which bonded us permanently. We didn’t live far from each other at home, and although we went to different high schools, we always stayed in close contact, especially since we both remained in Chicago and lived at home for college. I brought Marie to the third girls’ dinner I had with Hedy and Caroline, and a perfect square was magically formed. It was like
The Craft
. But without magical hair-color changing. Or the nightmare of high school witchery.

“Nipples are totally allowable. Even men have them.” Caroline waves off Hedy’s admonition.

“Ooo! I did a man last week, my first one!” Marie is very excited about this. “He cried like a baby. And not because of the emotional psyche part like my women patients sometimes do, he cried because it hurt. The women never mention the pain. Isn’t that weird?”

God bless her. Marie went to art school to be a painter, got fascinated with skin as a medium, and started doing all that trompe l’oeil body painting that was so popular in the 1990s after Demi’s famous
Vanity Fair
cover. She put herself through school mostly doing that for industrial parties and advertising campaigns, and then got hired to paint fake tattoos on actors for a biker movie that was shooting locally. She met her longtime live-in boyfriend John on the set; he was the consulting tattoo artist. Then seven years ago her stepmom, Leanne, got breast cancer and they couldn’t save her nipples. The doctor offered to tattoo new ones for her, and Leanne asked John if he could do it instead. He said he could, but that he thought Marie should do it, since her eye for realism and color and dimensions was so amazing.

Marie spent six months practice-tattooing slabs of smelly pigskin with John training her, and then gave Leanne the nipples she had always wanted. “Jamie Lee Curtis,
Trading Places
. The nipple women want, and men fantasize about.” Marie did such a great job that Leanne showed them off to everyone at the hospital and all the women in her support group, and Marie got a call from the surgeon asking if he could refer his patients to her regularly. And a career was launched. Marie specializes in the circa 1983 JLC nipple now. It’s her signature. Jamie Lee has no idea how many women are running around with perfect replicas of her perfect nipples.

“ENOUGH.” Hedy rolls her eyes dramatically. “Good lord, Anneke, please save us from nipple talk. How are things going with you?”

“Well, let’s see. My nipples are a little sore from this new bra I bought last week . . .”

“AAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!” Hedy yells, fingers in her ears. And the four of us collapse in giggles.

S
o, what is the plan for the big five-year anniversary?” Hedy asks Caroline when we retire from the dining table for tea in the sunroom.

Caroline blushes prettily. “France.” She is always a little quiet about the fact that she and Carl are insanely wealthy. Especially since it is mostly his money. She made a very nice living when she was working, the sale of her condo paid for the substantial down payment on their first condo together. But since the IPO they are effectively rolling in dough and she is officially a lady who lunches, albeit with more social conscience than many and less shopping than most. She knows that while none of us are living on the edge of poverty, we are all workingwomen, and there is still a part of her that hates feeling kept.

“He’s buying you France? In this economy? Is that wise?” Hedy says with her serious voice. She does deadpan better than anyone.

“I thought five years was wood?” Marie teases.

“Shut up, you wenches, I want to hear about France.” The one thing Grant and I dream about is someday traveling in Europe together. I’ve never been out of North America, and only got my passport when Grant took me to Toronto for a food and wine festival a year ago.

“A couple that Carl knows well have a vacation home in Provence, and have offered to let us borrow it.” She’s hedging, and Hedy smells blood.

“For how long, dearheart?”

Caroline’s blush moves from pink to fuchsia. “Five weeks. Next summer.”

“HA!” Hedy says.

“Oh, honey, how wonderful! A week for every year. What a terrific trip.” Marie claps her hands in genuine delight.

I shake my head. “Caro, you have to stop being apologetic about your wonderful life and fabulous hubby. We are all just really happy for you.”

“I know, you are all so amazing, I’m just . . .” She trails off and we know what she is thinking of. She lost some friends when the money went from “comfortable” to “crazypants rich.” Some people behaved badly. Some people had expectations of charitable endowments and names on buildings. Mostly it was little things like their more casual friends never seeming to reach for a wallet at dinner anymore. And it put a serious strain on her relationship with one of her brothers, who seemed to think that it was suddenly her responsibility to bankroll his business and put his kids through college, neither of which she was inclined to do, and the rest of her brothers deciding that the care and feeding of their aging parents should all be on her dime, making all future family gatherings strained and awkward. Money creates opportunities for jealousy that can’t really be touched by anything else, and we know how much it weighs on her that the simple fact of good fortune is also a source of stress and complications in relationships.

“Fuck the haters if they can’t just be happy for your happy, Caroline. Fuck ’em all.” Hedy, for all her gibing, is always the first and fiercest defender of Caroline.

Caroline smiles at us, and shakes off her momentary hesitation. “Indeed. Fuck ’em.” She raises her teacup and we all drink to her happy.

H
owsh the house?” Hedy slurs, Walter gliding us down Lake Shore Drive back to the city.

“Good. Slow, but good.”

“It’s going to be beautiful when you’re done,” Marie says sleepily. We put away a flock of wine.