The Sleeping Beauty Proposal (38 page)

The truth was, ninety-nine percent of her best desserts came off the backs of boxes—Hershey's fudge cake, banana pudding with Nilla wafers, icebox cake made from Nabisco chocolate cookies—though on Saturday nights she'd make dark chocolate sauce from scratch. I
love
that fudge sauce, especially over peppermint ice cream.

But actually make it myself? No way. I don't care if it's as easy as my mother says. Once I start whipping up fudge sauce, I'll be on to brownies and cookies, slowly easing into the hard stuff like cakes, which require whole days to bake, cool, and frost. After that, can roasting a turkey and making tetrazzini with leftovers be far behind?

I shudder to think.

"Thank you sooo much,” I coo, pecking her on the cheek and giving her a quick hug. “This is really, really nice.”

"So . . . you'll go?” Mom asks doubtfully, her fading blue eyes questioning.

“Of course I'll go. I'm looking forward to it. I'm actually very, very, very excited.”

She sits back, satisfied. “Good. Because my guess is you'll be delighted by how much you'll like it. I've got a packet of information at home for you to read and even one of Chef Renee's cookbooks I bought on sale. Who knows—this might open a whole new world for you, Julie.”

“Who knows?” I say, throwing up my hands in wonderment.

“Ha, ha,” Em singsongs as we leave Mike's and head into a soaking May drizzle. “You have to go to school.”

Yeah? That's what she thinks.

After Em cooks dinner (raspberry chicken avec Chambord/wild rice/asparagus), she retreats to her room to do homework. Dad falls asleep as usual in the wing chair with the TV on low, and Mom and I? Well, what I had in mind was a relaxing evening on the couch with a book and maybe a teeny-tiny slice of the Baba Rum cake we bought at Mike's. It is, after all, Mother's Day. The dishes can wait.

But not Mom.

Soon she's puttering around my kitchen, wrapping up food and quietly stacking plates. It's the quiet part that drives me nuts, because it's so damn false. She
wants
me to hear so I'll feel guilty, even though it's my house and as far as I'm concerned the dishes can sit until next year.Why can't she leave them be?

I try to read my book, but it's no good. I'm dealing with a pro here. She hums tunelessly. She drops cutlery. She goes, "Ow!” if the water's too hot.And finally, when she groans as she bends down to put away a serving plate, I declare defeat.

“You should start with the glasses first.” Victorious in her efforts, she happily dunks the Orrefors delicately in the fresh soapy water. “That way there's no greasy residue.”

Thank you, Heloise, I think, waiting with a dish towel to dry, and wondering when she's going to stop wearing those godawful T-shirts with the silkscreen prints: herbs, wildflowers, cardinals at the bird feeder.

Em and I have bought her other shirts,
normal
shirts worn by normal people, that she professes to adore. But the next day, there she is going out to get the mail with a big grizzly bear stamped across her bosom and the word
ALASKA
written in loopy cursive around her waist.

“This is the last dish in Aunt Charlotte's pattern,” Mom says, handing me a rather hideous gold and green bowl.“All the rest she threw at Uncle Herbert.”

I know this, of course, because Mom tells the exact same story every single time she sees that bowl. I can recite in my sleep how Aunt Charlotte trashed her entire set of wedding china when Uncle Herbert came home to announce that he'd blown all their savings in electric energy. And how Charlotte eventually admitted that she'd been itching for an excuse to get rid of that pattern all along since Herbert's mother chose it, and Charlotte, then a young bride-to-be, had reluctantly agreed simply to appease her future mother-in-law, who turned out to be a right witch who intentionally chose an ugly pattern.

Often my mother recounts these vignettes of family history when she's doing chores, yapping about Aunt Charlotte's plates or Uncle Herbert's basset hound, Pokey, who spent his days in Herbert's Laundromat, where the steam zapped Pokey of his zing. Sometimes she incorporates cleaning tips, like how Nana used to spray the plastic shower curtain liners to keep them from molding. (Whereas my solution is to throw them out.) Or how, after the market crash of 1929, Great-aunt Louise kept her family of five fed for two weeks on one ham, thanks to an old-fashioned hand-crank meat grinder.

“You learned how to make the most of every last scrap during the Depression,” Mom inevitably adds when retelling the Great-aunt Louise Great Depression ham story. “Then again, I make the most of every last scrap, too. I'm not from your disposable generation.”

Tonight, though, aside from the Aunt Charlotte comment, my mother grows taciturn, a word I learned when I studied for my SATs and I don't think I've used once since. She is pensive, moving methodically from good glasses to everyday glasses to good plates to not-so-good plates to cutlery, her gray brows furrowing as she wipes and rinses.

I decide that her sullenness is the fault of my brother, Paul, a playboy stockbroker in New York City who has forgotten to call on Mother's Day. An unforgivable sin in her book, and one not easily atoned for with belated flowers or chocolate.

“It's not Paul,” Mom says when I gleefully accuse him. “Anyway, he did send me a card and a pass to the Lilly Day Spa in Waverly.”

Damn.That's what I wanted.

“No, if there's any reason I'm off,” she says with a pout, “it's because of you.”

I dump the forks into the dishwasher, falsely accused again. “Me? What have I done now?”

“It's not what you've done. It's what you're going to do. Or, rather,
not
going to do. You're not going to go to those dessert classes I got. I just know it.”

I find myself turning red as I attempt to sputter a lie. “That's not . . . not true. Of course I'm . . .”

“Don't lie, Julie. I don't care if you skip the classes as much as I care that you tell the truth.”

“Look, Mom. It's not that I don't appreciate the classes or your intention behind giving them. I do. It's just that”—what reason can I invent so I don't hurt her feelings?—“I have to work on Friday nights, and it might be hard for me to get away.”

“Bull.” Mom hands me the washed rice pot, suds still clinging to the handle. “You can change your schedule—it's far enough away. And you haven't even looked at your packet or cookbook. You've shown absolutely no interest in this gift whatsoever. I hate to sound crass, but those dessert classes weren't cheap, you know. Quit a bit of scratch for an old lady on a fixed income.”

This is a new personal record for her. Gift guilt + daughter inconsideration + expense + the old lady + the “fixed income” line. One can't help but be impressed.

“Sorry, Mom.You're right. I'll go the classes and enjoy them. In fact, I'll read over the packet tonight just to make you happy.”

Mom goes, “Hmph.”Though I can tell she's pleased.

But it's not until long after she's in bed and I'm flipping through the packet that I smell a skunk. My dear sweet mother's not eager to see me improve my culinary skills one bit.

For, as I scan a list of fellow future classmates, I come to the bottom and stop short at the name in bold block letters.

MICHAEL SLAYTON.

The man I once loved to the depths of my soul.

The man whose career I once ruined.

Surely this can be no coincidence.

About the Author

Agatha Award-winning novelist Sarah Strohmeyer is the author of
The Cinderella Pact,The Secret Lives of Fortunate Wives,
and the successful Bubbles series (
Bubbles All the Way, Bubbles Betrothed, Bubbles A Broad, Bubbles Ablaze, Bubbles in Trouble,
and
Bubbles Unbound
). She has worked as a journalist for numerous publications, including the
Plain Dealer
and the
Boston Globe.
She lives with her family outside Montpelier,Vermont.