Excerpt of Comfort Food by Kate Jacobs

Chapter 1

February, 2006

Gus Simpson adored birthday cake.

Chocolate, coconut, lemon, strawberry, vanilla–she had a particular fondness for the classics. Even though she experimented with new flavors and frostings, drizzling with syrups and artfully arranging hibiscus petals, Gus more often took the retro route with piped-on flowers or a flash of candy sprinkles across the iced top. Because birthday cake was really about nostalgia, she knew, about reaching in and using the senses to remember one perfect childhood moment.

After twelve years as a host on the CookingChannel–and with three successful shows to her credit–Gus had made many desserts in her kitchen studios, from her creamy white chocolate mousse to her luscious peach torte, her gooey caramel apple cobbler and her decadent bourbon pecan pie. A "home cook" without culinary school training, she aimed to be warmly elegant without veering into the homespun: she strived to make her dishes feel complete without being complicated.

Still, birthday cake was something altogether different: one sweet slice fed the spirit as much as the stomach. And Gus relished that perfect triumph.

She loved celebrating so much that she threw birthday parties for her grown daughters, Aimee and Sabrina, for her neighbor and good friend Hannah, for her executive producer (and CookingChannel veep) Porter, and for her longtime culinary assistant who'd recently retired and moved to California.

But Gus didn't stop there. She always made a big ta-da for the nation's anniversary, which wasn't so out of the ordinary for an American, and for December 25, which, again, wasn't all that unusual for someone who'd been raised Catholic. Then she also made a fuss for saints Valentine and Patrick, for Lincoln, for Julia Child (culinary genius; August 15), Henry Fowle Durant (founder of her alma mater, Wellesley; February 22) and Isabella Mary Beeton (author of the famous Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management; March 12). No matter that those guests of honor were quite unavailable to attend, being dead and all.

Some hostesses love parties because they relish being the center of attention. Gus, on the other hand, found her greatest pleasure in creating a party world with a place for everyone and where she believed everyone would be made to feel special.

"Let me fix a little something," Gus said to her daughters, their friends, her colleagues, her viewers. She truly loved the idea of taking care, of nurturing and nourishing. Especially those guests who found it hard to make their way in the crowd: Gus always looked out for those ones the most.

There was only one birthday that Gus was getting tired of organizing. Tired, really, of celebrating at all. Her own. Because in short order–March 25–Augusta Adelaide Simpson was turning fifty.

The problem, of course, was that she didn't feel as old as all that. No, she felt more like a twenty-five-year-old (ignoring, as she often did, the logistical problem that her older daughter, Aimee, was twenty-seven and her younger, Sabrina, was twenty-five). And, as such, she found herself completely caught off-guard–genuinely surprised to add up the years–to find that she'd arrived at the half-century mark.

A half-century of Gus.

"You'll want to use the best sherry you can afford when making a vinaigrette," she had said on a recent show, before realizing the sherry was almost as old as she was.

"I could be bottled up and put on the shelf," she'd said, laughing.

But a nagging dread had snuck up on her, and she resented it. Forty-six, 47, 48, even 49–all those parties had been smashing. When she blew out her candles on last year's cake–a carrot ginger with cinnamon cream cheese icing–and her producer, Porter, had shouted out, "Next year's the big one!" she had laughed along with the crowd. And she felt fine about it. She really, really did. No, really. She did. She hadn't scheduled a session of Botox, hadn't begun wearing scarves to hide her neck. Fifty, she told herself, was no big deal. Until she woke up one morning and realized she hadn't done a thing to plan. She, who never missed a chance to have a party. And that's when she realized that she didn't want to do anything about celebrating, either.

The problem, she reflected one morning while washing her tawny brown hair with color-enhancing shampoo, developed somewhere between working on the show schedule for the upcoming year and learning that the CookingChannel was slashing the budget and ordering fewer episodes than usual.

"All the cable channels are losing market share," Porter had explained. "We just have to ride it out." He'd been in the TV business a long time, longer than Gus, and was enviably successful, a black man in the very white world of food TV. There were rumblings he was even going to be named head of programming. Gus's trust in Porter was absolute.

Then the CookingChannel had hired a style consultant who informed Gus that "after a certain age" some ladies do well to add a few pounds to smooth out the face ("You're wonderfully slender but it wouldn't hurt to fill in the lines, you know," the stylist had said, not unkindly. "Good lighting can only work for so long.") Finally, she'd met Sabrina for dinner one night and admired the couple at the table across from them, a gorgeous black-haired young woman in a bubble-gum-pink dress accompanied by a frowning older woman, her butterscotch hair in a medium-length swingy bob and clad in an oatmeal linen pantsuit. She was startled to realize the wall across from her was mirrored and the grumpy-faced diner was herself. "Are you okay, Mom?" Sabrina had said, signaling the waiter for more water. "You look as though you're a little ill."

Gus wasn't young anymore.

At first she'd tucked this awareness away with her white shoes after Labor Day. But the truth refused to stay hidden, revealing itself when she spotted a wrinkle she'd never noticed or heard a crackle in her knees when she bent over to pull out a saucepan. Or when her longtime sous chef announced, in what seemed like out-of-the-blue fashion, that she was retiring. Which meant she'd reached retirement age. Alarming when you considered that it meant twelve long years had gone by since Gus had her first CookingChannel show, The Lunch Bunch, in 1994. That the young mom who'd twisted her shimmering butterscotch locks into a loose updo, tendrils escaping, had eschewed aprons, and whipped up easy, delicious dishes now, was a parent of girls with jobs and lives and kitchens of their own. Girls who had, sort of, become women.

They weren't really grown-up. Not in the real sense. After all, she'd had two children by the time she was Sabrina's age–and that was in addition to a husband, and a year of adventure in the Peace Corps. Aimee and Sabrina, on the other hand, were far from self-sufficient. Aimee seemed never to have anyone serious in her life, and Sabrina changed boyfriends with the seasons. It was funny, really, how today's twelve-year-olds were far more sophisticated than any middle schoolers Gus remembered and yet the twenty-five-year-olds existed in a state of suspended adolescence. She spent more time worrying about them now than she probably ever had.

So it was easy enough to pop along with the day-to-day of life and not really think about aging in a personal way. But then small things–a word from a stranger, a glance in the mirror–startled her fantasy image. Suddenly, reluctantly, one fact became clear.

Gus Simpson was going to be fifty.

Not, in and of itself, a remarkable event. It happened to other people every day. Surely. But Gus had blithely assumed getting older wouldn't quite happen to her. After all, she was slim (if not exactly a devotee of exercise), had a thriving career, a chunk of money in the bank (well managed by David Fazio, a top financial adviser Alan Holt had recommended years ago), a closet bursting with pricey clothes–Gus's signature look was a comfortably elegant collarless silk duster, layered over a smooth shell, with wide-legged silk georgette trousers–and a convertible in her garage, dammit. She listened to Top 40. She used a digital camera. She had an incredibly tiny cell phone. She knew how to send text messages. She still dressed up at Halloween to give out candy. Wasn't all that enough to keep maturity at bay?

Turning forty-nine had had a jaunty ring to it; fifty felt like she ought to buy a pair of orthopedic shoes.

"It's quite impossible to figure out how to act these days," she told her producer Porter, who had several years on her. "My mother had settled into being a grandmother at this age. But today some women are still having babies at fifty–babies, Porter!"

"Do you want a baby, Gus?" he'd asked, joking.

"No! What I want is to figure out this disconnect between a number on a piece of paper and how I feel inside," said Gus. "Do you know that the women from thirtysomething are now fiftysomething? And they're still young. What about Michelle Pfeiffer? Meryl Streep? Jane Seymour? Oprah? They say fifty is the new thirty."

"So it should be no problem then," reasoned Porter. "You look great."

"And yet it is an issue," admitted Gus. "I have wrinkles. Real wrinkles, not those little crinkles I used to moan about when I turned forty. Porter, I think fondly about turning forty! I mean, I just can't stop wondering, How did I get here?"

"Where did the time go?"

"Yes, really. Where did the time go?" asked Gus. "And when do I get to hit 'pause'?"

And so, she reasoned to herself, it had been natural to fall behind on planning her birthday party. It had been easy to just put it off. Any other year she'd have begun organizing her birthday party immediately after Thanksgiving, deciding first on her cake flavor, arranging the food, sending formal invitations in the mail. (No, Gus Simpson simply did not appreciate the informality of E-vite, thank you very much. The little details were what made guests feel most welcome, she knew.) She could have picked one item or concept–a pomegranate, an orchid, the color puce–and built the entire festivities around it as a theme. Her ability to decorate and entertain was so innate that she simply assumed anyone could throw parsley on a dish and make it look better rather than a haphazard explosion of green.

But not this time; not this year. Suddenly it felt like too much effort: Gus Simpson, one of the most popular entertaining gurus on television, didn't want to throw a party. In fact, she'd have preferred canceling her birthday altogether.

She poured a stream of rich hazelnut-scented coffee from her large French press into an oversized blue-and-white-striped pottery mug. With care she carried her drink to the speckled gray-and-black granite breakfast bar, perching herself on the counter-height navy chair. Gus took a sip, just a little almost-slurp (since no one else was around) so as not to burn her tongue, and flipped through the New York Times, trying to jolly herself out of her gloomy mood. But her natural habit–it was Monday, which meant the weekly Media section, and she loved to follow her industry–led her to a large article above the fold of the paper.

"The New Faces of Food TV," Gus read to herself, feeling a whoosh of anxiety in her chest. "Food is the new fashion and the latest crop of program hosts look as delicious as their culinary creations."

Gus tapped her teeth against each other as she always did when she was tense and scanned the large photo with all the up-and-coming hotshots in cooking television: there was that young surfer chef who always wore shorts and looked barely old enough to be in college, the young Midwestern housewife who only made dishes that took up to six ingredients, and the young Miss Spain who had turned a gig promoting her country's olives into an Internet cult following on YouTube. From there, Gus read how Miss Spain had created her own 10-minute Web show, FlavorBoom, which was also downloadable to TiVo, and had edited a small cookbook that had just come out at the holidays a few weeks before. It had already been a top seller online. The story continued on page 2 of the section, where there was a glamour shot of the petite, black-haired Miss Spain in her crown and far too much mascara, with a large caption underneath: "Carmen Vega: From Beauty Queen to Foodie Queen."

"I bet she can't even cook," Gus announced to her coffee mug, quite ready to close the paper in disgust. But then a familiar line caught her attention and she found herself scanning the words carefully.

'"Imagine there are only a certain set of ingredients and that's all there is to use," says Gus Simpson, CookingChannel's ubiquitous program host and star of the well-known Cooking with Gusto! in a recent interview in Every Day with Rachael Ray. "But we don't all create the same thing. So it's not really about what you put in a dish–it's about how you make that meal taste. It's not about how you make it but about how eating it makes you feel. Cooking, like life, stays interesting when you keep the experience fresh."

And fresh new hosts seem to be how cable is hoping to hold on to viewers, as ratings continue to decline on all channels...'

Blah, blah, blah went the article. On and on about these exciting new voices in the world of food television, all seemingly sanctioned, via the clever use of already reported quotes, by none other than Gus Simpson. Oh, how she hated that! Being interviewed for one article–which had been published over a year ago–and then finding those same words popping up in every other journalist's food story.

The lesson she'd learned: Don't ever say anything, cutesy or cutting, that you don't want to hear parroted back to you for the rest of your life.

Gus thought about crumpling up the paper and tossing it in the bin, but there was no one around to see her dramatics and she always felt that grand behavior wasn't really worth the energy when there was no one to witness it. Television had trained her well. Instead, she sighed and left her spot at the breakfast bar for more comfortable surroundings. She shooed her white cat, Salt, out of an overstuffed wing chair in the bay window and watched her pad her way over to lie in a ray of sun with Pepper, who was black and had a somewhat pungent attitude.

Then, coffee in hand, she settled herself down on the sturdy white twill (for Gus had strong faith in her guests' ability to not spill and in the power of ScotchGard if they did). The large kitchen was a space in which Gus keenly felt a sense of home and was where she did all her important thinking, be it coming up with new recipes or sorting out the endlessly complicated lives of her daughters. The wing chair closest to the French doors, long ago dubbed her "thinking spot" by Aimee, was perfectly positioned to lend a view of the flagstone patio. She could enjoy the color of her divine garden come spring–currently a bit of leftover snow and slushiness from a Westchester winter–as well as have full range of her gleaming kitchen. Sitting in this chair provided what she always called the "viewer's-eye view" because it was how her home appeared on television.

Hers was a dream kitchen, with a deep blue Aga stove, a marble-topped baking area, those granite counters, a deep and divided white farmer's sink, the artfully mismatched cabinets designed to look as though they were pieces of furniture added over time (assuming every flea market and antique shop would miraculously contain wood pieces with precisely the same bun feet and crown molding) and a bank of Sub-Zero freezers and refrigerators along one wall. The piece de resistance? The substantial rectangular island, with eight-burner cooktop and raised backsplash, ample counter space, and breakfast bar to one side (though not immediately in front of the cooktop, of course, where it might ruin the camera shot). The island was the part of her kitchen most familiar to her viewers.

What a great idea it had been to suggest filming at her home when she began her third CookingChannel program, Cooking with Gusto!, in 1999. It certainly cut down commute time and, much more important, had turned the reno into something she could write off. And Gus, for all her professional success, was a devotee of socking away money. For a rainy day. For her retirement. Which had always seemed way, way off, on account of the fact that she was so tremendously, eternally, divinely young. A someday worth planning for but nothing that seemed as though it was about to arrive soon. She was too busy.

In the early years when she first started on television, long before the plump paychecks and the merchandising deals, Gus hosted a half-hour program called The Lunch Bunch based on her menu at her gourmet spot The Luncheonette. It filmed in a studio in Manhattan and she took the train home to the small two-bedroom home she shared with Aimee and Sabrina. It was the same compact Westchester bungalow that she had initially moved into with Christopher, after they'd returned from their overseas Peace Corps stint and had given up living in Manhattan, back when they were barely married. When he'd raved about every dinner she burned and she made him brown-bag lunches, with sexy little notes tucked inside. When they were too new at life and marriage to comprehend the bad that could come. Would come.

The tiny place had been home with their two little girls, and Gus had tried out a variety of careers–taking photographs for the local paper, doing part-time camera work for the local cable station, and making a line of homemade candles–while baking cupcakes for Sabrina and Aimee's school and carpooling the neighborhood kids. Still enjoying the luxury of figuring out what she wanted to do.

Christopher's accident had changed things, of course, spurred her to open The Luncheonette, which attracted the attention of Alan Holt and his cable network. Gus's little restaurant, in Westchester County, just north of New York City, specialized in quick bites and tea parties and the like. She was close enough to the station that commuters popped in for beverages and snacks before catching a train. The décor–bright and light with distressed off-white tables and comfy Parsons chairs upholstered in a wide red-and-cream stripe–had been spruced up to lure in the soccer moms with time between errands and school's end. The small but thoughtful selection of gourmet groceries was selected to entice the adventurous home cooks, both the commuter and soccer mom variety.

It had been a gamble when she opened, a chunk of her late husband's life insurance money dwindling in a bank account and her two young daughters. It seemed as though running her own business would provide her the type of flexibility she needed with two young girls, and she'd always loved to cook. Loved to experiment with flavors and cuisines and making things look pretty. Her friends, though well meaning, disapproved, encouraging her instead to invest and live off the interest. But there wasn't really enough to quite do that, and besides, Gus had wanted the risk. She needed the jolt.

However, taking chances did not translate into being sloppy. No, indeed. And meeting with Alan Holt was a tremendous opportunity she couldn't afford to screw up. She had, in fact, served him several pastries and more than a few sandwiches, never knowing him as more than a regular customer. Until the day he handed her his card and suggested he wouldn't be averse to a home-cooked meal over which they could discuss a business proposal. Gus's fervent hope had been that he was interested in showcasing The Luncheonette in an episode or two.

She remembered vividly when Alan came for dinner in the spring of 1994, when Aimee and Sabrina were both young teens and she was a harried single mom, still keenly missing Christopher though he'd been gone six years by then. It was as though she'd hit the "hold" button on her life when he died, waiting for something she couldn't quite place her finger on that might make it somewhat better, and had instead filled up her days with working and organizing her girls. She hadn't much energy left over, which had been her intention. Just enough to wish for the ability to provide her daughters with the life their father would have wanted for them.

All Gus had asked the day Alan Holt came for dinner was to be left alone in the kitchen and for her girls to go out and cut some flowers. Something bright and cheery they could bring to her so she could do up a vase. Her oldest daughter, Aimee, had promptly walked outside to the back patio and flopped into a wicker chair, arms crossed, while Sabrina slowly wandered off through the front door, with a look Gus couldn't discern between sulking and concentration.

In fact, Gus had been quite prepared for the girls to come back empty-handed from the garden and had put together her own centerpiece hours earlier, working efficiently while her just-turned-into-teenagers slept away a gorgeous sunny Saturday morning. She'd tucked her arrangement onto a shelf above the washing machine, knowing her girls were hardly about to go near anything that seemed like a chore. Her request about gathering flowers had really been a mother's trick to get the kids out of her way while she seasoned and sampled in the kitchen.

And then she saw it: seven stones and one feather.

That's what Sabrina had placed on the center of the polished rosewood table.

"What do you think, Mom?" asked the thirteen-year-old, brushing her glossy black bangs out of her eyes as she gestured to a lineup of polished river rocks arranged by size and a random piece of gray fluff that looked, at a distance, more similar to dryer lint than to something that once winged through the sky.

Gus Simpson had chewed her lip as she pondered her younger daughter's contribution that day and cast her eyes down the length of her table, covered with her good ivory linen place mats, clean and crisp, her collection of quality china–the artistically mismatched pieces of creamware she'd collected at estate sales and flea markets and the occasional full-price purchase at a department store–and the genuine crystal goblets and glasses she'd brought back from Ireland years ago. Red, white, water. They'd cost more than three months' worth of mortgage when she'd made the splurge and Gus felt both guilty and exhilarated every time she saw them. Every mouthful–even plain old tap water–tasted better, too.

The Ireland trip had been her last vacation with Christopher, a romantic trip without the girls and filled with night after night in which they turned in early, eager to be alone. They'd laughed as they steered awkwardly around the jaw-droppingly beautiful coast, neither of them quite comfortable driving a stick shift on the other side of the road. But they'd managed it just fine, thank you very much. This made the accident all the more incomprehensible: Christopher had driven the Hutchison Parkway every day. Every single day. And then he made a mistake. That's what happened when you let your guard down.

Gus Simpson kept a vigilant watch: she knew that every moment, every detail mattered. Even the table setting.

The just-polished silver had gleamed as it lay on the linen tablecloth; the sixteen settings had been her great-grandmother's. Every clan has its own version of mythmaking–the hard winter everyone barely survived, the long and impossible transatlantic voyage from the Old World–and Gus's family had their own, of course. It was The Quest for Fine Things. And so the silver service (much more ornate than current fashion) had been purchased, at great sacrifice, as a setting a year from Tiffany & Co. and used only for the big three: Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving in later generations. Sometimes, the story went, a spoon was all that could be afforded, the knives and forks left waiting for a fatter year. And so the set had made its way–though not without causing tension within the family–from mother to oldest daughter to daughter's daughter and finally to Gus, where the flatware had been put to more cutting and eating than ever before. No doubt her grandmothers would have thought it frivolous the way Gus delighted in her good plates and knives, and frowned upon their frequent use. Save, save, save it for later. That had been their motto. Tuck away the good to use only when you really need it. The thing was, Gus always felt as if she really needed it.

Though the night Alan Holt came to dinner, surely, even her grandmothers would have approved Gus setting such a grand table, all ready for the gorgeous meal simmering and roasting away in the kitchen. Cream of asparagus soup. Rack of lamb with herb jus. Gently roasted baby potatoes. Fresh, crusty bread she'd made from scratch, using a wet brick in her oven to generate steam (thanks to the advice of Julia Child in a well-worn copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol 2). All followed by a rich, buttery financiere with homemade raspberry sorbet.

She'd wanted the meal to be delicious. Homey. Welcoming. After all, it wasn't every day that the president of the CookingChannel came over for Sunday dinner and the prospect of a different future hovered.

"Mom? The table?" her daughter had said.

Ah, yes, the table. Sabrina's display had been the one element of discord in a perfectly arranged tableau: it was clearly unacceptable.

Gus had opened her mouth to tell Sabrina to clean up the mess she'd created. To go upstairs, change out of the clothes she was wearing and put on something decent. To go find her sister and tell her to get ready.

The words had been all ready to tumble out. Even without seeing herself she could feel the frown, her furrowed brow. How many times had Gus criticized Sabrina and Aimee? Change your clothes, turn down that music, tidy up your room, don't leave wet towels on the floor. She, like all mothers of teenagers, had keenly felt her transformation into a walking cliché, as so many of the little issues that had seemed trivial and fuddy-duddy when she was young had stretched to matters of tremendous importance. A widow with two daughters, no less. Turning lights out when she left a room. Wearing a sweater instead of turning up the heat. Using a coaster on the coffee table. Eating leftovers. It was paying the bills that did it. Changed her perspective. Suddenly everything had mattered.

Every thing mattered. Even the table setting. She knew it had to be fixed.

But then she had caught the look of anticipation on her youngest daughter's face. The wide eyes, the mouth slightly open, just enough to catch the glimmer of her metal braces. Her heart caught in her throat: Gus had assumed the sad little decoration on her table was a way for Sabrina to make clear how little she cared about Gus's career. But could her daughter have been trying to help? she'd wondered.

At precisely that moment, Aimee had slouched into the room, alerted, no doubt, by the radar all kids have when they sense–hope–their sibling is about to get in trouble. What is it about family that makes them close ranks to outsiders but attack one another with impunity in private? Gus wondered. Thinner and two inches taller than Sabrina, her light brown bangs dyed pink from Kool-Aid, fifteen-year-old Aimee grinned slyly as she saw her mother frowning at the table.

"Nice!" Aimee said, catching her sister's eye, gesturing toward the stone-feather combo. "Mom's totally going to throw that away. It's not perfect. And Gus Simpson doesn't do anything that's not perfect. Right, Mom?" Then Aimee shifted all her weight to one hip, as though standing up straight would take too much effort. She waited.

Sabrina waited.

Gus hesitated as her mom side duked it out with her career side.

"I think Sabrina's arrangement is lovely," Gus declared. "It's very modern, very sleek. It stays on the table."

Aimee rolled her eyes.

"Shut up, Aimee, it's a very karma design," shouted Sabrina.

"I think you mean Zen, dear," smiled Gus. She recalled Sabrina's huge ear-to-ear smile, the silver braces gleaming on her teeth, her sweet blue eyes wide and shining. It was the right choice, even though she'd felt a twist in her stomach when Mr. Holt, the CookingChannel president, had looked questioningly at the table as he sat down. But Gus had made no apologies, aware of Sabrina hanging on her every word, and in fact praised her daughter's creativity.

"Part of being a good host is to let everyone feel they've played a part," she'd told him with confidence that spring day long ago.

Mr. Holt, a divorced father, had nodded thoughtfully. "You're just the type of person I'm looking for," he announced. And by the end of cake, Gus Simpson–an unknown gourmet-shop owner without a cookbook to her name–had been asked to host a few episodes on the fledging cable channel.

Sabrina's display, it turned out, had been karma after all.

And voila! A few years on TV's CookingChannel and she became an overnight sensation. That was the thing with all that "overnight" business: It typically took a lot of work beforehand.

And now here she was in 2006, the very heart of food television, The Luncheonette long since sold away. She lived in a stunning manor house in Rye, New York, precisely the style of house that Christopher would have loved: a three-story structure, white with black shutters, with a large formal dining room to the left of the foyer, a conservatory, a small parlor that Gus had converted to her private den, a wood-paneled library, a glassed-in breakfast room and a cozy sitting room off the kitchen. Plus all the requisite space for her camera crews. There was a spacious patio immediately through the French doors from the kitchen, and a lush back lawn, edged in flowers, that was crowned with a decorative pond and waterfall that gurgled soothingly when she was out among the rose bushes.

There were far too many bedrooms in the manor house for a single woman–her children had been practically packing for college when she signed the deed but she forged ahead anyway–and there were definitely not enough bathrooms for a modern home. It was her plan to update the upper floors though she'd been too busy over the years to do that just yet.

The house was the proof of her professional success. It appealed to her not only because of its magnificence but also because of its imperfections. It had a history that left it a little worn in places.

And so Gus had purchased the home when she was developing her most popular program, Cooking with Gusto! It was her third program for the network and the most well reviewed. Every week she hosted a brilliant chef in the manor house's amazing kitchen (renovated twice since the program had started), and she and her guest drank good wine and chatted as together they prepared an incredible meal, discussing amusing stories from the world of professional restaurant kitchens and doing their sincere best to convince the viewer at home that she, too, could make the scrumptious dishes they were preparing.

Gus Simpson had always been a good home cook. But she was no chef and she knew it: she'd been a photography major at Wellesley and possessed a great eye for visuals, and she'd had an idea ripe for its moment with The Luncheonette. Still, her gift–and it was a gift–had always been about creating an amazing experience. She was a true entertainer: Gus made her guests feel alive–even when her guests were on the other side of a TV screen–and her joie de vivre made every mouthful look and taste refreshing. Gus's main product was Gus, and she sold herself well: She was mother, daughter, best friend, life of the party. And she was good-looking to boot. Not so gorgeous that a viewer simply couldn't stand her, but undeniably attractive with her big brown eyes and her wide, toothy smile.

Gus Simpson was eminently watchable. Her viewers–and therefore her producers–loved her.

Her friends, her daughters, her colleagues: everyone wanted to be around Gus. And Gus, in turn, had been enchanted by the idea of looking after all of them.

Yet now it felt as though the spell was lifting.

So, okay, she didn't want to plan her own party. Who said she had to have one? Gus began pacing about the kitchen, ticking off a list on her fingers of all the people who would be disappointed if she didn't put something together, her frustration rising with every step. She was always doing, doing, doing.

Maybe turning fifty simply meant it was time to shake things up.

"Knock knock?" Shuffling open the white French door from her garden patio was Hannah Levine, her dear friend and neighbor. The two of them had shared an easy intimacy over the seven years they'd been friends. It hadn't been quite that way when they first met, on the very Sunday Gus moved into the manor house during the summer of '99. Gus had walked over to each of her neighbors' homes and presented a freshly baked raspberry pie, expressing how thrilled she was to be in the neighborhood. It was a brilliant touch, of course–pure Gus–and reciprocated by several dinner invitations and the beginning of many warm acquaintanceships. And then there had been Hannah, who lived immediately adjacent in a crisply painted white cottage, converted from what had once been the carriage house to Gus's stately home. Hannah had come to the door in faded gray pajamas, her medium-length red hair pulled back into a low ponytail. Her skin was pale and free of make-up and she eyed Gus suspiciously through thick black glasses.

"What kind is it?" Hannah had asked, gesturing toward the pie, her body partially hidden by her wide mahogany door. She was even thinner back then, all sharp clavicle and bony wrist. And nervous, tremendously nervous. Of course, Gus was immediately smitten: she simply had to add Hannah to her collection of darlings. To the ones she wanted to nurture and nourish. Her girls, their pals, her coworkers: everyone was clay that Gus was eager to mold. She made a pest of herself that summer, dropping over next door with all manner of muffins and cookie bars, her resolve to befriend her neighbor only heightened by the fact that no one else seemed to visit the gentle, wary woman in pajamas. Certainly Hannah, already in her thirties then, was far too old to be a surrogate daughter; Gus imagined she would become like a little sister. But what happened instead was far more welcome: the two women found they had much in common–a shared love of gardening, an unconventional work schedule, a devotion to finding the perfect chocolate chip cookie, and a love of rising early–from which a true friendship sprang.

When the body wakes up before dawn, as Gus's typically did, there can be several hours when it seems as though there is no one else in the world. A peaceful time for some. Not Gus: she found these early moments, the house dark, the girls' rooms empty, the cats snoozing in far corners, to be tremendously lonely.

Fortunately, Hannah was quite likely to be on her way over by 7 am, crossing the unfenced property line between their two homes. Because once it became clear that Gus was going to be persistent, Hannah accepted her friendship as the most natural thing. From early on, she had the peculiar habit of never tapping on the door when she came by, always calling out and making her way inside. With anyone else Gus would have found such a gesture intrusive; with Hannah it seemed perfectly normal. The two of them spent many an early morning sitting in Gus's bay window, on those overstuffed chairs, dipping biscotti into their cappuccino and having the very same conversation they'd had the day before. That was the thing about their friendship: it was all about the being together, never about doing anything. As such it made few demands. Theirs was an easy intimacy.

It was also precious: Hannah was the first real friend Gus had made after becoming well known. There was no handbook for becoming semi-famous. (Or at least nothing that had been handed to Gus by the CookingChannel.) In a society thirsting for celebrity, it didn't take much for people to elevate a widowed mother with a knack for entertaining into a culinary guru. And so even by the late nineties, Gus had developed quite a following, with the requisite cookbooks and calendars, too. It was great; it put Sabrina and Aimee through some good schools. But her sort-of-but-not-quite fame also made it a hurdle to connect–people already "knew" her from TV and therefore it could be a tremendous disappointment to them if Gus turned out, for example, to be even slightly different than they envisioned. To be plain, it had been difficult to make friends. Oh, easy enough to meet people who wanted to say they were chummy with the host of Cooking with Gusto! More challenging to get to know individuals who wanted to know Gus.

Hannah Levine had been entirely different.

For one thing, she didn't watch television. Well, not exactly. Hannah watched multiple channels nonstop: CNN, MSNBC, and CourtTV. But dramas, comedies, home decor or cooking shows? Hannah didn't watch any of it. Instead, she holed up in her home office–with its built-in bookcases and large television–and wrote article after article for women's magazines. Sometimes in jeans but most typically in pajamas, with fuzzy slippers on her feet, and a bowl of M&Ms nearby. Hannah was a busy freelance journalist and her area of expertise was health, which pushed her slightly in the direction of obsessing over whatever she'd written about most recently. But she obsessed in a rather benign, almost kindly variety, as concerned for a stranger's odd throat clearing–could it be whooping cough?–as for her own potential ailments. Having the Internet as her main companion all day merely encouraged her cyberchondria.

That was one reason Hannah had been wary of the pie that first summer, having just written an article about an epidemic of E. coli on fresh berries, but seemed rather unfazed to learn about Gus's career. And frankly, in all the time since, she seemed yet to have watched one of her programs. Gus absolutely adored her for that.

Now she waved Hannah inside, though of course her friend was already halfway to the coffee. Gus had already left a mug on the counter, spoon on a napkin, and a few slices of fresh banana loaf arranged on a plate.

"I just finished a piece on the dangers of ignoring sore feet last night," Hannah told Gus after swallowing her first mouthful of hot coffee. "Do you stand for the entire time you're on TV, Gus? Because I've got a few ideas to make it a little easier..."

"Don't worry–from now on I think I'll be doing my show from a wheelchair," said Gus, shaking her head at Hannah's worried expression and reaching to show her the section of the New York Times. "Apparently I'm over the hill."

Hannah scanned the article. "Look, at least you're in it. You know you're still important when a journalist declares it so." She pulled a face at Gus to show she was joking.

"I'm just feeling a bit of I-don't-know, you know?"

"Is that why I haven't received my invitation to your birthday party?" said Hannah. "If it was anyone else I'd assume I was off the list. With you, I've been worried something's wrong. Your birthday is a few weeks away and I still have to plan my outfit."

Now it was Gus's turn to smile. "Why don't you wear your gray coat dress?" she suggested. That was the same outfit Hannah wore every year, purchased on a rare shopping trip with Gus. Hannah hated to leave her comfort zone of home. Hated to wear anything other than casual, loungy clothes.

"I think I'll just do that," Hannah said, nodding. She didn't mind being teased by Gus.

The two of them settled into a kind of cozy silence, munching on banana loaf and sipping coffee and intently dawdling to avoid the day's work. It was what they did every morning and they loved it.

The phone rang. It was only 7:08 am.

"Who could that be?" Gus knew she wasn't needed in the studio for a meeting, and the TV crew filmed at her house on Wednesdays. Maybe something was up with Sabrina? Aimee was certainly still asleep at this early hour.

She picked up the cordless and said hello.

"Of course, of course, yes, definitely," she said, jumping up and almost spilling coffee on her white chair. She hung up the phone.

"Well, thank goodness," said Gus, drawing out every syllable for Hannah's benefit. "That was my exec producer. The bad news is that I have to be in the city and ready to be on air in less than two hours. The good news is that Gus Simpson isn't quite yesterday's leftovers."

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