Catering a wake was not my idea of fun. First of all,
there was the short notice. A person died. Three days
later there was a funeral. In this case the body had been
discovered on a Monday, autopsy Tuesday, funeral Saturday,
seven days after the presumed day of death. In Colorado we
didn’t call the buffet after the funeral a wake. But
whether you called it a reception or coming over for a
bite to eat afterward, it still meant food for forty
mourners.
I dumped a mound of risen dough as soft as flesh onto the
oak countertop. Eating, I reflected, was a way of denying
death. I had known her. I did not want to think about it
now. My fingers modeled soft dough around dill sprigs,
then dropped the little rolls onto a baking sheet, where
they looked like rows of miniature green-and-white sofa
pillows. This was the last two dozen. I rubbed bits of
yeasty mixture off my hands and let cold water gush over
them.
A professional caterer has to keep her mind on the job,
not the reason for the job. October was generally a slow
month for parties in Aspen Meadow. Despite the fact that
Goldilocks’ Catering, Where Everything Is Just Right!
provided the town’s only professional food service, making
a living here was always a precarious enterprise. Like it
or not, I needed the income from this postfuneral meal.
Still. I would rather have had Laura Smiley alive. She had
been Arch’s fifth-grade teacher last year. She also had
taught him third, when he was recovering from the divorce.
They had become special friends, had worked on games and
outdoor projects. They had written letters over the
summers. I could picture Laura Smileywith my son, her arm
around his slender shoulders, her cascade of brown-blond
curls just touching the top of his head.
Psychologists and social workers had come into the
elementary school to work with the students after the news
of Ms. Smiley’s death broke on Monday. Arch had not spoken
much about it. I did not know what the counselors had said
to him, nor he to them. All during the week he had come
home from school, taken snack food into his room, and
closed the door. Sometimes I could hear him on the phone,
acting as dungeon master or playing television trivia
games. Perhaps losing Ms. Smiley was not much on his mind.
It was hard to tell.
But now because of her death we had this job, which would
help pay the bills for October. Laura Smiley’s aunt from
Illinois, acting in place of parents long dead, had
ordered the food and sent me an express mail cheque for
eight hundred dollars. This covered my second problem,
usually my first, and that was money.
Above the steel hand-washing sink, one of several required
by the county for commercial food service, the booking
calendar showed only two parties between tomorrow, October
tenth, and the thirty-first. Clearing four hundred dollars
on each of those plus four hundred for tomorrow’s buffet
would take us to the Halloween-to-Christmas season, where
I made almost enough money to get Arch and me through May.
Long ago I had learned to stop depending on regular child
support payments from Arch’s father, even if he did have
an ob-gyn practice with an income as dependable as
procreation. The payments were invariably wrong and
invariably late. But arguments between us were bad for
Arch and dangerous for me. Peace was worth a lower income.
I stared grimly at the calendar. Lots of parties between
Halloween and Christmas. That was the ticket to financial
security.
Problem number three after short notice and money was
getting all the supplies for a job. My meat and produce
supplier was doing an extra run for me because she, too,
had known the financial strains of single motherhood. Her
truck was supposed to be rumbling up from Denver right now
bringing a salmon and out-of-season asparagus and
strawberries. After she delivered them, she’d give me a
lecture on going out. She’d say, It’s not that tough to
have fun. But tough was like a roll in the microwave. I
didn’t have time for a harangue about my social life
because in addition to needing the supplies, I’d just used
the last of the honey to make the rolls. This meant the
muffins were on hold. The local honey supplier was a
handsome fellow named Pomeroy, lusted after by every
unattached woman in the county, a fact my supplier usually
did not fail to mention. Unfortunately Pomeroy had said he
wouldn’t be able to get over for a while to resupply my
stock. The unusually warm weather had brought out a
predator that had raided one of the hives. And he had his
hands full.
Of what, I had wanted to say, but hadn’t. Sugar would do
for the muffins.
The phone rang.
“Goldilocks’ Catering,” I said into the receiver, “where
everything is just...
“Spare me the greeting, Goldy,” came the voice of Alicia,
my supplier. “I called Northwest Seafood. Fish’s all
yours.”
“You’re great.”
She mm-hmmed and then said nothing.
I said, “What is it?”
“How well did you know this Laura?”
“She was Arch’s teacher. For a couple of grades.”
“Young?”
“Early forties,” I said. “She acted young.” I paused. “I
knew her.”
She grunted and said she would be up in an hour.
I opened the refrigerator, a walk-in needed for the
business. John Richard Korman, my ex-husband, had found
the cost of this item ridiculous. Ditto the van and the
required new sinks and shelves to store food above insect
level. Other purchases out of my sixty-thousand-dollar
divorce settlement had included a six-burner stove, extra
oven and freezer, and enough cooking equipment to outfit
Sears. Retrofitting our old house off Aspen Meadow’s Main
Street had not been terribly difficult.
What had been difficult was hanging up on John Richard’s
alternately shrieking and pleading voice, and then finally
getting the locks changed when he had shown up repeatedly
to do one of two things. At first, even though we were
separated, he would try to seduce me. Sometimes
successfully, I was ashamed to admit. Or he would start a
fight to demonstrate his opposition to my financial
independence.
And by demonstrate, I don’t mean like Gandhi.
In the walk-in I reached for the butter, eggs, and cream.
I backed out and whacked the door with my foot, then
regarded my balancing act in the mirror-black surface.
Blond curly hair. Freckles on a face unbruised for three
years. Brown eyes. These stared back at me, saying, Don’t
think about it now, just cook. At thirty I was doing okay,
single but with good friends, and only slightly pudgy from
all the fancy cooking that made the living for Arch and me.
But I was preparing a wake for someone I’d known. Early
forties. Also single. Had been.
For the dessert shortcakes I used an old trick: make giant
scones. Another thing I’d learned in this business:
involve the clients with the food. Make the spread good to
look at, smell, touch, taste. Gauge action by needs. At a
bridal shower, don’t give the guests much to do with the
food since they’re already involved with the presents. But
keeping people active at a wake was essential. Being busy,
like working, allayed grief. By splitting cakes and
heaping on berries and cream, the mourners could start to
get their minds off death. Getting one’s mind off it. Not
easy.
Laura had smiled broadly and flourished papers with Arch’s
drawings of mountain wildlife at our parent conferences,
which I’d always attended alone, as John Richard couldn’t
be bothered. Arch is so talented, Laura had said, one of
the most unusual students I’ve ever had. It’s too bad he
doesn’t have more friends.
The food processor blade whirred and bit through the
butter and flour. Soon the kitchen would smell divine.
Arch could have a hot scone when he came in from school.
Maybe he would eat it in the kitchen instead of heading
off to his room. The phone rang again.
“Goldilocks...” I began, but was interrupted.
“Shut up, it’s me!” shouted Marla Korman, John Richard’s
other ex-wife, now a good friend of mine. “Arch home yet?”
I strained to see out the window that overlooked Main
Street, then listened for the bus. Yellow aspen leaves as
bright as lemon disks shook in the warm breeze. No
children’s shouts announced the bus’s afternoon rounds.
Instead there was only the roar of a motorcycle and the
rushing sound of Cottonwood Creek, already frigid with
October snow melt from the high mountains.
I said, “Not yet. Ten minutes or so.”
“I’ve been shopping,” Marla said, “because I don’t want to
think about Laura. The stores are empty now that the
tourists have gone. They didn’t leave much.”
“Maybe we didn’t have much in the first place,” I said.
“This place,” wailed Marla.
I poured a cup of coffee and steeled myself for the coming
barrage of complaints. The town would be the warm-up for
the ex-husband.
She said, “How demoralizing to live in a terminally quaint
western village.” I made sympathetic noises.
“Of course, I don’t know why I would need a size sixteen
cowgirl dress anyway,” Marla complained, “since I’m not
coming to this shindig tomorrow. The Jerk’s going to be
there, isn’t he?”
“He certainly is,” I said. “But I’m leaving the rolling
pin at home.”
Bad joke, but we chuckled anyway. The Jerk was what Marla
had dubbed our mutual ex, for his personality and his
initials, J.R.K. Marla so intensely disliked seeing John
Richard that it was hard to understand why she talked
about him so much. Seven months after my divorce was
final, John Richard ended a fling with a married woman who
sang in the church choir and wedded Marla’s bulk and
wealth. They were divorced fifteen months later and she
and I promptly became partners in anger. But before that
point Marla’s disgust with his extramarital antics had
ballooned her up another thirty pounds, weight she’d used
to good advantage when he came at her with a rolling pin.
She had managed to heave him into a hanging plant,
dislocating his shoulder.
I looked down at my right thumb, which still would not
bend properly after John Richard had broken it in three
places with a hammer.
“That rolling pin,” Marla was saying between
giggles, “that damn rolling pin. You could use it to fix
him green tomato pie.”