8. Chapter 8
Chapter 8
G randma Rosa’s recipe cards covered every available surface of her antique wood dining table. There were so many, Jules wondered if they’d ever be able to cook them all, but that wasn’t the point. All that mattered was the opportunity to spend time with her grandma.
Not sure how to file them, she took a step back for a collective look at the hundreds of recipes in front of her. Plan forming in her head, she picked out the recipes that interested her the most and plotted them on a calendar hanging in the kitchen. Her organizing included color-coded sections denoting “Lunch, Dinner, Side, or Dessert.” Breakfast was Grandma’s least favorite meal; there was not a single breakfast dish in the entire box.
Energized by all the sorting, Jules slipped each of the recipes back into the tin, now arranged in neat sections. The thought crossed her mind it might be easier to see everything if she put them in a book format, but that would take too much time. She needed to focus on the promise she had made to her grandma to cook through as much as they could while she was back.
Shouting up the stairs, Jules asked Grandma Rosa if she wanted to go to the grocery store. After her appointment this morning, Rosa's physical therapist gave her the green light to be on her feet more each day. Her hip was healing well, but she needed to move it. A change of scenery wouldn’t hurt either, Jules reasoned.
It took a few minutes to get them out the door and into the car, which she had picked up from Winnie’s earlier that morning. Flipping the passenger visor down to open the mirror, Grandma Rosa checked her lipstick and pinched her cheeks for color, although she had a full face of makeup on already. She wouldn’t be caught dead without looking like she spent an hour getting ready, even if it was just to go to the grocery store.
“You look great,” Jules quipped.
“Right. You just never know who’ll run into in this small town.” Rosa closed the visor and cast her eyes down, picking at the invisible specs on her trousers.
It hadn’t occurred to Jules that her grandma might be feeling nervous about her first trip in public since the accident. Rosa always carried an air of independence about her, so it must be hard for her to have to depend on other people. Barb used to joke that Rosa’s spine was made of steel. This proved that at least her hip wasn’t.
Still, Grandma Rosa didn’t complain. She wouldn’t grumble or hide away. She’d face the world head-on, like she’d always done. An injury wouldn’t prevent her from living her life, and Jules admired that. She grew up admiring that strength, hoping that some of it would rub off on her.
“You know, I used to go with my father sometimes to Chicago’s South Water Market in the early mornings,” Grandma Rosa said, staring out the window at the grey day passing by. “He would wake me up around five, while everyone else was still asleep, and we’d sneak out the back door with our canvas tote bags. That’s where my love for all things food started.”
Jules nodded, encouraging her grandma to continue. She’d never heard this story.
“We’d hop on our bikes and ride the few blocks in the dark. I remember it being so quiet at that time of day. The energy was different, slower in those moments before the day began; the last moments of stillness that few ever saw,” Rosa continued, a wistful look on her face. “My dad and I wouldn’t say a word the entire ride. It was as if we were both in on a secret, and neither of us felt the need to talk about it. We were just in it.”
The image of her grandma as a young girl riding a bike through the residential city streets during the twilight of the morning hours flashed in Jules’ mind and she ached for moment she'd never experience.
“He went almost every morning to sample the fresh produce for the restaurant and place orders. But on the rare days he took me with him, I felt special. It was the only time we’d ever spent alone together.”
Rosa was the eldest of three daughters, and Jules’ great grandmother divided her time between the house and the restaurant. The two youngest girls took up most of her attention. Rosa helped as needed, but preferred to be in the restaurant, especially as she got older. And her mother didn’t hide that she thought it improper for a young lady to work in a kitchen, even though she did the same almost every day. It drove a wedge between them over the years, one that Jules wasn’t certain ever dissolved.
As they drove, Grandma Rosa told Jules how her father taught her how to pick out the best and freshest artichokes, eggplants, juicy red and green peppers, and everything else they could find for that day’s menu.
“After a while, we made a game of it,” she recalled. “I had to guess which pieces of produce were the best at each stand. If I chose correctly, we’d share a warm slice of pandoro sweet bread from one of my dad’s favorite purveyors before loading our haul onto the wire bike racks.”
Afterwards, she’d follow him to the restaurant and watch as he prepped food for the day. She still remembered the first morning he invited her to help, clasping his hand over hers as she held onto a large chef’s knife, barely tall enough to see over the counter. It wasn’t long until he trusted her enough to handle the prep by herself, which she did every morning before school.
“The kitchen became my sanctuary. It’s where I learned that to be great at anything takes an incredible amount of control and focus. Things many people lack." She looked at Jules. “Things you have in spades.”
Jules could see it all unfolding in her mind, and she longed to know more about her grandma’s childhood. It seemed so different from her own.
Pulling into the parking lot in front of John’s Shoppe, Jules turned the ignition off and sat for a moment while Rosa gathered her things. She’d heard her grandma tell stories about what it was like growing up and working in her father’s restaurant, but never anything quite so intimate. Jules had a sense that there was a lot her grandma was leaving out, but didn’t know why.
Jules helped her grandma out of the car, gently holding her elbow as she pushed herself upright almost completely on her own. It was clear Rosa didn’t need her as much as she’d anticipated, but Jules didn’t care. It had been years since they’d spent this much one-on-one time together, so she was grateful. Their relationship had changed in the years since Jules grew from a young girl to a woman. Now, she appreciated her grandma’s wisdom and the stories she shared with her in a new way, through the eyes of a woman who’d experienced the ups and downs of life and could relate on a more personal level.
Together, they made their way through the store, gathering all the ingredients needed for that week’s menu of recipes. At the produce section, Grandma Rosa shared her some of her father’s tricks to identify the best pieces.
“You have enough here for a feast,” said Micky, the current owner, as he scanned their items. He inherited the shop a few decades ago from his father, John.
“We’re on a mission to cook our way through some old recipes,” said Rosa in an upbeat tone Jules hadn’t heard in a while.
“I bet they’ll be delish , especially if they’re your recipes,” he replied, smiling back at Rosa.
If Jules didn’t know any better, those two were flirting. Her head swiveled back and forth, watching them exchange playful banter as they stood in the checkout line. Trying hard to keep her face as neutral as possible, she loaded their items into the bags they brought, not saying a word.
What was happening? No wonder Grandma Rosa seemed preoccupied with her appearance earlier; she had a crush on the shoppe owner, Jules realized to her horror—and maybe delight? She wasn’t sure.
That evening, back home in the kitchen, they laid out all the ingredients to make lasagna from scratch, even the pasta. It had been ages since either of them had rolled out fresh pasta dough, and they looked forward to the rhythm of it. Since they were planning to make enough to take leftovers to The Landing, they got started in the early afternoon. It would take a while; making fresh pasta and sauce was a labor of love. The sauce had to simmer in the big pot for at least two hours. Ideally all day, but they’d gotten too late of a start for that. A couple of hours would have to do.
Mixing the flour with eggs, salt, and a dollop of olive oil, Jules formed the dough into four large balls and covered it with plastic wrap to sit for thirty minutes before rolling it out. During the downtime, she helped her grandma open the cans of San Marzano tomatoes, the only kind she would ever consider using, and poured them into the big pasta pot that once belonged to her great-grandfather. She stood close as Rosa added the seasonings and fresh herbs, along with three onions chopped in half, which would simmer in the sauce until the end, when they’d be used to smear on crusty bread as a sort of tomato-y onion confit that Jules loved.
It felt good to have her grandma cooking alongside her now instead of backseat driving from the table. Neither of them noticed the afternoon tick by. It was an easy thing to do in the kitchen, lose sense of time. It wasn’t until after they’d rolled and cut the lasagna sheets that they realized it was getting late. They’d need to hurry if they wanted to get the pans of lasagna assembled and in the oven by five. It would take at least an hour to bake in the oven and they were already cutting it close to dinner time for the eager ladies at The Landing.
With an intentional pep in their step, they got all four pans in the oven with no time to spare. Exhausted from the manual labor, they both plopped down at the table. Jules could see the exhaustion on her grandma’s face. She’d been on her feet almost all day, by far the most activity in weeks.
“I’ve got the rest of it. Why don’t you head upstairs, and I’ll bring you a plate when it’s ready?” she offered.
“I won’t say no to that," Rosa said, lifting herself from her chair as she reached for the walker.
A pang of guilt flared in Jules. Going forward, she'd be a better caretaker and not let her grandma go that long without sitting again. It was too easy to get caught up in the moment and forget that her grandma was still healing.
Shame tugging at her, she grabbed her phone, in need of a distraction. It was still sitting in her purse, hanging on the back of the chair where it’d been since they’d gotten back home from the store. Forgetting about it was becoming a habit.
Only a few unread emails from her boss, Becca, waited for her. She’d read them more thoroughly later tonight in her room; she still owed Becca a response and signed papers, although it was the last thing she wanted to think about right now. It all seemed so distant. How had only a week and a half gone by? It was as if she’d been here for a year, her memories of D.C. fading into black and white.
Just as she clicked out of her email, the phone lit up with a new text from Miles:
Still on for our date tomorrow?
Does it qualify as a date? Jules wondered. Or was it more of an experiment to test whether they could handle a fling?
Date, huh? Yes, we’re still on.
It is a date. See you tomorrow at five. I’ll be the one in the convertible.
Convertible? Jules thought he drove a truck. An obnoxious truck. But maybe he had another car? The thought washed over her with relief. She hadn’t realized how much the truck bothered her. It just seemed so not Miles. So much so that it made her doubt she still knew him at all; maybe their time apart had changed him. She knew the fear was unfair; she’d likely changed in ways that made her unrecognizable to him as well. But, then again, their bodies still responded to each other like they used to.
Before she could over-analyze it, Jules turned her phone to silent and shoved it to the bottom of her purse to keep it out of reach, returning her attention back to the dinner she was making for her grandma and the ladies at The Landing. She didn’t want to disappoint this group of posh, opinionated women.
***
The red sports car crawled up the drive right on time, top down. Miles smiled, wavy hair windblown and looking effortlessly sexy in his black V-neck t-shirt and retro Ray-Ban sunglasses. After admiring the view, Jules hopped up from her seat on the front steps where she had been waiting, like she had done many times as a teenager. It all felt too familiar, except for the expensive vintage car picking her up.
“Can I fancy you for a ride to the ball, my dear?” said Miles in an awful English accent. He had always been terrible at accents; time hadn’t made that any better.
The sports car looked like a classic, maybe from the ‘80s, and it was exactly what Jules had pictured Miles driving. Not some large, generic pickup truck. She slid into the white leather passenger seat, pulling her hair back into a loose ponytail to keep it out of her face so she could enjoy the short drive.
A few miles outside of town, they turned off a main road onto a grass and gravel side street which led to the open field where the festival took place each fall. It smelled of fresh-cut grass and damp earth. Off to the right, in an almost hidden clearing, sat an old picnic table Jules had hoped was still there. It looked the same, except maybe a little more weathered by age.
“This will be our place. A special spot we can escape to when life is too much,” she heard her Grandpa Lou say, lost in the hazy mist of a faraway memory.
When she was in elementary school, Grandpa Lou had made about a dozen picnic tables in his workshop, which he donated to the local park district to place around town. This table was the very last one he made, so as a surprise, he’d engraved it with Jules’ initials. On the weekends, he would pack a basket of bread, cheese, and jam, and they would often have lunch here, overlooking a field of wildflowers and old hardwood trees that buzzed with insects and birds. She loved running her fingers over the carving of initials as they sat and could still feel them as if it were just yesterday.
They passed the picnic table, turning into a makeshift parking lot in front of the festival grounds. It looked like half the town was here, but they got lucky, spotting an empty space where a car had just left.
The Heritage Days Festival had gone on for decades in Riverbend. Taking place in September after school started back up for the year, it ran for three days over a weekend. Jules used to look forward to it every year. Her grandpa would volunteer to role play as a seventeenth-century furniture maker, and she’d spend hours at his side in their booth, watching him dressed in period clothing, talk about woodworking in an old-timey accent she loved.
That’s what Heritage Days was all about, celebrating pioneer life. There’d be reenactments of all sorts, from Native American displays of teepees and leather tanning to homesteading pastimes like churning butter and axe throwing. All the sixth-grade classes took a field trip out to Heritage Days on Friday morning, before it opened to the public, to get a private tour of the reenactments and to learn to make bread and soup like they did hundreds of years ago.
Walking up to the ticket booth, they spotted Winnie and Emily already buying their admission and drink tickets. They hurried through the line and collected their first round of “Heritage Hops” beer, made by a local home brewer. Emily opted for a lemonade. Taking a sip, Jules enjoyed the light, crisp taste, surprising herself since it wasn’t her usual glass of chilled white wine. The late afternoon air smelled of cut grass and honey wafting in over the trees with a warm breeze. It had rained the day before, so the ground was moist but not enough to cake mud on their shoes. The tall trees loomed above them, still thick with leaves that had not yet turned colors. Everything seemed cleansed, waiting for fall to arrive.
They made their way around the field, stopping at a few of the market stands selling handmade soaps, jewelry, and various housewares which dotted the perimeter of the festival area. Winnie remarked at one point it had morphed into more of an art and craft fair than a festival aimed at recreating seventeenth-century life in the Midwest, but overall, the spirit of the festival still felt alive.
Grabbing Miles by the forearm, Jules led them over to the old log home situated in the middle of the celebration to watch a demonstration on quilt-making from a woman she vaguely recognized.
“Thinking about taking up a new hobby, huh?” Miles asked as they watched.
“You never know. It could come in handy when I leave D.C. to buy a farm and go completely off grid,” she joked.
“City slicker you, going off grid? Never.”
“I could say the same thing about you coming back to Riverbend. Never thought I’d catch you back here.” Jules casted a glance his way but quickly returned her attention back to the woman holding the large multi-colored quilt. He didn’t need to know how much she’d wondered what brought him back here.
“For a long time, I didn’t think I’d ever come back either. But things changed, and—” was all he got out before a hand clamped down on his shoulder.
A large, burly man stood just behind him, dressed in an intricate-looking costume with a fiddle dangling from his free hand.
“Miles, nice to see you here,” he said with a wide smile before coming to a quick stop, eyes resting on Jules.
“Jules Cuccia, is that you?” he bellowed, pulling her in for a tight hug. Jason Fedema was a legend in these parts. For more than three decades, he led the high school band, taking it from obscurity to the powerhouse ensemble it was today.
“Hi, Mr. Fedema. It’s great to see you,” Jules mumbled into his wide shoulder, delighted to see him.
“Oh, none of that now. It’s Jason. I haven’t gone by Mr. Fedema since I retired two years ago.” He took a deliberate step back, chuckling at himself. “You haven’t changed a bit!”
While they both knew that wasn’t true, Jason looked like he hadn’t aged a day since the last time she saw him twelve years ago. The same salt and pepper curls poked from his head in an unruly way that gave him the air of a distinguished professor with no fashion sense, and his round belly still tested the limits of the buttons on his shirt.
Pushing his metal-framed glasses up his nose, a confused looked crossed his face as he looked between between Miles and Jules.
“Are you two kids back together?”
A long pause hung in the air until Miles held his hand out to Jules in a gesture to explain.
“We’re just friends. I’m home to help my grandma, who just had her hip replaced,” she said. She could see Miles’ jaw clench out of the corner of her eye. What did he expect her to say?
“Well, isn’t that nice? You should come by the school to see the band practice one day. Miles could use all the help he can get.” Jason slapped Miles on the back, adding that he often dropped in as well. Jules logged that for later. She wondered if he was part of the reason Miles came back to Riverbend. The timing lined up.
After a few more minutes of small talk, Jason excused himself to regale others with his fiddle, a crowd forming around him as he played near the candy-apple stand.
The early evening sky took on a purplish and pink hue, like it had been painted in watercolors just for them. Every few minutes, Jules would spot someone she recognized from her childhood, all grown up and with children of their own. It was like she had time hopped from high school to present day. Her life in D.C. felt separate from Riverbend, on a different timeline altogether.
Watching Miles as they walked around, she noted how comfortable he seemed here, smiling and saying quick hellos to many people walking by. He appeared to fit in here in a way that he never had back when they were in high school. Now, he’d found his home, and Jules was only a guest.
She thought about what others must think of her: Jules, the big city slicker, who had moved away as soon as possible ; what was she doing back here? Couldn’t handle the pressure?
The night crawled by, almost as if they were walking through sweet molasses. Soon enough, though, the sun had set and bonfires were ablaze throughout the field, smoke drifting up through the trees, pointing to the stars shining bright above. When they met back up with Winnie and Emily, someone remarked that it felt like a storybook evening, almost too perfect.
“Well, I know how we can fix that,” Miles said with a sneaky grin playing on his lips. “I say we head to the Golden Kernel for something stronger.”
Jules hadn’t even thought about where the rest of the night would take them, but she didn’t hate the idea, either. Forgetting that Emily couldn’t drink, she gave an enthusiastic, “I’m in.”
“Sounds fun, but I think we’re going to call it a night. You two should go, though!” Winnie said, taking Emily’s hand.
Jules froze. This was turning into more of a date than she expected. The Golden Kernel would lead to more, if she let it. Was she ready for that? Her stomach flipped out of fear and anticipation, giving way to excitement. She needed this, she told herself. Keep it casual; nothing more than a fling.
Miles looked at Jules. “What do you say? Care to join me for a nightcap or two?” His voice reverberated low, alluding to more.
A thrill ran through Jules’ lower spine. “Sure, let’s do it.”