Happier Here With You

Chapter 1

The exhibit opens to clinking champagne flutes, but all I hear is the ghost of Charles Dickens, whispering from his grave:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

And yet, it feels like the worst of times—for my motherhood report card, at least.

Tonight, while I rub elbows with some of Chicagoland’s finest female chefs and field questions from journalists, my five-year-old daughter, Hannah, will graduate from kindergarten.

She will walk across an adorable kid-size wooden bridge in her school gymnasium and receive her diploma.

After, she will look into the audience to see not her mother waving from her seat, but her longtime babysitter, April, who graciously agreed to take Hannah in my absence.

April promised to film the biggest ten seconds of my daughter’s young life and text me the clip.

If ever a person wanted to be in two places at once . . .

The opening gala date was set the moment we miraculously booked Ruth Rivers, the only living cookbook author featured in the exhibit, and extremely hard to pin down.

She literally had one night available in late spring to fly in for the festivities—a Wednesday evening—the same night as Hannah’s graduation ceremony, set by the school board a year ago.

There was nothing I could do.

When I told Hannah, she didn’t seem fazed. “It’s okay, Mom,” she said. “April can just put it on YouTube.”

It probably is okay with Hannah. It just isn’t okay with me.

This isn’t the kind of parent I want to be.

I know it’s one hundred percent acceptable and financially necessary for today’s working parents, mothers and fathers, to miss their children’s soccer games and ballet recitals and science fair presentations.

And because I’m a widow—my husband, Sean, passed just two months before Hannah was born—I likely receive a double get-out-of-jail-free card.

But just because I can do it, and I have to do it to support us, doesn’t mean I want to.

The truth is, I am in two places tonight.

My body and brain are here at the museum, but my heart is in that stuffy school gymnasium, where Hannah will step toward another version of herself.

And if I’m really being honest, it isn’t just tonight.

For the past six weeks, as I’ve been preparing for the opening, there’s been too much screen time, for both of us, and lots of fast-food takeout.

We used to read three picture books together every night, but lately, we rush through only one or two on the weekend.

When I do make time for Hannah, I’m hardly in the moment.

Despite my best efforts, my mind always wanders to work.

Tonight, I try to put Hannah’s graduation out of my mind.

I mingle and shake hands and snap photos and answer questions and laugh at a food-pun joke and smile.

And I remind myself to actually celebrate this accomplishment.

It’s exhilarating when something that was once just an idea transforms into something tangible—an event, no less—and I revel in seeing guests stop at various points of the exhibit to study an artifact or read a placard.

The pièces de résistance, in my opinion, are the kitchen replicas.

We curated every detail to whisk museum visitors back in time, to a specific place.

The countertops in Julia Child’s Cambridge kitchen, for example, were taller than standard to account for her six-foot-three stature, and our replica reflects this difference.

It also boasts her blue pegboard with hanging brass pots and pans, painted black refrigerator, and yellow oil-clothed dining table.

When I feel my phone buzz inside the pocket of my black dress pants, I immediately head to my office. I want to watch Hannah’s graduation clip in private.

Because I already know I’m going to cry.

On the tiny phone screen, I watch Hannah bounce across the bridge, her brown curls grazing her shoulders.

She smiles at her kindergarten teacher as she accepts the roll of white paper that is her graduation certificate.

In reality, the whole ceremony is silly.

Hannah’s school is K–6, so next year, she isn’t even changing buildings.

She is literally moving one classroom down the hall.

There is no need for a graduation. And yet, it seems so important to encourage her education, to celebrate her first full year of school.

But this isn’t why I’m crying. The tears are because I know that while I get to see Hannah graduate, thanks to April’s cell phone camera skills, Hannah will not see me watching her graduate.

There is no one capturing the love and pride on my face now for her to view another time.

The phone screen is a one-sided mirror.

I can see her, but she can’t see me.

By the time I arrive home and relieve April, it’s almost 11:00 p.m. Hannah is fast asleep, but I sit at the edge of her bed for a few minutes.

Her chest rises and falls in a steady rhythm—the epitome of peace.

Her graduation cap, crafted out of black cardstock, sits askew on her pillow.

She must have gone to bed wearing it. I move it safely to her nightstand.

I’m bursting to tell her about my night, how I finally met—in person, at least—one of my all-time heroes.

Ruth Rivers is a chef extraordinaire, entrepreneur, food-industry icon, and editor in chief of Mirepoix, a gourmet cooking magazine to which I’ve long subscribed.

She’s a goddess in the foodie world. My head still feels light, floating above me like a balloon, from actually being in her presence tonight.

While I’ve conducted several phone interviews with her over the past two years—exhilarating on their own—actually seeing her in the flesh, hearing her iconic Minnesotan accent without the buffer of a television screen, felt surreal.

She was everything I thought she would be, and also, so humble.

I expected a well-earned air of importance, but I caught her more than once serving drinks to guests, rearranging appetizers on platters, and clearing crumbs, as if she were more comfortable being in the back of the house than the front.

She called me Ms. Brodbeck several times, even though I asked her to call me Maggie.

Of course, this only reminded me of Sean.

I was resolute in keeping my own name when we married, but after he passed, I questioned that choice.

Sometimes, I still do. Not that it could have possibly made a difference.

But somehow it feels like more of a loss, more of a severing, without this shared name forever binding us.

Now, I recall my conversations with Ruth this evening and wonder if I made an equally good impression, or if I seemed distracted, which I was.

I kiss Hannah’s forehead, then head to the kitchen and peek inside the fridge.

The food served tonight was catered and gourmet, but feeling anxious, I didn’t eat a bite.

Now, I’m suddenly starving. There are no leftovers because I asked April to treat Hannah to her favorite fast-food kids’ meal tonight.

Plus, I need to go grocery shopping. Dinners have been haphazard as of late, with the opening of the exhibit, the end-of-school-year vibe, the warmer temperatures and longer days.

Once late May arrives in Chicagoland, everyone heads outdoors—where cutting, chopping, roasting, or sautéing go by the wayside.

Grabbing cold subs and eating a picnic dinner at the park feels right.

Or a bowl of cereal with ice-cold milk. Easy and quick seem to be the core requirements of any meal since losing Sean.

Once upon a time, I lingered at the stove, constantly stirring a roux for gumbo or pitting fresh-picked Montmorency cherries for a cobbler.

Unfortunately, cooking seems to be a gift of time and contentment—neither of which I have much of these days.

After looking into my near-empty fridge, I grab what’s left of the bread—two ends—and slather on some peanut butter and cherry jelly.

A cup of herbal rooibos tea completes my meal, and I sit at the kitchen table and sort through the mail April brought in earlier.

It’s a lot of junk. Most of it will end up in the recycling bin or shredder.

I see there’s another issue of Mirepoix, and I wince.

I have yet to look at the last issue. Has a month passed already?

I should probably cancel my subscription.

But that would be like canceling who I used to be, the hope of rebecoming that person.

At the bottom of the pile, there’s a long white envelope with curvy scripted handwriting and a return address in St. John’s Ferry, Wisconsin.

The trifold letter inside is typed—as in, on a typewriter—the corners of each letter nostalgically pooled with black ink.

I start reading, but it’s late and my eyes blur. I blink and begin again:

The time has come, Magpie.

Spend the summer here on Rosehill Farm.

You and Hannah. Anytime is fine.

But I should warn you, they say the cell reception is “spotty.” No internet. And there will be work. But I promise, it will be the best summer of your life.

The time to grow like wild.

Alice

And then a phone number typed below her name.

I read the letter again, and then once more, trying to process.

I’ve never even met my Great-Aunt Alice, and yet, she is asking—no, practically telling—me to come to her Wisconsin farm for the summer. There will be work. Like what? Milking cows? Repairing fences? As if I could just drop everything—work, life—and do that.

As if I could live three months without internet.

And why did she call me Magpie? No one has ever called me that in my life.

My full name is Magnolia—like the flower—but everyone calls me Maggie.

Could it be a typo? I wonder if she’s almost blind or going senile, typing fragmented letters on some dusty typewriter and mailing them to estranged family members.

Her tone is too casual, almost patronizing.

The time has come.

What does that even mean?

I glance at the clock. It’s half past eleven, which means it’s only 9:30 p.m. on the West Coast. My mother, a math professor at UCLA, is probably still awake, grading papers.

My impulse is to call her, read her the letter from Alice.

Gossip. But the idea sours my stomach. For some reason, it feels like breaking a trust with Alice.

But how can I have a trust with someone I’ve never even met?

I know very little about Alice. She’s my late grandfather Albert Jr.’s much younger—by eleven years—sister, my mother’s aunt, and the family outcast. Last I knew, she lived alone—no husband, no children.

In addition to her “wild” hair, curly and unruly, wild has also referred to the berry jam she makes and sells on the side of the road and the turkeys she eats.

Throughout my childhood, Alice was a whisper at Independence Day picnics, a murmur over Thanksgiving pie, a heavy sigh between sips of Christmas eggnog, and a cleared throat after Easter Sunday ham.

I knew her only through stories, which made her a mythical enigma.

My juvenile brain placed her somewhere between Paul Bunyan and a unicorn.

My mind travels back to the Brodbeck family Fourth of July picnic, the summer I turned seven.

I remember my mother baked cupcakes, frosted them white, topped them with blue or red sprinkles, and arranged them on a platter to resemble the American flag.

She carried that platter to the picnic table like an overfilled fish tank.

“Diane, did you make these?” my aunts—all three—asked.

My mom nodded and beamed at their oohs and aahs. “Homemade,” she said.

When my cousins peeled off the cupcake liners and bit into them like cheeseburgers, I dabbed my fingertip into the frosting and tasted, then ran my tongue over the roof of my mouth, noting the heavy film.

I didn’t know then about hydrogenated fats; they don’t dissolve in your mouth because their melting point is higher than the human body temp of 98.

6 degrees. Instead, the commercially made frosting coats your mouth in blubber.

All I knew was I didn’t like it.

“Watch out, Mags. You better eat that cupcake, or I’m going to,” joked my Uncle Tony. He was always chiming in with something instructional as if to make up for me not having a dad. “Those are homemade cupcakes.”

“No, they aren’t,” I blurted. The table chatter came to a deafening silence. “My mom made them at home. But it was from a box,” I corrected. “From the store. And the frosting was also from the store.”

I held my breath. Had I just told one of my mother’s deepest, darkest secrets? Would she ever forgive me?

“Well, of course it was,” Tony said, while the rest of the aunts and cousins chuckled at my naivete. “That’s how you make homemade cupcakes.”

“Actually, it’s not,” I said, barely audible over their snickers.

I had never baked a cake from scratch, but I knew that truly homemade versions didn’t come from a box or a tub.

You could make them by combining a list of ingredients and following steps in a recipe, something I had recently figured out after perusing the cookbook section at the public library.

In the limited food vernacular of a seven-year-old, I attempted to explain all of this, until my cousin Tommy cut me off.

“Your cupcakes are the best, Aunt Diane!” he announced. Then the kids all grabbed a second one as if to prove me wrong and shut me up.

Which they did.

Later, I could barely hear my mother and her sisters while they packed up for the night. But I knew they were talking about me, their voices hushed, side glances in my direction. I sat alone on a flannel blanket studying the constellations instead of the fireworks.

I couldn’t make out what they said, except a single phrase.

“She’s just like Alice,” one of them said.

“Alice,” I whispered into the darkness, the name tingling the tip of my tongue like pickle juice. As the ground shook below me, I wondered who this Alice was. If my mother disowned me after tonight, maybe I could go live with her.

And we could be just like each other, together.

My mind snaps back to the present. I set the letter down and begin to tidy up, run through the muscle memory of my nighttime routine, all while a barrage of questions floods my brain: Why did Alice write me?

How did she get my address? How does she know about Hannah?

Why does she want me to come to her farm this summer?

Why does she think I need to grow, like wild?

And, what if she’s right?