Chapter 7
Alice carries Hannah from the outside porch to her bedroom upstairs. It’s a darling room with white-and-pink flowered curtains and a dormer window seat perfect for reading or daydreaming.
“This used to be your room,” Alice whispers as she rests Hannah on the full bed with a white, lacy ruffled pillowcase. My daughter barely wakes and turns her back to us, rocking her body slightly to nestle into the mattress.
I look around the room once more and try to remember it. I don’t. But as we tiptoe into the hallway, I see something else familiar. A rope hanging from the ceiling.
Alice catches my glance. “The attic.”
“You pull the rope, and the stairs come down,” I say as a memory returns. “It’s creaky.”
“Do you remember what’s up there?”
I shake my head, then pause. “Books?”
Alice smiles. “And then some.”
She reaches for the rope, and I watch the trapdoor open and the staircase descend out of nowhere. It screeches, a sound I remember, reminiscent of a Halloween sound effects tape. I follow Alice up into the secret room.
It’s part library, part reading room, part artist studio, part puzzle room, part antique storage. The ceiling is high, and we walk around without hunching. It’s literally a third floor, the square footage equal to that below. This is what lies beyond the turret window of the farmhouse’s exterior.
“I’ve had dreams of finding a secret room like this in my house,” I say as we spill into the space.
Alice laughs. “Oh, that dream. I love that dream. Supposed to mean you’re feeling hopeful about the future.”
I haven’t had a dream like that in a while. “Do you come up here often?” I ask.
She frowns. “Not as often as I used to.”
“Did I used to come up here? When I was a kid?”
“All the time. We did art projects up here. You read books.”
“I read? At three?”
“Well, you weren’t really reading, but in a way you were.
You thought you were reading, and that’s really all that matters.
It’s the start. You’d sit by the window and flip through books, the ones with pictures but some without.
You liked the cookbooks. You’d point at the pictures of food and say ‘Me eat!’ It was really adorable. ”
I laugh. “That explains my lifelong obsession with food.”
Alice moves toward a shelving unit filled with various bins and boxes, some labeled and some not. “How did you become a food anthropologist?” she asks nonchalantly, shifting boxes and lifting lids, looking for something.
“It was my mom’s idea. She wanted me to be an academic like her, a college professor. So we settled on the most scholastic food-related career that interested me. That ended up being food anthropology. Not every school has a program, but it’s become more common in recent years.”
“But you wanted to be a chef.”
I swallow. Alice just seems to inherently know me.
“I wanted to go to Le Cordon Bleu,” I finally say.
“Well, who doesn’t?”
“Right?” I laugh. And yet, many people, including my mother and school counselor, didn’t understand my dream of going to culinary school. They likened it to wanting to be a ballerina or a professional baseball player. Unrealistic. Childlike. Pie in the sky.
“Why didn’t you go?” she asks, shifting a box to the left.
I shrug, despite knowing the answer. I think back to high school, to that Foods 2 class. I had fallen in love with the idea of taking that class. But my mother had said no. “Honestly, I felt like I needed a permission slip,” I finally say. “And nobody signed it. Not even me.”
Alice nods. “I get that.” She pulls a bankers box out from the shelf like a Jenga piece. “Do you still cook? Bake? At home?”
“Sometimes. But not as much as I’d like to. I wish I made more from scratch. With fresh, local ingredients. Lately, I’ve just been so busy,” I say, and to my own surprise, I divulge the details of my recent panic attack. “I’m supposed to be taking it easy this week. Relaxing.”
Alice smiles, a glint in her narrowed eyes.
“Well, you’ve come to the right place. St. John’s Ferry is definitely a chill place.
And a great farming community, if you want to reconnect with food and where it comes from.
” She sets the box on the table beside us.
It’s dusty and weathered at the corners. “This is for you.”
“What’s in there?” I ask.
“Recipes. Family recipes.”
“Family recipes?”
“Your mother and your grandfather may not have been very good cooks. But my grandmother—as in your great-great-grandmother—Rose Brodbeck, was a force in the kitchen. This was her house and farm once upon a time.”
“I actually just found that out,” I divulge. “Something else my mother never told me.” I start to sketch a family tree in my mind. “So Rose is my great-great-grandmother and . . . what was her husband’s name?”
“Charles,” Alice says. “Unfortunately, he passed quite young. So Rose was a widow, left with two boys to raise on her own: my father, Albert Sr., and another son, Hank.”
“Right,” I say, starting to make sense of the familial connections.
I feel a shiver run through me as I realize what Rose and I sadly have in common.
And though my father didn’t die, my mother raised me alone.
Single motherhood seems to be our family rite of passage.
“And your father, Albert, married your mother, my great-grandmother, Doris?” I go on.
“She was the actress, and they had two kids, my grandfather—Albert Jr.—and you.”
“You got it.”
I place my hand on the box protectively. “And these are Rose’s recipes inside?”
Alice nods. “Like I said, she was an amazing cook. I lived here with Rose when I was a kid,” she adds.
I’m suddenly struck by the parallel of our lives. “For how long?”
“A year. I came for the summer after I finished kindergarten—I had just turned six, about the same age as Hannah. It was just my mother who brought me because Albert Jr. was a teenager by then and had a life of his own. Sadly, my dad was in a rehab facility for alcohol. Did you know that he struggled with addiction?”
I shake my head. “Maybe that’s why my grandfather never talked about his family, why I grew up not really knowing about any of you.”
She frowns. “Well, it was a good thing I came here that summer. I’d been having trouble in school at the time, behavior issues, poor grades, and I was having difficulty learning to read.
Today I’d probably be diagnosed with an attention disorder, but at the time they just thought I was overactive.
I was a bit of a tomboy, always wanting to play outside and get dirty and climb trees.
Couldn’t sit still in my chair. Over that summer, I learned to read and became a lot more agreeable. ”
I sit down at the table beside us, absorbed by her story. “That’s amazing.”
Alice joins me at the table and continues.
“It was. That’s why my grandmother suggested I stay for the school year too.
She told my parents that I was thriving here.
My parents agreed for me to stay for first grade.
It was easier on them, really. You mentioned my mother, Doris, was an actress, but both of my parents were actors, both trying to build their Hollywood careers.
With my brother being so much older, I think they were kind of done with parenthood by that point.
But after a year, my mother insisted I come back home.
My parents were divorcing, and my father’s mental health was spiraling.
My mother soon remarried, wedding a man named Stan.
We never came back here again. I missed my grandmother immensely.
We started writing letters back and forth when I was in college.
But by then, her health had declined. And unfortunately, she passed before I could visit again. ”
“So when did you come back?” I ask.
“After college. When she died, she left me the house and the farm. Everyone thought I should just sell it and pocket the money. Developers even wanted it at one time. But once I came here, I didn’t want to leave. I couldn’t. I never went back to California.”
I nod but don’t comment. I don’t want to share with Alice how poorly the family spoke of her, the grudges they held against her, how they made her the family misfit. She doesn’t need to know. “Are you glad you decided to stay?” I ask instead. “Do you think it was the right decision?”
“Hard to remove an ingredient from an already-baked cake. But I wouldn’t dream of being anywhere else.” She pauses and shakes her head. “This is home.”
I see something in her expression—Sadness? Disappointment? Resignation?—and feel like there is something she isn’t telling me.
“Alice, why did you mail me that letter?” I ask pointedly. “After all these years?”
She shrugs. “Life is short. Time is a gift. And you have to use it wisely.”
It’s an abstract answer, more like an inspirational quote. It doesn’t feel like the truth. But I’m not comfortable pressing her. “Well, I look forward to sorting through these,” I say instead, gesturing to the box of recipes.
“I thought you might. Maybe you could even organize them? Compile them into a book for me? I’ve been meaning to but .
. . well, you know how quickly time can pass without doing the things you mean to do.
And I’ll be honest, sometimes, my hands cramp.
Arthritis. Come to think of it, you might want to just take these home with you. ”
I shake my head. “Oh, I wouldn’t feel right about that. They belong here, don’t they? In Rose’s house? They’ve been here this long. They should stay.”
I stand and lift the box, feel its weight on the pads of my fingers. Without opening the lid, I know it’s filled to the brim. What treasures sit inside this box? What insights to the past?
What instructions for the future?