Epilogue
SIXTEEN MONTHS AFTER the festival, Three Table Catering occupies two kitchens.
The original prep space on Gallatin Avenue is still home base.
Same stainless steel counters, same walk-in cooler, same photo of Holly, and the same corkboard where Mom’s pound cake recipe is pinned in her handwriting next to a photo of Aarti’s culinary school graduation and a postcard from Sheena’s vacation in Savannah.
The second kitchen is three blocks east, in a rented storefront we converted in September, and it handles overflow prep for the weekends that now book three and four events deep.
We hired two full-time line cooks in the fall.
The Aston-Malik wedding produced five referrals, those referrals produced more, and the weekend calendar is booked through November.
Dom built a scheduling system that tracks ingredient overlap across simultaneous events, and I trained Aarti on my mise en place process until she could prep for a hundred-person luncheon without consulting the recipe binder.
Holly’s name is on a small brass plaque beside the front door of the original kitchen.
Co-founded by Holly Barrow, who believed the best meals are the ones that bring people to the table.
Dom installed it on the fourth anniversary of her death, and I helped him choose the wording.
We stood in front of it for a while after the screws were in, reading it, without speaking.
Then he went inside and started prepping for a Saturday event, because that’s what Holly would have done.
Mom’s pound cake is on the dessert menu now, listed as Melinda’s Brown Butter Pound Cake.
Clients request it for weddings, baby showers, retirement dinners, and memorial receptions.
I make it myself every time. I never delegate it.
The recipe calls for three sticks of butter browned until the milk solids turn amber, a full tablespoon of vanilla, and a pinch of salt that Mom always described as “just enough to make people ask what makes it different.” The answer is the salt. It’s always the salt.
Dom proposed four months ago, on a Tuesday, in the kitchen, while we were cleaning up after a corporate luncheon for a law firm. I was wiping the last counter. He was drying a sheet tray. The kitchen smelled like roasted garlic and the industrial soap we use on the stainless steel.
“Nat.”
“Yeah.”
“I think we should get married.”
I stopped wiping. He was still drying the tray, holding it in one hand with the towel in the other, and he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the tray like it held the answer to a question he’d been carrying around.
“What brought this on?”
“Nothing brought it on. I’ve been thinking about it for two months.
I wanted to make sure it wasn’t about proximity, or grief, or business convenience, or any of the twelve other reasons it would be easy to write off.
” He set the tray on the rack. “It’s not about any of those things. I want to marry you.”
“I think so too,” I said.
He looked at me then. His face was the face I’d been looking at across prep counters for years, and the expression on it was the same one he wore the first time I kissed him in this kitchen. Startled. Relieved. Like he’d expected to argue his case and couldn’t believe the verdict.
We went to look at rings the following weekend. He wanted something simple. I wanted something simple. We agreed in four minutes. It was the easiest decision we’ve ever made, including the chimichurri.
I’m six months pregnant with a girl. We’ve been arguing about names for weeks.
Dom wants Francesca after his grandmother, I want something shorter, and the compromise is still pending.
The baby kicks when I stand at the prep counter too long, which Dom uses as evidence that his daughter already has strong opinions about mise en place timing.
The pregnancy isn’t what Wynn owed me. It’s what Dom and I chose after we’d both stopped waiting for someone else to decide our future. We chose it in the same kitchen where we chose everything else. Deliberately, without performance, and side by side.
I heard through a mutual friend that Wynn and Ellora are still together. They moved to Raleigh with their son. I don’t know the details, and I didn’t ask for them. I hope the child is loved. That’s the full extent of care I have for the three of them.
The voicemail is still saved on my phone.
I don’t listen to it anymore. I don’t need to.
I know what my mother was trying to say, and she would have said more if she’d had the time, the certainty, and the energy to push past the instinct to protect me from what she saw.
The dying don’t owe us their suspicions.
They owe us their love, and Mom gave that in every phone call, every squeeze of my hand, and every “I love you” at the end of every voicemail, including the one I almost deleted.
Dom is in the kitchen. Tomorrow’s ingredients cover the prep counter in labeled containers. His handwriting on some, mine on others, and Aarti’s on the overflow trays she staged before she left. The brass plaque by the front door is clean, the letters sharp. Holly’s name is permanent.
I pick up a knife and start working, content with every aspect of my life.