The Table by the Kitchen
Part One: The Necklace
“Grandma, let me fix your necklace,” Lucy said.
My daughter was standing behind my mother in the bride’s dressing room at the Hillside Country Club, carefully unhooking a thin gold chain that had twisted at the back of Mom’s neck. Lucy is fifteen. She has long, careful fingers, the kind that are good at untangling things.
Mom smiled at her in the mirror.
“Thank you, sweetheart,” she said. “I want to look nice for Daniel.”
She did look nice. She looked beautiful.
She was wearing a lavender dress she’d bought at Dillard’s three months earlier and altered herself, because she said the sleeves were too long for an old woman’s arms. Her silver hair was set in soft curls. She had on the pearl earrings my father gave her for their fortieth anniversary, the year before he died.
And the necklace. A tiny gold locket on a thin chain. Inside were two pictures. My father on one side. On the other, a photo of my son, Daniel, at four years old, in a little chef’s hat she’d made him out of a paper bag.
My mother’s name is Ida Kowalski. She’s seventy-six years old.
She raised both my kids after my divorce. I want you to understand that. I want everybody to understand that.
When Daniel was seven and Lucy was eight months old, my husband left. He moved to Phoenix with a woman from his office and sent child support for exactly fourteen months. After that, nothing.
I was a nurse at Mercy Hospital in Cincinnati. I worked nights, twelve-hour shifts, three and four nights a week. It was the only way to pay the mortgage.
My mother moved in with us that winter.
She’d just retired from thirty-four years as head pastry cook at this very country club. The Hillside Country Club, up on the hill in Indian Hill, where the old money in Cincinnati plays golf and holds weddings and eats crème brûlée on the terrace.
Mom made that crème brûlée. And the wedding cakes. And the Christmas cookies and the birthday cakes and the little lemon tarts the ladies ate at bridge club.
She retired at sixty-two with a sore back, a modest pension, and a lifetime of burns on her forearms from the ovens. Two weeks later, she was sleeping on a pull-out couch in my living room, packing my children’s lunches.
When I worked nights, she made the kids dinner. She helped with homework at the kitchen table. She took them to school in the morning in her old Buick, then picked them up in the afternoon.
She taught Daniel to make pie crust when he was nine. She taught Lucy to read before kindergarten. She sat in the bleachers at every one of Daniel’s high school basketball games and every one of Lucy’s choir concerts.
She did it for eleven years. Until Lucy was old enough to stay home alone and I’d finally moved to day shifts.
She never once asked for anything.
The night before the wedding, Daniel called her.
I was in Mom’s kitchen when the phone rang. She put him on speaker.
“Grandma,” Daniel said. “Are you still coming tomorrow? You’re feeling okay?”
“Of course I’m coming,” Mom said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I just wanted to make sure,” Daniel said. His voice was a little thick. “I want you there. More than anybody.”
Mom smiled at the phone.
“I wouldn’t miss it for anything,” she said.
Part Two: Jenna
Daniel is twenty-seven now. He’s a sous chef at a restaurant in Over-the-Rhine. He got into cooking because of my mother. He says she’s the reason he does everything he does.
He met Jenna Whitfield three years ago at a farmers market in Hyde Park. She was buying tomatoes. He told her she was picking the wrong ones. She told him to mind his own business. Then she bought the ones he recommended.
They’ve been together ever since.
Jenna is a pediatric occupational therapist at Children’s Hospital. She’s smart and funny and warm. She calls my mother “Grandma Ida.” She sends her birthday cards with handwritten notes.
I loved her the moment I met her.
Her mother was a different story.
Patricia Whitfield is fifty-eight. She lives in a big stone house in Indian Hill with a three-car garage and a circular driveway. Her husband, Grant, is a corporate attorney. They’ve been members of the Hillside Country Club for twenty-five years.
Patricia chairs the Garden Society. She’s on the board of the Cincinnati Art Museum. She plays doubles tennis every Tuesday and Thursday at nine a.m.
She’s always perfectly dressed. Always perfectly polite.
And from the first time she met my mother, something in her face went tight.
It happened at the engagement party. Two years ago, at the Whitfields’ house.
I walked in with Mom on my arm. Patricia was standing in the foyer greeting guests. She shook my hand. She smiled.
Then she turned to Mom.
And for just a second, her smile froze.
“Have we met?” Patricia asked.
Mom looked at her for a long moment.
“I don’t believe so,” Mom said quietly.
Later that night, in the car, I asked her about it.
“Mom, did you know her?”
Mom was looking out the window at the big houses going by in the dark.
“A long time ago,” she said. “When she was very little. I don’t think she remembers.”
“From where?”
Mom didn’t answer right away.
“From the club,” she finally said. “Her mother worked there.”
I didn’t think about it again.
Not until the wedding.
Part Three: The Cake
Two days before the wedding, Daniel called me in a panic.
It was Thursday afternoon. I was at work, on my lunch break in the cafeteria. He was talking so fast I could barely understand him.
“Mom,” he said. “The bakery closed. The cake’s gone.”
The bakery was Lumière. A famous French patisserie in Mariemont. Patricia had chosen it. She’d paid a deposit of four thousand dollars for a five-tier white chocolate and raspberry cake with sugar flowers cascading down the side.
That morning, a water main broke under the street. The bakery flooded. Two feet of water in the kitchen. The ovens were ruined. The health department shut them down.
Every order for the weekend was canceled.
“Patricia’s losing her mind,” Daniel said. “She’s called every bakery in Cincinnati. Nobody can do a five-tier cake for a hundred and eighty people in two days. Nobody.”
“What about a smaller cake? Cupcakes?”
“She says it’ll look cheap,” Daniel said. “She says everyone at the club will know. Jenna’s crying. Mom, I don’t know what to do.”
I was quiet for a moment.
“Have you called Grandma?” I asked.
Daniel didn’t answer.
“Daniel,” I said. “Your grandmother made every wedding cake at that country club for thirty-four years.”
“I know,” he said. “But she’s seventy-six. She’s got a bad back. It’s a five-tier cake. I can’t ask her to do that.”
“You don’t have to ask her,” I said. “Just tell her what happened.”
He called her that afternoon.
She was at her house in Westwood, watering her tomato plants. She listened to the whole story without saying a word.
When he was done, she said, “What flavor did Jenna want?”
“White chocolate and raspberry,” Daniel said.
“With sugar flowers?”
“Down the side,” Daniel said. “Like a waterfall.”
Mom was quiet for a moment.
“Bring me two hundred dollars’ worth of butter,” she said. “And six dozen eggs. And find me your sister. I’m going to need help.” 