Aftertaste - Meredith Mileti [31]
There is a long pause. I wonder if he’s forgotten about the invitation. That wouldn’t be surprising. My father has always been a bit absentminded. It also fit with the picture I was beginning to develop that my father, at the ripe old age of sixty-four, was suffering the earliest signs of dementia.
“You know, Thanksgiving?”
“Oh, Thanksgiving! Well, Mira, I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it, honey. I’m having dinner with some friends.”
Friends? Friends are where you go when your children couldn’t have you over. Doesn’t he know that any self-respecting father drops whatever he is doing to be with his daughter and granddaughter? And besides, since when does my father have friends?
“Oh,” is all I can think of to say.
“That, and I also have to work on Friday. A big grant proposal is due in Washington on Monday. No rest for the weary,” he says with a chuckle. “You know,” he continues, nonplussed, “I think I’m getting too old for this nonsense. I have a good mind to retire,” he says with a laugh, and we both know that nothing could be further from the truth. Suddenly my father is talking about RFPs and government contracts and his voice is chipper and peppy, which doesn’t exactly fit with my picture of a partially demented senior citizen.
“Sounds like you’ve been busy. Are you sure everything is okay, Dad?”
He hesitates before continuing. “Well, I have a bit of bad news, actually. You remember Debbie Silverman?”
I’d gone to high school with Debbie’s brother, Ronnie, and Debbie had been a few years ahead of me in school.
“Her husband—an orthopedic surgeon, I think—died unexpectedly. A heart attack at forty-eight. Dropped dead right in the operating room. Well, anyway, I don’t mean to upset you, but I thought you should know. You might want to send her a card.”
“Thanks, Dad, I will. Poor Debbie.”
But what I really want to say is, “What about me?”
One of the many differences between being divorced and being widowed is that when you are a widow, everyone sympathizes with you. You get condolence cards by the bushel; people send you flowers and make you casseroles. But, if you’ve been jilted, and particularly when you have been spurned in favor of another woman, the underlying assumption is that you are somehow lacking. It makes me wonder, if Jake died now, would I be entitled to call myself a widow? And to all the rights and privileges thereof?
Not if the death looks too suspicious, I suppose.
By Wednesday evening, I’ve convinced Chloe’s peers and their parents of my cooking prowess and dutifully eaten my sweet potato and marshmallow casserole while wearing a Pilgrim’s collar and cuffs. I’ve also taken an entire roll of pictures of Chloe eating her first pumpkin pie, supervised the service of over two hundred lunches, finalized the winter menu, shopped, cooked, and cleaned the apartment. The complicated machinations that have allowed me to achieve this delicate balance between family and work have left me looking and feeling like a stale Krispy Kreme donut, glazed and pasty on the outside and filled with jelly. I’m in the midst of setting the table when Richard calls to tell me that his flight has been delayed. Instead of taking advantage of the extra time I have to sit down and relax before he arrives, I put Chloe to bed and start baking biscotti, because I think it’s a nice hostessy thing to do.
Even though my mother had been a Cordon Bleu–trained chef, it was not she who taught me to cook—that I learned from Mrs. Favish, our next-door neighbor. It was during the first spring my mother was away, drying out at the expensive retreat center in New Hampshire. I was ten years old. Some people might have found it intimidating teaching the daughter of a professional chef to cook, but it hadn’t seemed to bother Mrs. Favish. In fact, she undertook my culinary education with extraordinary zeal, teaching me first to bake because she believed that one must