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Rose had been thinking for some time about how she was planning on cooking this banquet. It had to be perfect; Dorothy deserved the best, and she wasn’t going to let her hire a caterer even though she was about to become fabulously wealthy.
And Blanche’s aunt. Every time she brought that up, Blanche shuddered from her head to her toe. Usually it took someone extravagantly handsome or incredibly suave to get that kind of reaction out of her. A naked Burt Reynolds fresh out the shower couldn’t have made her shiver that hard.
Well, that couldn’t be helped. Dorothy was deliriously happy and the four of them were going to celebrate every second of the wedding. Rose knew from experience what she liked – deviled eggs, a nice relish tray with freshly sliced salmon and cold meats, vegetables and cheeses, and thick slabs of fresh baked bread. Rose had contributed her favorite sort – a sweet bread with crystallized sugar, filled with marzipan. She’d learned it from her mother, and she’d passed it down to her daughters, though neither seemed particularly interested in being the bread baking types.
Rose thought to herself that Sophia might like to learn the recipe, if she weren’t so stubborn about controlling the kitchen when they baked together.
Sophia’s contributions to the platter had been cookies and pastries that Dorothy had loved as a child; creamy, light delicate things, which fragmented and melted on her tongue in sweet slices. Rose had watched her cook them while sharing her best Saint Olaf stories to pass the time – for some reason Sophia had asked her to take a trip to the market on the other side of the town to get a bottle of cinnamon sugar that she could’ve gotten on a two-second drive, but Rose thought she’d made a decent companion. Sophia had even smiled when she’d given advice on the cake – it was cooling, chocolate-rich and smelling wonderful – on the kitchen table.
After she placed the appetizers in the fridge, Rose started boiling stock for the bouillabaisse. There was veal breaded in the refrigerator, and a ham. Potatoes peeled and ready to be boiled. Carrots and parsnips to be mashed.
And then there was a cheesecake.
Only the best would do for Dorothy, so the cake was to be carefully baked, carefully steamed without a drop of water leaking into it. With every fresh ingredient Rose added to the mix, she threw in a happy memory, a shared tear, another little bit of their past held together by memories and laughter that would always make her smile.
They had eaten so many cheesecakes on this table, and spoken so frankly with one another. Rose had never had friendship like that before. She wanted everything put on that banquet table to reflect the importance of what Dorothy and Sophia and Blanche meant to her.
Standing back from the feast a few hours later, she realized that she’d done her very best to create something with love in it – and completely succeeded.
She called for Sophia and gave her room to play.