Chapter 1: Grandma Rosa’s
My sister raised her wineglass over Mom’s pot roast and said, “To Grandma Rosa’s secret recipes.”
Everyone at the table drank except me.
Mom slid a glossy flyer across the tablecloth so it stopped against my plate. Cream and gold. A cartoon grandmother in a headscarf pulling a round loaf out of a brick oven. GRANDMA ROSA’S BAKEHOUSE. Secret Family Recipes Since 1962. Grand Opening Saturday.
“Which recipes?” I said.
“Grandma’s, obviously.” Vanessa touched the corner of her mouth with her napkin, careful of her lipstick. “The sourdough. The anise rings. The lemon ricotta cake. The classics.”
My sister is forty-two. For fifteen years she was a marketing director at Midwest Mutual in downtown Dayton, and for twenty years she has called what I do for a living “manual labor.” She says it fondly, the way you’d talk about a cousin who never left town. How are things down in the flour mines, Nora? For my thirtieth birthday she gave me a forty-dollar hand cream. For your little workman hands.
“You quit Midwest Mutual?” I said.
“Three weeks ago.” She smiled. “I’m done making other people rich.”
Across from me, Dad was cutting his pot roast into smaller and smaller pieces. He hadn’t looked up once since the toast.
“Your father and I invested,” Mom said brightly. “It’s a real storefront, Nora. On Wilmington Avenue. Thirty seats. A display case as long as this room.”
“How much did you invest?”
“That’s between us and your sister.”
“Don’t make that face,” Vanessa said. “You sell sourdough out of a folding tent at the Second Street Market. I’m building a brand. Somebody in this family had to finally take Grandma seriously.”
I set my fork down. “Grandma left the book to me.”
“She left a notebook to the only grandchild who wanted to stand in a kitchen at four in the morning.” Vanessa put her glass down, very gently. “The recipes belong to the family, Nora. Not just to you.”
“The book is in my safe.”
She smiled at me then. I knew that smile. It was the one she wore when we were kids, after she’d already eaten the last cookie and was waiting for me to find the empty jar.
“Then you have nothing to worry about,” she said.
“Can we please,” Mom said, “just be happy for one night? For once?”
Dad passed the potatoes to nobody in particular.
I left before dessert. Mom called after me that I was being dramatic. Vanessa didn’t call anything at all.
I drove home on Route 48 with both hands on the wheel and the flyer on the passenger seat, face down, because I didn’t want to look at that cartoon grandmother. My grandmother never wore a headscarf in her life. She wore a hairnet and a man’s wristwatch and she could pull a forty-pound sack of flour off a pallet without bending her knees, and she would have hated that drawing.
Grandma Rosa’s book is brown leather, cracked down the spine, held shut with a rubber band and stiff with sixty years of flour. I don’t bake from it. I haven’t needed to in years. I keep it the way you keep a photograph.
The safe is in my hall closet, behind the winter coats. The code is Grandma’s birthday, because it was the first number I thought of, and because nobody would ever look for it there.
Everybody in my family knows Grandma’s birthday.
I knelt on the closet floor with my coat still on and punched in the four numbers. The bolt clicked. The door swung open.
The book was there. Right where I’d left it, the rubber band snug around it.
I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding.
Then I slid the rubber band off and opened it, just to feel the pages, and I stopped.
I keep one yellow sticky tab in that book. Only one. It marks the page for the mother, Grandma’s sourdough starter, the page I’d turn to if I ever forgot everything else.
The tab was two pages to the left of where I’d put it.
Somebody had opened Grandma’s book.
And put it back very, very carefully.
