In Twenty Years: A Novel (13 page)

14

CATHERINE

Catherine woke this morning with Lindy’s white-noise machine cooing, and she suddenly couldn’t remember when she’d last made French toast. When they lived here, it was something of a ritual, at least on the Sundays when they all found themselves in their own beds, which was less frequently than you’d think (mostly on account of Lindy and Colin skewing the odds). Back then, Catherine thought of it like a family sitting down together over Sunday dinner, the irony being that now, her family rarely sat down for Sunday dinner, and certainly she’s not mastering French toast in the mornings. The closest she’s come is whipping up brunch food on
Good Morning America
, but she really just whisked some ingredients together on-screen before magically presenting the finished plate. But honest-to-God homemade French toast, made with care and thought and love . . .

When was the last time she made that?

Not for Mason or Penelope in ages. Not for Owen either.

So she resolved to make perfect French toast. She stared at the ceiling from Lindy’s bed and thought,
Today, I’m going to be who I was when I was twenty, twenty-one. And made all sorts of things for my friends here—in this house, under this roof—that were filled with care and thought and love.

She ran to Wawa for ingredients while the others slept, and then she cracked the eggs and melted the butter and added in a splash of vanilla extract that she found in the spice drawer and poured in just the right amount of milk. The slices sizzled on the pan.
Yes, today’s the day that I remember why I started doing this in the first place.

Also, she knew that the scent of French toast would wake them all—it used to back then too, when they’d emerge from closed doors one by one, bed-headed and sleepy, but hungry and thankful for her efforts. She’d drifted in and out of sleep in those few precious hours since she’d been granted a reprieve from Owen’s snoring, thinking of Bea, thinking of her wedding, of how poorly she behaved, then even more poorly at the funeral. She inhaled the aroma wafting from the pan and imagined that Bea was somehow looking down on her approvingly, like this particular French toast was absolution for the things set in motion that day at the brunch. As if this particular French toast would unite the five of them again.

Twenty years ago, Catherine never believed she quite got the French toast right. She tore recipe after recipe out of magazines, xeroxed them from cookbooks borrowed from the library. There were a surprising number of tweaks to French toast that elevated it from decent to delectable—orange rind, lemon zest, jumbo eggs, nutmeg—and Catherine never trusted her own instincts enough not to heed someone else’s formula. Bea would sit with her sometimes while she cooked, dragging a chair over from the dining table whose paint job Catherine was equally dissatisfied with, and ooh and aah about the mouthwatering scent, about Catherine’s natural ability in the kitchen (“at everything!” Bea would marvel—“I’m just so terrible with my hands!”). But Catherine would shake her head and reread whatever egg- or milk-spattered recipe lay on the counter, and keep tweaking. She was never as good as she hoped. Never good enough, certainly. Not good enough to gamble and attempt a go from scratch.

On this morning, Colin pops his head up the stairs first, pulling a Stanford T-shirt over his chest. He hasn’t changed much, Catherine assesses. Some finer lines around his eyes, but other than that, it’s as if time froze for him. He is simple. He is happy. He is unburdened.

It must be nice to be unburdened. To not have readers to satisfy, board members to please, Target to placate.

She slides him a plate, and he growls, pleased. His fork scrapes against the plate before she can even set it down.

“You’d better have saved some for me!” Lindy barrels down the steps, coming from who knows whose room.
Had she slept in Bea’s bed?

“French toast! I’d know that smell anywhere.”

A smoldering hipster-looking guy bounds down the steps behind her, and Catherine narrows her eyes, contemplating how on earth Lindy has managed to land a one-night stand, and just how typical that was. And then immediately regrets her judgment—
What if Bea is watching us? What if I could have done things differently?
—because she had earlier resolved to truly make amends. She drops two slices on another plate and offers it to Lindy.
See, Bea? I’m trying!

Smoldering hipster-looking guy tears off a corner of the top piece and chews slowly, thoughtfully. “Not so bad,” he says, his head cocked, his brow wrinkled. “But French toast
is
my specialty.” He winks at her, and Catherine sags.

“Leon.” He extends his hand. “I’m just playing.”

Catherine frowns. “Catherine. This is five-star French toast. It’s reader approved.”

“Hey, man.” Colin bobs his head. “Colin. We didn’t officially meet last night.” He offers him another slice with his fingers, like this five-star French toast is disposable, like it’s not a goddamn work of art.

Lindy grabs it and swallows it in three bites. Not how French toast is meant to be savored.

“Do I smell French toast?” Annie sings from the basement. God bless her, Annie is going to make this right, appreciate it for all it’s worth. She bounces up the steps, her ponytail swinging behind her. “Oooh, Catherine! My favorite, you shouldn’t have!”

Catherine waves her hand, like,
no biggie
. She hands a plate to Annie, who sits beside Colin but avoids his eyes and instead focuses—intently—on cutting her toast into perfect symmetrical squares before spearing them with a fork and relishing each bite.

“Oooh, this is heaven,” she says. “Is this your old recipe? Is it on your site?” She turns to the others. “I check her site every day. She has
the best
holiday suggestions. I use them all the time for the PTA.”

Her site!
In the early-morning haze of revisiting her grief over Bea and outrunning Owen’s snoring, she’d forgotten. She never forgets about her site! And today, of all days, with the critical Fourth of July spread, the one Target would be eyeballing, the one with the stills from the HGTV pilot that surely their executives will be mulling over too. After the disaster of the test run, she’d insisted on a full redo with her own ideas (well, not her own ideas
exactly
: she hadn’t
quite
copied anything expressly, just took inspiration, maybe, and some tiny creative liberties from a few unknown mom-and-pop blogs that no one would have heard of, no one would have ever seen!). She tried to manage the shoot from soup to nuts, 100 percent, but what with the board prep and the increasingly frantic e-mails from her CFO, she inevitably had to leave some of the details to Fred.

“Oh!” She claps her hands and pulls out her phone. “I was having so much fun with the French toast that I completely forgot! We have a new photo spread up today.” She wipes her hands on a dish towel and hopes the others don’t detect the worry that surely spreads like a shadow across her face.

Annie has her mouth full, so she gestures to the chair beside her, and Catherine sits with her phone aloft in her palm, while Leon inexplicably hovers over her shoulder too.

“Leon,” he says to Annie.

“That’s Annie,” Lindy says before Annie has a chance to swallow her bite and reply.

Catherine is immediately sure she’ll be caught this time; that this will be it: her cover will be flambéed. Her eyes dart back and forth over the glossy shots, her thumb and pointer finger enlarging the screen for a better view. She’d been at the shoot, of course, the bulk of it anyway—present and accounted for (physically at least)—but now she can see that some small details slipped, even under her own watch. A few of the elements knock it out of the park: the towering centerpieces crafted out of cupcakes, mimicking an exploding firework; handwoven tablecloths braided like the American flag (found on a teeny-tiny homemade site that hadn’t appeared to be updated in seven months!); a giant Liberty Bell piñata (which Catherine personally papier-mâchéd after stumbling upon an image from a homeschooling blog out of Iowa), and a Statue of Liberty replica carved out of watermelon (discovered deep in the bowels of Pinterest).

But the flower arrangements are off.
Who approved Gerbera daisies? Do Gerbera daisies scream patriotic to you?
And someone forgot the little American flags in the lemonades, which round off the entire look and were, as Catherine told her staff, just as she ran out the door to try to make one of Penelope’s gymnastic meets, “the final flourish, the salute to America, the salute to our readers.” She didn’t tell them that the flags were fresh off the shelves at Target, a tip of the hat to her potential partners/life raft. Should she have? Was that the only way to get her staff to actually dedicate themselves to the fine print, to the nitty-gritty details?

Those goddamn flags could cost us a partnership, could cost you your jobs, you nitwits! Now, are you listening? Now, are you paying attention?

It’s no goddamn wonder that their hits are faltering, that ad sales are sinking. How does someone on her payroll forget a goddamn salute to America?

“It’s beautiful!” Annie whispers. She smacks her hand across her chest, like she was pledging allegiance to Catherine. “Wow, Cathy, just . . . wow.”

Catherine freezes her face into something like what she hopes is a smile as she runs down the checklist of all the screwups. Her eyes feel wild, her irritation unhinging her. Maybe she should have ignored her irate CFO, maybe she shouldn’t have overcommitted to a TV pilot
and
a Target partnership (though she surely needs both), maybe she shouldn’t have gotten distracted with all this personal stuff from her past—coming here, dredging up old wounds, losing focus. Or maybe this is her penance for poaching from someone else, for never quite being good enough to play in the big leagues, even though she’s firmly
in
the big leagues. Who ever said she was good enough to deserve it?

Leon slaps the table, clattering the plates.

“That’s it! That’s how I know you. You’re The Crafty Lady. Oh, man! I used to watch you on Food Network, like, all the frickin’ time.”

Lindy side-eyes Leon at the revelation. Catherine spreads her smile wide and hopes he doesn’t ask why she no longer guests on the Food Network. (They replaced her with Suzy Carpenter of that stupid Suzy’s Secrets blog who was twenty-nine and a mom of four, not to mention a size zero with flawless blonde highlights and a cheeriness that could make birds sing.)

Colin rises and helps himself to seconds.

“Well, hey,” Leon says, pulling her into a hug, like they’re old mates, like Catherine is at all comfortable with this. “Man, I didn’t mean anything with my comment . . . I was just playing . . . if I’d known the French toast was coming from you, well, man . . .”

Catherine doesn’t think she can smile any wider than she already is, so she gently pushes her hands against his chest and untangles herself from his lanky limbs, and thanks him demurely. He offers a reverent bow. Though she’s not sure that this was much of a compliment: delicious only in name, not in execution.

Leon, evidently a domestic god in skinny jeans and a neck scarf (and whose presence she still doesn’t quite understand—
Who are you? What are you doing here?
), takes her phone, peering intently at the photo spread. Catherine worries that he’ll recognize something, call her on the plagiarizing farce that she (kind of, at times) is.

Instead, he says, “That looks awesome.” He exclaims, “You’re killing it! I’d like to go to a goddamn barbecue that looks that fly.” He moves to hug her again, but Catherine delicately steps backward ever so slightly, and they both pretend that he’s not attempting to invade her personal space with his fawning.

“You’re into crafting?” Lindy asks.

“It relaxes me. Also, you should try my coffee cake. Next time you’re in the city, I’ll make it for you.”

Footsteps reverberate overhead, and they all gaze upward, and then Owen plods his way down the steps.

“Good morning!” he says, as if he hadn’t ingested approximately seven times the legal alcohol limit twelve hours ago and then kept the rest of them awake since. His baseball cap is slung too low, but otherwise he’s in pretty good shape for a guy who arguably could be hospitalized right now. He glances at Leon, utterly unperturbed by a stranger standing in their old living room. “Hey, dude.”

“It’s practically noon!” Catherine says. It’s not like Owen has slept so much later than the rest of them (well, other than Catherine, who rose at 8:30 a.m.). But she can’t help herself.
Who does he think he is to saunter down here and act like he hadn’t been a ridiculous fool last night?
When she woke, she resolved not to hold it against him all day, but now he’s so buoyant and unapologetic that she resolves to nearly hold it against him forever. “And you missed French toast.”

French toast is Owen’s favorite. She knows this will sting.

“It’s also July 4th,” Annie says, like this is just occurring to all of them for the first time.

No one says anything for a moment. They all stare at their bare feet (Owen stares at his socks because he fell asleep in them), contemplating the enormity of something so simple as a new date on the calendar. Yesterday was just any old day. Today was Bea’s birthday. Twenty-four hours can flip your perspective on end.

Leon just glances at the rest of them because he has no clue what this all means.

“Jesus. It’s Fourth of July,” Colin says, mostly to himself. “We need to go out and do something. Something like we used to,” he says to the others, gazing at each of them. “For Bea.”

“For Bea.” The rest of them (well, not Leon because he still doesn’t know who Bea is) murmur.

For a second, they mean it, they really do.