Kitchens of the Great Midwest (26 page)

“Thank you,” Celeste said, looking down at her feet. “It’s just an old family recipe, nothing special.”

“Why a copper mixing bowl?” Pat asked Celeste.

“Oh, for the egg whites,” Celeste said. “It stabilizes them. Don’t ask me how.”

Barb looked at Pat. “You didn’t know that?”

“I actually don’t separate my eggs for bars. When I’m making a soufflé or sponge cake, I add a little cream of tartar to my egg whites, and that does the trick for me.”

The other women nodded.

“Don’t get me wrong, though. Who wouldn’t love to have a copper mixing bowl,” Pat was quick to add. “But we just gotta work with what God gives us.”

“I use a copper whisk,” Barb said.

Sandra, finishing her Mississippi mud pie bar, licked her plastic fork. “I think we have our winner right here. What do you think, Pat?”

Pat nibbled at her Mississippi mud bar. When she raised it to her lips, she saw that Celeste’s bar left a thick stamp of greasy oil on the paper plate. In her mouth, she literally felt granules of sugar wash around; her fillings cried out in protest. She chased the thick buttery slab with a glass of water, which she swished around in her mouth before swallowing.

“Definitely one of our final three, yes,” she said, smiling.

 • • • 

When the rain receded enough for all of them to drive home safely, Pat got in her rusty old Accord, which didn’t look like much, sure, but got a person from point A to point B reliably and had been loyal to the family through so much abuse. Not even Eli’s ungrateful daughter Julie could destroy that car. The problem, on days like today, was that one of the rear windows didn’t go all the way up, and even though they had taped up a Hefty bag to cover the gap, the storm had blown it right off the car. Now part of the backseat was sopping wet and would have to be dried later so it didn’t get full of mold.

Why was God testing her like this? With the storm, the wet seat, and, most painfully, the soul-breaking trial that was Celeste Mantilla. Maybe, Pat thought, God felt that she was having it too easy with the blue-ribbon-winning bars year after year. Maybe He felt that she needed a challenge. And so He had sent this demonic force, in the form of a beautiful woman with these ridiculously sweet bars, to oppose her, to put things in perspective, to remind her of what was really important. Like He said in 1 Peter 1:7, “The trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth.” Which was true. But why were the most pious always the most severely tested?

Don’t answer that, Lord,
she said as she turned onto her street, and whispered a brief prayer of apology. She also forgave her friends, for the Mississippi mud bars proved that their spirit might be strong, but their flesh was weaker than ever. One day they would see the error of their ways; but when the time of their contrition came, she would be gracious and forgiving to them and
not
say that she had known from the first that Celeste was pure evil, because no one likes to hear an I-told-you-so.

 • • • 

At home, the power was still out, so there was no opening the garage door. Pat carefully stepped up the wet concrete stairs to her front door
with her one-quarter-empty tray of bars and trudged up to the kitchen. Her husband, Eli, and son, Sam, were drinking milk and eating Schwan’s mint chocolate chip ice cream in the candlelight, watching distant lightning from the kitchen window.

Wiping her face and head with a paper towel, Pat looked at Sam’s huge bowl of ice cream without saying anything.

“Mom, it’ll go bad otherwise. With no power to the fridge.”

“Did you save any?” Pat asked.

“A little,” said Eli, eating the ice cream out of the box, tilting it to her eye level.

“So, Mom, who else besides you is going to County?” Sam asked, squirting more Hershey’s chocolate syrup on his ice cream.

“Me and Barb, and this new woman, Celeste,” Pat said, setting her tray of bars down on the kitchen counter.

“When the power went out,” Eli said, putting his empty glass of milk in the dishwasher without rinsing it first, “I was six hundred words into a blog post about an injury in our secondary. Then, blam! All gone.”

Sam looked up at his stepdad and said nothing. Pat’s son from her first marriage wasn’t a Minnesota Vikings fan, or a fan of any sports, really, and neither was Pat, but that didn’t prevent Eli from telling them each about everything he wrote on his blog.

“And I was
juuuust
about to save it and shut the computer off.”

Pat removed a milk glass from the dishwasher and rinsed it out in the sink. “Anyway, this new woman Celeste’s a piece of work,” she said.

“Well, they don’t even have the results of the guy’s MRI yet. But I knew we should’ve picked a safety in the draft. We switched to a Tampa 2 D and we have
one guy
who’s a Tampa 2 safety. And so guess who goes down today in practice.”

“And her bars. Basically fat bombs. Of course, you-know-who just loved them.”

“And there’s no decent free agents this time of year. Blew our chance there.”

“They don’t realize how embarrassing it’s gonna be to enter those bars in a County contest. You have to be more nuanced at the County level. It’s not like the judges are a bunch of eight-year-old boys.”

“Maybe we can move one of the corners to safety. That’s what I was proposing.”

“And you should see her. You can bet she doesn’t even touch these bars. She looks like a model.”

“Who looks like a model?” Eli asked.

“The new woman at church, Celeste.”

“You should invite her over sometime,” Eli said, opening the freezer. “What else we got in here?” He pulled out two flat brown rectangles wrapped up in cellophane. “What are these things?”

“My edibles,” Sam said. “Brownies. They go for forty each.”

“Edibles. Is this a felony amount in here?”

“No, felony’s one and a half ounces. Way less than that in those things. An ounce each, tops.”

“You should only sell these, then.”

“I don’t sell. My friends sell. I grow and manufacture.”

Pat stepped out of the kitchen without looking back. “I don’t want to know any of this,” she said, walking into her separate bedroom. “Help yourself to the bars.”

 • • • 

The day of the County Fair Bake-Off, it always made sense to carpool, so Pat agreed to meet Barb and Celeste at Celeste’s house over on the lake. The five-bedroom, four-bath stone house was the nicest, most expensive place in town; it used to belong to a personal injury attorney and his family. Pat had never been in the house before and was a little curious about it. Sure seemed like a lot of space for a couple with two teenage kids. What were those extra bedrooms for? Maybe they were hoarders.

Pat rang the doorbell and heard it echo through the vast space inside, like a lonely voice in an empty tomb. She thought of 1 Timothy 6:9—“Those
who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition.”

 • • • 

A man who looked like a younger Peter O’Toole answered the door. For a moment, the excruciatingly handsome man stared at Pat, with a look that said,
What are you doing here?
but in a sexy way.

“Yez?” he finally said, in a heartbreakingly warm accent.

For a moment, Pat couldn’t move or speak. She looked at his head of wavy light brown hair, the clean-shaven jaw, the shocking blue eyes, and the buttons on his white dress shirt that showed no strain near the navel; though she had never seen “washboard abs” up close in person, she was sure this guy had them. Pat found it necessary to quickly remind herself that she loved Eli with his scarred face and scratchy beard. In fact, that’s what attracted her to him—the promise of a big, full heart that needed healing, beneath that rough, tough-guy shell. She composed herself, met the handsome man’s eyes, and spoke. “Hi, I’m here to see Celeste? She’s driving us to the fair.”

The man looked past her. “Ez that your car?”

She turned and looked back at her rusty Accord with the fresh black Hefty bag hanging in the rear window.

“Yep, sure is.”

“Do you mind,” he said, thoughtfully touching his strong chin, “moving it down a house or two? We just moved here and I don’t want to give our neighbors the wrong impression.”

“OK,” Pat said.

“I’ll take this in for you,” he said, relieving her of the tray and setting it on the floor, near the shoes.

“Thank you. Be right back,” Pat said, walking down their driveway, thinking about what he had said about giving the neighbors the wrong impression, succumbing to unkind thoughts about these people and their evident, vulnerable pridefulness.

After moving her car two houses down and coming back to the front door, she found Celeste waiting.

“Did Oscar make you move your car down the street? I’m so embarrassed,” Celeste said.

After Pat picked up her bars from the floor by the doorway, Celeste led her through what Celeste called the “lawyer foyer” into the main living room, which was clean and spartan and arranged with that horrid midcentury modern furniture like the kind that Pat’s parents had in the 1960s. That style was supposedly making a comeback, but it only reminded her of uncomfortable groping from disrespectful boys and awful family game nights, when her dad got drunk and swore at everyone.

“I’d love to give you the tour,” Celeste said, “but I’m afraid Barb says we have to get going. Registration got moved up to 9:30 a.m. So we better make tracks.”

The doorbell chimed and there was Barb, standing at the door with her bars. “Let’s go, ladies!” she said.

On her way out, Pat saw something pink and slender descend the staircase behind her, and turned to see a teenage girl in a low-cut spaghetti-strap top, with straight bangs like that Zooey Deschanel, mope her way down the stairs, her angelic face downcast in teenage-girl frustration.

“Mom!” the pretty little nymph said. “What the fuck did you do with my fucking iPad charger?”

“I left it in your room, honey,” Celeste said, setting down her tray of bars as she put on a pair of red-bottomed heels in the doorway.

“Which one? My bedroom or my study room?”

“Your study room.”

“God, Mom. How many times do I have to tell you, don’t touch my shit.”

The girl turned and saw Pat watching her. Pat was disturbed by the language—it reminded her so much of Julie before she finally left—and the teenage girl grinned at Pat’s disapproving expression.

“Hey,” the girl said, absolutely unembarrassed. “You Sam Jorgenson’s mom?”

“Yes, yes I am,” said Pat, unable to look the girl in the face.

“Tell him to text me back, OK?”

Barb tugged on Pat’s arm and whispered for them to go. Celeste kissed her daughter on the cheek, shouted a goodbye to her husband, adjusted her Ray-Ban sunglasses, and followed Pat and Barb out onto her driveway.

“Wow, nice shoes,” Barb said. Barb was the most brand-conscious of the Deer Lake ladies, at least until you-know-who breezed into town. “Are you sure you want to wear Louboutins to a county fair, though? There’s, like, cow and horse poop everywhere.”

“Oh, these are knockoffs,” Celeste said.

 • • • 

There was some discussion over whether to take Barb’s Jeep Cherokee or Celeste’s Mercedes GLK, but after a short discussion it was decided that they would take Celeste’s car because Pat had never been in a Mercedes before. Barb sat up in front to help Celeste navigate the long, lonely rural roads to the County Fairgrounds, and Pat sat in back, to keep an eye on everyone’s bars.

As they drove past the lake, Celeste caught Pat’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

“I think my daughter Madison has a huge crush on your son Sam,” Celeste said.

“Oh my,” Pat said.

“She met him at that coffee shop, Professor Java’s. He works there, right?”

“Yeah, not nearly enough.”

Celeste laughed. “Apparently he’s playing hard to get.”

“Well, he’s got a busy life.”

“What else does he do?”

Pat wanted, just then, to tell Celeste that Sam was the biggest drug dealer in the entire high school, knowing that it would permanently put
the kibosh on any future relationship between her child and Celeste’s little demon-spawn.

“Well. He’s holding down a 3.4 GPA. He’s vice president of the skateboarding club. He’s into music. A typical teenage boy, I guess. What about your daughter?”

“Well, she’s a National Merit Finalist. But she had a private tutor to teach her all the tricks on the test. She got in the IB classes, barely. Varsity volleyball, dance. She’s done with Cotillion, thank God for that. For college, she wants to go to NYU, but that girl is going to college in New York City over my dead body. Oscar and I are going to make her go to Michigan—it’s closer. And Oscar likes their football team.”

“Neat,” Pat said.

“Our son, meanwhile, never leaves his room,” Celeste said. “He’s probably just, y’know, doing his thing, but I hope he’s not looking at anything weird when he does it.”

Pat decided that she had nothing to say on the subject.

“Any other kids?” Celeste asked.

“Well, Eli has two kids from his first marriage. Will and Julie. They’re grown up, both of them live outside of Chicago.”

“Cool. That must be fun to go down to visit them.”

“They don’t really talk to us.”

“They side with the mom in the divorce?”

“No, their mom died, that’s what happened. They still side with her, though. They can’t stand me. Never could.”

“That really sucks. You helped raise these kids, you put them through college, right? How old were they when you met Eli?”

“Sixteen and thirteen.”

“Wow, you never had a shot. And not even a thank-you, for what you’ve done.”

“It was hard at first, but now . . . I try not to take it personally.”

“Well, if it’s any comfort to you, I’m sure my own kids are gonna be
just as bad. I know for a fact Madison’s only going to call us when she needs money.”

A snore burst from Barb’s face. Pat and Celeste both withheld laughs as they looked at their friend, zonked out in the passenger seat.