Maggie waved her daughter’s accusation away. Bess had been gone for four years, and still, she had a knack for sharing her opinions whenever Maggie least needed to hear them. And she wasn’t getting maudlin. There was something, some thing missing from her relationship with her grandchildren. It hadn’t always been gone. Not when they were small, not even after they lost Bess. There had been a time when they were a unit, when they’d flourished under the unbreakable bond that is family. Only now—
Savannah burst through the kitchen door, followed closely by Thomas.
“Welcome home,” Maggie chirped. “Tell me all about your days.”
The rush of air as her grandchildren blew past was so strong it mussed her hair.
“Fine!” came their reply in unison, then they were gone to their rooms.
Oh well.
Maggie wiped at a smudge on the red table and tucked her shirt back into her pants. She didn’t have time for a walk down memory lane. She had to get Thomas to the orthodontist and Savannah was out of deodorant. Chef Bart would return soon to start cooking, and they were hosting a guest for one of the famous McClair Friday dinners. A woman named—what was it? Maggie tried to jog her memory. She’d met her on the parkway while walking Katherine Mansfield, their standard poodle. The woman had been in the airline industry. Negotiated with hijackers. What was her blasted name?
In the aftermath of Bess’s death, Maggie had struggled to fill the silence that swallowed her family. Some days she heard little more from her grandchildren than the scrape of a fork at dinner. She tried reading aloud at mealtime from the pages of once-favorite magazines—Rolling Stone for Thomas and Variety for Savannah. When that brought little reaction, she encouraged them to invite their friends over, but after several awkward dinners it quickly became clear that middle school children didn’t know what to do or say in the home of the recently deceased.
Maggie believed in the power of silence. She also knew that too much became a poison.
One morning, Maggie had looked up from her oatmeal and asked, “How would you like to meet some of my friends?”
“All right,” answered Thomas.
“Friends are good,” said Savannah.
Maggie and George had been people collectors together, and for more than twenty years, their house hummed with new acquaintances. There was Officer Priestly, who’d helped Maggie retrieve the contents of her purse from the lanes of Interstate 35 after she’d driven away with it on the roof of her car. And Richard Endres, who’d developed the “Cough it up for Lung Cancer Research” advertising campaign back when George was on the board of the Minnesota Cancer Foundation. They’d met Alice Overberg, who raised money for the Minnesota Orchestra, and Tilley Thillis, who styled the blunt, silver-white bob for which Alice was so famous. The McClair house was a revolving door.
Throughout it all, the McClairs prioritized one thing: interesting conversation. Maggie hoped her once-beloved dinners might just be the antidote to a silence, a sorrow so hungry it threatened to devour her family whole.
There at the red table, with the help of her acquaintances, Maggie offered the twins all the riches on which she herself had been raised—food and conversation and laughter and debate.
Little wonder that the quest to find Thomas and Savannah’s father would take root at the red table, as well.
* * *
It all started with that night’s Friday dinner. Chef Bart bustled in the kitchen with preparations, cooking something that smelled of nutmeg and apricots and anise. “I’ll pay fifty dollars to anyone who correctly guesses the mystery spice!” he called from the kitchen.
Chef Bart had come to Maggie’s and the twins’ rescue four years ago, soon after Bess had passed. Maggie’d met him in the produce section of the co-op near her house when she had started to cry while holding a pomegranate.
“They’re so sweet,” she wept to the kind stranger. “But almost too difficult to eat.”
He took her next door to a café, bought her a cup of coffee and taught her how to seed a pomegranate right there at the table.
“I understand grief all too well, myself,” he’d confessed. “Good food is my favorite medicine.” She offered him a job on the spot as her personal chef.
These days he arrived in time for lunch and stayed through dinner, bringing with him fresh produce, heirloom recipes and a bottomless good will. He also brought his sixteen-year-old daughter, Nadine. Strangers sometimes bristled when Maggie mentioned having a personal cook, but friends never did. They knew Chef Bart allowed Maggie to put her attention where it needed to be—on her grandchildren. And she could afford it. George had left her with plenty; real estate development was a good game in the eighties. She had a bookkeeper for the bills, a handyman on speed dial and a cleaning team every Monday. But she counted her lucky stars for Chef Bart, a gentle soul, who was to Maggie what Vitamin D was to one’s diet—good for the heart and the mind.
Nadine, Savannah and Thomas sat at the red table, flipping through Maggie’s ancient collection of church basement cookbooks. Katherine Mansfield lay at their feet sporting a neckerchief awash in spring colors, waiting for a scrap to fall from Chef Bart’s chopping block.
The twins didn’t go to the same high school as Nadine—Minneapolis had ten—and they didn’t socialize outside of the McClair house. But Maggie believed that sometimes, fate works on people like a warm morning breeze. They might not have known it, but they needed each other.
“Oooh, here’s a good one,” said Savannah. “Unusual Tuna Loaf.”
“How about Beefy Bunwiches,” laughed Nadine.
“Mother’s Helper Hot Dish.”
“Lazy Daisy Cakes.”
“Let’s hope Mother’s Helper doesn’t turn out to be Lazy Daisy,” said Thomas.
“True. That would make Unhappy Father,” agreed Nadine.
“With a side of Disappointed David.”
Maggie sat, content, waiting for their guest to show up. She’d been gathering friends to her home like this for years. Decades, really. All the way back to when Bess was a child and George was busy building his real estate business, the period of their lives when she made a pot of coffee every morning for her husband, sent their daughter off to school and got to work doing her part for the common good. “I’m a people gatherer,” she liked to say. “Life is best lived among, don’t you think?”
The doorbell rang, and Maggie sang cheerily, “That must be her!”
She would look back on this as the moment the course of their lives changed. If they hadn’t opened that door, hadn’t allowed that guest to walk through, perhaps nothing would have gone awry like it had. But they didn’t know this yet.