“He knows!” Lauren says, laughing.
“Oh, that’s good!” Miriam says. “The father can get awfully offended if someone knows he’s about to be a dad before he does.”
“Well, I wasn’t offended, but you can imagine my surprise when someone else knew that I was pregnant before I even knew,” Lauren says, grinning.
“The doctor?” Stacy says.
Lauren shakes her head. “No. Andrea.” She points her finger at Andrea, laughing. “You knew!”
Andrea smiles. “I suspected. That’s all.”
“When are you due?” Gloria asks, both of her hands resting on the backs of Lauren’s shoulders.
“Sometime in December, but I don’t know a date! I have to find an obstetrician!”
“And we have to plan a baby shower,” Heddy says.
“But before that we simply have to do something with Lauren’s home,” Miriam says. “A little color to make one realize they’re not part of a lab experiment when walking through the front door, and a kitchen table is definitely in order, and a crib inside a nursery. And we simply must hang some things on the wall so the baby doesn’t cry out in boredom from the plainness of it all.”
Gloria shakes her head. “There are days when I think, ‘Today’s the day. Miriam won’t blurt out whatever is on the top of her head. Today Miriam’s brain will have a filter.’ But then you say things like that, proving me wrong … again.”
Miriam opens her mouth to defend herself when Lauren lifts her hands, laughing. “It’s okay, Gloria. I agree with everything Miriam said.” Miriam gives Gloria a smug smile. “I’ve been wanting to do things with the house, but I just don’t know what. Now that we know a baby is coming, I definitely want to make it more homey.”
“Then I’m on it!” Miriam says, thrusting her index finger into the air.
Gloria sighs. “Those are the most chilling words that Miriam could say to anyone: ‘I’m on it!’ Oh the terror of it all!”
SIX
May 1972
“Don’t let it get to soft ball,” Joan’s mother, Alice, says.
Joan sighs on the other end of the phone. “What exactly does that mean? The recipe says to get it to softball, but you say don’t let it get to softball. Why do they call it softball anyway?”
Her mom chuckles. “It’s not softball, like the sport. It’s soft ball. It starts at 234 degrees. But don’t let it get to 234. Take it off the burner when the thermometer gets to 233.”
Joan stares at the thermometer in her hand with red liquid in the bottom that will climb up through the thermometer as the temperature rises. “My thermometer doesn’t say 233. It just says softball.” She catches herself. “Soft ball.”
“Just take it off the burner before it reaches soft ball,” her mother says. “You can also test a little bit of it by pouring it into some cold water. If it forms a soft ball in your hand, you know that it’s ready.”
Shaking her head, Joan says, “There’s no way I’m trying that. I don’t even know what that really means. Well, if anything, we can pour this over ice cream and eat it.”
“You can do it!” Alice says. “I bet you’ll all love it so much that you’ll end up making another batch in a few weeks.”
“We love Aunt DeeDee’s fudge, Mom,” Joan says, reaching for a pot. “It could be an entirely different story when I make Aunt DeeDee’s fudge.”
“Call me later and tell me how it turned out.”
Joan hangs up the phone and puts the sugar into the pot with the milk. She then measures out a cup of Marshmallow Fluff and puts that into a separate small bowl, along with a cup of peanut butter. After she stirs the milk and sugar together, she turns on the burner and places the thermometer on the side of the pot so the bottom of it is immersed into the mixture. She is paranoid as she watches the temperature, stirring consistently as the red moves upward through the slender thermometer.
“Is it done yet?” Gigi asks, playing with Christopher on the kitchen floor. Joan has learned the best spot for the children to play while she is cooking is right in the heart of the kitchen with her.
“Not yet,” Joan says, stooping over to make sure she is seeing the correct temperature. The temperature rises quickly during the first several minutes of cooking but seems to crawl for the last several, making Joan wonder if something is wrong with the thermometer. She stays stooped over, watching the red dye as it creeps toward 234 degrees. Before it reaches soft ball, she turns off the burner and removes the pan from the stove. Taking the thermometer out of the pot, she uses a spatula and adds the Marshmallow Fluff and peanut butter to the mixture, along with a teaspoon of vanilla. She stirs everything together and then pours the mixture into a buttered pan. “Who wants to lick the pan and the spoon?”
Gigi and Christopher are in front of her before she finishes the question, raising their little hands for the goodies. Joan leaves enough in the bowl for all three of them, and as the warm peanut butter fudge hits her tongue, she smiles in satisfaction. “Wow! So good.”
“Yummy!” Gigi says, running her spoon around the bottom of the pan.
When the kids aren’t looking, Joan uses her spoon and scoops some fudge from the pan. She remembers loving it this way as a child when her mom made it, warm and gooey right out of the pan. She looks at the soft brown fudge and hopes it will “set up,” as her mom always said.
* * *
John lifts a long, thick slab of black walnut inside his workshop and sets it on the wood plane to begin the process of planing each side. He’ll rotate the wood until it’s approximately a one-and-a-quarter-inch square piece of lumber and thirty-one inches long and will repeat this for each leg before working on tapering them. He stops his work when Joan opens the door, letting the children run in ahead of her. She’s holding a small plate in her hand. “Is that lunch?” he says, shutting off the planer.
“It’s peanut butter fudge!” Gigi squeals. “It’s yummy!” The little girl jumps up and down, waving her arms as if she’s about to take flight.
“Is this Aunt DeeDee’s peanut butter fudge?” John asks, taking the plate and lifting a piece. Joan nods. “There’s nothing like it.” He watches Gigi move busily around the workshop and smiles. “It looks like Mommy filled your tank with fudge because you have lots of energy!”
“Just eat some and you can do this, too,” Gigi says, jumping.
He bites into a piece, closing his eyes. “Mmm. The best.” He opens his eyes, looking at her as he pops the rest of the piece in his mouth. “Please tell me this means you’ll be making it every year from now on.”
“Yes, we will!” Gigi says, jumping higher yet into the air.
“I can’t afford to make it every year,” Joan says. “I think I’ve eaten half the pan by myself. I’ll be enormous tomorrow.”
John puts another piece of the fudge into his mouth. “It’s worth being enormous one time a year for this.” He hands the plate back to her. “What else are you making in there today?”