Mom responded to Molly’s question, “Oh, nothing’s perfect at my age, you know, but I am as well as can be expected.”
She looked back at her mother and fought with herself to make eye contact. “Where’s Dad?” Ed, Molly’s father, was a workaholic with a distracted and distant temperament as a parent, but on occasion he managed to provide a thin but welcome buffer between Katherine and their girls.
“Some emergency came up of the firm, and he’s on a conference call in his study. He’ll join us as soon as he can.”
Darn those emergencies at the firm. Molly tried—and failed—to remember a family get-together that hadn’t involved at least one of those vague, foreboding excuses.
Mom glanced back at the kitchen. “I was in the midst of preparation for the horseradish cream fraiche which your father likes so much.”
Molly inhaled slowly and nodded. The mention of her mother’s favorite spicy condiment, a long source of needless debate in her family, turned Molly’s stomach for more than one reason. She herself had liked it well enough in small doses, but she hadn’t been able to tolerate it at all since her body had begun to register her pregnancy.
While Molly wrestled with nausea, Katherine yammered on, “Of course, he never thanks me for the work I put into all these important details, but sometimes love must be its own reward.”
“Don’t let me get in your way,” Molly said. “I can look after myself in the interim.”
“I have a few other tasks waiting away in the kitchen, Meryl, if you’d like to lend your poor mother a hand.” It wasn’t a request.
She pursed her lips for half a second. “Certainly.”
Molly followed Katherine into the over-wrought cooking space and was immediately set to washing up her hands. At her mother’s orders, she transferred steamed fresh green beans from a complicated porous metal basket into a heavy, covered, designer crock.
While Katherine savagely beat her prized white dip into submission with a polished silver fork, Molly, per seemingly endless detailed instructions, seasoned the beans with fresh creamery butter, Moroccan sea salt, and pinches of basil, ground white pepper, and dill. That done to satisfaction, she set the covered dish on the back of the almost-invisible space-age cooktop to warm.
Molly then performed a similar procedure with the gold-skinned mashed potatoes, stacked hard dinner rolls in a fine linen-lined wicker basket, filled a crystal pitcher with blended ice tea, and started a pot of gourmet brandy-flavored coffee.
She was filling her mother’s designer ice bucket with crushed cubes from the icemaker when—
“Corelle ware?”
Molly almost dropped the bucket, but managed to keep it steady, covered it with its matching-but-separately-sold lid, and set it on the counter nearby. She turned to face her mother.
Laura had left Molly’s brownie plate on the buffet before she disappeared with her son. Now Mom lifted Molly’s dessert offering in the air and raised her eyebrows. Incredulity dripped from Katherine’s knife-pointed tongue. “Seriously, Meryl? That’s your idea of appropriate presentation for the only dessert served on a special occasion?”
Molly tried to smile. The woman couldn’t be pleased with the effort and love put into from-scratch, dulce de leche-layered fudge brownies carefully cut in star and heart shapes and decorated with stenciled powdered sugar like fancy English tea cakes, all because they were served on an inexpensive (though still clean and un-chipped) dish.
“The Corelle is what I have, Mom.”
“You could let me buy you some proper china, as I have volunteered to do many times.”
“My place is so tiny. I don’t have room in my cupboards for any china.” Molly had pointed out that fact many a time herself. “I’m gonna have to clear out half my mugs and Tupperware just to fit in the things I need for the baby.”
“You might have room for proper dishware if you got rid of the Corelle.”
Hardly. The thin Corelle was a major space-saver. Anyway, why? So I can eat leftover pizza in my living room off too-fragile dishes worth more than the couch I sit on? Molly’s dishware was sturdy, lightweight, practical, and the design printed on it was downright pretty. It was exactly what Molly needed in her little home, especially with a baby on the way. “I am sure your well-stocked cupboards contain something much more suitable, Mother. Would you like me to re-plate the dessert?”
“Well, it’s too late now. The roast is already resting. We will be ready to eat in a just a few minutes.”
“We won’t eat dessert until an hour or so after dinner. I’ll have time enough between.”
Mom first gave her a look of profound frustration and disappointment then said, “Well, I suppose. If it’s not too much trouble.”
“Not at all.” Molly’s voice was a tad tight, but she was relieved she didn’t have to transfer the delicate dessert now. Her hands were shaking too badly.
Waterford dessert plate or no, the brownies would lose their visual charm if smudged and crumbled to pieces by a pair of clumsy, inelegant paws. And if Molly dropped the Waterford on the marble countertop… It wasn’t worth thinking about.
Mom slapped the offending dish down onto the buffet. “Hurry up, then, and wash your hands for the table.”
In spite of cleaning her hands thoroughly only just before lifting the string beans from the steamer, Molly sidled to the sink and scrubbed them in steamy water until they were red.
Molly transferred the warming dishes to the dining room table while Katherine disappeared into the “wine cellar” (a dark pantry closet in the basement) to choose the perfect bottle of wine, from which only she would drink. Ed always went for neat doubles of expensive scotch while Laura’s taste ran more towards Jello shots. Molly herself, even when not pregnant, didn’t care for Katherine’s ultra-dry reds.
Arriving beside the table just as the last dish was placed on its potholder, Katherine opened the bottle and poured a glass “to let it breathe.” She sneaked a large sip and said, “I don’t know why I bother with these special meals, Meryl. No one appreciates the work I put into them. I should just pop in a frozen pizza like the rest of the cretins in this country.”
Molly liked frozen pizza a great deal, especially the ones she got when she and Laura made their day trips to Trader Joe’s. But she said, “We do appreciate you, Mom.”
“Could you please go find your sister while I finish up in here?”
The side dishes were finished now and the table fully set, but Molly nodded and left the room.
Laura and Liam would be in “the play room,” one of the empty bedrooms upstairs, into which a fancy wooden box of fancy wooden toddler toys and an old TV/VHS combo machine with a few 1990’s Disney movies on tape had been secreted.
In the darkened room, Liam watched Aladdin while Laura read her Facebook newsfeed on her smartphone. Molly knocked lightly on the open door, and Laura looked up.
“Time for the gauntlet then, is it?”
Molly bit back a smirk. “Dinner is served.”
The two sisters descended the stairs together, trying to look brave and graceful. Liam ran on ahead and sing-shouted, “Mashed potatoes, mashed potatoes, mashed potatoes!”
Molly loved her nephew dearly, but sometimes he was a lot to take.