Last Bite: A Novel of Culinary Romance

  Last Bite

  A NOVEL

  Nancy Verde Barr

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  For Roy

  “Anybody can make you enjoy the first bite of a dish, but only a real chef can make you enjoy the last.”

  —FRANÇOIS MINOT, editor of Guide Michelin

  Contents

  Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22 | Chapter 23 | Chapter 24

  Also by Nancy Verde Barr

  Chapter 1

  I’ve always been crazy but it’s kept me from

  going insane. —Waylon Jennings

  They say insanity is repeating the same behavior again and again and expecting different results. I think real insanity is knowing the results will be the same and repeating the behavior anyway. When my most recent romance ended, I bought a gerbil and named him Insanity. He’s pretty innocuous and probably doesn’t deserve the name, but when he engages in that incessant wheel spinning that leads nowhere, he reminds me that, when it comes to love, I am prone to the same behavior. He also reminds me that the last man in my life turned out to be a rodent. So from now on it’s just Insanity and me—and my job, which I love.

  I work for Morning in America, a newsmagazine show on national TV that airs from seven to nine in the morning. When the credits run, I roll by as “Executive Chef, K. C. Costello.” The K. C. is for Katherine Conti, but I’ve been called Casey since fifth grade. “Executive Chef” means that I arrive at the studio sometime around five-thirty to oversee the preparation of ingredients and backup dishes for the cooking segments. Mostly I work with Sally Woods, the grand old dame of food television and our regular on-air cook, but I also prep for guest chefs, cooking teachers, and celebrities who come on the show to demonstrate their talents or plug their new cookbooks. When you watch a food show and see all those little bowls of measured-out ingredients, when the chef puts raw ingredients into one pan and then turns to a twin pan with the ingredients all cooked, and when a finished dish miraculously appears from under the counter, that’s because someone like me is backstage getting it all together. Preparing and cooking the food is the easy part, especially since I have a great assistant who is fast and efficient. What’s tricky is knowing when to make the swaps from raw to partially cooked to fully cooked so that it all works out in the time allotted.

  Occasionally, the show sends Sally on location to tape week-long food specials, and sometimes they send me along to do what I do. About two months ago, the executive producer told us that we would be spending a week taping food segments in several Italian cities. That is what led to the demise of my last stab at romance. I wanted Richard, my then-boyfriend, aka rodent, to meet me at the end of the shoot and spend a few days together in bella Italia. My vision was of him whisking me around on a Vespa scooter á la Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday.

  Richard Payne is a dentist. (He really should have changed his name.) I met him when he appeared in a health segment on our show to discuss implant surgery. His six-foot-two frame is workout fit, and that morning I was getting excited just picturing him in his white dentist’s jacket. I liked the six foot two because I’m five foot ten, and I know from experience that staring up into a man’s eyes is more romantic than looking down. I was twenty-nine; he told the audience he was thirty-two. Seemed perfect.

  After his segment, I went out on the set to chat; in other words, to drop hints that I was single and would love to see him again. I’m not shy about being obvious but I am traditional about wanting the man to do the asking out. He didn’t ask, so I told him that I would like him to be my dentist. I thought that was fairly obvious, but he just gave me his office number. After one appointment for a cleaning and general checkup and another for teeth whitening, I had to deep-six my principles and ask him out. Under other circumstances, I would have been more patient, but the office visits were expensive. He said he was planning on asking me out, but you just have to wonder what he was waiting for. We began dating, and after a few months, I more or less moved in with him. On one level, it was a matter of convenience. He lived near the studio; I was temporarily living back with my parents in New Rochelle, a forty-minute trip from the city. The distance makes a difference at night when you have to end a date in time to catch the train. It’s huge at five in the morning.

  On another level, I thought the relationship might be “it.” We really enjoyed being together and mostly liked the same things. But, after seven and a half months together, I couldn’t shake off a nagging feeling that something major was missing. When I asked him to meet me in Italy, he began to twitch. Then he frowned as though I’d asked him to come up with the formula for gene therapy.

  “You know I can’t leave my office on such short notice.”

  “But it’s over two months away! You have a partner. You have a secretary who can reschedule your patients. You have a passport. You’ve never been to Italy.”

  “Here we go again,” he said, throwing his head to the side in an exasperated gesture.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “We go through this every time one of these trips comes up, Casey. You ask me to go somewhere and I can’t. I explain why I can’t. You start to swear at me in Italian and then you storm out.”

  “So, what’s your point?”

  “The point is that I would love to take a trip with you but I want to do it when we have the time to plan. Research the place, look at brochures, and talk to people who have been there. Find the best rates.”

  I put a little more pleading in my voice. “Just once, can’t you be a little spontaneous?”

  “No. I can’t. I don’t like to do things that just come up. I never have and I never will. You know that.” And, there it was. I did know that, yet I kept expecting it to turn out differently. Obviously I am only a few brain cells away from insanity.

  “This isn’t working, is it, Richard?”

  “I think we need a break.”

  “You want to break up? Just like that. No discussion?”

  “I said ‘break’ not ‘break up.’ I can’t discuss it with you when you’re angry.”

  “We’re arguing! I’m supposed to be angry.”

  “Well, it makes it hard for me to think,” he said, in the even, measured tone that he used when we’d argue. Unfortunately neither the Irish side nor the Italian side of my heritage has ever grasped the concept of arguing in even, measured tones, so I began to yell at him in Neapolitan gutter language.

  “Mannaggia! Tu sei patzo,” I sputtered before heading for the front door. I yanked it open and then slammed it behind me, shouting “Vaffanculo” at the molar-shaped door knocker. I didn’t start to cry until I was halfway to my parents’ house in New Rochelle.

  WHEN I WALKED IN, my parents were in the den yelling at the TV. Wheel of Fortune was on and they were begging a contestant to choose a C. The player ignored them and chose a B instead.

  “Oh. I can’t believe it! It’s so obvious,” my mother groaned. “Who ever heard of a ‘bookie-butter plan’?”

  “I knew she wouldn’t get it. Look at that hair!” Dad thought a bad hairstyle on a woman was a sure sign that there wasn’t much under it.

  “Hi there. It’s just me.” I made my best stab at sounding as though I was just in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by, but my mother took one look at me and arched an eyebrow ever so slightly. That was all it took. “I don’t want to talk about it” was all I could manage before breaking
into hysterical sobs.

  “I’ll make cannoli,” my mother said, heading for the kitchen. Making cannoli was her way of acknowledging that this was a “situation.” She’d let my father deal with the worst of the storm and wait for me to join her in the kitchen when I could speak clearly enough to tell her what happened. The Conti women have always unloaded a lot of baggage around the stove.

  “Come here, sweetie,” my father said stretching out his arms. I sat down on the couch next to him and he wrapped me in a huge bear hug. He’s six feet three inches tall, so when he puts his arms around me, I feel held. I get my height from him and, thank God, my ability to eat what I want and still be able to zip my jeans. Everyone says we look a lot alike even though our coloring is very different. We both have thick, wavy hair; his is a warm blend of light and dark grays and mine is very dark brown and shoulder length. His eyes are blue, whereas I have my mother’s dark brown eyes, but Dad and I crinkle them in the same way when we smile. Our eyes weren’t crinkling at that moment.

  He kissed the top of my head. “You want to tell your da what’s up?”

  I told him my story and then added, “I mean it’s not all bad. Most of the time we get along really well.”

  “Ah, Casey. Richard’s a nice guy. But there’s more to love than liking the same things. You have to want the same things and you and Richard are on different wavelengths there.”

  “Tell me about it. Sometimes I worry that maybe it’s just me. Maybe I just want too much excitement. I’m afraid that I’ll quiet down and be sorry I’ve thrown away a really solid relationship. How old were you when you quieted down?”

  He gave me a devilish grin. “I’m working on it.” Then he tightened his arm to pull me closer. “Honey, I want to see you madly in love. I want you to be deliriously happy, swept away, head over heels, lose-your-appetite in love. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Well, I can’t identify with ‘lose my appetite,’ but I get the rest. It just doesn’t seem to be there.”

  “Then he’s not the one for my girl.”

  I could smell the cannoli shells frying so I kissed him on the cheek and went to the kitchen to see how they were doing. Cannoli have been my favorite sweet since I was a toddler. When I was two years old, I stood up in my highchair to reach for one on the table and fell to the floor, breaking my collarbone. I moved so fast, no one saw me. I’ve always been enthusiastic about food.

  My mother keeps round disks of dough in the freezer so she can make cannoli at a moment’s notice. The disks are less than a quarter of an inch thick, so by the time she heats the oil, sifts the sugar, and drains the ricotta the dough is pliable enough to wrap around the molds.

  When I walked in, she was pulling a stool up to the cupboards to reach the top shelf for a bag of miniature chocolate chips for the filling. My mother is petite. Everything about her seems to be in miniature. Her hands are small. Her feet are small; I outgrew her shoes when I was in the third grade. Her dark brown eyes are so expressive that we all know immediately what she’s thinking and feeling. Dad calls them “espresso eyes.” Right now, they were saying “worried” to me. I was grateful they weren’t saying “I told you so.” When I moved in with Richard she spent at least a week raving that I was damned forever. Many of my friends’ mothers warned about “not buying the cow if the milk was free”; mine took it all the way to eternal hell flames.

  “I’ll get those, Mom. Want me to mix the filling?”

  “That’d be great. I’ve already sifted the sugar.”

  Four fried cannoli shells, still on their metal tubes, were draining on paper towels and she was working on four more pieces of dough. While she worked her rolling pin—really an old broom handle—over the thin circles of dough, stretching them into even thinner ovals, I told her about Richard and Italy. She continued to roll. My mother makes cannoli by rote, so I knew she heard every word I said even though she never stopped working. Well, not until I told her about saying vaffanculo in the hallway. Then her hands stopped and she looked up at the ceiling. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Casey. Tell me you didn’t say that. It’s not something you’re supposed to say out loud. Did anyone hear you?” The problem with these dialect words and phrases is that I know under what circumstances I’ve heard them, so I know when to use them, but I don’t always know exactly what I’m saying.

  “Only the nuns getting off the elevator, but they just said, ‘Same to you,’ so I don’t think they damned my soul.”

  She squinted at me to make sure I was kidding and then went back to her dough. While I chopped candied orange peel and ate handfuls of chocolate chips, she wrapped the dough around metal tubes and slipped them into the hot oil. “So what exactly does ‘a break’ mean? Is that just a little time apart?”

  “I don’t know. It was his idea,” I mumbled through a mouthful of chocolate chips, then stirred the few left in the bag into the bowl with ricotta, sugar, vanilla, and orange peel.

  “What do you want it to mean, Katherine?” she asked as she put the crisp shells down in front of me. She scooped some filling into a plastic bag, twisted one corner, and cut a large hole in the opposite corner. I pulled a pastry bag out of the kitchen drawer where my mother keeps the kitchen tools she never uses and the sexy aprons my father gave her that she wouldn’t even think about showing to anyone, let alone wearing.

  “I don’t know that either. I mean, most of the time we’re so comfortable together that it seems perfect. But then I get to wanting more than comfort. I want passionate, exciting, spontaneous.”

  “I would have thought you had enough of those things for the two of you. Whatever happened to ‘opposites attract’?” She picked up a shell and smoothly squeezed the filling from the bag into the pastry. I was trying to pipe my filling into the shell, but I was having trouble finding the center because tears were clouding my vision.

  “I think someone forgot to finish the thought. Opposites attract but they don’t always make it for the long haul. It’s just too hard. You and Dad are an exception.”

  My parents have been married for thirty years, and it’s hard to imagine two people who could be more different and still adore each other as much as they do. My mother is from a traditional southern Italian family. Her mother, my Nonna, raised three boys and two girls the way she had been raised—in the old country. She kept a tight rein on her five little Contis, intimidating them by claiming she had “eyes in the back of her head.” Whatever admonitions Nonna overlooked, the good nuns covered in fourteen years of parochial school and two years of Catholic college. The result of all this rigid upbringing is the outward appearance of a controlled, somewhat prissy person. In fact, Mom can be downright prudish, but beneath the surface, there’s a wild woman looking to escape. No doubt, it was that side of her that attracted my father.

  Lots of people think that Costello is an Italian name, but it’s Irish, and Dad inherited more than his share of blarney, charm, and “bit o’ the devil.” When he met my mother, she thought he was too wild to bring home. But it wound up being a good match. She gave his life structure; he gave her structure life. I am their only child, and that has always been just fine with me. In spite of what the third-grade nuns tried to drill into me, I think sharing is highly overrated.

  Mom put her arms around me. “I don’t want it to be hard for you, and if Richard is not the right one, better to find out now.”

  I hugged her back and it made me feel a little better. We talked about some of the places I’d be seeing in Italy while we filled the rest of the cannoli and dusted them all with powdered sugar. We brought Dad his share of the feel-better pastries and watched a little television before I headed off to bed, dreading the morning’s commute and contemplating the various meanings of “break.”

  A WEEK LATER, I was still contemplating, when, as I was nibbling on the leftovers from a morning shoot, Richard’s receptionist called my cell to say that she had to reschedule my next week’s appointment.

  “To when?” I asked.

>   “I don’t have an opening right now.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Richard and I hadn’t even spoken to each other since the argument and now he was turning “break” into “breakup.” With a canceled dental appointment! How low is that? Well, no way, I thought. I decided to go to his office and let him know that I was breaking up with him and getting a new dentist. It was quarter of one, and Richard always went to lunch from one until two. If the entire staff was out, the office would be locked. If someone stayed behind, I could sit in the waiting room and read the latest copies of six-month-old magazines until Richard came back. The door was open and the waiting room was empty, but I could hear faint giggling coming from one of the operatories. Realizing that one of his assistants or hygienists must be there, I went back to say hi.

  The giggling was coming from Lexi, Richard’s provocative, nineteen-year-old chairside assistant who wore gauzy, see-through white uniforms that looked as though they came from show-all.com. At the moment, she was sitting on my boyfriend-on-a-break’s lap and showing all to him.

  “Casey!” Richard jumped up, dropping the assistant on the floor. “What are you doing here?”

  As if that was the predominant question. “What’s going on here?” Okay, that was a dumber question, but my brain couldn’t wrap itself around what I was seeing. And then I couldn’t see at all, because my tears were blinding me. Lexi was still in a crouch position where she had been dumped, and she was clutching her barely-there uniform in a futile attempt to cover what I resentfully noticed was an ample bosom. I gave her a nasty, teary look and screamed, “You should be ashamed of yourself. Puttana!” before running out of the operatory. Richard followed me and grabbed my arm.

  “Casey. Don’t run off. We need to talk about this.”

  “Seems to me there’s not much to talk about except why you couldn’t have at least let me in on your definition of a break. I thought that meant time to think things over, not to work over your assistants.”