East Hope Read Free Page A

said.
    â€œYou want me to sell my house?”
    He withdrew his hand and stood. “You’re going to need the money.”
    â€œIt’s Rob’s house. It’s where he grew up.”
    â€œWe can invest the profits. You can get something smaller.”
    â€œI just don’t think I can do that.” She looked around for her handbag, wanting to get away from him, not wanting to hear any more.
    â€œLet me help you, Red.”
    â€œI’m going to be fine.” She found her handbag on the floor. “I’ll work things out.” At that moment she had been overcome with anger, though not at Pete. He had only been trying to help.
    â€œThere you are, Caroline, darling.” Marjorie, a pretty, dark-haired woman wearing a crisp linen dress, came through the swinging door into the dining room bearing a white ironstone soup tureen. “You’ve been hiding away far too long,” she said, a little too loudly. Marjorie placed the tureen at the head of the table, removed the lid, and smiled with satisfaction.

    During dinner, Pete kept Caroline’s wineglass filled. The strains of a violin concerto trickled into the candlelit dining room above the hum of the air-conditioning. Caroline and Harry had dined at the Spencers’ home many times, but tonight was the first time she had been there by herself. Everything felt strange to her, as if she had never been with these people before.
    Caroline no longer fit into this world of couples. Her life was now made up of solitary rituals: breakfast in the kitchen, and after her second cup of coffee she would sort through Harry’s papers and documents in hopes of salvaging something, a statement from a forgotten mutual fund, an overlooked insurance policy. The only new thing was the letter from Maine. Harry’s great-aunt, who had died the previous summer, had left him her house. She hadn’t shown the letter to Pete.
    Most days, after lunch, sometimes with her best friend, Vivien, Caroline walked for hours on the canal towpath. More work, and then supper alone in front of the evening news. She never even went to the trouble of opening a bottle of wine. She went to bed early, still keeping to her side of the bed.
    Working on the cookbooks was the only way she could escape the intolerable consequences of Harry’s death. Vivien, the food editor at World Life Books, was producing a new series, Back to Basics, a kind of “clean cuisine,” she called it, with the emphasis on simple recipes using fresh organic products. They were pitching it to an older, well-heeled set.
    Caroline had spent the winter working on the soup book, writing an introduction to each recipe, and clarifying the accompanying directions. After Harry died, soup was the only thing she liked to eat; everything else seemed to get caught in her throat. She wrote about a velvety cream of broccoli, the virtues of a hearty pasta fagioli, and a smoky lentil soup with an underbite of curry that tasted like no other version she’d ever prepared. If it weren’t for the task of cooking, tasting, and trying to make the recipes appealing and workable, she might have cooked nothing at all that winter.
    Marjorie, like many who knew that Caroline was a food writer, went overboard in an effort to impress her. Tonight Marjorie was serving carrot-and-ginger soup, a roast pork tenderloin in a teriyaki sauce with new potatoes in a cheese sauce, along with asparagus in a piquant lemon vinaigrette, a menu that didn’t make much sense. In truth, Caroline never minded what people cooked when she went to parties. She was happy for a night away from her own kitchen. In the last few years she liked thinking and writing about food more than cooking it. She complimented Marjorie on the soup.
    Marjorie thanked her, reached for the bottle of wine at her end of the table, and began talking about the garden club’s daffodil show. “Melissa didn’t set up enough tables for