softening influence of Spanish, a musical dash, perhaps from the time in France. Entirely unique. “Can I bring two people with me?”
“Absolutely. Anyone I know?”
“No one from the Blue Turtle. Patrick is a sommelier with genius for the front of the house, and Mia is a pastry chef. Very talented, both of them.”
“Aside from the two I mentioned, everyone else is your call.”
Julian heard her take a breath, as if to steady herself. “All right, then, Mr. Liswood. I’m all yours. The sooner I get out of here, the better.”
“Excellent. I’ll fax the contract and get on the condo right away.”
“Don’t forget I need to bring my dog.”
“I won’t forget.” He paused. “Welcome aboard, Elena.”
“I’m honored to have the chance. If I haven’t said so, thank you. Very much.”
“My pleasure.” He hung up and held the phone tenderly in the cup of his hand for a long moment until the car stopped at the airport.
He tugged his hat lower on his head, hiding his hair. Dark glasses hid his face, and the combination made him anonymous. Until the recent security crackdowns, he’d traveled as Jonathan Craven, the antihero in his block-buster horror series, but 9/11 had put an end to that. Now he was simply Julian Liswood. Not many security guards recognized the name by itself. Directing was not like acting.
Settled into his first-class accommodations on the plane, he remembered to be grateful for the extra space for his long legs, and flipped open his cell phone, dialed the number of his business manager. “I found my chef. We’re a go for the Aspen restaurant,” he said, watching two burly men load bags into the hold. “Let’s meet this evening.”
FOUR
ELENA’S BEST FOODS
Paris Hot Chocolate
Very nearby the Louvre is a strip of tourist shops and eateries. One is a two-story restaurant with beautiful young waitresses and a counter in front to sell chocolates. It’s called Angelina’s, and I think it was famous at one time. The walls are baroque and a little grimy, with mirrors and gilt. There, three expats in Paris retreated on a miserable, rainy November day in 1993 and huddled together, wishing for home. Until the chocolate came, a big, boiling hot pot of it, served with a pitcher of thick cream. Patrick, who had been there as a child, smiled and poured.
“Now taste,” he said.
Mia and I, mourning our language and our homes and our boyfriends, who lived ten thousand miles away across an ocean, picked up our cups. I took one swallow, and a chocolate river opened into my throat, down through my chest. I swam in it.
Patrick laughed.
FIVE
Elena had met Patrick and Mia in Paris. The trio were eager students at Le Cordon Bleu, giddy with possibility and miserable in their Americanness and clumsiness with the language.
Mia was a soft, round Italian-American girl with clouds of hair and breasts and lusciousness, who could prepare pastry so seductive that she never lacked for lovers, though she could not master the art of keeping them. She made Elena think of her lost siblings, and that led her to sit down next to Mia the first day of class. They bonded immediately.
Patrick was a Boston blue blood with a flair for service, who fussed over details and beauty. He joined Elena and Mia a week into the program, rejected by a pair of French youths who disdained Patrick’s slight and boyish plumpness, his nearly albino paleness.
On long rainy afternoons, the trio huddled in the tiny apartment they shared, and nursed hangovers from drinking too late in tucked-away spots with black-clad human commas who made Elena think of beatniks. As they warmed themselves with coffee, shivering beneath shawls and blankets, they spun a dream of opening their own restaurant—Elena as chef, Patrick in the front of the house, Mia as pastry chef.
Now, fourteen years later, they would have the chance. Within three days, Elena had promises from both of them to join her in Aspen, and three days after that, she was on the road in her Subaru that had plenty of room for Alvin, her possessions, most of which belonged in the kitchen—she didn’t even have many clothes, since she spent most of her time in chef’s whites—and herself. She nestled a geranium, a bright magenta bloomer, in a secure spot. It was the one thing she’d carried from place to place to place all these years, grown from a cutting she’d taken from a plant in her grandmother’s restaurant.
Place to place, she thought. Place to place to