The Lost Recipe for Happiness - By Barbara O'Neal Page 0,100

time, she thought, with his age showing on his neck, and in the thin flesh around his eyes, but not in his hearty body, which he shared generously, and not in his lush, seasoned, and delectable mouth, which offered the best kissing she had ever done. Long kisses, and his long fingers, and his deep and all-encompassing laughter. He had come from somewhere in the South, and lived in a small house in a neighborhood full of trees, and he liked to barbecue on summer Sundays, cooking ribs and chicken in a converted fifty-five-gallon drum. His sauces were made with coffee and vinegar, and he served it in a big messy pile on paper plates with white bread and American beer. James. Yes. She thought of him sometimes when the blues played and when she smelled chicken barbecue and when someone laughed just right. The happiest man she’d ever met—happy in his skin, happy in the world, happy singing or drinking or making love. In the end, too old for her and maybe too simple in his ways. She thought too much, he said, and he hadn’t liked her attention to her career, to the restaurant, where she sometimes spent sixty or seventy hours a week. He wanted more of her.

She let him go, but there were moments she liked taking out sometimes—sitting with him in a fish house on a hot summer day in Oakland, with no fans and no breeze and the fryers making it even hotter. The fish was fried perfectly in a crisp, thin batter, salted and rich, whitefish they called it, and sprinkled with hot vinegar. Everyone knew him and liked to sidle up to him, the bluesman who played the clubs downtown, and talk to him about music. He looked over at her and winked, and she grinned back and that was that.

Thinking of James led to thinking of Timothy, her sturdy English lad, and his version of fried whitefish, cod from the fish and chips shop, greasy and hot and salty and sprinkled with vinegar. She met him in Paris, at school, a dark-haired youth of twenty-four with the whitest skin she’d ever seen—it was as thin and pale as milk, delicate skin that was easily irritated by soaps and powders and chemicals, which caused him challenges in the kitchen. He was plumpish and by now was likely quite fat, but then he was still a luminous boy, his beauty in that coloring, that paleness and those vivid blue eyes and the glossy thick darkness of hair. He loved her exotic background—New Mexico!—and the strangeness of her Spanish, a language he spoke quite well, and the warmth of her skin. They traveled together, young lovers sure of the possibilities in front of them, eating octopus on Spanish beaches and drinking ouzo in the Greek islands. Sometimes they found work enough to stay for a few weeks or a few months if they liked it. Sometimes they traveled back to Paris for a respite with Mia and Patrick, who had stayed longer in the city to learn their particular techniques—Mia in an apprenticeship with a patisserie, Patrick as understudy to a sommelier in a three-star restaurant in the Marais district.

Moments with Timothy: in Paris, when they first met at cooking school, cuddled together in a cold loft, a garret, really, so tiny you could barely stand up in it, with a shared toilet down the hall. The long window looked out over the fabled rooftops, medieval and golden in the late afternoon, pale and pink in the mornings like this. Timothy snuggled. He liked holding her all night. She liked waking up to him in the morning, his arms looped around her, his breath on her shoulder.

They were together for three years, and she thought they would be together forever, but they moved back to England and Elena hated the dullness of the gloomy, dark English winter, and she didn’t fit in with his old school friends and their girlfriends and wives, and Timothy, doing what Elena had no courage to do, simply, plainly broke it off. Elena had limped back to Paris, devastated.

But thinking of him now, she could smile. It would be fun to track him down and see how he was, if he still cooked and where. She imagined him living in some English village with a busty wife and a tangle of children and a long commute into the city where he cooked for lords. His gift…oh, their gift to