Allegra Goodman - The Cookbook Collector

Alex bounced the Ping-Pong ball too hard, and it popped off the edge of his paddle, but he was quick and made the save. “Work with me, then.”

She wanted to. She wanted to give him free rein, but prudence prevented her. Her instinct was to distrust his instincts.

“You need to present this idea formally to the Board.”

“We’ll see,” said Alex.

“Say you will, or I’ll do it for you.”

He bristled. “You aren’t presenting anything for me.”

She turned away, then, so he couldn’t see her smile. He was arrogant, but she’d manage him. His idea had so much potential!

As she took the stairs down to the third floor, her imagination leaped ahead. If Alex let go of his surveillance model, his techniques could be employed in new, more sensitive search engines. His idea of fingerprinting could have applications for passwords. What if Veritech went into password verification? Yes! She would name Alex’s new password authentication system Verify. Emily stopped on the stairs and almost laughed. Deliberate in everything she said and did in public, she had a passion for new schemes.

She hoped she could talk seriously to Alex that weekend. The day before the IPO, she was hosting Sunday brunch, an event that impressed Jess as very formal and old-school.

“You have such a sense of propriety!” said Jess, who’d come early to help shop and set up.

“It’s not propriety,” Emily replied, as they browsed the melons at the Farmers’ Market in Stanford Shopping Center. “It’s just …”

“What?”

“Doing the right thing at the right time.”

“There you go,” said Jess. “That’s what propriety is. You don’t even realize you’re doing it. You’re a throwback.”

“To what?”

Jess considered this. Hi-tech at work, Emily was paradoxically old-fashioned in her life. She didn’t even own a television. “The nineteenth century,” Jess concluded. “No. Eighteenth. You can be eighteenth. I’ll be nineteenth.”

“I never pictured you as a Victorian.”

“No, early nineteenth century,” said Jess, who had always been a stickler when it came to imaginary games and books. The Blue Fairy, not Tinker Bell. Lucy, not Susan. Jo, not Amy. Austen, not the Brontës.

“Focus.” Emily considered the bins of cantaloupes and casabas.

“Let’s buy one of everything,” said Jess.

“That’s too much.”

“You can afford it! You’re going to be a millionaire tomorrow.”

“Shh. No, I’m not.” Still, Emily’s heart fluttered. Even with the six-month lockup, even with the volatile market, she had three million shares of Veritech.

Jess gazed at the apples arranged in all their colors: russet, blushing pink, freckled gold. She cast her eyes over heaps of pumpkins, bins of tomatoes cut from the vine, pale gooseberries with crumpled leaves. “You could buy a farm.”

“Why would I do that?”

“To be healthy,” said Jess.

Emily shook her head. “I don’t think I’d be a very good farmer.”

“You could have other people farm your farm for you,” said Jess. “And you could just eat all the good things.”

Emily laughed. “That’s what we’re doing here at the Farmers’ Market. We’re paying farmers to farm for us. You’ve just invented agriculture.”

“Yes, but you could have your own farm and go out there and breathe the fresh air and touch the fresh earth.”

“I think that’s called a vacation,” said Emily.

“Oh, you’re too boring to be rich,” Jess said. “And I would be so talented!”

“You took care of those Friends and Family forms, right?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” said Jess.

“And Dad was fine with the loan, wasn’t he?”

“I told you I took care of it,” Jess said airily.

Alex arrived first with sunflowers so big that Emily didn’t have a vase for them. “They’re beautiful,” she said as he thrust the huge paper-wrapped bouquet into her arms. “Hmm.” The blossoms were velvety black fringed with gold, their stems thick and rough, their leaves like little limbs. You couldn’t trim such flowers with a scissors.

Emily lined up the stems on a cutting board and chopped the ends off with a cleaver. “The question is, what should I use for a vase?” Emily was just thinking aloud, but instantly she regretted asking. Alex looked so disappointed, standing in the kitchen doorway. The flowers were too big. They were all wrong. Poor guy. Sunflowers must have looked perfect in the store: prettiest and least symbolic—not like roses, for example.

“Don’t worry,” Jess reassured Alex in the living room as Milton arrived.

“What can I do? Am I pouring waffle batter?” Milton asked.

“I’m going next door to ask the neighbors for a vase,” Jess called out.

“Okay,” Emily said. “No, wait, don’t do that—the one next door works nights. He works in the ER at Stanford Hospital. Don’t knock on his—” But Jess was gone, and here was Emily’s assistant, Laura, and her husband, Kevin, and their two little children. They had come straight from church, bearing cinnamon buns.

“I made half with pecans and half without,” said Laura. “You can warm them in the oven.”

“You’re amazing.” Emily spoke to Laura, but she was smiling at three-year-old Justin, in his Bermuda shorts and blue plaid shirt and bow tie. One-year-old Meghan, in her yellow gingham sundress, was already heading for the stairs with Kevin close behind. Kevin was a graduate student in accounting. Laura was twenty-six, just three years older than Jess, but there she was with two children. They were so beautiful, blue-eyed like their mother, their hair even blonder than hers.

“They’re easy to make,” Laura told Emily in the kitchen.

“They don’t look easy,” Emily said, admiring the giant glossy rolls.

“When I was a kid I had a summer job at Cinnabon,” Laura explained. “I took the recipe home and divided it by forty.”

“What temperature do you want?”

“Just very low, as low as you can.”

“All right, let me see,” murmured Emily, fiddling with the controls. She was unfamiliar with her oven.

“You don’t want to bake them any more, just keep the glaze gooey. Here, let’s put them on the counter.” Suddenly Laura looked a little pale.

“Are you all right? Do you want a drink? Do you need to sit down?” Emily asked.

“I’m fine. I’m pregnant again,” Laura whispered.

“Really? When are you …?”

“We aren’t telling anyone yet. We just found out,” said Laura, and almost imperceptibly she sighed.

Emily wanted to talk further, but Milton manned the waffle iron just steps away. “The green light means they’re ready, right?” he asked.

“Let me get you a platter.” Emily was reaching for one when Jess burst through the door bearing an umbrella stand for the sunflowers.

“Come sit,” Emily told Laura. “You too,” she called to her sister, who was using the sprayer from the kitchen sink to fill the umbrella stand. “Everybody has to eat a lot of fruit salad.”

“Did you get Bruno’s halcyon-days e-mail?” Milton asked as they sat down together, eight at the table, counting Meghan in Kevin’s lap.

“Bruno’s out of town, so now it’s open season?” Emily asked lightly.

“I had to look up halcyon,” said Laura.

“These are the halcyon days,” Alex declaimed in his best imitation of Bruno. “But the days are numbered when we can spend as we choose and operate without scrutiny …”

“With a public offering comes public accountability,” Milton chimed in with his own version of Bruno’s German-Swiss accent.

“Move the syrup, hon,” Kevin warned Laura, as Meghan’s little hand stole across the table.