Page 2 of A Pinch of Magic

Her move landed. Sergio rubbed his ample belly, and his eyes rolled back until Cam could only see the whites. “Camillia, you’re killing me. Your minestrone…” He trailed off, and he kissed his fingertips and looked out into the distance dreamily, like he was hearing a favorite song. “It’s better than my Sophia’s, which I would never tell her.”

“Your wife doesn’t have to know,” Cam said, a little suggestively. The rhubarb was almost hers, she knew it, and she was willing to stoop to shamelessness to get it. “I’ll bring it hot, and you can eat it here.”

Sergio’s eyes narrowed for a moment as he considered the deal.

“With the bread from Siriano’s?” he asked, naming a bakery near her apartment where she often bought bread and cannoli with filling so light it felt like they might float away. Sergio was no fool.

“Of course.”

Sergio threw his hands up. “I make the call.”

Cam gave Parsley a thumbs-up as she watched Sergio shuffle into the small office in the back of the shop. Parsley just cocked his head. Sergio emerged a few moments later and gave her a gallant bow.

“The lady will have her rhubarb,” he said. “My guy will deliver it in the morning with the regular orders.”

“You’re the best, Sergio!”

“I know, I know,” he responded with an exaggerated shrug. “I guess I’m a sucker for a beautiful girl. And her beautiful soup.”

She blew him a kiss as the bells chimed her exit. As she and Parsley strolled home, Cam took out her tidy shopping list and made a satisfying slash through the last item and sighed with relief. She would be able to test out the chicken recipe. She would make her deadline. Russell would be delighted. Crisis averted.

Cam’s fork hovered in midair, and she closed her eyes, as if cutting off her sight would intensify her power of taste. She rolled the rhubarb compote around on her tongue, scanning its flavors, noticing how the astringent notes of the vegetable—rhubarb was a vegetable, not a fruit, like most people assume, since it usually ends up in tarts and pies—were balanced with the tiny touch of honey she had added. There wasn’t quite enough sweetness, she decided.

She turned to the Moleskine notebook sitting on the scrubbed, knife-scarred butcher block kitchen counter at her elbow. Under the heading Tasting Notes—Chicken/Rhubarb #1, she wrote Increase to 2T honey in neat script. Cam kept detailed notes as she cooked, noting exact measurements and clocking cooking times with an electric timer, and then again afterward, when she critiqued her work, figuring out whether something needed just a minute or two more time over a hot flame to concentrate the flavors or a different herb or a touch more salt.

Cam kept all the tools of her trade—measuring cups and spoons, pans of varying sizes, French linen hand towels, gleaming copper bowls—in sight on the open shelves that lined her spacious-for-New-York galley kitchen and on the far wall, which was set with pegboard painted blue and had hooks, just like Julia Child’s. A large crock beside the stove held whisks, zesters, and well-worn wooden mixing spoons. Cam prided herself on keeping order; she liked it to look beautiful, too. Golden light poured onto the butcher block from a small brass lamp, and a bunch of dahlias beamed at her from a chipped antique transferware pitcher.

Something else was bothering her about the sauce. She took another bite and considered it again. Something was off… Before she could contemplate any further, her phone buzzed. It took Cam a beat to come out of her reverie, and she blinked a few times at the intrusion before she noticed who was calling.

Avery, the screen announced, and Cam lunged at the device, jabbing the answer button. She would usually let a call go to voicemail when she was working—not that anyone under the age of seventy left voicemails anymore. But a call from her cousin trumped the plate of chicken in front of her.

“Avery!” Cam couldn’t help but keep a note of concern from her voice. Her interactions with her cousin were almost always via text—emoji-laden snippets tapped out while Avery waited for a flight to whatever far-flung city was hosting her latest exhibition or at some god-awful hour of the morning after she had left for her studio to paint. Cam couldn’t imagine keeping that kind of schedule—but then again, she couldn’t imagine being a free-spirited artist, either. Sometimes, Avery would arrange a phone date with Cam ahead of time, knowing her cousin in Brooklyn didn’t welcome unexpected interruptions, even in the form of a conversation with her best friend. But an actual, out-of-the-blue phone call from Avery meant Something. Was. Up.

“Hey, Cam!” Cam could hear street noises in the background. “Sorry, it’s a little loud here.”

“Where are you?”

“Budapest! Wild, right? It’s amazing here—you would love the food. I tried this flaky pastry thing that was absolutely to die for, and I bought you a bottle of paprika that everyone swears is the best in the world.”

“I didn’t even know you were traveling,” Cam said.

“It was a last-minute thing,” Avery said. “An opening came up at this artist’s residency for two months, and they’re paying my rent and my airfare. It could be really good for me. I’ll get to work on this new series, and then there’s the networking—a lot of artists here are showing at the big galleries. And one of them is really hot. He’s Spanish. With this intense kind of jawline, like, he literally has a cleft chin like Henry Cavill. He’s the one who played Superman, right? Anyway, I’m considering an intercontinental love affair.”

Now Cam was officially worried. Avery had a way of falling in love with abandon and then taking the inevitable breakups hard. She had only recently stopped incorporating images of bleeding hearts into her paintings four months after her last relationship ended. What was his name? Kyle? Cam vaguely remembered he was a massage therapist.

“Maybe just focus on your painting?” Cam said, knowing as soon as the words came out of her mouth how lecture-y she sounded. She was only a year older than Avery, and anyway, it wasn’t like Avery wasn’t a hard worker. Cam knew her cousin was always hustling, trying to break through in the notoriously tough art world. But another disastrous relationship in the making seemed like a bad idea to Cam.

“Do you always have to be so practical?” Avery retorted. “Maybe if you focused less on your work, you’d find your very own Superman! Maybe, if for once, you just let your guard down for a hot second—”

“I’m fine,” Cam cut her off but kept her tone light. This clearly wasn’t the time for that discussion. “And anyway, I’ve got Parsley for company. Is everyone all right?”

“Yeah, yeah, everyone’s fine.” Avery paused as a siren wailed in the background. “Well, I don’t know. Maybe not? When was the last time you spoke to Birdie?”

Cam’s mouth went dry, and she lowered herself back onto the wooden stool on which she’d been perched. “Oh, God, is Birdie sick?” Cam could no more imagine their seventy-four-year-old grandmother ill than she could picture her in a ballgown. Birdie Parker wore nothing but blue jeans and had never, as far as Cam knew, so much as come down with a cold. It seemed impossible.

“No, no, nothing like that,” Avery said. “But when did you last talk?”

“She missed our last Sunday-night call,” Cam said. “She left me a voicemail saying she had a meeting with the holiday fair committee or something. You know Birdie.” Their grandmother was on enough committees to fill a C-SPAN lineup. And she ruled most of them like a senior statesman, which she practically was in her little town of Silver Cove, Virginia. “So I guess I last talked to her ten days ago or so? Why?”