Christmas Recipe for Romance novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Tree Lighting
Hattie stands up at the town tree lighting and refuses her uncle's ticketed version of her grandmother's free feast, then finds the recipe tin gone and realizes she knows only four of the twelve dishes.
My uncle Barton waited until the whole town was holding a paper cup of cocoa to sell my grandmother.
It was the first of December, and the tree lighting on the green was already ten minutes late.
I stood at the back of the crowd with a sheet tray of gingerbread.
I have handed out gingerbread at the tree lighting since I was nine.
Mabry stood beside me, stamping her boots and eating a gingerbread man feet first.
"He's wearing the good fleece," she whispered. "Nobody wears the good fleece to light a tree."
Barton climbed the gazebo steps with a microphone in his fist.
Behind him hung a banner that said Pinecrest Hospitality in white script, and under it, smaller, Doyle Hall.
"Friends," Barton said, and the speakers shrieked. "Neighbors. My mother, Winifred, God rest her, gave this town fifty-two Christmas Eves."
The crowd made the soft sound a crowd makes at a dead woman's name.
I felt it in my throat, and I held the tray tighter.
"This year," Barton said, "we honor her by doing it right."
"Oh no," Mabry said.
"Introducing the Doyle Christmas Table," Barton said. "One hundred fifty seats in the restored Hall."
"Twelve dishes from Winifred's own recipes. Ninety-five dollars a plate."
Nobody clapped.
A man near me said, "A plate?"
"Tickets go on sale Friday at nine," Barton said, beaming.
"And every recipe is in the new Doyle Family Cookbook, copyright Doyle Hospitality, on sale at the door."
Somebody held up a phone, and I saw Pinecrest's logo glow on the little screen.
I have never decided to do anything in my life.
My body does it, and my brain arrives later with a clipboard.
I put the gingerbread on Mabry's arms, and I walked up the center of the green with snow in my braid.
Barton saw me coming, and his smile got bigger, which is what it does when he is nervous.
"Hattie," he said into the microphone, because he had forgotten to lower it. "Everyone, my niece, who helped my mother in the kitchen."
"Helped," I said.
I took the steps one at a time and held out my hand for the mic.
He gave it to me because two hundred people were watching him do it.
The speaker popped.
"The feast is free," I said.
My voice came back to me off the church wall.
"It has been free for fifty-two years. Grandma never took a dollar."
"She took a plate from anybody who came, and a story from anybody who needed to tell one."
Someone near the front said, "That's right."
"I'm cooking it on the twenty-fourth," I said. "Five o'clock. Same as always. Free. Bring a chair."
The cheer started at the back, ragged and then big, and I will remember it when I am eighty.
Barton put his hand over the microphone, and I felt his fingers squeeze mine one second too long.
"With what kitchen?" he said, quietly, just for me.
"What?"
"The Hall kitchen is mine," he said. "The ovens, the tables, the chairs, the pots are mine."
"You couldn't cook a hot dog in this town without my say."
"Then I'll cook it somewhere else."
"Where? Mother's tin doesn't open itself, sweetheart."
He let go of my hand and took the microphone back.
"And now," he said, bright as a bell, "the lights."
The tree blazed up behind me, and half the crowd turned to look at it, and the other half kept looking at me.
I walked home down Mill Lane in the dark with my ears ringing.
The cottage was warm, because the stove banks overnight, and it smelled like cloves, as it has since the day I moved in.
I hung my coat on the hook, and I went straight to the shelf over the flour bin where my grandmother kept the green tin.
It has sat on that shelf since 1974.
It holds every recipe card from the Hall kitchen, and I have never needed to open it, because I have always had her.
There was a clean, round ring in the dust where the tin used to be.
I stood very still.
The back door was locked, the front door was locked, and the little kitchen window was shut.
Barton had a key to the cottage, and I had never once asked why.
I sat down on the stool and counted the dishes on my fingers.
The turkey, brined in maple.
The cider gravy.
The gingerbread with lemon icing.
The cranberry relish with orange peel.
Four.
There are twelve dishes at the Christmas Eve feast, and for eight of them I had never held a spoon.
I had only ever found them at four in the morning, in foil pans on the back step of the Hall, still warm.
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