Read Online The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman - Free Book Online

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