"Jeez, go away. You're not helping."

"Helping? I've been trying, Gwen. I can't win with you. I didn't call enough this summer. I wasn't jealous enough when that guy Steve drove you back to Belmar for school. You're my girlfriend, and I didn't think I needed to be, and god, Gwen, he's not even your type."

"My period's late." The words came out so quickly and without any kind of conversational echo. It was like a hiccup that polite people ignored, that polite people went on ignoring. "I'm just stressed, that's all. I think it's because I started to exercise or something. I'll get it soon. It's nothing."

Back to U...

She'd followed Nicola out and stood on the front porch in her socks, which might not have been a great idea for a couple of reasons. The big one, besides not wanting to talk to the woman at all, was that Nicola wore a coat and boots, and Gwen was already freezing. She tried not to shift her weight back and forth on her feet because that was trying to keep warm like squirrels did.

"You are here because you cannot live in the dormitory, yes?"

"Oui." Gwen smiled like she'd made a joke at her own expense, but Nicola didn't register it. "And... I've kind of been dating Max. You probably know that."

"I am very, very tolerant of men. They are..." Nicola waved her hand, "men. Max will let you stay. I will not."

Gwen forgot she was cold for a moment. What did that mean? Head of her program or not, who did Max's ex-girlfriend think she was? "Listen, I know that Max feels responsible for you coming here--"

Nicola laughed, and it sounded light and musical even though Gwen knew it was fakey and mean. "I should hope so. We have had our difficultes as anyone does. And what this is," Nicola waved an elegant finger her direction, "I am understanding to be... oh, what is the word? Nostalgia."

Why, when Nicola said it, did nostalgia sound so old and moldy? "I'm here for old time's sake?"

"Yes, you understand also. His attention will turn, and we will be stronger, our marriage."

Marriage? Lord, but the woman had a hurtful way with the English language. "You mean relationship."

Nicola didn't answer, just stood there looking so perfectly put together Gwen heard cool as a cucumber run through her head over and over and had to stop thinking it to focus. "You're married to Max?"

"But of course." Nicola gave a sad smile that looked neither sad nor smiling. "He did not tell you I see by the wrinkle just here." Nicola touched the smooth spot between her own thirty-year-old eyes. "Men... are they not small boys? But he has taken you in, for a price, has he not? And you have no finances. This is right? And no... I must be honest, ability." Nicola shook her head. "Shame."

Shame. Is that what she felt? It could be in there along with embarrassment, anger, and maybe heartbreaking pain all wadded up in the world's largest ball of stupidity residing at her core. She felt a shiver run through her.

"Ah, but you are cold, and I am off now." Nicola sighed. "He will come to his senses speedy enough, no?"

No, he wouldn't. He never had. He never would. And obviously she hadn't come to her senses speedy enough to avoid that lesson again.

Missy drove them towards town, and Gwen tried to imagine she was alone without a daughter beside her, a mother in the back seat, and barely enough money for the cheap hotel they were headed for. Missy had turned down the radio but the pop station seemed to specialize in women panting over unintelligible lyrics, and it wasn't filling the silent gaps enough.

They would ask her soon, any minute, why the hell she'd dragged them out of Max's. They couldn't be ignored for long, but maybe they could be distracted for another minute. She turned to face the front windshield, the signs bright in the night as they lined the blocks ahead. "So, Missy, you're driving grandma home tomorrow."

"Yeah."

"Glad your medical adventure's over, Mom?"

Missy's eyes darted to the rear view mirror, and Gwen swiveled to catch Ellen's answering look. "What?"

"Gwennie, what happened with Max? He didn't understand why we were leaving either and such a nice meal we had."

Clearly she'd learned her distraction trick from her mother, but she'd done it first this time, so Ellen had to be the one to answer. "What's going on, you two? I saw the look. Missy, your grandmother practically invented the look. I grew up with it, and I know it means withholding information."

Ellen gave a hint of a smile. "It was my mother who invented the look." Nostalgia, Gwen thought, but the good kind. "I'm just second generation."

"You're doing the distraction thing again, Mom. What's going on?"

Missy stopped at a red light and turned to her, and Gwen felt a pulse of panic. "Grandma has osteoporosis."

"Early days, early days." Ellen waved her hand in dismissal. "I refuse to have that humpy back. Surely there are fashion tricks to camouflage it if it comes in real bad, like stripes. Horizontal, do you suppose?"

Gwen tried to remember what she knew about osteoporosis beyond breaking a hip, and it seemed like there were some potentially serious health issues. "Mom, when you get home I want you to see your doctor and check on medications, exercise, maybe some physical therapy." She saw the look again and busted them in the rear view mirror. "Tell me."

Ellen sighed like a long suffering teenager, and Gwen wondered if Missy had learned that generationally as well. "I don't have any insurance."

"You certainly do."

"I did, Gwennie, but to be fair to the tool, and I'd rather not be, but he can't take care of me anymore. I'm not even his mother-in-law, unless you patch things up with him."

Missy shook her head. "Mom, you can fix this, all of it."

She was supposed to do what? Re-snag a husband so she and her mother had someone to insure them?

But Missy kept going, clearly buying whatever story Steve had sold her. "He's alone. He really is. And he--"

"Oh, so I should quick go catch him while he's between girlfriends?"

She heard Missy suck in a breath. "That's mean."

"Yeah, mean to me, and I don't think I need to take advice from either of you." She hooked a thumb toward the backseat. "Hannah Montana's had a stadium worth of potential husbands, and you've followed up Austin with Bryan, and don't think I didn't notice. He thinks anything female is fair game. You won't be the only one, Missy. Your father may have walked out after twenty years, but we had twenty years. Bryan's just like Max."

Ellen leaned into the gap between the front seats. "What about Max?"

Missy pulled into the hotel parking lot and jerked into a parking space. "You don't know anything."

The hell she didn't. "Well, I know he's married."

Missy looked at her like she was crazy. "Bryan is not married!"

Ellen made a clicking sound with her tongue. "Max, honey. And don't stress your mom out about boys. She doesn't know anything."

"God, right, huh?"

They got out and left her in the car.

"It's darkest before the dawn, Gwennie."

Gwen listened to the grumble of the radiator, felt the polyester bedspread scratch the underside of her chin, and understood a little of Martha Stewart's experience in prison. And she knew her mother would wait for some response. There, in the dark of a cheap motel in separate but equally lumpy double beds, her mother could wait forever.

Gwen sighed. "It's darkest before you see the light at the end of the tunnel. And that light is actually a train that finishes you off."

"Heavens, I don't think it's all that bad."

She considered the state of her affairs, and since Max was married, she was also guilty of an actual affair. "My husband left me and took everything. Max set me up to knock me down again. Deb and Nicola made me commit to a program I can't afford. My daughter isn't listening to me and will screw up her life. Gee, am I leaving anything out?"

"You're leaving me out. You've blamed Steve and Max and the folks in the cooking school and Missy. You must be depressed if you didn't start with me. I worked in a bar. I liked men, and they liked me. I didn't give you the right kind of house or the right kind of dad. I think it's fun to dress up for Halloween and have a good time."

She heard her mother take in a breath. "But let me tell you something, Gwennie. People aren't like one of your recipes. You can't take what you want and throw out the parts you don't and make something that suits you. I'm an Ellen casserole, and I don't like all the ingredients either. I'd have chosen for your dad to stay with me longer, a lot longer, but I made do. That's what being human's about, to go on loving our lopsided lives and all the half-baked people in it." Ellen gave a little snort and rolled over.

Gwen felt the heat of tears pour out of the corners of her eyes and down along the side of her face. She wanted to say goodnight, wanted to crawl into bed with her mother and be comforted, helped, forgiven, but instead she tried to steady her breathing so no one would know she was crying at all.

She'd spent a week going from the Belmar kitchen to the library to the motel room Ellen had put on a credit card for her. It was probably a credit card Steve had forgotten to cancel. She didn't want to think about any of that, just get through finals and then move in with her mother where she'd begin amassing cats and body fat and not necessarily in that order.

Other things she wasn't thinking about? Thanksgiving, which had come and gone without so much as a turkey sandwich. All of the messages from Max on her cellphone. And the fact that she'd let herself get close to him again, and he'd squashed her like a bug with a woman she really, really hated for just being that woman. She wasn't going to think about any of that, just school.

She'd aced her psychology test and wished she could just enjoy completing her associate's degree, but the dream of becoming a chef had muddied the water. Anything less than a culinary degree felt like more failure, and sitting in the classroom with the final test in front of her, she felt ill. Just seeing a tense Deb and surprisingly relaxed Ty, she'd had a headache before she even started.

By page two her eyes crossed from pain, and she wasn't sure if the meat HACCP systems were regulated by the USDA with seafood and juice falling under the FDA, or if she had that reversed. When the definition of charcuterie stumped her for ten minutes, she knew the test had her bacon. Charcuterie... cooked flesh... prepared meats... bacon. She got the first section answered and then kept going.

Page after page she mowed it down. Wrong probably, but answered. She visualized a pair of headache pills, a glass of cheap wine, and a bath in a questionable tub waiting for her when she finished. So what if it would only be noon. It was okay to drink a little since the hands-on testing wasn't until the next day. Wasn't that a country western song? If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen and drink 'cause it's five o'clock somewhere.

She hummed the drinking song while she finished page eight by sketching a kitchen layout for a fifty seat restaurant. She'd hoped that besides happy hour, somewhere in the world it was happy life-stage for women her age. It may be that medication rates were up for her demographic, suicide rates were climbing, and satisfaction rates remained non-existent, but like a good western twang, somewhere middle-aged women were coming into their own and feeling satisfied with the quality of their lives half-way done. The gals were probably part of an obscure tribe with a mere three or four women, but they'd managed to wave goodbye to their children and were enjoying the abundance of what was left to them. She'd imagine that because of those women, their sisters all over the world could grab some happiness because there was happiness somewhere.

She flipped the page over to a section on culinary arts related mathematics determining food costs, yields, and percentages. She sighed loudly enough that Deb looked up to give her an inch of pity. She'd take pity. She wasn't short any. Even she knew she was swimming in it, but she'd take it. It was better than the world of regret she'd been carrying for years.

She'd explained to Marta, the woman at the motel desk, about the hands-on testing. Gwen knew she'd really lost everyone in her life if she had to chat up someone who was paid to be nice. It might just be the friend equivalent of hiring a hooker. And black box testing did sound pretty bad. Marta thought the students were placed in an actual box.

Heading down the culinary arts wing, Gwen decided that being enclosed in a box would have made her less nervous. She actually did pretty well under tables, so a box couldn't be that much different.

Stepping into the kitchen, she felt tension radiating from everyone except Ty. Ty looked ready to go. His chef's jacket, his hat, and his smile were already on, and like an Olympian at the starting line, he was prepared, in place, and already a winner. Naturellement.

She remembered with fondness the painful book testing the day before. Sure, she'd suffered then, had a throbbing headache, but compared to what lay ahead, the written test had been filled with charm.

Charm, and she hadn't even had wine or a bath. She'd fallen asleep on the polyester bedspread after eating popcorn for dinner. The dining experience had been enhanced by a reality show that involved troubled young women who confused their currency in the world with their sexuality and who deeply needed to get their GED's and work on their language to stop bleep, bleeping, bleep, bleep, bleeping so much. Even that seemed delightful to her as she waited for the black box. The previous day had been, in fact, so perfect, so appealing, she wanted to live it over and over again like Ground Hog day.

Deb stood in front of a steel cart, neither black nor a box, and Gwen tried to gauge her face. Mostly tired, with hints of grim. Grim, Gwen was pretty sure, was bad. Grim, when the instructor knows what's coming, might be epically bad. Deb could step aside and reveal any chef's nightmare, a combination of ingredients that no one could make a cohesive plate out of. Tuna fish, canned. A cup of peanut butter. Eight slices of American cheese. Mace.

They might be given things that were never intended to go together, like potatoes and kiwi fruit. Or worse, things that reacted badly when combined and made something more horrible than the individual items could hope to make, like a baking soda and vinegar volcano with the waxy aftertaste of botulism.

Even the best chefs, professional ones, couldn't manage something like that, and there was no way she could succeed and then she wouldn't even have the hope of leaving with a passing grade and then without any hope she wouldn't have any hope and then what? Hopelessness, all because some things could actually, literally, not be done. They were, no matter how optimistic you'd been, no matter how you'd Pollyanned your way through the past twenty years, things you just couldn't make work, and it wasn't just you because no one could. It was actually, actually impossible like... like...

She watched Deb put her hand on the cart. "Chef Gaspard put these ingredients together. You have three hours to make a plate. Main dish, side dish, one sauce minimum. Chef Gaspard and I will grade your finished product and your final grade on the practical testing will be averaged with yesterday's written test. Good luck.

It was like... like... "Orange!"

Everyone turned to stare at her, and she realized she'd blurted it out loud. "Uh, I was just thinking about combinations that wouldn't work like tuna and peanut butter."

Ty shrugged. "Thai peanut sauce over grilled tuna."

"Or American cheese and mace."

"We wouldn't get American cheese."

"Well..."

"Sauce bechamel."

Gwen felt the inevitability that Ty would pass and she would fail, but she still needed to defend her impossibility theory. "Well, the word Orange has no rhyme in the English language no matter how you spin it. None."

"Okaaay." Deb lifted the lid, and Gwen nearly stopped breathing when she spotted the orange.

Deb wanted to see her. See her in her office. It could be good... Deb understood that Gwen didn't know anything about Chef Gaspard. Or it could be bad... Deb understood that Gwen had done Chef Gaspard's husband under the dining room table. Or maybe, Gwen felt her chest tighten, maybe she'd bombed the test and her continuing stress headache was merely an exclamation point on her latest failure.

It surprised her to see Ty already seated in Deb's tiny office. She could rule out an infidelity talk and probably her other failure, the academic one. That left nothing.

"Take a seat." Deb pointed to the empty chair, a stiff-backed metal and fake black leather. "We have a problem that needs to be resolved."

Gwen looked at both of them and could tell they knew what the subject was. Ty's lips were tight together. He was upset about something, but what? And it looked like Deb was trying not to smile, and Gwen didn't know what that was about either.

"There's a tie."

"You beat me in the written section." Ty let out a puff of breath. He'd given the whole thing some thought, she could tell. "I out-plated you by twenty points." He lifted a hand. "Tied."

He had cooked up a shrimp bisque that not only featured Pernod, which she'd never heard of before and nearly called Pernod when she saw the bottle and not pear-no which was the pronunciation everyone else in the room seemed to know, but he'd made some kind of abstract art project with the dish. No one even wanted to disturb its perfection and taste it.

She'd wanted to think of her shrimp jambalaya as earthy, but next to Ty's French cuisine, it looked like a low budget Cajun cousin. Still, she'd hung in there, and... "Tied? Really?"

"So what happens now?" Ty jumped to the next thing, but she hadn't figured out the first thing yet.

She held out a hand, "Sorry. I'm just a little amazed. We tied?"

Deb nodded. "A few more points on the written test, and you'd have been the top cooking student."

She smiled at Ty. "Well, tying is great. It's even better." She tried not to let his lack of a smile back bother her. Some people were just naturally competitive, but she was going to enjoy sharing the win all the way back to her mother's pull-out couch where she'd live out the remainder of her days.

"You didn't hear." Deb looked friendlier than she had for a long time. "Chef Gaspard is leaving us for professional opportunities elsewhere." She started to roll her eyes, but seemed to stop herself. "Her family wanted to thank Belmar for not expressing... let's say disappointment that Chef Gaspard wouldn't be completing her year-long contract."

Ty shifted impatiently beside her, and Gwen could practically feel him humming in irritation before he jumped in. "There's an appretissage at Applaudissements."

She should know what that meant. She'd obviously done well on the test, and the name of Nicola's family's restaurant rang a bell, but what was the...

Deb shook her head, and if they were still friends, Gwen knew she would have laughed in complete amusement at Gwen's general ignorance of how the cooking world worked. "There's an apprenticeship in Paris offered to the top student from this year's graduating class." Deb smiled at her, a real one this time. "They'll pay for spring semester, and after graduation, the winner will have a job at their five star restaurant."

Gwen felt light-headed with a rush of something like joy or hope. She'd get to stay, then graduate, then run away to Europe and be employed, and best of all, it would be success, success that anyone could see. She'd be able to say, I did it. Check it out. By mid-life I got there, boom. Sure it didn't happen gradually like most people and instead hit all at once, but the important thing is it happened. I happened. No one would be able to take that away from her. Gwen found herself on the edge of the tippy chair and scooted back. "So, what now?"

"Well, because of the tie, Chef Gaspard felt that she should make the final decision..." Deb nodded when Gwen cringed. "But when I spoke with the Arts dean..."

Had Deb helped her out? Nicola wouldn't have chosen her over Ty for more reasons than the Max one, although that would be sufficient. In bringing in another person, Deb prevented Ty from instantly getting the apprenticeship.

"We compromised and decided that the final decision will be dependent on another black box competition."

"Yes!" Ty whispered it, but with force. Gwen half thought he'd accompany it with a ghost fist pump.