Exasperated, he ran his bony fingers through his dark brown hair, thrilling me with the sight of the gold ring on his bachelor hand. I didn't ask him to repeat Ingrid's outburst or condemn it. Inside my own wedding band were the words that counted, a surprise he'd dictated over this same hospital phone to the local jeweler: Kris & Natalie Semper Fi-all the blessings I needed from a Berry.

We were discharged together, twenty-seven days after the poisonings, and, while Kris technically had a home to go back to, it no longer functioned as an inn.

My mother had kept up my rent on the attic apartment, so Kris and I returned there, to part-time jobs at Marx Fruit and Audrey Marx Properties, respectively, and postponed our honeymoon for the foreseeable future. A check was waiting-five hundred dollars for "consultations rendered" from Mr. Simone. They had read about my mishap and miraculous recovery in the Boston Herald, he wrote on his firm's letterhead. He and Hilda wished me every success in future endeavors, but, there being no formalized agreement with the future Chez Simone, the deal-such as it was-was off.

"They don't want the mushroom murderess on their payroll," I said.

"You didn't want that stupid job anyway."

"I'm a pariah."

"It'll pa.s.s," he said.

" 'NEWTON GIRL BRINGS DOWN THE HOUSE OF BERRY.' "

"Not on purpose," said the true-blue Kris.

I resigned myself to a future in real estate, telling myself that few people return from the dead to achieve both professional and personal happiness. Back at my old desk, I took messages, and wrote cla.s.sified ads; I photographed the interiors and exteriors of houses with my mother's Polaroid, and then, like an extra-credit project, mounted them on poster board for display in the agency's dusty front windows. I was particularly unconvincing at sales, which I did only at the unlicensed, telephone level. If a caller asked about the cozy ranch on the dynamic street, I would picture its cramped rooms and the traffic whizzing by. Distaste for the property would creep into my voice. My mother tried to educate me in the ways of real estate diplomacy, explaining that one person's bad taste was another person's dream decor, so I should not spit in anyone's water, because I might have to drink it.

I hated it still. I hated the buyers and the sellers, the compet.i.tion and the co-brokers, the dress-up clothes required for desk work, the clerks in the courthouse, and the typesetters in Cla.s.sified. When I confessed to my mother that I didn't think I could ever be fulfilled in real estate, she said, "I know."

She paid for me to see a therapist, who pointed out that I couldn't undo the poisonings by staying out of kitchens. For homework she asked me to write a list of life-affirming things that could happen at a future restaurant of mine. Grudgingly, and not until I was seated in her waiting room the following week, did I scribble: "marriage proposals," "wedding receptions," "anniversary & birthday parties," "bar and bat mitzvahs," "job offers," "mergers," "deals," and "misc. celebrations."

I should cook toward that goal, the therapist said, waving my lackl.u.s.ter list: for love and for personal happiness-my own and my future patrons'.

I asked, "What if I make another mistake? I know someone who put peanut b.u.t.ter into her chili, and a customer died of an allergic reaction not an hour later."

"And where is that cook today?" she asked smartly. "In a penitentiary?"

"No."

"Why not?"

I admitted what my friend the unindicted chef had learned the hard way: A horrible mistake is not a crime. The customer takes his chances, the restaurant's attorney had said, when he orders a melange like chili. Case law regarding fish bones in chowder and a choking plaintiff backed him up.

She asked if I was staying out of kitchens because I was genuinely afraid of poisoning more people, or if I was sentencing myself to life behind the bars of Audrey Marx Properties for my imagined crime.

I said I hadn't seen it in quite that way.

"Do you find anything fulfilling in the work your mother and sister do?"

I said without a second's reflection, "Not a thing."

I read my short, gaping resume to Kris as he scrambled eggs for dinner.

"What's the big hurry?" he asked. "We're doing okay. I don't want to deliver baskets for the rest of my life, but it's only temporary." He pointed out that I was not back to my fighting weight, and as long as I was still fading in the afternoons, it was best to have the flexibility offered by working for family.

"What if this never pa.s.ses?" I asked.

He knew I meant my fear of food, not the fatigue. He said, "Doctors lose patients and go back into the O.R. Drivers. .h.i.t pedestrians and get back behind the wheel. Firefighters reenter burning buildings. Liz Taylor and Richard Burton are heading back down the aisle. You'll cook again."

TWENTY-SEVEN.

Distraught over our condition, Linette had enlisted Mr. Feldman and his minions to pray for us. More than one bison-size flower arrangement had arrived at the hospital from "Your friends at the Halseeyon," followed-when we had been upgraded from serious to fair-by enough rugalekh to feed the town of Gilbert.

"Who's that boy who calls here after he thinks we're asleep?" her father finally asked.

"Nelson?" Linette said, managing to convey the sheer nerve and wrongheadedness of such a question. "He's calling with medical bulletins. He's just a friend."

"I was young once," said her father, "no matter what kind of a shnook you take me for. You haven't been the same since that boy jumped in the pool."

"Natalie and Kris may die," she told him.

"I'm watching you," he warned.

When we didn't die, when my parents survived the news of my mixed, civil marriage and the world didn't end, Linette found the courage to call Joel. He listened with unusual, almost suspect, equanimity and said, "Let me think this over. There's someone I should confer with here. I'll call you Sunday."

"I'm sorry," said Linette. "I never meant to drag this thing out. I didn't know my own mind."

"I'm not exactly stunned," said Joel.

He didn't wait until Sunday, but called her back that same night. "Here's what you do," he advised. "Tell them it's my decision."

"Why?"

Joel said, "Tell them I had doubts about your commitment to marrying a rabbi and to being a rebbetzen. Tell them I was concerned about the differences in our backgrounds and our values, and in the end I felt it was wrong to uproot you and ask you to give up the hotel."

"Is this true?"

"Tell them that," he said. "It'll make it easier if they hate me instead of you."

"What a great guy," I said later, marveling at his civility.

"Please," Linette sneered. "He's shtupping someone in Cincinnati."

He didn't sit shiva or formally disown her, but Mr. Feldman stopped speaking to Linette as soon as she began collecting corrugated boxes and talking nonsense about a change of scenery. Out of nowhere, he grumbled, she's interested in Providence. "Who moves to Rhode Island?" he wanted to know.

Linette countered that Providence had much to recommend it: It had ocean, it had Brown, it had history, it had hotels in case she wanted to keep her fingers in that pot. It had been seven years since graduation, and he knew what that meant, didn't he? A sabbatical. She would audit courses at the Rhode Island School of Design and at Johnson & Wales, where disciplines would accrue to the eventual benefit of the Halseeyon. Hal Feldman believed none of it. There was a boy at the heart of this-in Providence of all places. The wrong kind of boy, he was certain, despite Linette's denials.

He said cunningly, "It would be one thing if I thought you had a friend or two there, but leaving your family to go live among strangers ..."

"I have friends there," she said.

"That boy," he pounced. "The shmegege who jumped in the pool."

"You gave him a medal. You called him a great humanitarian."

"I treated him like a headliner," Hal retorted, "and the gonef helps himself to my daughter."

"He saved a soul. You said that in front of witnesses; you quoted the Talmud; you announced that his name was inscribed in the Book of Life."

"You think Minna Gitlow needed saving in four feet of water?" her father yelled, his complexion deepening to a purplish red. "I was looking to make a gesture, to liven things up. I'm no rabbi."

"It's irrelevant. My taking a leave of absence has nothing to do with Nelson Berry or Minna Gitlow."

"You'll be back," he shouted. "You're not walking out on the Halseeyon. I'm semiretired. And you're engaged to someone else."

"Daddy," said Linette. "It was Joel's decision to break up. I need to get away so there aren't the constant reminders."

"She's lying," he told his friends around the pinochle table.

"You've got four daughters," they counseled. "Did you think every one of them was going to take up with someone you approve of?"

Young people ... It's different today ... My niece, my nephew; my own daughter, my own son, his friends said.

"Achhh," said Mr. Feldman.

My mother seized the opportunity to contact the Feldman family, writing a thank-you note for flowers and baked goods on my behalf, introducing herself as practically mekhutonim. "You must miss Linette terribly," she wrote. "We saw her yesterday, when she stopped by my place of business to visit my daughter Natalie. What a lively and intelligent girl you raised. She is broadening her horizons in Providence, but as a parent I know what a hole this leaves in your heart. P.S. The Inn at Lake Devine is on the market."

Her note and business card arrived a month after Linette's departure, at a time when Hal Feldman was feeling unfamiliar sensations. What had seemed in the heat of the moment a father's prerogative-to scream things he didn't mean at his daughter's back and to throw away his little red-haired baby with the bathwater-now discomfited him. While conceding nothing on the boy, he did admit one night, after a particularly satisfying dinner of lima beans, sweet potatoes, and carrots simmered all day with brisket, that the thought of bringing her back into the business sooner rather than later wasn't the worst idea he'd ever had, especially given Linette's talents and, G.o.d forbid, her prospects with a Gentile schoolteacher.

He told his wife and mother what he was thinking: a hotel for Linette to cut her teeth on; a small, cla.s.sy inn with no overhead to speak of-they were asking bubkes for it-in that state with the foliage, not New Hampshire, the other one-cows, maple syrup, Calvin Coolidge: Vermont. Far enough from Providence to wear down the sheygets, far enough from home to make her think she was on her own. Someone give her a call.

"You give her a call," said his wife and mother both.

Stubbornly, in the face of their poorly disguised affection, and, more often than not, no answer when we phoned Linette's apartment, Nelson and Linette continued to call their love affair a friendship. At odd moments I believed them, but mostly I felt that I knew the truth: They were in love, had been in love for longer than even they acknowledged to each other, but for reasons of religion and ascension and superst.i.tion-both had been engaged with full ceremony to people they never married-neither wanted to advertise or formalize their union. Linette's truth, as I understood it, was that as long as her parents were alive, she would be the daughter who went to business; the modern one, who didn't live at home, who didn't need a ring, a wedding, or china, or silver. A presentable, amiable companion like Nelson would do very nicely on those occasions when a woman wanted to be seen with a man.

I approached food slowly, coaxing artless dishes like roast chicken and broiled chops from my narrow apartment stove. I moved on to stewing and braising, and even to creamy melanges that required layering in gla.s.s ca.s.seroles. Finally, in an arithmetic progression of ingredients, I made an elaborate Moroccan couscous with lamb-kosher lamb, actually, because Linette was coming for dinner, our first dinner party in Mr. Zinler's attic, on our telephone-cable spool table.

She and Nelson brought not only wine, and cannoli from their favorite bakery, but gift-wrapped knives, a wedding present that made me burst into tears for its generosity, its aptness, and for the faith it implied: top-of-the-line German high-carbon-steel works of art-a six-inch chef's knife, an eight-inch chef's knife, a paring knife, a boning knife, a slicing knife, plus a steel for sharpening and a magnetic bar for storage. The card read, "Your biggest fan, Nelson."

"How did you know?" I asked.

"Everyone needs knives," Linette said, "and I figured a chef needs them more than most people."

"Pammy wanted to give me a kitchen shower, but I declined," I said, marveling at their feel, the weight of the blade against the ma.s.s of the handle.

"Robin had a bridal shower," Nelson said quietly, "but I think all she got was lingerie."

"I had one," Linette said brightly.

"Oh really?" asked Nelson, eyebrows arched. "What would that have been? A hair gizmo shower? Or a dingy-cotton-underpants shower?"

Linette stuck out her tongue at him, and he returned it.

"Do you have to return shower gifts after an engagement is broken?" I asked, hoping to elicit more private jokes, more displays of affection.

"Nah," said Linette. "It was so long ago, I don't remember what I did with them. Except a popcorn popper. I took that with me." She turned to Nelson. "And the electric blanket, now that I think of it."

Kris stabbed a leftover piece of lamb on my plate and, just before popping it in his mouth, asked, "Are there dual controls on this blanket? If I may cut through the bulls.h.i.t."

"What bulls.h.i.t?" Linette asked.

He mimicked in falsetto, "We're good friends, my pal Nelson and I. Notice that the wedding present is from him alone, because we're not a couple. We're so clever that n.o.body has caught on."

"Are you really angry?" Linette asked.

Kris said, "I get the part about your parents-a sick mother and a hothead father. But Natalie and I don't need a song and dance. It's insulting."

"It's not like you can't trust us," I said.

"And it's not like Nat and I are the couple of the year."

Nelson cleared his throat and said solemnly, after studying our faces, "If it works out-Mr. Feldman's offer on the Inn-I'm taking a leave of absence from school."

"As what?" I asked.

He smiled. "Manager-in-training. See if I still have it."

Kris prompted with twirls of a finger. And?

"To see if he's cut out for the hotel life," said Linette.

"With-?"

"Me," said Linette.

"My cupcake," Nelson said.

"So what was the big secret?" Kris demanded.

"My parents," said Linette. "Your parents. The Fifes. Five thousand years of Jewish law."

"The Fifes?" I repeated.

"It hasn't been so long, and you know Nelson-always wants to do the menschy thing."

"And where will you hide him when your father visits?" I asked.

Linette was shaking her head emphatically, curls flapping from a cinched geyser of hair on her crown. "He won't leave my mother overnight, he won't eat non-kosher food, and he won't stay in a pitsel hotel with no golf course."