The Mulberry Tree by Jude Deveraux

Author:Jude Deveraux [Deveraux, Jude]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 2011-01-29T05:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

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It was Patsy who gave Bailey the idea.

It was two days after she'd seen Arleen in the restaurant in Welborn, and Bailey had been going crazy trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life.

Absently, she had cooked meals for Matt, and when he showed her his latest house plan, she barely looked at it. "A penny…" Matt said, but Bailey didn't respond. Her mind was fully occupied with the questions of what and how and who.

Finally, it was what Patsy said that made the bells in her head start ringing. It was Patsy's turn to have them over to her house, and Bailey had shown up with a carload of food. She'd reached the point that she couldn't bear one more of Patsy's tasteless dips-and-chips.

"My problem with food," Patsy said, "is that I don't know what to serve before or after."

Bailey's mind was elsewhere. She'd been reading all that she could find about marketing what the industry called "specialty items," and it seemed that every avenue of the market was filled. There were gourmet jams everywhere, plus every conceivable sauce, mixed spice, and pickle; and as far as Bailey could tell, every country on Earth had a couple of lines of their products out. All she could see to do was repeat what others had already done. But what she really needed was a hole that could be filled.

"Before?" Bailey asked absently.

"You know, before the meal. What do you serve before the meal?"

"Hors d'oeuvres," Bailey said, not understanding what Patsy meant.

"I know that," Patsy said in disgust. "I know what the name of the food is, but I don't know what to serve."

"You can—" Bailey began, but Patsy cut her off.

"I know that I can make little puff pastry shells and fill them with some divine lobster concoction," Patsy said, her voice heavy with sarcasm. "I'm not stupid. I watch those TV cooks just like everyone else does, but I don't want to do that. Nobody seems to understand that there are people out here who really and truly hate to cook. We just want to get in and out of the kitchen as fast as possible. But we're all supposed to pretend to want to be Martha Stewart."

Bailey was having such a difficult time understanding what Patsy meant that she was coming out of her reverie to listen. "Pretend to be Martha Stewart?" Bailey asked. "What do you mean?"

"All those cooks on TV tell us that it's easy to make fabulous meals. All we have to do is add a little of this and a little of that, and bam! we have a great meal. What they don't tell us is that we have to, first of all, think of what we're going to end up with, then we have to go to the grocery and buy all that stuff, then we have to create it. I don't have a brain that works like that. And I don't have the time to do

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