Chapter 2

Saturday mornings were set in stone. I always got up early, went to Bar Method class (half ballet, half yoga, all hard-core), picked up my dry cleaning and a smoothie, then went home to shower. And dress. And strut. And Brie. But somewhere between the shower and the Brie, there was Roxie. “Girl. How’re the sticks?” I asked, sinking down onto the couch with my

berry-banana concoction.

“How’re the sirens?” she shot back, her answer every week. My best friend for years, we’d fallen into the habit of chatting more often now that she was back on the correct coast and only a ninety-minute train ride away up in the Hudson Valley. We’d always stayed close, but something about living closer to each other had kicked our friendship up a notch, and now I looked forward to our weekly Saturday-morning chats. I spent a similar hour each Sunday morning on the phone with our other best friend, Clara, whenever she was in the same time zone. A branding specialist for luxury hotels, she was frequently out of the country on business.

“How come you haven’t shipped me one of your coconut cakes yet? My doorstep is suspiciously devoid of Zombie Cakes care packages . . . who should I talk to about that?” I teased, slipping out of my sneakers and examining my pedicure. I might need to pop over this afternoon for a shine- up.

“You can talk to the lady in accounts receivable, which is me. As soon as you buy a cake, you’ll get a cake, it’s that simple,” she said with a laugh. “I’m starting a business here; I can’t be giving away the profits.”

“Can I get it at cost?”

“Sure. It costs fifty-five dollars, plus shipping.”

I rolled my eyes. Roxie had recently started a food truck in her hometown of Bailey Falls, using her grandfather’s old Airstream trailer. She was already making a name for herself in the Hudson Valley and had even brought the whole show into the city on a few occasions. It took time to start a business, naturally, but she was doing it in exactly the right way. She’d started small, and with a little guidance from me in terms of marketing, she was kicking some ass. Her cakes were wonderfully rich and nostalgically old-fashioned, a great combination. “How was your week?” she asked, snapping me back from my thoughts.

“It was good; brought in a new client, assisted on a few other campaigns, nothing too exciting. How about you?”

“It’s crazy here right now with the harvest; Leo is going nuts. You’ll be proud of me, though; I learned how to make a plaster-of-paris town hall.”

“For Polly’s class?” I grinned, thinking about how upside down Roxie’s life had become within one summer. She’d come home to help her mother out with the family diner, and ended up falling in love with a local farmer who had a seven-year-old daughter. She was head-over-heels in love with her new life.

“Yeah, they’re making a mock-up of Bailey Falls, and we were in charge of the executive branch.”

“Sounds exciting,” I said drily.

“I’m glad she didn’t get assigned the water tower; that would have been difficult.”

And just like that, the life around you begins to change. We were growing up.

“Leo ruined the first town hall. It was all finished and ready to go to school the next morning, when he got all twisted up in my panties, tripped us both, and fell, sending me ass first into the cupola. We had to stay up all night making a new one.”

And just like that, you realize nothing ever really changes.

“Enough with the Mayberry. You planning any trips into the city anytime soon?” I asked, dangling the city carrot every week.

“Nothing on the books right now. You planning on coming up here for a visit anytime soon?” she asked, already knowing the answer.

“You’re adorable,” I said, chuckling, finishing my smoothie and rising off the couch to throw it away in the kitchen. “There’s a big foodie festival here the first week of November; you should try and get your cakes into it; lots of gourmet eyeballs there.”

“Send me the details and I’ll see what I can do. Speaking of food, are you gonna talk to Oscar this week?”

“Shush.”

“Explain this to me again, please,” she said, her voice incredulous. “I’ve seen you get a guy to literally eat out of the palm of your hand, and you can’t talk to Oscar the Grouch?”

“He wasn’t eating out of the palm of my hand.”

“He ate olives off your fingertips, and he kneeled down to do it. In a bar, for God’s sake.”

I giggled. He did. Yuri. He’d said he was a Russian mafia guy, but he wasn’t so tough. I stuck my tongue in his ear, whispered what he could do to me if he played his cards right, and . . . wow. He really was eating out of the palm of my hand.

“I don’t understand why this guy makes you so googly! I mean, he’s obviously got that brooding bad-boy sex god thing going on, and—”

“You can stop there; that’s enough to make me go googly,” I interrupted, my eyes crossing.

“You know, if you came up here for a visit, I could easily arrange a meetup . . .” Her voice trailed off, plotting.

“No! I can’t, no!”

“Why in the world not?”

It was a good question. Why wasn’t I jumping all over this?

“If I come there and I see him, and we talk, about cheese or whatever else might come up, then it’s like . . . I don’t know. Something changes.”

“Yeah. We get this shit moving past the scrambled-brain phase,” she replied.

“Exactly! What if, once we start talking, he no longer scrambles my brain? What if, once I get to know him, there’s no grrr behind the golden? What if”—and I had to sit down to even say this out loud—“what if he’s got a teeny weenie?”

I could hear her intake of breath.

“Well then, Clara would take the train down and we would get. You.

Through!” It almost sounded like she’d choked.

“Are you laughing at me?” I asked, narrowing my eyes. “No. Not at all,” she insisted, and coughed strangely. “You are totally laughing at me, asshole!” I exclaimed.

“I can’t believe you’re actually serious! A teeny weenie? I’m pretty sure Oscar is packing a giant milk can . . .”

“Oooh, you think?” I asked, relaxing back onto the couch and curling up like a cat, my teeny-weenie terror momentarily subsiding.

“You’re certifiable,” she said, undoubtedly shaking her head. “Seriously, though, you should think about coming up here and taking this thing to the next level.”

“I like this level. I know this level,” I said, chewing on my ponytail.

“But it doesn’t make any sense! You should own this guy, destroy this guy

—and you can’t even talk to him? Make this make sense to me.”

I thought for a minute. She asked me this almost every weekend, and every weekend I said I don’t know. I didn’t know, and that was the truth.

“I wish I knew, Roxie. Somehow, everything I know about guys goes out the window when I see him. There’s just something about him.”

“Well, what are you wearing this week?” she asked, the browbeating done and the girl-talk planning now beginning.

Once off the phone, I wandered around in my apartment, restless. I folded some laundry, I spot-cleaned a few shoes, but mostly I paced. I’d circled the kitchen a few times, finally landing next to a cupboard that was almost hidden behind the trash can.

Inside that cupboard was my secret little world, one that I rarely shared with anyone. This city girl . . . loved the country.

Scratch that. Loved the idea of the country.

I’d been collecting pictures out of magazines for years, always depicting small-town Americana at its best. Town squares complete with duck ponds and hitching posts. Hayrides, wash hanging on the line, kitchen gardens, and homemade cobbler.

I had this idea that one day, far off into the future, I might leave it all behind and live in the country. Wild and free, wearing comfortable overalls and broken-in old work boots, picking blueberries by the side of a dirt road with a country dog by my side. I even knew the song that would be playing on this little blueberry adventure, “Dust Down a Country Road,” by John Hiatt.

I really did have a soundtrack for everything.

Even more specifically, I secretly dreamed about one day giving up my advertising career to chuck it all and start making cheese for a living. It’s true. I knew nothing at all about the actual process, but in my head it was very romantic and sweet, just me and my cows and rows of tidy little cheese rounds.

I’d devoted an entire cupboard to this very 3-D version of a vision board, one that I’d visit when particularly daydreamy or when the city had been especially tough.

Ten minutes spent gazing into my cupboard was worth an hour of therapy, even if officially I’d never acknowledge my love of never-actually-visited- but-often-imagined all things country.

I looked at the clock, my heart jumping a bit when I saw it was almost time to go see my dairy god.

Strutting, strutting. Just strutting along, not a care in the world. Here I go. In fact:

Here I go again, on my own . . .

As Whitesnake’s classic song played in my head, I could see myself doing front walkovers across a car, or riding through a tunnel halfway hanging out

of the passenger-side window while Oscar drove, reaching over with his long, tanned fingers to caress the inside of my black thigh-highs.

I Tawny Kitaen’ed myself through the farmers’ market, stopping whenever I saw something interesting, just doing my normal Saturday shopping.

Oh look, farm-fresh eggs. I’ll take a dozen. Speckled brown? Fabulous. Into the linen bag they go; it’ll be my contribution to the family brunch tomorrow.

Mmm, my favorite flower stall. Look, beautiful deep-red dahlias. I’ll take a few bundles for some color in my living room.

Just shopping, not noticing at all that there’s a stall now just twenty feet away that contains the most beautiful thing ever created on this earth.

There he was.

Come on, strut it out, girl.

No use. Those gray-blue eyes laser locked on me across the pavement, and the entire world stopped. Usually I didn’t see him until I made it up to the counter. He said his line, I said my line, and that was it for the rest of the week. Sometimes, if I was lucky, the wind would blow a few wisps of that thick, wavy hair around his face. And then angels would sing . . .

But today, something was different. He spotted me way before it was time, and he held my gaze. His eyes were piercing, cutting through the crisp autumn-morning air.

And as the wind blew, I realized there was no tie in his hair today. The chestnut was mixed with mahogany and copper and all the other sexy brown crayons. It was thick and a little curly, and cropped just above his shoulders. As I watched he ran his hand through the length, pushing it up and away from his face.

Today was different, I could feel it. I forced my feet to move toward him, using muscle memory to make things that should bounce, bounce. He noticed. He dropped his gaze from my face and it rolled down my body, his stare heavy enough that I could feel it.

There was no one else in line—another first. I walked right up to him, slowing my pace at the end to make sure that when I revisited this later in my

dreams (day, sleeping, and wet varieties) I could truly savor it.

Now, standing in front of him, glorious in his simple godlike jeans and T- shirt, I took a moment to breathe. This time, I got a hit of him. Peppery, clean, with a hint of sweet butter. It made sense: the man owned a dairy.

I would kill someone with my bare hands to see him hold his churn.

The mere thought of this nearly knocked me off my feet, but as it was, I was already feeling the telltale signs of going googly, as Roxie called it. Thank goodness, he knew the drill.

“Brie?” he asked.

“Oh. Yes,” I answered. He wrapped it up, handed it to me, and this time, instead of what simply could be called an accidental brush of a finger, he held onto it for exactly two seconds longer than he needed to. And in those two seconds, he reached out with his thumb and stroked the inside of my palm. For two seconds, he thumb-stroked me.

I held my breath for an eternal two seconds, thumb-stroked so good that I saw stars. And when we finally let go, I knew I’d never be the same.

If he could make me that stupid with his thumb, what would happen if he

—

My body was threatening to blow out every circuit, so I stepped away as

he looked over my shoulder to the line that had formed. I walked up to the cashier, handed her the package, and fumbled in my linen bag for my—

Where’s my money? I peered into the bag, seeing the eggs and the flowers, but no small coin purse holding my cash for the day. I looked behind me, looked on the ground, and for pockets that I didn’t have.

“Shit,” I breathed, wondering where it had gone. “I’m so sorry, I think I lost my money,” I told the cashier, confused and still rattled by the thumb porn.

“Sorry, cash only,” she said, taking my cheese and setting it back onto the display. “Next!”

“It’s on me,” a deep voice interrupted, and I looked up to see Oscar handing me back the cheese.

“On you?” I repeated, and for the first time, he grinned.

“Mm-hmm.” He raised that scarred eyebrow in a knowing way. “On. Me.”

Yeah, today was different.

If Saturday morning had a ritualized feel to it, then Sunday was etched into stone tablets and mounted on the wall.

You will have brunch with thy mother and father. So it is written. So it is done.

Brunch with my family meant a lazy morning reading different sections of the Times, consuming platters of food from Zabar’s, and recapping the week’s events over incredible coffee. An unstated rule was that, barring anyone being out of town, Sunday mornings were nonnegotiable. Even hangovers were not an excuse for no-showing. You got your ass out of bed, and nursed it with one of my mother’s patented Bloody Marys, supplemented by extra onion on your bagel and schmear with belly lox.

Once when I was home on summer break from college, I developed a terrible case of mono and could barely walk. My father carried me downstairs on Sunday mornings and my mother would push on my jaw to make sure I ate my chicken soup.

If you were breathing, you were brunching, my mother would say. And for the most part, with the exception of Great Aunt Helen’s untimely demise in our front room one Sunday, the rule was rock solid.

The other rule, equally unstated, was that you don’t bring someone home with you on Sunday morning unless there’s a sparkling ring in your very near future. My brother, Todd, once brought over a Dakota or a Cheyenne or some such, who giggled and pranced and preened, and kept referring to my brother as Tad. He never made that mistake again. Sundays were for family.

This particular Sunday I was lounging at my end of the dining room table, croissant in one hand, fashion pages in the other, trying to concentrate on what I was reading. But my eyes kept wandering to the travel section that my father was reading, to the story on the back page with the picture of a small farm in upstate New York.

Its claim to fame was a flock of imported Scottish sheep that were not only delightful to look at, all snowy white and puffy, but apparently gave some of the most delicious milk around. The farmer made incredible sheep’s milk cheese likened to a Spanish Manchego, salty and perfect. A husband and wife, living in the country, making things with their actual hands!

I wondered if the wife was happy, if she loved her life. I bet she was adorable, all sunshiny and strong hands and cute cardigans. To bed early, up when the cock crows—I bet she lived her life according to the natural circadian rhythm of the earth; not segmented around fashion week and art gallery parties.

I got all that from the back of the travel section in the Sunday Times that I was sneak-reading instead of reading my own section. I bit down hard on the croissant.

I thought about my secret dream, the one that only Roxie and Clara knew about, which was to one day venture off my island and into the wild. To live on a farm and collect eggs and make gorgeous handcrafted cheese in sweet packaging from smiling sheep. And if there was someone sharing my bed who woke me with his crowing cock . . . well, that would be very okay.

I sighed, thinking about cheese and the simple life and simple yet intense sex. I wondered if Oscar liked cardigans. I wondered if he’d like me in only a cardigan, the edges barely covering my breasts, one large button barely keeping it closed somewhere around my navel, crossing my legs just so as I perched on a hay bale to keep him from seeing my country kitty. His eyes would shine, his shirt would disappear, displaying all of that wonderful ink as he stalked across the barn toward me, his hands flexing as he ached to take hold of me, flip me over the hay bale and—

“Natalie.” “Hmmmm?”

“Natalie,” I heard again, and I blinked. My mother, father, and brother were looking at me with amusement, my croissant squished in one hand.

My forehead was damp and I was hot all over, my pulse pounding. Good lord, I’d been daydream-fucking Oscar at Sunday brunch?

“Excuse me,” I said, heading into the kitchen.

My mother was close on my heels. “We lost you there for a minute.

Where’d you go?”

“Nowhere special.” I sighed, quickly drinking a cold glass of water. The chill spiked through my haze, bringing me back down to earth.

“Sure looked special, from the dreamy look on your face.” She started slicing more bagels for round two. “Anything going on that I should I know about?”

I’ve imagined an entirely separate life for myself based on the word

Brie . . .

I haven’t been able to concentrate on one guy for more than an hour at a time ever since I saw the Cheese Man . . .

There was a moment yesterday where I thought thumb-stroking could quite possibly be my new favorite thing ever . . .

“Nope. Same old, same old,” I said. “But I landed a new account on Friday.”

“Sweetheart, that’s wonderful! Did you tell your father?” An artist by trade, my mother was tall, like me, but even more fair-skinned, which she took great pains to maintain. She kept the wide-brimmed-hat business hopping. Her long, thick red hair was usually worn in a lazy bun.

“Go tell your father, I’ll bring this along in a moment. Ask your brother if he ate all the olives already . . . I could have sworn there were some for the platter . . .” As she looked for the lost olives, I smiled and headed back into the dining room.

My father had begun the crossword puzzle, so before he got too far into it, I sat down next to him and plucked the pen from his hand. “I’m supposed to tell you I landed a new account on Friday,” I announced.

Todd peeked over the top of his newspaper. “Congratulations!”

“Thanks. And I’m supposed to ask you where all the olives are. Mom’s going crazy trying to find them.”

My brother grinned. “Olives? Never heard of ’em.” “She’ll kill you,” I said with a knowing look.

My father took off his glasses and cleaned them with the edge of his shirt, looking at my brother. “If you’ve hidden them somewhere, I’d strongly

recommend that you go put her out of her misery.”

Todd headed into the kitchen with a grin, and a moment later we heard, “Stop teasing your poor mother!”

“So, tell me about this new account,” my father said, giving me his full attention. I told him everything, from how I’d come up with the pitch, to the research I’d done into past campaigns and how effective they’d been in the marketplace. He listened and nodded, asking a few questions as I went along. “I know Mike Caldwell, the guy you pitched to. He’s tough,” my father

said, a look of pride on his face.

My father was head of Grayson Development, a real estate development company operating in the five boroughs. He’d moved into Brooklyn ahead of the renovation curve twenty years ago, and could have retired long ago based on that building boom alone. He developed some commercial, but he mostly concentrated on residential. Occasionally high-rises, but mostly prewar conversions in the smaller buildings. He loved a brownstone.

“You could have asked me for an introduction, Natalie. I would have been happy to put in a good word for you and MCG,” he said.

“I know that.” And while he would have called up this client in a heartbeat, he also knew that I didn’t need him to. Which made him even more proud. Which in turn made me all preeny. From the beginning, my father had instilled in my brother and me that you carve the path you wanted, and then you work like hell until you get it. Not that he’d ever be opposed to offering a helping hand, as in introducing me to Mr. Caldwell. But I was proud knowing that I’d gotten where I was in life on my own. “I did kind of kill it in the pitch,” I said with a quiet smile.

“Of course you did!”

My mother came into the dining room with the bagel platter then, and all shop talk ceased as brunch continued. Where my father instilled the “get where you need to go on your own” mentality, my mother instilled the other half of my “take no prisoners” attitude. Family first, but never sacrifice yourself in the process. She was already an up-and-coming artist when she met my father, and in the middle of their whirlwind romance they had an unexpected surprise: my brother. She could have set her own life aside to

make a home for my father, but they were equals in every way and they made sure neither sacrificed more than the other.

As I watched them move around our dining room, each perfectly complementing the other, I sighed in contentment, knowing that no matter what happened outside these walls, my mother and father would be inside, keeping it together.

Brunch continued, plans were discussed for the upcoming week, and other than an occasional look from my mother that told me she definitely knew something was up but was biding her time, I managed to keep my dairy fantasies to myself until I got home.

When I got in bed that night, however, I let them fly.