“Will you open your eyes, for God’s sake? I can’t stand the suspense,” her mother said to her. Pennie opened her eyes and started reading. She didn’t have far to go. The letter began with a single word, “Congratulations!” Her mouth opened and her eyes opened wider. She stood still as a statue, and then leapt in the air with a bloodcurdling scream. Both her brothers hurtled down the stairs immediately, as Pennie threw her arms around her mother and lifted her off her feet.
“What happened?” Seth asked breathlessly, as he stormed into the kitchen with Mark behind him.
“I got in! I got in! I got in!” she was screaming as Seth rolled his eyes.
“We thought Mom had cut off a finger or something, or had a heart attack.” They were all forbidden to touch her professional knife set, which she had in a leather case.
“So where did you get in?” Seth asked her.
“I got into Harvard!” she screamed again. Her brother beamed at her, Mark high-fived her, and Eileen stood smiling at all of them, and wiped the tears off her cheeks with her apron. It had been a beautiful and unforgettable moment.
Pennie went to call her father and all her friends, and then texted Tim in California. He answered immediately and congratulated her. It was one of the high points of her life, and she knew she would remember it forever. She called her school advisor on his cellphone, and thanked him for his glowing recommendation.
“You did this yourself, you know,” Eileen reminded her, “with all that hard work and studying, all the parties you didn’t go to, and your essays were fantastic.” She had done three different ones that she used for different schools. “This is a wonderful accomplishment. You should be very proud of yourself. I’m very, very proud of you.” Eileen started crying again, and then laughed through her tears. They were tears of joy.
Pennie filled out the paperwork that night, including the form for housing in the dorms, and she declined all the others who had accepted and wait-listed her to free up the spaces for other students. She mailed all the envelopes on Monday morning on the way to school. She felt as though a thousand-pound weight had been lifted off her shoulders. She had been tense for a month waiting to hear. Almost all her classmates had heard by then, some with happier results than others. But most of them knew where they would be going now. It made every day bittersweet as the students thought of leaving each other. It made her think of Tim, and how he had felt when he heard from Stanford, and her own mixed feelings about breaking up with him. And then the baby had happened, and they’d almost gotten married. She wondered what their life would have been like if they had, and if they’d have stayed together after she lost the baby. It had been so overwhelming, and he had been so nice about it.
She hadn’t dated anyone for all of senior year, and hadn’t wanted to. She had turned a lot of nice boys down. She didn’t even have a date for senior prom, and had said she wasn’t going. She had wanted to put any romantic possibilities on hold. She was terrified of the risk of another pregnancy, and couldn’t face it. She knew that even girls who took the pill got pregnant sometimes, if they missed one and didn’t realize it, or took it at irregular hours. One girl she knew had taken an antibiotic for strep throat, which canceled out her birth control pill’s effectiveness and she got pregnant. Pennie had decided to take a break for the year and stick with abstinence, although there were one or two boys she would have gone out with, if the pregnancy with Tim hadn’t happened. She had never asked him again after the first time if he had a girlfriend, although she suspected he probably did, but she didn’t want to know, and he never told her. He treated her with caution and compassion, and the love he still felt for her, even now. He had been deeply affected by what happened too.
But now something wonderful had happened. Her dream had come true. She was going to Harvard! It meant a lot to her father, since he had gone there as an undergraduate too, and started business school there.
Her school was bustling with news on Monday morning, and a few panicked faces of the students who hadn’t gotten in anywhere, or had applied to too few schools. She had cut it close with only seven. Some of her classmates had applied to fifteen, especially if their grades and board scores weren’t as good as hers. Her counselor had assured her that she had a strong shot at the Ivy Leagues, although they were unpredictable, like Duke and Dartmouth declining and Yale wait-listing her. But she was grateful Harvard hadn’t declined her and didn’t put her on a wait list, which extended the stress for several months. She was in! In five months she’d be a Harvard freshman! She couldn’t think of a better feeling in the world, and her mother kept reminding her that she had earned it and deserved it. Eileen wanted her daughter to be proud of herself, enjoy the victory fully, and celebrate it.
Pennie went out with her friends that Saturday night, those who had their answers and were happy with their options, and they had dinner together, then Eileen took all three of her children out to dinner on Sunday night. She thought of inviting Paul to join them, but decided not to. She hadn’t spoken to him since the day she got home, and his pathetic pleas to continue their marriage. She had signed the papers the next day, and by now, she was sure they had arrived at his attorney’s office, but she hadn’t heard a word from him and didn’t want to.
She’d had lunch with Jane when she got back and told her all the news, and Jane told her she looked ten years younger after Paris. Better than Botox!
* * *
—
Once the college acceptances were in, and Pennie had accepted Harvard, Eileen turned her mind to other things. She called an agency for restaurant personnel that she found online and listed the job for a caterer’s assistant. She wanted someone experienced, particularly with classic French cuisine. She expected it to take a while, but within two days the agency was calling her with applicants and emailing her their CVs. There were a dozen of them for her to sift through. Some of them sounded inappropriate immediately. Others went into a “maybe” pile for her to study more thoroughly late at night when she wasn’t busy.
After she did, three of them stood out. She wasn’t allowed to ask their ages, but she could guess in most cases from their list of previous jobs. All of them had worked in restaurants, one had been a caterer’s assistant for six months, but the circumstances surrounding the end of the position sounded mysterious and didn’t feel right to her. She told the agency she would meet all three applicants, and made appointments with them at a coffee shop in town. She didn’t want strangers coming to her home.
The first one was a young woman who had worked at two excellent French restaurants in Boston, and was a sous-chef. She was young, had good experience and good references, but she had piercings everywhere, eyebrows, nose, ears, lips, tongue, and “sleeves” of ominous-looking tattoos on both arms. Other than that she looked neat and clean, but Eileen couldn’t see her as an assistant at a high-end wedding. The second was an older man who had been a line chef in his youth, and a pastry chef at a five-star hotel for the past five years. He was very dour, but his references were excellent. He expounded for half an hour about his rigid ideas about how to manage staff. Eileen felt claustrophobic with him halfway through the interview. Their cooking experience mattered most, but their personalities factored into it too. She couldn’t see herself working with either of them, no matter how good their references were. And she knew she would be spending a lot of time with her assistant if the business took off and became a success, as she wanted it to. She needed someone who would inspire confidence in the clients, didn’t look scary, presented well, and could coordinate all the different kinds of staff and suppliers they’d be using, from tent rentals to dance floors, to tableware, florists, and their food wholesalers. She was looking for a person who understood fine cuisine, and could deal with guests at an event if Eileen was busy somewhere else. Eileen was hoping to garner a big portion of the wedding business in Greenwich, which would be very lucrative. People with large estates went all out when their daughters got married. The food was an important part of it, but there was a great deal more to handle. Eileen had been giving it a lot of thought since she had the idea. She’d been buying wedding books to study flowers, décor, and table settings, and had some creative ideas of her own.