Becoming the Talbot Sisters Page 8

  A few customers were seated in the restaurant with coffee and plates of strudel in front of them. The entire place exuded a calm cheer and smelled delicious. It had an old-world vibe, with real tablecloths and lots of dark wood and antique objects on display, Hungarian with just a hint of kitsch. Charlie liked it. Although she usually avoided anything that smacked of tourism, for some reason she didn’t mind this place. It was welcoming and uncomplicated. The world just seemed brighter with a piece of strudel in front of her.

  She approached the glass display case and surveyed the selection. Good, they had sour cherry. They also had apple, cheese, apricot, and mak, a traditional strudel stuffed with a dense layer of poppy seeds. She made a face at the mak. The gritty texture was not her favorite. She was about to order just a breakfast special for herself but then reconsidered. Perhaps she should cushion her arrival back to work with strudel. If she brought a box of pastries, maybe it would deflect any serious questions about her lengthy absence or anyone noticing something different about her, like a certain glow. It seemed like a good preventative measure.

  “I’ll take four of the four-piece boxes to go,” she told Kinga, listing her flavor choices. “And a strudel breakfast—one sour cherry and one cheese, please.” She sat down at a table for two and waited for her order.

  In a few minutes Kinga brought the strudel, along with orange juice and a cup of coffee. Charlie set the coffee aside. It came with the breakfast, but she had no intention of drinking it.

  “How’s school going?” she asked.

  Kinga was in cosmetology school and was hoping to get a job abroad when she was done.

  “I’m finished.” The girl beamed. “And my cousin texted me yesterday that he has a job for me in Munich. I go in a few weeks.” She placed the boxed strudel at the empty place across from Charlie.

  “Munich, huh?” Charlie glanced up at Kinga, her hair pulled back in a ponytail with a fringe of bangs at the front, looking impossibly young to be setting off alone to work in another country. Charlie smiled at the thought. She must be getting old. She’d been younger than Kinga when she bought a ticket to Johannesburg and never came back.

  She lingered for a few moments over her breakfast, enjoying the warm, muted bustle of the restaurant, the happy clink of forks on plates. With a glance at her watch, she realized she was going to be late to work. She waved Kinga over and paid her bill.

  “Send me a postcard from Munich, and have fun,” she said, spontaneously adding a large tip to the amount of forints for the strudel.

  Kinga ducked her head and grinned sweetly. “Okay. Thanks, Charlie.”

  Charlie picked up the to-go boxes of strudel. “Just be careful,” she added as an afterthought.

  Kinga nodded cheerfully and handed Charlie her copy of the receipt. “You sound like my grandma.” She laughed.

  Charlie shook her head in consternation, hoisting the boxes of strudel in one arm. “I really am getting old,” she said with a rueful smile, then hurried out the door to catch the bus.

  “Morning.” Charlie pushed through the tall double doors of Care Network’s office twenty minutes later, armed with strudel. She opened the boxes and set them on the long conference table in the main room, and the few colleagues who were already there clustered around, greeting her but largely focusing on the pastries. Charlie grinned, helped herself to a slice of cherry cheese strudel, and settled into a seat at the table. It was good to be back.

  Care Network’s Budapest office occupied a worn but spacious apartment on the top floor of a shabby Austro-Hungarian building. The block of flats, which had once housed the Budapest gentry, stood near to the ornate Keleti train station in the somewhat dubious Eighth District. At night Roma prostitutes patrolled the corners around the station, wearing black vinyl jackets and fishnet stockings. Homeless drunks slumped in the doorways of the ground floor shops, drinking cheap beer from liter plastic bottles and smoking. It was not the pretty part of the city, although it had once been grand, but the rent was cheap and many of the problems of the Eighth District were the problems Care Network was trying to address.

  Charlie had been working for the NGO since her move to Budapest six years before, immediately after her abrupt departure from South Africa. She had been drawn from the start to the organization’s purpose statement—“To provide training and resources to promote whole person health and wellness to underserved individuals and communities in central and eastern Europe.” With a full-time staff of twelve, plus interpreters and local workers in various permanent drop-in centers and youth programs, Care Network ran over fifteen programs around the region. It wasn’t the flashiest or most glamorous charity around, but it met a need and was an effective organization.

  “Well, if it isn’t Charlie Talbot. You’re a sight for sore eyes.” Duncan Cameron, Care Network’s personnel coordinator, dropped into the chair beside Charlie, holding a slice of apple strudel. With his effortless boyish charm, an Edinburgh accent like golden syrup, and a smile that would melt the coldest heart, Duncan was the perfect person to coordinate personnel and volunteers for Care Network in the ten countries where they had a presence.

  “Thanks, you too,” Charlie said, genuinely pleased to see her favorite colleague. “What did I miss while I was gone?”

  She leaned back comfortably in her chair and ate her strudel, waiting for Duncan to fill her in. She and Duncan often worked closely together, and she enjoyed his wry sense of humor and perpetually cheerful disposition. He could, quite literally, charm his way into or out of almost any situation. His affable personality, combined with a keen-eyed intelligence and blunt honesty, made him an excellent coworker.

  Duncan took a big bite of strudel. “We canceled the Christmas care package delivery to the orphanages in eastern Serbia.”

  “Why? Donors love that one. It’s always one of our most successful programs.” Charlie finished her strudel in a few bites and debated taking another slice, but a glance told her the box was already empty except for the poppy-seed-filled ones. She frowned, wishing she’d saved another slice of sour cherry for herself. Was it her imagination, or was her appetite picking up already?

  “Turns out the orphanage staff were taking some of the gifts home to their own kids and selling the rest.” Duncan licked the last of the apple strudel from his fingers. “We’re trying to figure out how to make sure the kids actually get the presents, and then we’ll start up again next Christmas.”

  Charlie rolled her eyes. Corruption was a constant problem in central Europe, one that filtered down through so many layers of bureaucracy left over from Communism.

  “I was sorry to hear about your aunt.” Duncan gave her a sympathetic look. “Did you get everything taken care of with her estate?”

  “All squared away.” Charlie nodded, feeling a small pang of guilt. She had no intention of telling anyone at work the real reason she had been gone so long . . . not until she couldn’t hide it any longer.

  The problem wasn’t her coworkers. It was Ursula, her boss, an icicle of a woman from Stuttgart who was a stickler for rules and took great pains to enforce them. She had landed the director position just two years ago and had proceeded to whip things into shape—her shape—with a brisk efficiency that had alienated her from the rest of the office. She’d taken a particular dislike to Charlie after a confrontation over Ursula’s decision to cancel self-defense courses for middle school girls. Charlie had won the argument and the courses were reinstated, but she had made an enemy by disagreeing with her boss. They had kept each other at a prickly distance ever since.

  Charlie was certain that Ursula would frown on having a single female staff member pregnant in a region where many countries were still quite traditional and conservative. Especially a staff member who taught reproductive health courses. Charlie would look like a walking advertisement for what not to do.

  “Anything else I missed?” she asked.

  Duncan shrugged. “Oh, some rumors of budget cuts. Nothing confirmed, but looks
like we might have to let one or two staff go.”

  “Really?” Charlie asked, dismayed by the thought. With a small staff, losing anyone would hurt, and there was always the possibility that she could lose her job in the cuts. Then where would she be—camping out in the spacious guest suite at Waverly and Andrew’s house, getting rounder by the day? That was a depressing thought.

  “Hey, you guys ate all the good ones already?”

  Charlie and Duncan both turned at the question to find Arben, their Albanian staff member in charge of transportation and logistics, peering at the remaining strudel selection in disappointment.

  “Sorry, mate. You’re too late.” Duncan shrugged and grinned.

  Arben grumbled but picked out a piece of mak strudel and ambled over to them. He was a popular member of the staff, a warm, bluff man with three young kids under the age of six.

  “Hey, Arben,” Charlie greeted him. “How are Luljeta and the kids?”

  “They’re good,” Arben said around a mouthful of mak. “Making me crazy as always, but good.”

  He pulled a face, and Charlie and Duncan both laughed. Arben liked to complain, but he was a family man to the bone, deeply dedicated to his wife and children.

  “Is Ilir around?” Charlie asked. “How’s he doing?”

  Arben’s younger brother, Ilir, lived with their widowed mother and sister in Albania but often visited Arben, staying for a month or two at a time. He helped Arben with logistics part-time, and his carefree personality and cocky, youthful humor made him a staff favorite.

  “He’s doing okay.” Arben shrugged. “He needs new friends. He’s going to come stay with us next week. Maybe it will help.” Much to Arben’s dismay, his brother had become increasingly zealous for the pro-Albania cause, supporting politicians with aggressive rhetoric and surrounding himself with people Arben considered to be radicals.

  “Ursula alert, incoming. Just saw her out the window.” Kate, Care Network’s pert and efficient office manager, bustled into the room with a pot of fresh coffee and a warning.

  Immediately the tone of the office changed. People straightened up, brushing strudel crumbs off their clothes and turning intently to their work. Arben clapped Duncan on the back, gave Charlie a little nod, and found an empty chair farther down the conference table.

  A moment later the door opened and Ursula swooped in. With her severe gray suit and chopped blond bob, she was all business. She clapped her hands once, and the staff sprang to attention like well-trained spaniels. Charlie exchanged a look with Duncan, and they slowly turned their chairs in her direction. Kate slid into a chair on the other side of Charlie, her eyes fixed on Ursula.

  “Guten morgen.” Ursula spied Charlie and gave her a brief nod. “Charlie, I see you are back with us again.”

  “Don’t get too excited,” Duncan murmured out of the corner of his mouth.

  Ursula glanced sharply at him, and he smiled back innocently. She raised an eyebrow but didn’t reprimand him. Even the rock-hard Ursula was not immune to his charms. Kate stifled a giggle and shot a look at Duncan, blushing when he winked at her.

  Charlie rolled her eyes. Duncan was as charming as could be, but he could be a complete idiot about matters of the heart. He seemed oblivious to the fact that Kate had been smitten with him since her arrival from Toronto almost eighteen months before.

  Ursula fixed the entire table of staff with a stern look, and Charlie composed her face into an expression of polite interest.

  “I have two items of business to communicate,” the boss announced. “The first is that Dr. Harrington is no longer an employee of Care Network, effective immediately. We are searching for a suitable replacement.”

  A low hum of surprise zipped around the conference table. Care Network employed a licensed medical doctor as a consultant for all of their programs to make sure that the information they gave was medically accurate and up to date. Dr. Harrington had held the position for the last decade.

  Kate turned to Duncan and Charlie, leaning in. “Want to know why he got the sack?” she queried in a low whisper. “I heard it all through the office door when Ursula finally fired him.”

  “Well, the man drank like a fish, even on the job,” Duncan offered. “He smelled like a distillery at nine in the morning.”

  Kate nodded. “I know, but that wasn’t it. His medical license had been suspended in the UK for years, and we just found out about it. You should have heard Ursula. I thought she was going to pop a blood vessel.”

  Charlie leaned back in her chair. The boozy doctor would not be particularly missed; he had been both incompetent and somewhat boorish. Perhaps they could get someone more qualified this time around.

  Ursula cleared her throat to regain the room’s attention. “Now I have some bad news,” she said. “As some of you are aware, we have recently lost a portion of our funding from private donors. This means that we will be forced to reduce our staff by at least one person.”

  A ripple of concern spread through the staff, and she held up her hand.

  “This decision will not be made lightly. I will be reviewing every staff member thoroughly before making my decision. We will keep the most qualified, most productive, most dedicated staff members. If you do your job well and are a benefit to us, you have nothing to fear.”

  Duncan raised his hand. “When will the cuts be made?” he asked. He looked completely unconcerned. Ursula liked him, and his role in the organization was indispensable. He probably had more job security than anyone in the office.

  Ursula nodded briskly. “A good question. We will make the final decision by the middle of April. That is when our current funding runs out, and this will give me enough time to make a thorough and accurate assessment of staff.”

  Charlie listened with a sinking stomach. A little more than six months away. Enough time to be totally and unquestionably visibly pregnant. Enough time to allow Ursula to find an excuse to let her go. Charlie needed to be on her best behavior. She ticked off the time on her fingers. Six months and she could be out of a job. She couldn’t let that happen, but what could she possibly do to stop it?

  CHAPTER 9

  December

  The Simply Perfect television studio

  Greenwich, Connecticut

  I knew from a very young age that I loved to cook,” Waverly said in answer to the Good Housekeeping interviewer’s question.

  They were sitting in staged comfort around the French provincial kitchen table in Waverly’s studio kitchen, sharing tea and some buttery stem ginger shortbread they’d baked as part of a photo shoot for the article. Outside, snow lay on the ground, and Michael Bublé quietly crooned Christmas favorites in the background. Afternoon sunlight slanted in through the french doors.

  Waverly took a sip of tea from one of her special collections of teacups and continued. “I lost my parents tragically quite young, and I have always felt that cooking was a way to keep my mother close to me. She was an excellent cook. Most of my mother’s friends employed someone to cook for them, but my mother loved to cook, so she did it all herself. She taught me so much. I have a distinct memory of helping to stuff dried apricots with a teaspoon of camembert and a whole toasted walnut for a fall party. I sneaked bites when she wasn’t looking. I couldn’t have been more than five or six.” Waverly smiled at the memory.

  The interviewer, an earnest young woman named Emily, paused from tapping out notes on her laptop and looked sympathetic.

  “Yes.” Waverly took another sip of tea. “I think it all started with those apricots.”

  “And does it work?” Emily asked, pausing with fingers poised over the keyboard. “Do you feel your mother is with you when you cook?”

  “Yes, I do. Sometimes I imagine what she would have thought of this dish or that recipe, but I can’t really know. It was so long ago. Now I have only the memory of her and my father. Everything I do honors their memory and the love they gave me.”

  “You miss them?” Emily asked.

&
nbsp; Waverly didn’t hesitate. “Every day,” she said truthfully, wistfully. “Every hour of every day since the day I lost them.”

  They wrapped up the interview with a few puff questions, and then the photographer requested more shots of Waverly at work in her studio kitchen. She tied on one of her favorite aprons—lemons and green citrus leaves on a white linen background with ruffled eyelet trim—and set about whipping up a simple salmon mousse while the photographer circled her, taking shots.

  It was a novelty not to have to narrate every step and interact with the TV audience as she usually did. She removed the chilled baked salmon fillet from her Sub-Zero refrigerator and moved it to the counter with the other ingredients.

  The photographer crouched on the other side of the island, snapping away. “Just act natural,” he instructed. “I’ll get the shots I need as you work.”

  Waverly nodded and continued her preparations. As she worked, her hands on autopilot, her thoughts wandered to her mother. Margaret Talbot had been only thirty-six when she died, a year older than her twin daughters were now. What had she thought when she kissed them good-bye and followed her husband to South Africa? None of them had imagined it would be the last time they saw each other.

  Their father, Robert, was an oral and maxillofacial surgeon, a vigorous and hearty man with a booming laugh and a ready smile. He donated two weeks a year to patients in the shantytowns around Johannesburg who had no other hope of treatment. He’d been doing it for years and had finally convinced his wife to accompany him. They were supposed to be gone for the usual two weeks, with a safari weekend tacked on to the end to celebrate their fifteenth anniversary. The twins were being cared for by their nanny.

  And then the unthinkable happened. The charter plane to the park went down outside of Johannesburg with no survivors. The twins were just shy of thirteen. It was the greatest loss of Waverly’s life, devastating at such a tender age. In some way she felt she had never recovered. The miscarriages, heartbreaking as they were, had somehow served to intensify her grief over losing her parents, each loss building upon the last, every one hollowing out her heart just a little more.