From a Distance Read Online Free Page B

taciturn thirteen-year-old’s birthday, but, she reminded herself, this was still the dummy run. Maybe it would turn out to be ambrosial. And actually, young Nick Bryer would probably like a punch-drunk pudding, it was his mother who would worry. Much could be tweaked.
    She moved down the table to find her notebook. It lay open among a sea of belongings that came and went from the table as family members collected and discarded items. Ah! There was Mae’s hairbrush, an elasticated gingham scrunchy bunched like bloomers around the handle. Shame it hadn’t surfaced earlier, when Mae, beset by a squall of bad temper, hurtled like a furious bluebottle around the house, banging doors and snatching open drawers in search of the brush. ‘I’m not using yours, Luca brushed Grayson with it,’ she wailed, when Luisa offered her own.
    Luca, hands in his pockets, was bouncing a ball on his foot as he waited for his sister to get ready.
    He shrugged. ‘Grayson’s as clean as you are. Cleaner probably, so I don’t see why you have to get so stressed.’
    Mae, infuriated, had flounced out to sit in the car. Luca’s ball fell off his foot and tipped over the dog’s water bowl just as Tom walked into the kitchen, carrying too many folders. One dropped from the pile. It was at moments like these that Luisa took a deep breath and fixed her attention on an ingredient.
    Cherries. She had bought a box of them yesterday. It was easy to make them into a sauce of course, a splash of kirsch and they became a stain like an anemone to pour over vanilla ice cream, but there was always another way to do things, that was what Luisa loved. Making ice cream was alchemy. Luisa had learned early the magic of transformation, as eggs and sugar, cream and chocolate or strawberry syrup or drops of precious fragrant vanilla essence, churned in the kitchen at the back of her grandfather’s shop. She loved the process, the smell, the fluctuation in form as the temperature dropped, the powdery sparkle that attached itself to sorbets and ice creams as they froze. She might easily have lost interest, but, one Easter when she was fourteen, a bevy of aunts and relations arrived from Northern Italy and made hot chocolate the way they made it in the mountains. Luisa could not believe the sensation in her mouth when she drank the rich chocolate then ate a spoonful of vanilla ice cream.
    That was it, she would make mouth-sized cherry-shaped tiny almond ice-cream bombes, and fill them with cherry sorbet, or could she somehow inject them with hot syrup? Ah, but then they would melt. Her notebook page was dense with a list of ingredients and instructions to herself. This could work. She would call it May Day. Every ice cream she created had a name, it was part of the process. The Baked Alaska was called Skin Deep, which had brought a huge grin to the otherwise surly face of Nick Bryer but not to that of his mother Cathy when she commissioned this pudding.
    Hunched over the sponge and meringue concoction as she glued the Alaska together, Luisa’s back twinged. Oh to really be in New York, with the day stretching ahead and time to practise perfect deportment with a handsome personal trainer. Would Nick like this ice cream? Or rather, would Cathy? Not that she would taste it, of course, she was one of those dairy-free mothers, but she would have an opinion, and it needed to be a good one. It was through the support of Cathy and friends like her that Luisa had been introduced to the new restaurant in Blythe. The award-winning chef who ran it had taken three of her desserts. Luisa rolled her shoulders. He would like May Day, but she might give it a more Italian name for his menu.
    It was a shame, it was just the sort of thing Gina, her mother, would love to do, but she had left last week for the summer. Off to stay with her sister near Turin. Every year she made the trip, but since Luisa’s father died, the weeks had started to stretch into months. This year she would be