On the Right Side of a Dream Read Online Free Page B

some diagnostics (something about a rotor, or maybe it was a radiator) and to fill up the gas tank. I could have stayed in Yancey’s kitchen a week, just watching.
    Wendy and her creations had me feeling like a kid in Toys Us. I listened to her talk about the cakes and the crusts for pies and tarts and flans and brulées and white chocolate and dark chocolate, berries, nuts, and sprinkles and extracts of this, and drops of that. There were influences from here and shades of there and sometimes Wendy sounded like Mr. Dinos in my painting class at the community college. And when she’d finished, she had a work of art rising from a plain white dessert plate.
    I knew how to cook and I knew how to bake. I could pinch a pie crust around the edges and ice a cake pretty good. But Wendy’s desserts were millions of miles from the ones that I made. I never gave my stuff much thought, just whipped ’em up and threw ’em in whatever pan or plate they needed. Turned the oven on to 350 degrees and wiped my hands. There weren’t any complaints. There weren’t even any crumbs left when I made a sweet potato pie or a yellow cake with chocolate icing, especially if Mountain was around.
    But watching Wendy got me to thinking about cooking in a different way. New words sneaked into my vocabulary like “artistry” and “technique” that didn’t come from the last novel I had read. And one more new word: credentials. Could I sculpt a confection onto a plain white plate? Could I craft a pyramid out of chocolate or make custard lighter than clouds and decorate it with a dollop of cream that looked like a marble statue? Could I learn to do that?
    Wendy had several framed pieces of paper on the wall of the crowded little corner of a back room that served as her office. These pieces of paper were diplomas and certificates from cooking schools and competitions. She had a row of medallions hanging from red, white, and blue ribbons. She’d baked quiches in Santa Fe and whipped up puddings in a hotel in British Columbia. She had stirred soup in Taipei and baked chocolate confections in Edinburgh. She seemed to have been everywhere and had credentials coming out of her ears.
    The question that I wanted to ask got caught in my throat. I had a high school diploma and knew how to use measuring cups and turn on the oven to the right temperature. I knew salt from sugar, cayenne from cumin. I could match the right pot or pan to the recipe. I could stir up fudge in a pan. In other words, my list of “culinary” skills could be added up on five fingers. But I couldn’t do puff pastry. I hadn’t baked bread or created a soufflé. And I would never think of sculpting whipped cream or cutting out pieces of paper-thin chocolate the way that Wendy did.
    I was just a cook. But could I be a . . . chef? I hadn’t realized it but I said this aloud.
    Wendy laughed.
    “Why not?” she said. Without breaking a sweat, she formed a two-inch-high Babylonian tower of whipped cream on top of strawberry shortcake. I sighed. It was the most beautiful food I’d ever seen. “Sign up for a program. It’s as much talent as it is training. You can’t have one without the other.”
    “But I can’t speak French!” I exclaimed, remembering the two certificates on her wall from a gourmet academy in Paris.
    Wendy shook her head.
    “I’m from Tyler, Texas, honey. How much French do you think I spoke when I started in this business? You’ll pick up what you need along the way.”
    Easy for her to say.
    I saw chocolate pyramids and white icing skyscrapers in front of my eyes nearly all the way south. I remembered lighter-than-air lemon cake and a dense chocolate cake with a liquid center. I had always stopped to watch Jess work, doing what I called “fancy” cooking as he blackened this, terrined that, or created a pale- and delicate-looking sauce that was packed with flavor out of a little cream, a splash of wine, and a handful of crushed herbs. And I wondered if I