The Happy Home for Ladies: A heartwarming,uplifting novel about friendship and love. Michele Gorman

jowly face flashes several expressions as he works out an answer. He’s not great at thinking on his feet. ‘Well, we can always microwave ready meals,’ he finally says. ‘That would free you up to take over for Mary.’

      He sees the look on my face. ‘Or put them in the oven?’ he tries. ‘I don’t know. Whatever you do when you cook.’

      Whatever I do when I cook? ‘Max. I prepare three meals a day, carefully balanced for the residents’ nutritional requirements. Not to mention their weird phobias and dietary whims. You really think you can replace all that with a few ready meals?’

      I can’t keep my voice from shaking. I’ve worked here for three years, and this is all he thinks I do?

      ‘They have some very good ready meals now,’ he answers. ‘I’m only trying to make a suggestion.’

      Everything I’ve done, the exacting planning, budgeting and bending over backwards to make food that the residents will love, has made no difference in my boss’s eyes. I’m nothing but a glorified takeaway delivery person to him.

      ‘Hey, don’t get upset,’ Nick says. ‘Please don’t.’ His voice is so full of concern that I just choke up more. When he puts his arm around me, it squeezes out a very unladylike sob.

      To be clear, though, this isn’t sadness. It’s fury. How dare he.

      ‘I’m sure he didn’t mean to offend you.’ Nick’s eyes search Max’s, looking for an apology. Meanwhile, I can’t stop thinking about being in the crook of Nick’s arm with his lips inches from mine.

      ‘Well, he bloody well did offend me,’ I mumble. I haven’t worked this hard to be dismissed by someone who thinks the supermarket sells haute cuisine.

      ‘God, no, I didn’t mean to upset you, Phoebe. I’m sorry. We’ll get another waitress for you, I promise. We can get a new one tomorrow, right, June?’ He sounds like he’s replacing an ice cream cone that I’ve dropped on the floor.

      All this rage can’t only be about Mary quitting, or Max’s insensitivity. Deep down it must be about Mum too, because she put this soundtrack in my head in the first place. ‘You’re Not Living Up to Your Dreams’ was on the greatest hits album, but the B-side included classics like ‘Why Can’t You Be More Like Your Brother’, and everyone’s perennial favourite: ‘If Only You’d Try Harder’. She didn’t want to hear that I was living up to my dreams, and doing the best that I could. Maybe I haven’t dealt with that as well as I’d thought.

      ‘We’ll get a temp to fill in for Mary till we find a replacement,’ June says, enveloping me in her arms. ‘Don’t worry.’ Like a relay baton, Nick passes me off to my best friend. ‘Want that drink later?’ she asks. ‘I’ll buy.’

      ‘God, yes, thanks.’

      Nick offers to bring Terence back to his cottage. I’m surprised that the old man agrees to go. Whenever Max tries getting him to do something, he unleashes a tirade that would make a sailor blush. Nick definitely has a way with people. As they walk off, I can hear him speaking quietly to Terence. He’s a perv-whisperer.

      ‘He really is good, isn’t he?’ I say.

      ‘That’s the best hiring decision I ever made,’ June answers. ‘Aside from you, of course.’

       Chapter 5

      It’s thanks to my lucky stars that June hired me. Otherwise I’d have had to leave our little home town to find work after the bistro closed down.

      The bistro was my first job out of catering college. It wasn’t overly fancy, at least not when I first started working there. It teetered somewhere between a builder’s caff and someplace that served food au jus. Set in the old town fishmonger’s shop, its walls were tiled white with a pretty Victorian green border running around the whole room. We only had seating for twenty-eight, with the open kitchen behind the old fish counter. Jen, my boss, kept as many of the original features as she could. Pale green ironwork surrounded the huge plate-glass front windows and door, which rattled awfully in winter, so we had a heavy velvet curtain in front to keep the customers from blowing away whenever someone came in.

      There were fishy touches all over the restaurant: some of the original adverts for jellied eels and pilchards in old money, weighing scales with their enamelled dish on the battered sideboard. Fishhooks hung from the ceiling and the old barrel by the door held customers’ wet umbrellas. We even used the display counter – once upon a time piled with ice and seafood – for our desserts.

      Jen had upmarket ideas when she hired me. Best of all, she believed in me. But, being fresh from catering college, I had yet to believe in myself.

      I don’t mean that I didn’t have the skills. I knew my pâté from my parfait. I just didn’t have the confidence. Yet there I was, the new cook in a newly reopened bistro – Jen had the word ‘café’ prised off the front of the building, and ‘bistro’ just fit, though it always looked squashed together. I got to have complete say over the food we served. Once I got over the shock and stopped panicking, I started to love the job. Every week Jen and I sat down together so I could tell her what I was planning. I didn’t have to ask permission for my menu. My catering school friends were gobsmacked when I told them that. Most of them were prep cooks, waking at 5 a.m. to chop mountains of onions, and there I was, designing my own menus.

      Jen was thrilled and so was I. Finally, finally, I was an actual cook, just like I’d always planned. I don’t want to paint it as the perfect job, because the hours were punishing and it was sweaty and nerve-racking. Still, it felt like my dream had come to life.

      Within a few months we were gaining a good reputation around the town, and people had to book for dinner on weekends. And sometimes even for lunch. But no matter how packed the bistro got, my parents still weren’t convinced. ‘What do you want to do next?’ Mum asked every single time I visited, like I was working behind a McDonald’s counter instead of running my own restaurant.

      ‘This is what I want to do,’ I always answered. ‘Why else would I have gone to catering college?’

      ‘I still have no idea,’ she’d say, ‘when you could have gone to university. Though I suppose this could be a leg up the ladder, if you leverage it. But darling, you’ve got the brains to be on your way to the boardroom, not doing dishes in a kitchen.’

      Maybe I shouldn’t be bringing this up now that Mum’s gone. After all, it’s wrong to speak ill of the dead. But it was harsh, so there’s no use pretending that she was a saint. You may as well know what she could be like.

      Mum always followed up with her main objection to my career plans: I should be challenging myself to do more than even my parents had. They were entrepreneurs with a successful building firm, but Mum always saw corporate jobs as better than what they had. That’s where you could really get a leg up the ladder. She and Dad did what they could without any education or family money. She wanted more for me.

      The problem was that every time they told me I could be more, all I heard was that I was less. That’s hard to accept at any age. I was still a teen. Meanwhile, my brother did everything they wanted. Maybe his aspirations really did align with theirs, or maybe he was brown-nosing. Whatever the case, he made them happy while, as long as I worked in a kitchen, I wasn’t going to measure up to Mum and Dad’s dreams for me. No matter what I was doing there, no matter how perfectly it matched what I wanted to do. Even after I’d been head chef for six years and built the bistro into a restaurant with a waiting list for reservations, and won awards for my cooking, they weren’t as convinced about my success as I was.

      The more they harped on about all the ways I could be doing better, the more I tried to ignore them. After all, I was happy with my progress. I was doing exactly what I’d set out to do. Their criticism couldn’t hurt me. At least, that’s what I thought.

      Now