There was only one birthday that Gus was getting tired of organizing. Tired, really, of celebrating at all: her own. Because in short order—March 25—Augusta Adelaide Simpson was turning fifty. The problem, of course, was that she didn’t feel as old as all that. No, she felt more like a twenty-five-year-old (ignoring, as she often did, the logistical problem that her older daughter, Aimee, was twenty-seven and her younger, Sabrina, was twenty-five). And, as such, she found herself completely caught off-guard—genuinely surprised to add up the years—to find that she’d arrived at the half-century mark. A half-century of Gus.
“You’ll want to use the best sherry you can afford when making a vinaigrette,” she had said on a recent show, before realizing the sherry was almost as old as she was. “I could be bottled up and put on the shelf,” she’d said, laughing.
But a nagging dread had snuck up on her, and she resented it. Forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight, and even forty-nine: all those parties had been smashing. When she blew out her candles on last year’s cake—a carrot ginger with cinnamon cream cheese icing—and her producer, Porter, had shouted out, “Next year’s the big one!” she had laughed along with the crowd. And she felt fine about it. She really, really did. No, really. She did. She hadn’t scheduled a session of Botox, hadn’t begun wearing scarves to hide her neck. Fifty, she told herself, was no big deal. Until she woke up one morning and realized she hadn’t done a thing to plan. She, who never missed a chance to have a party. And that’s when she realized that she didn’t want to do anything about celebrating, either.
The problem, she reflected one morning while washing her tawny brown hair with color-enhancing shampoo, developed somewhere between working on the show schedule for the upcoming year and learning that the CookingChannel was slashing the budget and ordering fewer episodes than usual. “All the cable channels are losing market share,” Porter had explained. “We just have to ride it out.” He’d been in the TV business a long time, longer than Gus, and was enviably successful, a black man in the very white world of food TV. There were rumblings he was even going to be named head of programming. Gus’s trust in Porter was absolute.
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