Then the CookingChannel had hired a style consultant who informed Gus that “after a certain age,” some ladies do well to add a few pounds to smooth out the face (“You’re wonderfully slender but it wouldn’t hurt to fill in the lines, you know,” the stylist had said, not unkindly. “Good lighting can only work for so long.”) Finally, she’d met Sabrina for dinner one night and admired the couple at the table across from them, a gorgeous black-haired young woman in a bubble-gum-pink dress accompanied by a frowning older woman, her butterscotch hair in a medium-length swingy bob and clad in an oatmeal linen pantsuit. She was startled to realize the wall across from her was mirrored and the grumpy-faced diner was herself. “Are you okay, Mom?” Sabrina had said, signaling the waiter for more water. “You look as though you’re a little ill.” Gus wasn’t young anymore.
At first she’d tucked this awareness away with her white shoes after Labor Day. But the truth refused to stay hidden, revealing itself when she spotted a wrinkle she’d never noticed or heard a crackle in her knees when she bent over to pull out a saucepan. Or when her longtime sous chef announced, in what seemed like out-of-the-blue fashion, that she was retiring. Which meant she’d reached retirement age. Alarming when you considered that it meant twelve long years had gone by since Gus had her first CookingChannel show, The Lunch Bunch, in 1994. That the young mom who’d twisted her shimmering butterscotch locks into a loose updo, tendrils escaping, had eschewed aprons, and whipped up easy, delicious dishes now, was a parent of girls with jobs and lives and kitchens of their own. Girls who had, sort of, become women.
They weren’t really grown-up. Not in the real sense. After all, she’d had two children by the time she was Sabrina’s age—and that was in addition to a husband, and a year of adventure in the Peace Corps. Aimee and Sabrina, on the other hand, were far from self-sufficient. Aimee seemed never to have anyone serious in her life, and Sabrina changed boyfriends with the seasons. It was funny, really, how today’s twelve-year-olds were far more sophisticated than any middle schoolers Gus remembered and yet the twenty-five-year-olds existed in a state of suspended adolescence. She spent more time worrying about them now than she probably ever had.
So it was easy enough to pop along with the day-to-day of life and not really think about aging in a personal way. But then small things—a word from a stranger, a glance in the mirror—startled her fantasy image. Suddenly, reluctantly, one fact became clear. Gus Simpson was going to be fifty.
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