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were calling Friday’s “hazing” meal for the Belfiere cultoids.
    The fact that she appeared to be weeping quietly had nothing to do with Grief Week and everything to do with the trip with Choo Choo to the tattoo parlor in Philly that morning. She had returned with every spray, lotion, powder, cream, and ointment in a product line called Ink-Me-Gentle, designed to settle down skin with a new tat. These, Choo Choo reported, she applied simultaneously, then pulled up one of Choo Choo’s biker gloves to cover the site. Choo Choo thought the B in Bastarda tattoo font really looked very nice.
    So Nonna was inked, which was more than I could say about myself.
    If Landon and I were going to bring her to her senses about goofy cooking societies, we were going to have to act fast.
    I got impatient. “Well, what, Chooch?” I called after him. “Is eight good?”
    “Well,” said Choo Choo, an octave higher, “it’s probably a very good thing, considering four of them”— he turned and was already halfway out of the kitchen—“are from cribs.”
    And he was gone.
    Four of them are from cribs? How young does the Quaker Hills Career Center take them?I looked at Landon, who wrinkled his nose at me—he didn’t have the answer—and even Li Wei shrugged, without so much as a glance. Me, I turned back to a page of ziti recipes, wondering if there was anything at all I could do with penne pasta that did not involve either baking or chilling. Stuff them with hazelnuts? No? Almonds, then?
    What with a new gig looming as a college (Was it fair to say?) professor, I could feel myself sliding into a weird think-outside-the-recipe-box mood. Don’t just anticipate the unexpected . . . create it. Let that be the motto for Professor Eve Angelotta, undergraduate dance major at Sarah Lawrence, chef by default.
    So, it was in that mood on a lazy summer afternoon at Miracolo that I decided that my four young students out of cribs were just precocious. Supersmart and keen to chop. Yes, that was it. Fresh off solving the murder of Nonna’s boyfriend, I chuckled softly, what couldn’t I handle? Eve Angelotta: Pasta professor. Crime solver. Handler of grandmothers. Broken-legged chorus girl. Maker of cannoli to die for.
    All terribly important skills.
    As Landon, humming, let hazelnut morsels fall through his long fingers, I could tell we were both luxuriating in our little lives and jobs and sexual fantasies. Without so much as a word, we kissedthe air near each other’s cheeks. I stretched, ran my fingers through my wavy auburn hair, and believed in that moment at 1:23 p.m. that my world was under, well, control.
    I’m glad I noted the time.
    Control of my world was about to disappear as fast as Landon’s brand-new panna cotta alla nocciole —hazelnut custard.
    *   *   *
    While cousin Kayla, dressed in her light patchwork overalls and gossamer pink top—how does the woman actually farm?—argued with Landon over the day’s botched delivery, Nonna breezed into the kitchen with her mascara smeared and her clipboard clapped awkwardly against her chest with her non-bear-paw left hand. To the others she delivered one solemn nod; to me she murmured, “Eve, please,” and jerked her head toward the Miracolo office down the short corridor at the back.
    Dutifully, I followed her and closed the door behind us as she tottered over to the white oak and mahogany desk near the wood-shuttered window on the far wall. She collapsed into the leather swivel chair with a squeak. I couldn’t tell if it was her or the chair. Blinking, she set her right hand on the desk, where it lay there looking like a DarthVader body part, and she went on to ignore it. Like it was somebody else’s paw, somebody else’s tattoo, somebody else’s mound of creams and ointments.
    In her left hand she held a fountain pen as though it was a dart, that’s how unfamiliar that hand was with writing tools. “Here is the menu for my special meal for”—she actually