Soon enough, Wednesday night did come around, and both the main bakery and the new branch closed up shop early enough for dinner with the Carreon family.
At the head of the table sat Pappy—real name: Pablo Carreon—who held court before the family like a slick-haired, thick-browed king. Next to him sat his wife Mommy Guada, handing the rice bowl clockwise around the table to her children: first Paul, then Eloisa, then their younger sister Neri, who had passed the bowl back to me.
“Have some more rice,” Neri insisted. “You’re going to need it for the pochero.”
Neri didn’t make her famous meatloaf that night, but I had heard so many good things about her chicken pochero from her sister that they decided to have it as the main course for the night.
“I hope you don’t mind pochero for dinner, Monica,” Mommy Guada said as Neri passed the bowl of pochero to her. “Every time Neri makes this dish, there’s enough sauce to skip the soup course.”
I piled the tomato sauce onto the hill of rice on my plate. “I like to put soup on my rice while I’m eating,” I said. “It makes the rice softer for me.”
“Everyone has that habit of putting soup on rice,” Eloisa volunteered. “People used to think I was crazy for doing that when I lived in New York. I always tell them it’s a Filipino thing.”
“You’ve always done the ‘Filipino thing’ when you used to live abroad,” Paul shot back. “Whatever happened to—”
Pappy put the bowl of pochero down on the table. “Monica, how is your Tita Violet doing?”
Thank God for sanity, I thought. “She’s doing well,” I answered. “Between the Mother Butler Guild and the ballroom dancing lessons, I’d say that she’s as active as ever.”
“Ballroom dancing,” Mommy Guada noted. “Pappy and I used to go ballroom dancing before my knee went bad. I think that we have a few dance steps memorized now.”
“Pappy is a great dancer,” Eloisa added. “He would always dance the waltz with us girls when we were kids. He said that it was proper for us to learn how to dance like ladies.”
“Too bad Paul didn’t get any of Pappy’s dance moves,” Neri added.
There was no way that any of these siblings are going to snap at each other at this moment.
“There are three things that Kuya Paul cannot do well,” Eloisa said. “He can’t dance, he can’t cook, and he can’t bake.”
“Of course I can cook!” Paul responded. “I know how to make corned beef!”
“Corned beef from a can,” Neri answered back.
Mommy Guada laughed softly. “Poor Paul,” she said to me. “He’s always the butt of his sisters’ jokes. I told him that he could always learn how to cook, but he’s so stubborn.”
“But he should,” Pappy added. “He will never get a girlfriend if he stays this way.”
“Don’t say that, Pappy!” Paul called out. “That’s too much information for Monica.”
I cut into my piece of chicken. “No, it’s all right. I understand—“
“I’m sorry,” Paul answered. “This is how we are at the dinner table. We like to argue a lot. Eloisa, tell her about the first time Sean had dinner with us.”
I did remember walking in on a conversation between Sean and Eloisa the morning after that dinner. “Was he traumatized?”
“He’s an only child,” Eloisa said. “He’s not used to having spirited arguments around the table, but he got used to it.”
“Sean only comes for the food,” Paul interjected.
“Admit it, Paul,” I said. “You like having him around because you like having a guy your age at the dinner table.”
Paul shrugged, and went back to eating more chicken.
A few minutes later, talk around the dinner table went back to Paul and his lack of kitchen skills.
“Corned beef is the only thing he can do well,” Neri said. “Corned beef with cabbage. Corned beef with potatoes.”
“Corned beef with cabbage and potatoes,” added Eloisa. “That’s my favorite, and we don’t even celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.”
“That’s what I keep telling John Paul,” said Pappy. “He won’t have a love life if he does not learn how to cook soon.”
Paul shook his head. “Enough about me,” he said. “Monica, do you know how to cook?”
I cleared my throat. “I’m more of a baker, actually. Ever since I graduated from the culinary academy, I’ve done more baking than cooking.”
“But you do cook for your Tita Violet, right?”
“Sometimes,” I answered. “Nothing too fancy. When I’m not too busy, I make sinigang with salmon bellies for her.”
“Where do you get your salmon bellies?”
“The supermarket,” I said. “I rarely have time to go to the wet market.”
“Paul knows how to shop at the wet market,” Neri interrupted. “He knows how to buy rice and bargain for vegetables, but ask him to cook—“
“I said enough, Neri,” he answered.
Now I was growing suspicious. What was this family trying to tell me about Paul?
Eloisa stood up from the table. “I’m getting the dessert out of the fridge,” she said. “Monica, would you like to help me out in the kitchen?”
Gladly, I wanted to answer. “Sure, I can help you out. Pappy, Mommy G—“
“Go help Eloisa,” Pappy answered. “We’re excited about dessert.”
“What is going on?” I asked Eloisa. “Please don’t tell me they know about me and Paul.”
“I didn’t tell anyone,” she answered. “It’s just that Paul usually doesn’t invite people to have dinner with us.”
“Has he done this before?”
She let out a heavy sigh. “You asked the other day if he’d been involved with another girl.”
No. “I guess.”
“Well, the last time Paul invited someone to have dinner with us… she said ‘yes’ to him.”
“Ex-girlfriend?”
“Ex-fiancée.” She took out her dish from the refrigerator. “It’s a long story.”
The alarm bells started to ring in my head. I had to wonder what kind of unfortunate creature would agree to datePaul, let alone marry him.
“So let me get this straight,” I said. “Paul used to bring his girlfriend over for dinner?”
“Yes.”
“Were they together long?”
“Since their first year in college,” she answered. “Love at first sight. Kind of like me and Sean, except more conservative.”
“No sex, you mean.”
“I don’t want to know.” She handed me a dish full of whipped cream. “Monica, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course not.” I took out a spatula and spread the cream over the dish. “This pie looks good.”
“Thanks.”
I checked the top and sides of the pie dish to make sure that I covered every inch with whipped cream. I had to make sure that the peaks of cream stood up perfectly.
“You don’t have to check the pie, Monica.”
“I know, Eloisa. I just can’t help it.”
“I’ve been waiting for this all night,” Paul said as we brought the pie to the dinner table. “Baked Alaska?”
“You wish, Kuya,” Eloisa answered. “This is banoffee pie.”
“Is there coffee in it?”
“Bananas and caramelized milk—like the one you get at Starbucks.”
She then proceeded to slice up the cake: one slice each for me, Neri, and Paul, and small portions for her parents.
“And the chef’s portion,” she announced, plating up a slice that had fallen apart when she made the portions for her parents. “Let me know if it’s any good.”
I had to reserve my judgment. I had worked for this family for years, which meant that I could not even trust myself to give an objective opinion about their work—though I must admit that a crappy dessert from Eloisa was still miles ahead of anything that could come out of a commercial bakery in Manila.
This pie was far from crappy.
“I love this,” Neri said, licking her spoon. “This is so much better than the one from Starbucks.”
“We should have this at the bakery,” Paul proclaimed. “People would buy this by the box.”
Eloisa sighed. “What did I tell you about food trends, Kuya? Next thing you know, you’re going to ask me to make cookie butter from scratch.”
“What is this cookie butter, anyway?” Pappy asked. “Butter with cookies?”
“Spreadable butter with cookies,” I explained. “I know how to make it. Just crush the cookies in the blender with butter and a little virgin coconut oil.”
Pappy threw up his hands. “Now they’ve thought about everything.”
I continued to take my spoon to my portion of the pie.
“Monica,” Pappy asked, “do you make your own desserts at home?”
“Cookies and pies, mostly. Baking relaxes me.”
“No wonder you get along well with Eloisa,” said Neri. “I heard that you used to take special orders for Christmas.”
“I used to do that a lot in high school, when I was still living with my family in Antipolo. Our friends would pay me to make Food for the Gods.”
“Food for the Gods,” Paul said. “It’s fruitcake for people who hate fruitcake.”
That comment really got to me. “Paul, that ‘cake’ you just dissed helped me pay my way through my last semester of high school. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Food for the Gods.”
“Yes, but didn’t you get sick of it after a while?”
“Like I’ve said, Paul, baking relaxes me.”
“Well,” Eloisa said, “I guess Kuya Paul forgot about the time I put myself through school by baking cheese muffins.”
“Cheese cupcakes,” Paul corrected. “I remember you experimenting in the kitchen so it could taste as close as possible to the cheese cupcakes we used to buy as kids.”
“Does it matter now, Kuya? I still made enough money to help out Mom and Pappy with my tuition at Woodrose.”
Good God, is there any other way for Paul to be anything but prickly right now?
“Anyway,” I said. “I baked my way through high school, and I was supposed to go to college for business—but I didn’t qualify for a scholarship because I missed the cutoff point for business school. My Dad wasn’t very happy about that, and he wanted me to go to another college and try again. Luckily for me, it was Tita Violet who stepped in and told him that I would be better off going to culinary school, because I would be doing what I love to do anyway and I might even have a chance to go abroad.”
“But you stayed in the Philippines,” Pappy answered. “What made you change your mind?”
“I had my on-the-job training at the Manila Orient, and I had the worst supervisor ever: a German chef who was this extreme perfectionist. If we sliced a strawberry wrong, he would toss the whole cake into the garbage can and tell us to start again.”
“Asshole,” Eloisa muttered under her breath.
“I just took it in stride,” I said further. “But after that, I was so happy to be done with it that I decided I would never work for another foreigner again.”
“But what about your family?” asked Mommy Guada. “Didn’t you say that your Papa was in Saudi?”
“Daddy just came home from Saudi this year, but now my sister is a nurse in Dubai and she’s supporting the family. Besides, I have to take care of Tita Violet too.”
Pappy shook his head. “Must be sad for Violet to not have children of her own.”
“She wasn’t married for too long. After her husband died, it was like starting all over again for her.”
Neri glanced knowingly in Paul’s direction.
“What now, Neri?” he asked.
“Stop teasing your brother, Annamarie,” said Pappy.
“But that’s what the rest of you have been doing all night,” Paul said back. “Every single conversation goes back to me.”
Mommy Guada scraped up the last spoonful of banoffee pie from her plate. “Please forgive us, Monica. Paul is the eldest in the family, as you know.”
“And the unico hijo,” Pappy said. “You said that you have a sister, Monica?”
“Just that one sister in Dubai—she’s the breadwinner of the family now.”
“Do you visit your family often?”
“I haven’t been to Antipolo in a while, but they know how to make video calls so that they can chat with me and Tita Violet any time.”
“You should invite them to come to the branch opening, then,” Eloisa said. “We would love to meet them in person.”
“I’m sure they would love to meet you as well,” I answered calmly.
Nobody used this moment to get Paul’s attention. Thank goodness.