Sarafina Castellano has lost it all — her popular restaurant, her famous boyfriend, and her beloved father. At odds with her disapproving brothers, she has found a new place to call home, a quiet southern town called Hills of Andrew.
Starting over means a new job and new people, especially a new man who may want more than she is willing to give. As she tentatively moves forward, there comes a call from home; a favorite niece whose needs threaten to disrupt her fragile peace.
As she slowly finds her way back to family, friendship and love, can she also re-ignite passion for cooking, which was not only her livelihood for most of her life, but fed her soul and spirit?
A heartwarming journey that reaches back to the past and pulls into the future, Sara Starting Over explores the joys — and perils — of daring to build anew.
Sarafina Castellano has lost it all — her popular restaurant, her famous boyfriend, and her beloved father. At odds with her disapproving brothers, she has found a new place to call home, a quiet southern town called Hills of Andrew.
Starting over means a new job and new people, especially a new man who may want more than she is willing to give. As she tentatively moves forward, there comes a call from home; a favorite niece whose needs threaten to disrupt her fragile peace.
As she slowly finds her way back to family, friendship and love, can she also re-ignite passion for cooking, which was not only her livelihood for most of her life, but fed her soul and spirit?
A heartwarming journey that reaches back to the past and pulls into the future, Sara Starting Over explores the joys — and perils — of daring to build anew.
Sara Starting Over
By Dee Ernst
Chapter 1
I was drinking my morning coffee when I read that Marco had gotten married.
The picture showed up in the newsfeed on my phone. Marco getting married was newsworthy. After all, he was quite a celebrity if you were into sports and sports agents. And his bride was verynewsworthy — tennis phenom Emilia SanTuccio, barely twenty-three and plucked from the obscurity of the Italian Olympic Tennis team five years ago to become the sexiest thing in a tennis skirt to ever hit the clay courts.
There was a mention of the age difference. Thirty years. Yes, that certainly was a difference. The article also mentioned that Marco had been the one to find her in Palermo and guided her spectacular rise to stardom. It went on to mention all her recent wins, named many of Marco’s famous clients, and ended with saying the couple would make their new home in New York City.
There was no mention of how Marco left his partner of ten years, chef Sarafina Castellano, with nothing but a shrug and a brief I’m sorry. Or how Sarafina, who had been running the much-loved and successful SoHo trattoria, La Cucina, for fifteen years, had to close shop after a small fire mushroomed into a full-scale catastrophe a mere three months before that. And how, once thrown out by the aforementioned Marco, she had crawled back home to her father’s house in New Jersey, broke, unemployed and homeless. Or that she was now sitting in a tiny kitchen in a nearly empty rental house down in Virginia, staring at her phone and feeling her heart break all over again.
It’s not like Marco was the only man I’d ever loved. I’d been divorced almost ten years when we met. When you’re over forty in New York City, you’ve been around the block. Plenty. And it was not like he was my greatest love. Carl Delaney still held that title. After all, you can only have one first heartbreak, and when you’re twenty-one, it’s usually monumental.
Besides, I was still a fool enough to think that maybe, just maybe, my greatest love was yet to come.
I stared out my window into the cold February rain. I could barely see the Chesapeake Bay through the fog. The window was cracked open just enough to hear the wind and the far-off barking of Jack Lockhart’s dog.
I’d been there for three weeks. I left the house to buy food. I hadn’t unpacked the boxes I’d unloaded from my car, except for my clothes. I only knew that it was Jack Lockhart’s dog barking because my landlady had remarked on it when she handed over the keys.
I took another look at Marco, smiling and handsome. He looked like he’d just taken his nubile young wife to the same bed we’d shared for ten years. He’d moved on in a big way.
I, on the other hand, hadn’t even met Jack Lockhart.
Or his dog.
Of anyone else, for that matter.
Maybe it was time.
There was a knock on my front door that caused me to run from the bathroom in a panic.
Who would knock on my door? No one knew I was here. Not even my family. My weekly phone calls were just to assure my brothers I was still alive. Texts to my friend Maribeth included the view from my back patio…was it possible that she had somehow found a way to pinpoint my position from a tiny scrap of shoreline? I wouldn’t put it past her, but it was a stretch.
I peeked through the side window and cracked the door open.
My landlady, Bess Robinson, stood there.
I hadn’t seen her since she’d first shown me the house three weeks ago. After a series of phone calls, I arrived at the address a bit early. The house was not impressive: a gray, shingled Cape Cod style house with faded red shutters and a cracked cement walkway. I walked around to the back of the house and stopped, awestruck.
I looked over the Chesapeake Bay. It was by no means a beachfront property: the yard sloped down to meet a bank of scrub pines, then a two-lane road, then a few rows of houses, then another road. But I was high enough that I didn’t have to see any of that if I didn’t want to. I could look straight out and see nothing but the wide sweep of the water and the pale sky.
I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. I could smell it, too, the salty brine of the bay. And I could hear it above the faint howl of the wind and the barking of a dog.
“Looks good, doesn’t it?
I opened my eyes. “It’s perfect. And I can almost hear the waves.”
The woman came up behind me. “You could hear it a whole lot better if Jack Lockhart’s dog wasn’t barking its fool head off. I’m Bess Robinson. This is my house. You want to see the inside?”
I followed her, a tall, solidly built African American woman with a tight crop of gray hair and polished nails, through the back door.
The inside of the house was rather dusty and sad.
“I’ll give you an allowance at the hardware store in town,” she said. “Pick out colors and I’ll have the place repainted for you.”
“I’ll take it,” I told her.
“I need to run a credit check and verify your employment.”
“I lost my job and haven’t found a new one yet. What if I pay you a whole year's rent up front?”
She eyed me with interest. “If you have that kind of money, why aren’t you buying someplace?”
“Because I don’t want to be tied to anything. I want to know that I can leave if I want.” For years, I’d been responsible for my restaurant, organizing the menu, taking care of all the business end of things, nurturing my staff. They were, I knew, some of the best years of my life, but they were also the most exhausting. When a fire had forced La Cucina to close, I spent most of my retirement and savings paying my employees, waiting to reopen. But it never did, and the guilt was crushing. From there, I went back home to be the primary caregiver to my father. That’s time I would not have traded for anything in the world, but it drained me so completely that the thought of being responsible for anyone or anything again scared the hell out of me.
She narrowed her eyes. “You a drug dealer?”
I shook my head. “No. I recently got an insurance payment.”
She took a minute to look at me closely, as if searching for any outward signs of criminality or depravity, then nodded. “Fine. Where are you living now?”
“The Holiday Inn out on the highway.”
She raised eyebrow.
“I’ve just been driving.” For weeks. Since Christmas. Just driving in and out of small towns and cities, trying to find someplace that felt like I could live there. Hills of Andrew, Virginia, hadn’t seemed like an obvious choice until I found the rental listing on realtor.com.
“I’ll still run a check. And get the paperwork. I’ll call if there’s a problem, but otherwise…when can you move in?”
“Whenever you tell me I can.”
And so I did, the very next day. And that was the last time I’d seen her.
Until today.
Her tall figure radiated waves of disapproval.
“Well,” she barked, “can I come in?”
“Of course,” I muttered, and opened the door wider.
She took three steps into the living room, stopped, and looked around. Then she walked further into the dining room and stared at the sliding glass doors that opened to the small patio in the back. The dusty vertical blinds were in the same position they had been in my first day. She peered around the corner to the kitchen. “Where’s your furniture?” she asked.
I cleared my throat. “Well, I have a bed and a lamp. In the bedroom, that is.”
She glared at me. “I gave you a painting allowance. Mike O’Connell says you haven’t used it. My nephew Dante does all the painting and repairs on my properties, and he has been waiting. Are you going to spend the rest of your life in a house with dirty walls?”
“No. Of course not.” My voice felt rusty, and I cleared my throat again. “I just haven’t decided what color I want the rooms to be.”
She took a slow look around. The room told a sad story. The windows had the same battered vinyl blinds, there was a pile of unopened boxes in the corner, and my laptop was open on the floor.
Her eyebrows flew together. “What is wrong with you?”
I looked around the living room and saw, maybe for the first time, the clumps of dust in the corners, the smudged walls, the gray tracks of my footprints on the scuffed floors. The front window showed the gray winter sky. The sliding glass doors opened to the wide stretch of water, the view that I’d stared at daily without the feeling of joy and amazement I’d felt when I had first seen it.
I hadn’t heard from my family in over a week — Vincent had gotten angry with me during our last phone call and hung up, swearing and yelling. I closed my eyes and felt three days’ worth of grit and unwashed skin under my sweatshirt.
And Marco was married.
So, because she asked — and no one else had ever asked — I told her. “I lost the restaurant I owned for fifteen years, and my boyfriend dumped me because he met someone young enough to be his daughter. My brothers got all mad at me because I didn’t drop everything in my life to take care of my dad, and then when I did go home, he died anyway, and I just read that the boyfriend married the young someone and my life is just awful.” I ended on a sob as months’ worth of anger and hurt and tears spilled out, all over my unwashed face and down the front of my gray sweatshirt.
“Damn.” she muttered. She stared hard for a moment. “Damn, girl, you want a drink or something?”
I sniffed hard and nodded, pointing to the bottle of bourbon that was the only item on my kitchen counter that did not need to be scrubbed down.
She went into the kitchen, opened a few cabinets, and pulled out the only two clean glasses I had left: a champagne flute and a shot glass. She filled the shot glass to the brim, and the flute halfway up the slender bowl. She pushed the shot glass silently across the counter to me. I picked it up and downed it in one gulp.
She sipped delicately. “That’s good bourbon,” she said. “You haven’t been wasting it on pity parties, have you?”
I shook my head. “No. Well, yes. But just the really big pity parties.”
She nodded to herself and looked around the kitchen. “Sarafina, you haven’t been taking very good care of my house,” she said wryly.
“No. I guess I haven’t. And I’m sorry. I swear I’ll get better. And it’s Sara. Please.”
“Sara? Well, it certainly is easier to remember.” She shook her head. “Sitting around this house all day won’t get you better.” Her voice was a clipped New Englander’s voice, not a soothing southern drawl I’d expected from a woman of color this far south.
“Where are you from, Ms. Robinson?”
She sipped a bit more. “It’s Mrs. Robinson, and yes, feel free to sing it if you feel the urge. But Bess is fine. I don’t stand on too much ceremony with my tenants.” She sipped more bourbon. “Boston. Born and bred. Moved down here fifty years ago for my husband’s job. I still sound like Back Bay, don’t I?”
I nodded. The bourbon had washed a bit of the choke out of my throat, and my voice felt stronger. “I’m usually not this big of a mess.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Well, you have had a boatload of shit to deal with in the past, what? Year? Two?”
I nodded and poured more bourbon. I sipped it this time.
“What killed your Daddy?”
“Pancreatic cancer.”
She snorted. “Well, all the taking care of in the world couldn’t have helped him. Did your idiot brothers know that?”
I almost smiled. “Yes. They knew that. It didn’t change a thing. I’m Italian. I should have gone home the minute he fell ill and stayed with Dad and taken care of him.”
“How many brothers?”
“Two.”
“And did any of them go home to him?”
I shook my head. “They didn’t need to. They lived in the same town we grew up in as kids. They both had houses in the same neighborhood.”
“And you had to go there and take care of him? What kind of bullshit is that?”
“Italian bullshit.”
She finished her bourbon. “Well, I’d get over that, and fast. So, your brothers are stuck in the Dark Ages, your boyfriend is a complete douchebag, and you lost your livelihood. The insurance money…from your dad?”
I nodded.
“I’m sorry about all that, and I can’t help you with any of it. But you need a job. I can help you there.”
I looked at her. “I don’t need a job. I have plenty of money.” Which was not quite true. Paying a year’s worth of rent had made a substantial dent in my bank account.
She clucked for a few moments. “Money has nothing to do with it. You need a job because you need a reason to get up and get dressed every morning. You need to start meeting new people and start seeing what good there is left out there in the wide world. You want another restaurant?”
I shook my head.
“Good. This town probably couldn’t support a new restaurant if it had five Michelin stars. Want to cook for someone else?”
I shook my head again, hoping she wouldn’t ask why, because there were no words in the English language to explain how I felt about cooking right now. It had been my life, but that life had been a very long time ago.
“The hardware store usually hires on for the spring, but Mike will probably put the moves on you in the first five minutes, and I don’t see you as standing for that.” She frowned, thinking. “The library is going to need someone. Molly Packer is finally retiring. The money isn’t bad, no heavy lifting, and if the patrons get fresh, you don’t have to put up with it.”
I finally grinned. “Do you really think I have to worry about anyone getting fresh?”
She put her champagne flute in the sink. “You’re an attractive, articulate woman with all her teeth and all of her hair, even if it is gray. I bet if you clean yourself up a bit and get out of those baggy clothes, why, you’d be quite a catch around here.”
“A catch?”
“Oh yes. Lots of divorced men around here looking for company. Not that there are that many of them worth being caught. The eligible bachelors in this town aren’t nearly in demand as they think they are. Well, most of them aren’t.”
“I don’t need a man.”
She grinned. “Oh, honey, nobody needs a man. But they’re nice to keep around, you know. For killing spiders and such.”
“Maybe.”
She took another look around. “Start with cleaning this kitchen. Then go to town and pick out some paint for these walls. Something that’s a proper color. I can’t stand all those beiges and grays. They suck the life right out of a room.” She gave me a hard look. “It’s in the lease. You’re required to maintain the interior of the property. This,” she gestured with her hand, “is not in keeping with the terms of your lease. Then pretty yourself up and go to the library. Rose will want to know she’s got a snappy young thing behind the desk. She’ll hire you in a heartbeat.”
“Snappy young thing? Good heavens, is everyone in this town ancient?”
She drew herself up. “I’m seventy-four. And that’s quite a ways from ancient. And get a pet. It is a very comforting feeling to know that there’s someone waiting for you to come home.”
I opened my mouth to argue, then realized that was the most truthful thing I’d heard in quite a long time.
She closed the door quietly behind her. I stood for a long while, taking an occasional deep breath, before turning to the kitchen to start washing dishes.
The story begins with Sarafina (Sara) in an emotional crisis from loss across multiple spheres of her life, including her family connections, business ownership, the love of her life, and her passion for cooking. Sara leaves behind her identity and mourns the loss of her support system, leading her escape to a small town where she knows no one.
The genre is women's fiction, written in the first person, an apt point of view for this story as you meet the various characters with whom Sara interacts. Her personal history informs her perspective of the people who welcome her and those who don't. The dark places of her past affect her receptiveness to friendship, disdain for the closed-minded, and combat with her authoritarian brother.
Sara begins to grow roots in this small town where she is an enigma to residents, and the feeling is mutual. Everyone knows your business, a seismic shift from her life in New York City where privacy is the tacit code of behavior. But she learns to accept the lack of privacy as she develops reverence for the close personal ties possible in this environment.
As Sara's life blossoms, she continues to have conflicted feelings about many aspects of her life. That is the element of the book that most held my interest. Life is complicated, and issues are not swept away in unison once you get a job, make friends or fall in love. For example, Sara loves her niece, Carla, but when Sara ambivalently takes Carla into her home, Sara acknowledges that the life she was building around "me" has shifted to "we":
We. She said we. I was still struggling with the idea of this young woman living in my house, moving freely in and out of my day-to-day life, but she had already decided. We.
I also enjoyed the author's humor:
Oh, honey, nobody needs a man. But they're nice to keep around, you know. For killing spiders and such.
Cooking is integral to the story, and the descriptive passages are delightful:
The cassoulet was delicious: chicken falling off the bone, the sausage lightly spiced but full of garlic, the beans with just a hint of resistance as you first bit in, then melting away to a silky richness.
I recommend this book because it demonstrates steps forward and backward, sincere dialogue, and honesty about the jagged footpaths you encounter when starting over.