The Matzo Ball Heiress by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

here, honey. I was having a breakfast date at the Stanhope with Pamela Levine.”
    Mom had said “of course” to a rare request by her live-in cook, Angela, to leave Manhattan for her mother’s nursing home in Yonkers. Angela had wanted to check on her mother’s emotional state after such a tragedy. Mom asked Wilson, still handsome and her chauffeur after all these years, to bring along a stash of improvised sandwiches in the Lincoln Town Car in case he and Angela got stuck in traffic.
    “Have you eaten?” Mom asked when her two employees had left with a shopping bag full of turkey and romaine baguettes. “The pantry is plenty stocked.”
    It was. I’d peeked in there too; the cabinets were piled high with a designer-mustard collection and assorted preserves from London’s Fortnum & Mason. Does my mother feel worldlier knowing that if the munchies strike, she can make a quince sandwich?
    “What would you like me to fix us?” I asked.
    “Darling, you relax. I’ll cook.” Mom poked around in the stuffed refrigerator, and started in on the first meal I’d ever seen her make. I strolled back to the living room and took it all in, this alien but familiar environment, the apartment I grew up in, forever being redecorated.
    “Come eat!” Mom called and I joined her under my old dining room’s Austrian chandelier. I’m not quite sure what my mother’s September 11 meal was meant to be. She’d boiled unsnapped green beans until they were soggy and spooned them on the plate without draining them enough. She steamed strips of expensive beef until they were dead gray. Garnishing it all off was an uncooked baby eggplant cut into fat slices.
    “I’m a little rusty.”
    I swallowed another chunk of the flavorless meat. “It’s really okay. It’s just nice to eat with you.”
    It was. The end of the world loomed outside, but it felt good to have her taking care of me. It felt good to have that short but obviously heartfelt e-mail from Dad saying how concerned he was. Most days I feel as if I’m on the rim of a carousel that goes around and around and I’m never fully joining in the thrill. But for a moment, with New York in physical and emotional chaos, I got a taste of what it would be like to have grown up with doting parents. Then the horror of the greater circumstance hit me again, and I vomited in the master bathroom with the built-in spa.
     
    I’m still goosey when I reach the buzzer for Bettina’s ground-floor office in her swanky brownstone.
    I chew up a third of my exorbitantly priced therapy time telling her about my unsettling BBC encounter. I take a breath and Bettina hands me a glass. “Try my lemonade. A very famous chef who’s my client gave the recipe to me.”
    “Very good,” I say after a polite sip.
    “So, shall we begin our work?”
    After a few leading questions about the week that was, I explain that the one man I thought was interested in me was Steve Meyers of the Food Channel, and indeed he called, but I see now his only interest in me is for a seder segment. And I’m certain Jared S. is all about the same crap. “That’s all I am to them,” I say, “a woman with a colorful ancestor and a lot of industry connections. What’s most laughable is that Jake wants me to follow through with this asinine seder business, pretend we’re a functioning family, and even make up family members if we have to. He claims the business is in dire straits.” I look up, eager for sympathy. I’m sure that came out sounding awfully whiny, but I’ve shielded Vondra and Jake from my self-absorption, and Bettina is being paid good money to listen.
    Instead of calming me, Bettina is reproaching me. “Your cousin is absolutely right. You need to help the family if the business is jeopardized. From all you’ve said these past months, Jake and you are each other’s lifelines.”
    “My family will be exposed as freaks.”
    “Isn’t everyone worried that their family is on the outskirts of