The Five-Star Weekend by Elin Hilderbrand EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Elin Hilderbrand
- Language: English
- Genre: Marriage & Divorce Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
It’s early morning on December 15; Hollis Shaw is in the kitchen of her
Wellesley home prepping the dough for cheddar tartlets. Her husband, Dr.
Matthew Madden, has a ten o’clock flight to Germany—he’s presenting a
paper at a cardiology conference in Leipzig and will be gone for five days.
This opening scene, should Hollis show a video of it, would seem to be
one of domestic bliss. Hollis wears a pair of tailored red-plaid pajamas; her
hair is held back in a clip. She has a footed bowl of café au lait steaming
next to the slab of cool, gray-veined marble where she’s rolling out her
pastry dough. Carols play over the sound system; “The Holly and the Ivy”
is Hollis’s favorite and she sings along in a faux-operatic voice. Hollis’s
kitchen is all decked out for the holidays: spruce garlands encircle the
weathered wooden beams, and her collection of copper pots gleam like new
pennies on her open shelves. She’s trimmed a “kitchen tree” with culinary
ornaments: a tiny metal whisk, a wooden rolling pin, a bone-china box of
doughnuts. Hollis has also hung miniature wreaths on all her glass-fronted
cabinets. (Her daughter, Caroline, would probably declare the wreaths—as
well as the apothecary jars filled with ribbon candy and gumdrops—“too
much.”) The picture window above the sink where Hollis does dishes looks
over the mature oaks and evergreens of her side yard. The view offers a
pleasant distraction, especially this morning as snowflakes as big and fluffy
as cotton balls float to the ground. Hollis loves nothing more than snow
during the holidays.
Her timer chimes, and Hollis pulls a tray of crispy bacon from the oven.
Like magic, her Serbian sheepdog, Henrietta, jingles into the kitchen (Hollis
has put bells on her collar) and raises her furry face.
“Fine,” Hollis says, and she gives the old girl a piece. She drains the rest
on a paper towel next to the red-pepper-and-smoked-Gouda quiche she
made earlier that morning. She cuts a wedge of quiche and arranges it on a
plate with a few slices of bacon and sections of a Cara Cara orange, which
are a delightful and surprising pink.
When she hears Matthew’s footsteps on the stairs, she closes her eyes
and takes a sustaining breath.
Don’t bring it up, she tells herself. Let him go graciously.
But the truth is, this trip to Leipzig bothers Hollis; she was up half the night
fretting about it. Matthew will present his paper tomorrow morning, so he
could easily leave Germany tomorrow afternoon and make it home in time
for their annual holiday party on Saturday. Hollis and Matthew have hosted
a holiday gathering every year since they moved to Wellesley, and it’s
always the third Saturday in December. Matthew claimed he “thought it
was later,” so he made plans to stay at the conference until the end and then
travel to Berlin to visit his mentor Dr. Emanuel Schrader, who was just
diagnosed with Parkinson’s and can no longer practice surgery.
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB