The lines that threaded through his expressions weren’t from years of laughter, but years of frowns and condemnations. Thinking about it now, she’d never seen him truly laugh. Definitely not at anything she’d said, but they’d really never even shared a joke. They’d gone to the movies a couple of times, but he always picked heavy dramas that she failed to intellectualize with him afterward.
How had she fooled herself into thinking they had a partnership? In all the time they’d been together, she’d only just met his mother today, and he characterized it as her “tagging along.” They had no shared jokes, no secret code, no shorthand. What did they have?
Sex.
They had sex. At his convenience. Whenever, wherever he wanted. She accommodated him. She was his . . . receptacle.
“Stop the car,” she said.
They were perhaps a quarter mile away from Potomac Village, a cluster of shops and restaurants and a couple of gas stations that were all crowded into maybe one square half mile. It would be easy to get an Uber out of there, even though it would be expensive. But she couldn’t even wait the three minutes it would take to get there. She had to get out now or she would lose her mind. “I want to get out.” She picked up her purse with her left hand and put her hand on the door handle with her right. “Let me out.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
Her fingers tightened around the leather strap of her purse. She had to fight not to open the door while the car was still moving. “I’m. Not. Stupid.”
“Prove it.”
“Stop the car.”
“Aja—”
Everything inside her felt like it was boiling, bubbling up within and threatening to spill over. “Please stop the car.” She adjusted her grip on the door release.
“I’m not stopping,” he said, but at that moment he pulled up to the line of cars waiting at the traffic light. The simple intersection had worked a million years ago when it wasn’t so crowded but now it was an absolute clusterfuck, lucky for Aja. As soon as the car was nearly stopped, she opened the door and stepped out, losing her footing slightly, owing to a miscalculation of what seemed slow inside the vehicle versus what was slow getting out.
“Goodbye, Michael,” she said, her voice tripping with her uneven footing. She slammed the door.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she heard him yell, but it was behind the glass and mercifully muted, and disappeared behind her as she picked her way through stopped and slowing cars to get to the strip mall where she could regroup and call for a ride.
She watched as he was forced to move with the traffic, looking in her direction, gesticulating, his mouth moving with the force of angry words she could only imagine.
She didn’t ever want to hear that voice again.
* * *
MEETING 3—AUGUST
Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah
Forget food—Aja is four months pregnant! Been hiding it—not very well, but you never assume so I guess it was well enough. Explains the yawns, the not drinking, the seemingly bottomless stomach. She dumped her boyfriend and is working for his mother. Bad situation, imho.
* * *
September
Chapter Eleven
Trista
She didn’t know why, but this random Friday night had been fantastic as far as tips went. Fridays were usually steady, but not slammed like that. She and Ike were pooling the cash, but—thanks to a generous tip for Trista from an out-of-towner who had been thrilled to know how close they were to the Exorcist steps and from a woman who looked for all the world to be a drunk, and surprisingly agreeable, Ann Coulter—by 8:00 P.M. they were already pocketing a couple hundred each.
That was gold compared to the state of things when she’d first come back to the bar. Thanks to some nice Yelp reviews noting the renovations to both the structure and the menu, people were slowly starting to come around and give them a chance.
She was making Cathedral Sunsets for a couple who had recently moved into the neighborhood when Ike came out of the kitchen, visibly irritated.
Louis was right behind him. “Some were as tall as six foot eight, I’m telling you. Most of them. That’s the size of LeBron!”
“It’s not possible,” Ike muttered. “The average human is . . . I don’t know, but not that tall. That would be ridiculous. We would have heard about this by now if it were true.”
Every single day, Louis brought at least one weird fact to work with him. Trista actually got a kick out of them sometimes, although Louis had a problem with reading the room and, specifically, shutting up when a customer was ordering or asking a question.
It had been like that in school too; she’d be trying to take notes and not get in trouble for talking, and Louis would be telling her the manufacturing history of the college-ruled paper she was using and why a different pen would ultimately create less stress on her joints, thereby reducing her chances of having arthritis someday.
“What’s in this drink?” the woman in front of her asked. “It’s not too strong, is it?”
Trista smiled and shook her head. “It’s a fruity rum drink, more juice than booze. Let’s see, there’s orange juice, light rum, grenadine, and lime.” She raised an eyebrow before pouring. “You still want it, or would you prefer something else?”
“No, that sounds wonderful!”
Trista poured as the conversation behind her continued.
“Well, this was thirty-seven million years ago, give or take.”
She might have pointed out that people used to be smaller, not bigger, but she didn’t want to join the conversation. She knew from experience that it would only lead to frustration.
As Ike was experiencing now. “Where? Lilliput?”
“Actually, in Lilliput everything would be smaller,” Louis corrected, collecting dirty glasses on a tray. “I think you mean Blefuscu. Though Jonathan Swift invented them both.”
Ike rolled his eyes and took two Irish coffee mugs from the sink and added them to Louis’s tray. “Dude, they’re like a foot tall. You’re nuts. I will bet you money.”
“Oh, my friend, you do not want to do that.” Louis chuckled indulgently.
“Yes, I do. No penguin is, or has ever been, six feet eight inches tall. Or weighs two hundred and fifty pounds.”
Trista gave an involuntary laugh. “Penguin?” She pictured the bow-tied cartoon characters from Mary Poppins, towering over Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, outweighing them both by at least a Saint Bernard.
“That’s right,” Louis said, looking genuinely surprised that yet another person didn’t buy his story.
“Actually, you’ve got the details a little skewed but you’re basically right,” said the man who was now drinking a fresh Cathedral Sunrise.
“Kumimanu biceae was closer to six foot, but still quite an imposing fellow. It was about sixty million years ago.” He caught Trista’s eye and explained, “I teach zoology at American University.”
“Oh.” She nodded, impressed and yet wondering where this conversation could possibly go from here.
“You are correct,” Louis said. “I’m talking about a species in what would now be New Zealand, thirty-seven million years ago. Go ahead and check it.” He gestured toward the man. “It’s a new study. Fascinating.”
Trista knew she had to change the subject before Ike challenged the customer to some sort of trivia contest. “How on earth did this come up anyway?”
Louis didn’t pause for so much as a fraction of a moment before answering. “Ike was saying the rat in the back was the biggest he’d ever seen and he didn’t think it was really a rat but I told him a farmer in Ireland found a four-foot one once, and a shoe store in the Bronx found a dead one that weighed at least—”
“Louis,” Trista said sharply, physically pushing him toward the kitchen. “I’ve told you, you cannot joke around like this, people will take you seriously.” She gave a nervous laugh and hurried him away from the customers. Once safely behind the swinging doors
to the kitchen, she rasped, “What are you doing? You can’t talk about rats in the parking lot in front of customers!”
“Oh, he wasn’t in the parking lot.” Louis frowned and looked down at the shelves beneath the workstation. “He was right in here.”
Trista felt sick. No. Please, no. She’d paid an exterminator a fortune to get rid of the rat problem. “Which one was it?” she asked frantically, turning as Ike came in. “Was it Ratricia Clarkson?” Naming them had made them slightly less daunting when she was seeing them daily, but she’d never wanted to have to see them again. This was the kind of thing that could get her shut down. “Please say it wasn’t Ratthew McConaughey.”
Ike looked grim. “Worse.”
“Ratt Damon,” she whispered in horror, and Ike nodded. “I thought he was a myth, invented by China Taste so they could take over our space.”
“I thought it was a dog,” Ike said. “Until I saw the tail. And”—he shuddered—“the hands.”
“He was eating a burger bun,” Louis explained. “I think it might have been one of ours.”
“Okay.” She raked her hair back out of her eyes and thought. What to do? “If we close the door and he’s outside, then he can’t get in. But if we close the door and he’s in here, he’s trapped. With us.”
“Remember when Rattie Lupone ran through the dining room?” Ike shook his head. “Not a good situation.”
She took in a long breath and tried to calm herself. “I’ll call the exterminator and see if they can somehow get someone over here at this hour on a Friday night. You guys find a way to really secure the doors to the dining room and keep the back door open but you have to keep an eye on it. If he leaves, close the door. If he approaches, close the door.” This was bad. Just really bad.
And she basically had to count on Louis to get it right.
She thought fleetingly of asking the zoologist at the bar for help, but there was a difference between knowing about a penguin that could be mistaken for Abraham Lincoln and being capable of impromptu extermination of a rat the size of a Great Dane.
She didn’t even want to think about the carnage.
She whipped out her phone and googled the exterminator. She called the number and tapped her foot, waiting as it rang and rang. No answer, no machine. She blew through her texts, looking for the confirmation the tech had sent her the last time he was on his way over. She finally found it buried beneath people and bank codes and payment reminders, and shot a quick SOS to him.
Then she put on a smile and went back to the bar to serve what was shaping up to be the biggest crowd they’d had yet.
* * *
When Brice came through the door about forty-five minutes after her talk with Ike and Louis, she felt a huge sense of relief. The feeling was that a grown-up had arrived, and she wasn’t sure why she felt that way. Probably because she had been the idiot who had lost his license and he had been the adult who had handled it with aplomb.
But his suit wasn’t hurting matters any. Gray, tailored. The kind of classic style and fit that would look right at home on Gregory Peck or George Clooney. She didn’t know what he did for a living, but he was obviously pretty successful. There was dressing the part, of course, but some parts couldn’t be faked.
“You wouldn’t believe what’s going on,” she said, when he came over to the bar. His smile was disarming and she made a point of picking up a rag and wiping down the already clean bar top.
“I might,” he said, with a single nod and a significant look. “Louis called asking my opinion on a really bad idea so I thought I should come right over.”
She frowned. “Bad idea?”
“He wanted to do some Good Will Hunting.” He lowered his voice and leaned in toward her. “With an improvised kitchen crossbow. If you . . . know what I mean?”
“Ooooh.” The horror was too vivid. But it was classic Louis. He’d probably seen it on TV or read it in a book and wanted to try it out in real life. “God, I hope you’re not too late.”
He gave a quick nod and took off his jacket. “Right. So, if it’s okay with you, I’m going to just run back there and see what’s going on?”
“Yes, of course! Thank you! I really owe you one. Or two.”
He held up his jacket. “If you could just do something with this that doesn’t involve me taking it into the kitchen, we can call it even.”
She took it and had to resist burying her face in the soft fabric. It smelled lightly of . . . clean air? Soap. A bright, ocean-y note. Aftershave aromatherapy. It instantly put her at ease. Or at least a little more at ease. She wasn’t going to truly relax until Ratt Damon was gone.
A customer knocked on the bar a couple of feet away, bringing her attention back to the crowd. She glanced at Ike at the other end of the bar. It was even busier down there.
So she took the order and got back to work, hoping, for the first time since buying the place, that the crowd would subside so that she could go to the kitchen and see what was going on.
It was a good half hour before there was enough of a break for her to do that. She took dirty glasses from the two bar sinks and stacked them on a tray that had an old Holiday Inn logo fading in the middle.
She pushed through the door against what turned out to be a fifty-pound bag of sugar, and stumbled so dramatically she nearly dropped all the glasses. In that split second it was easy to imagine the customers’ attention being drawn by the noise and then treated to a Jurassic rat scurrying into the dining room.
She righted the tray, sat it down, and caught her breath for a moment before scooting the bag back in front of the doors.
“I don’t think a rat is capable of operating swinging doors,” Brice commented.
“You don’t know Ratt Damon,” she said. “And I gather you haven’t seen him?”
“Nope,” Louis said, flipping a burger on the griddle and pressing down on it with the spatula. She was about to school him in losing the juices when he saw her expression and said, “Smashburger. I’m putting them in the double stack. They seem to be really popular.”
It was true, she’d had at least four patrons raving about it. “Great,” she said. “Do what you’re doing.”
Louis lifted the burger to reveal a thin layer of onion. “My secret trick,” he said. “It kind of steams until I smash it for the sear.”
“That’s brilliant,” she said. She never would have thought of it. “What a good idea.”
He shrugged. “Learned a thing or two in my day.”
She smiled at him, genuinely optimistic about his future there for a moment, then turned to Brice and the matter that was still at hand. “If we don’t catch him tonight, I’m terrified I’m going to come in tomorrow and find the whole place ransacked. Or, ugh, worse, housing a whole group of rats—”
“Mischief,” Louis interjected.
“Okay, creating mischief—”
“No, it’s a mischief of rats. Not a group of rats. You know, like a murder of crows? Or a school of fish?”
She paused. “Really? A mischief of rats?”
Louis nodded, pleased with himself. An expression she recognized from years ago when he was able to tell Mr. Currey that blood was not blue before it met oxygen, that was just a trick of the light on skin; or when he corrected Mrs. Simon on the exact decimal point effectiveness of birth control, which he knew because he was working at the CVS by the grocery store.
“Sure. You know, like a horde of hamsters, an army of frogs, a rookery of penguins.”
She held her hands up. “Okay, let’s not get started on the penguins again. What is a single rat called?”
“A rat.”
She sighed, and Brice said, with a sly smile, “Come on, even I knew that one.”
“Okay, so what are we going to do about our rat?”
Louis shrugged broadly. “I’m really not sure it’s not a mischief. They rarely stick around in singles, and you’ve already named quite a few of them.”
“It did sound like you
were quite the casting director,” Brice said with a laugh. “You’d all but populated a whole Netflix series.”
She felt her face grow hot. “To be fair, I’m not sure all the ones I named are different from each other. Maybe they were all Ratt. Maybe he’s just gotten really fat as he runs free in the alleyways”—she glanced out the door—“picking up every fried, cheesy, salmonella-saturated bite. He could be out searching for the bubonic plague right now so we can be ground zero for a new outbreak!”
“Technically it’s fleas that carry it,” Louis began, but Brice shot him a look that shut him up faster than anything Trista had ever been able to think of.
“It’s a city,” Brice said, taking a slow step toward her. He gave a small shrug. “There are rats. It’s inevitable. You can’t eradicate them. As long as there’s trash—and air—there will be rats.” He stopped in front of her and for a moment she thought he was reaching for her arm, but at the last minute he stopped. “You should probably start keeping the door closed, for a start.”
“But it’s so nice to get fresh air in here!”
“It gets damn hot,” Louis agreed.
“Then get a Dutch door so the bottom can stay closed. That will keep out all the rodents.” He looked at Louis. “What do you call a group of mice?”
Louis looked at him like he was stupid. “A mischief.”
“Of course.” He turned back to Trista but Louis continued.
“If you got a pounce of cats that might help.” He gave an unmistakably smug smile. And he was right, though the idea was impossible. She couldn’t let a pet run free on these streets, and she couldn’t build a pounce of feral cats that lived outdoors either.
They were interrupted by a shuffling noise out back and the sound of a tin trash can lid clattering to the pavement.
Brice put his finger to his lips and went to look. One glance and he gave them the thumbs-up and grabbed a plastic milk crate and a piece of cheese from the stack Louis had sitting out for burgers.
The Cookbook Club Page 13