Stick a Fork In It

by Robin Allen

  Her first solution had been to put me on disability leave, but having nothing to do all day every day for days on end sounded like a vacation. No, thank you. I convinced her to let me do food permit inspections, which is why I was at the Sharpe place on Memorial Day.

  I left Todd and Ginger to their Troy troubles and walked through the restaurant to the main entrance, hotfooting it when I remembered that my borrowed hard hat was in the office, which left my noggin exposed to raining tools.

  Outside, Miles Archer stood near a wheelbarrow conferring with Rudy and Mingo. They must be the job foremen. No wonder Danny had protested using them as gurney drivers.

  I waved to them as I headed for the front gate, and Miles fast-walked to catch up with me. “I got to let you out, ma’am,” he said, then unlocked the gate.

  I passed through, then decided I should tell him about the water in case the Sharpes didn’t get around to it. I turned back to him. “You have no water in the bathrooms, either.”

  His eyes grew as big as charger plates. “No!” he bellowed.

  Behind me I heard voices shouting, “Go! Go! Go!” and I realized Miles was reacting to something besides that news. Then everything happened at once.

  five

  A blur of bodies rushed the fence. Miles grabbed my hand and jerked me inside the gate. He yanked so hard, I had to hold onto him to stay on my feet. He pushed the gate closed with his free hand, but I had pulled him off-balance. We both fell. Miles cursed. Guys whooped and wahooed as they galloped past us toward the building. Illegal construction workers returning to rescue their amigos?

  Miles hollered, “Lock the doors!”

  Rudy and Mingo ran into the restaurant and slid a metal door shut from the inside a millisecond before the mob reached it.

  “What’s happening?” I yelled.

  Miles grasped the fence with both hands and pulled himself to his feet. “Tree…huggers,” he said, huffing from his effort.

  He ran toward them but wasn’t fast enough. Some handcuffed themselves to the door handle while others clicked handcuffs around their free wrists, linking themselves into a voluntary chain gang.

  Miles bent over to catch his breath, then pulled his walkie-talkie from his waistband. “Miles…in the yard. We have…a breach.”

  “Location?” came the reply.

  “Front…parking…lot.”

  “Copy that.”

  The group began chanting, “Keep Austin green! That’s what we mean! Keep Austin green! No in between! ”

  I heard distant sirens.

  “Hear that, boys?” Miles asked them. “Cops are on the way.”

  “Green not greed! Construction is destruction! Green not greed! Construction is destruction! ”

  A couple of minutes later, two police cars pulled up next to my Jeep. The officers stepped out of their vehicles and took confident steps through the open gate.

  Troy came out another door near the corner. Probably the gift chamber. “Todd’s securing the back door,” he said to Miles. “Get John to come out here and take some pictures of these guys.”

  “Will do,” Miles said, then unlocked the gift chamber door and went inside.

  While Troy spoke with the police, I surveyed the handcuffed crowd. Eight twenty-something guys wearing jeans or shorts, flip-flops, logo T-shirts, and pierced facial features. Their look fit nature-loving protester dudes, but it also fit band dudes, skateboarder dudes, cashier dudes at any store, waiter dudes at any restaurant, and computer software developer dudes. All but the last group would have the leisure or desire to gather and gripe on a holiday Monday.

  And I knew one of them. After working almost every day in my father’s restaurant—in every job from busgirl to waitress to manager to chef since I was old enough to hold a ramekin—I had worked with thousands of people. Still, I’m surprised when I see someone I know from there outside the walls of Markham’s.

  “Philip Anthony,” I said, standing close to him to block the sun. His co-huggers snarled at me.

  He looked up through a shaggy fringe of dirty blond hair, then snapped the fingers of his free hand. “Don’t tell me.” Snap, snap, point. “Poppy Markham.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Are you working for these greedy jerks?”

  “Greedy jerks! Greedy jerks! Greedy jerks! ”

  I squatted down in front of him, wincing at the reminder from my tight quads that I had missed too many yoga classes recently. “I’m a health inspector now. Doing a permit inspection so they can open.”

  He narrowed his dark eyes. “Yeah, well, we’re here to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  “I heard y’all chanting that construction is destruction.”

  The dudes started on that chant again.

  “It is!” Philip tapped the blacktop with his finger. “This used to be green grass. Now look at it. Ruined.”

  “Aren’t y’all a little late with this protest? They’re almost finished. The grass has been gone for months.”

  I became aware of the dudes getting restless. They started booing and yelling, “Get away! Get lost!”

  “We’re sending a message to future greedy jerks that their businesses will fail,” Philip said, “so don’t even bother breaking ground.”

  I figured that Philip and his friends didn’t have jobs, and they had kept up their protest many months after groundbreaking so they would have something to do. “Markham’s lost a few waiters recently,” I said. “Go talk to Mitch about a job.”

  I heard someone behind me say “Smile,” and Philip flung his free arm in front of his face. Thinking he was going to hit me, I reared back and lost my balance, falling sideways at the same time a light flashed.

  My brain had been baking inside the kiln of my skull for about ten minutes, but I wasn’t hallucinating what I saw when I squinted up. And even if I was hallucinating, I would like to think that my scorched mind would have conjured Val Kilmer or John Cusack or, considering the restaurant’s theme, John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy. Anyone but my next-door neighbor, temporary roommate, and forever nemesis, John Without.

  Stunned, I asked the first thing that came to me. “Why are you using a flash outside?”

  “It stops the action.” He said it as if I were the densest cow in the solar system, which is how he says everything to me. Not only is he without hair, which earned him that nickname, he is without charm, height, and manners. He snapped a picture of a police officer using bolt cutters on handcuffs attached to the front door.

  The dudes began making barnyard sounds—snorting, oinking, and mooing. Mooing? The whole thing felt scripted, like they had read about the protest movements of the sixties and were doing what they thought they should. I guess not everyone could be Abbie Hoffman and the Chicago Eight.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  John Without pointed his camera at a policeman hauling Philip to his feet. “A job,” he said.

  I reached out my hand to John so he could help me up, but he ignored it. “You have a job,” I said, struggling to stand. “Running an art gallery with your boyfriend.”

  He turned to me and very deliberately pulled the camera away from his face. Then he exhaled slowly and fixed me with a surly blue stare. “Troy Sharpe hired me to document the erection of this facility.”

  I waited for him to hear the pomposity of his words, but he just blinked at me. “You mean take pictures of the construction?” I asked.

  He smirked. “That’s what I said.”

  Troy walked up to us as the police officers marched the protesters out the front gate. “Did you get all of them?”

  “Yes, sir!” John said. I had been to his art gallery, Four Corners, many times and recognized those words in that tone he reserved for people who were about to spend an obsce
ne amount of money on a piece of art.

  “Good man,” Troy said, patting him on the shoulder. “Print up some mug shots for me. I don’t want any of those goldbrickers sneaking into a job later.”

  “Shall I have them framed?” John said with a chuckle so obsequious I waited for him to add “milord.” “I need to take a few more pictures inside, then I’ll pack up my things and be on my merry way.”

  John and Troy went through the gift chamber door, and I left through the open gate. It wasn’t the roughest permit inspection I had ever done, but it was certainly the strangest and most violent. I had twice used my injured hand to break a fall, and spots of blood dotted the white bandage.

  My lunch date with Jamie wasn’t for another hour, so I fired up the Jeep and prepared for my next appointment. But then I stopped. For the first time since I became a health inspector, I didn’t have a next appointment. So I took off for the most comforting place I know.

  six

  My father’s house would be comforting only under one condition: if my stepmother, Nina, was off spending money to pamper herself with unnecessary clothes, an undeserved massage, or a gossip session with her cronies over an overpriced diet plate at her country club.

  Ever since my father, Mitch, ignored my sensible advice (and later, my strongly expressed opinions) and married Nina only fourteen months after my mother died, he has clung to the sweet but deluded hope that any day now, Nina and I will finally get to know each other and become friends. And we’ll include Nina’s daughter, Ursula, in our quadrangle of happiness.

  Mitch forgets that I did as he asked and got to know them, and that’s where we ran into trouble. It took about 1.8 seconds for me to determine that they were shallow and spoiled, and not people I wanted to include in my circle of friends.

  Granted, my circle is more of a semicircle that includes my ex-boyfriend, Jamie; my cousin, Daisy, and her family; and John Without’s boyfriend, John With, but I couldn’t imagine myself in any situation that would require the kind of advice Nina and Ursula were qualified to give.

  I would never want to know what color to wear with peacock blue or if a French pedicure is too last year or whether it’s unclassy to use all of your ex-husbands’ last names on your bank checks. And they wouldn’t seek advice from me about what dishes to make with textured vegetable protein or how to live within your means. Neither would I want to do either of them a favor—except for proving that Ursula didn’t kill the famous French chef Évariste Bontecou, but I did that for Mitch, not Ursula.

  I called my father, who told me that Nina had gone to meet her friend CiCi at the Palatine for shopping and sushi. Traffic up north to Hyde Park could hardly be called traffic because of the holiday, and about twenty minutes later I walked through the front door of my father’s house. Nina would have the locks changed if she knew that I let myself in with my own key instead of ringing the doorbell and waiting to be admitted like a proper visitor.

  I found Mitch outside, sunning himself by the show pool. I call it that because my father can’t swim and Nina doesn’t like to get her face wet, so no one has ever been in it as far as I know. Nina’s two Hairless Chinese Cresteds, Dolce and Gabbana, were balanced on each of Mitch’s thighs, intent on a plate of cheese and crackers that sat on the table just out of gobbling reach. Mitch had a cell phone to his ear and a sweating highball to his lips. His eyebrows said hello to me and mine said hey back.

  “I’m glad this worked out,” Mitch said, wrapping up his call. “See you tomorrow.”

  “You’re glad what worked out?” I asked as I took the drink from his hand and sniffed it. Water. One thing Nina and I and my father’s heart doctor agree on is that he should moderate his drinking. Not that he would normally be drinking hard liquor before noon, but when the warden turns her back, you couldn’t blame her only prisoner for pouring a taste of freedom.

  My father took his glass from me. “I think I found a new GM.”

  “Someone local, I hope.”

  “Recently returned to town,” Mitch said.

  He broke a cracker in half and threw the pieces in different directions. Both dogs hurled themselves to the ground and toward the same piece. They have separate food bowls, but they tussle with each other over the food in one, then do the same thing with the other.

  “It would be very easy to train them to eat their own food,” I said.

  “Honey,” Mitch said, stroking his white goatee, “there are two kinds of people in this world. Those who like to do things the right way and those who like to have fun.”

  “Are you saying I don’t like to have fun?”

  “Not at all,” he said, his smile letting me know he thought the exact opposite. That wasn’t news to me.

  “I suppose if you had to choose a last meal, you wouldn’t ask for rice and beans.”

  “Maybe as a side dish next to a porterhouse steak smothered in blue cheese dressing.”

  “Is the GM anyone I know?” I had worked in our family restaurant or the industry all my life, so the chance of me not knowing the new hire was slim.

  “Possibly.”

  “Oh, Daddy! You know I don’t like games. Do I know him or not?”

  “Could be a her.”

  “Do I know this person?”

  “Let’s wait and see if things actually do work out,” he said, then began humming a tune that sounded like “That’s Amore.”

  I have a different kind of relationship with my father than most girls have with theirs. I’m his daughter, but I’m also his employee—or I used to be until I changed careers. Mitch knows why I chose this particular one, and he doesn’t mind that I’m one of the most detested people in a restaurant owner’s life. What he can’t forgive is the fact that I left Markham’s in the first place. But after two and a half years, he’s coming around.

  In his role as my father, Mitch enjoys devising life lessons for me. He thinks I’m too serious and rigid, and that I would be much more fun if I could learn to roll with the punches. So even though I’m two years shy of forty and have lived on my own for almost twenty years, and even though his lessons often have unintended results, he hasn’t stopped trying to shape my worldview.

  When he thought I should be more patient, he had me start an herb garden for the restaurant. When he thought I should learn to get along with people I don’t like, he made Ursula the executive chef of Markham’s kitchen and demoted me to sous chef, her second in command. He had other reasons for demoting me, like the fact that I’d had my heart broken and couldn’t manage the kitchen, and that I had stopped eating animals, but getting along was the “life lesson” reason.

  I killed everything but the rosemary, and I quit the restaurant altogether after enduring Ursula’s one-upmanship, tantrums, and general crabbiness for seven months, but his lessons worked. I had learned both patience and how to get along with others. Whoever Mitch hired to manage Markham’s, I would roll with it.

  “How is Trevor handling his demotion back to sous?” I asked.

  Trevor Shaw is Ursula’s twenty-five-year-old sous chef and sometimes paramour who had taken over the kitchen during Ursula’s brief stint as an inmate. He kept Markham’s running during one of the worst times in its history.

  “He’ll be fine,” Mitch said, breaking and tossing another cracker.

  “I hope Ursula is treating him like the hero he is. I haven’t had a chance to tell you how he came through. I saw him in action. He’s got the chops to run his own kitchen.”

  “And he’s a pretty good cook, according to Jamie Sherwood’s review.”

  “Trevor deserves a raise.”

  “Already done. And I’m naming a drink after him.”

  Mitch is always naming drinks after people. It’s a way to get customers and their friends and family into the restaurant. And it’s an easy way for a bartender or f
ood server to build rapport when someone asks, “Why do they call it a Harvey Wallbanger?” No one ever asks about a Cosmopolitan or a Manhattan.

  If Mitch likes you, he’ll give the drink your name—say, the Lance Armstrong, or, if the honoree is shy about such things, Yellow Jersey. If you complain that his prices are outrageous for such paltry portions, you get the Hair on Ann Richards’s Chest.

  Mitch had never named a drink after me. Or Ursula, I thought smugly. “What’s in it?” I asked.

  “I’ll leave that up to you,” Mitch said, standing up. “Come by the restaurant tomorrow and work your usual magic.”

  I started to protest that I would be busy with inspections morning, noon, and night, but was again caught by habit rather than fact. I had nothing to do the next day. “How does Trevor’s Treat sound?” I said.

  “I like it.” He squeezed my shoulder on his way into the house. “Can you stay for meatloaf, honey?”

  He always forgets that I don’t eat meat. “I’m meeting Jamie for lunch.”

  He stopped in the doorway, Dolce and Gabbana each getting a snoutful of hairy shin. “Are you two back together?”

  During recovery from a recent surgery to put a stent in my father’s heart, he had started singing. The doctors told us that surgical patients sometimes show an interest or even an aptitude for things they had never done before, like singing or pantomime or air guitar. So I could believe that Mitch’s sudden interest in my relationship with my ex-boyfriend was a similar result of the surgery, or I could scan the sky for winged pigs.

  “We’re on a slow mend,” I said.

  He entered the house, singing, “‘When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie…’”

  seven

  I had recently inspected a restaurant near my father’s house that served raw vegan food and knew that the kitchen was sanitary. I called Jamie from Mitch’s driveway to suggest we meet there. “Have you reviewed Awstin Rawsome?” I asked.