by Amy Brent
She’d signed the contract with the Aviary and that was that. She started the next day. There was nothing more to be said, nothing more to be done. After she pulled her clothes back on they’d signed the papers, and he shook her hand and dismissed her as if she was just a delivery person. She cried all the way home to her mother’s house, and realized that the worst part had only just begun: there was no way she could tell her mother about this.
It was some kind of bone cancer, slow-growing but definitely metastatic. There was nothing the doctors could do except “keep her comfortable”, and even before Nicole opened the door she could smell the heavy, musky scent of the pot clinging to the air: Jordan, their weed dealer, was here. He was tall and lanky, with brown hair that stuck out at all angles, who dressed like a scarecrow, which made it hard for her to figure out how old he was. Her friend Leslie had been the one to put him in touch with them—pot was still illegal in their state, and in the three months that had elapsed since her mother’s diagnosis he’d proven himself to be friendly, kind, and trustworthy. He was sitting at the dining room table with her mother, a series of baggies laid out in on the table in front of them, with a stack of bills at one end of the line.
“Hey there,” he said, when she stepped through the door. “Is everything all right?”
“Great,” she said, forcing a smile. “I finally got that job.”
Her mother nodded sleepily. “That’s nice, dear.”
“I gave her a hit of Sandman’s Sleeper,” Jordan said. “On the house.”
“Thanks,” Nicole said. She nodded at the bills. “Is that enough?” The prices fluctuated every time he came by. She chose blissful ignorance when it came to how he set the prices; she never had the impression that he was screwing them, at least, which was more than she could say for Mark. She set her bag down and helped her mother over to the couch.
Jordan nodded. “I’ve got another batch of Pinky’s Pleasure curing now,” he said. “I should be able to deliver it in a week if you think it’d help.”
She shrugged. “That’s all the cash we have,” she said. “I won’t get paid until next week, and God knows if it’ll be enough.”
“Jesus,” Jordan said. “Is there anything I can do?”
She shook her head. “Not unless you can afford to give your product away for free,” she said, smiling wryly.
“Sorry,” Jordan said.
She shrugged and showed him to the door. He was a good guy, but it was basic economics: he needed to make money as much as she did. We all have to pay our own piper, she thought, as she watched him leave. The feeling of Mark’s hands on her body, the taste of him in her mouth, suppressed by Jordan’s presence, came back to her. The house was silent, and there was nothing between her soul and the memory of what had happened that afternoon, and after she closed and locked the door—after she made sure her mother was truly, deeply asleep—she slumped to the floor and let the hot waves of shame and pain wash over her. The tears came, slowly at first, but the repressive silence worked its way inside her head, like a knife, and she cried now—but silently.
The things we do for love. It’d always been a banal platitude. This was the first time that she’d truly realized what it meant.
One week later, Nicole came to the conclusion that it was either her or the job, but it couldn't be both. The job paid--that was all that could be said for it. Mark never set foot in the kitchen, but she could feel his influence with the guy who ran the kitchen, a guy (why did it always have to be a guy?) named Reginald Fiori, who refused to let her do anything more complicated than cutting vegetables--even when the kitchen was falling behind and needed another cook to help get the entrees out on time, even when she could time eggs and fry bread and toast garlic all at once, when the guy couldn’t multitask to save his life.
But she hadn't taken two years of classes and learned the difference between a mince and a mirepoix just to spend her life deseeding avocadoes and chopping onions into a coarse dice. She knew her shit, damn it. It was sexism, plain and simple, and even the other cooks in the kitchen knew it. But Reginald was Mark's friend, and he wasn't going anywhere, not even after the head chef, a beefy guy named Drew, with muscles the size of bowling balls and sleeve tats, spoke to Mark about making her the sous. "I tried," Drew said, and coughed up a loogey--he was a chain-smoker of at least thirty years, and while he claimed to be using a patch these days, he still lit up on every break, and it was beginning to show. "Mark's the only pony in this one-horse town, though, so if he wants to dish it, we have to eat it."
By the end of the second week Nicole was going crazy; one of the line cooks, a guy with a shaved head and more pictures on him than a children’s book, had a coke dealer and even she ended up taking a hit or two so that she could finish her shift without collapsing--coffee didn't begin to cut through this kind of exhaustion. She'd known that line cooks were underappreciated and overworked--and Reginald ran his kitchen worse than most so that the overwork was doubled and the underappreciation was tripled. But she couldn't have anticipated that it would be this bad. And so, on her one day off she called her friend Leslie Wiles and begged her to make a moment and rescue her from the insanity of her workweek. "If I don't have someone to stop me from finishing a bottle of tequila right now I'm going to drink myself to death before the day is over," Nicole said.
Leslie, being the best friend in the world, merely asked her to wait until she could get there before she started.
Leslie owned her own tattoo studio. She worked under the name Clash and while most of her work was simple, cliched motifs that pandered to the sensibilities of most of her clients, she specialized in creating portraits and three-dimensional work so realistic that people sometimes threw up looking at it. They'd met by accident: a few years ago Nicole had come into her studio one drunken night, together with a kid named Brian. She couldn't remember why she and Brian had gotten drunk, much less why they thought that getting tattoos was a good idea, but they'd ended up together--Leslie was just closing up and while she didn't tattoo them she did bring out a bottle of vodka and that was that. Nicole still heard from Brian from time to time--he was doing work for NASA these days--but she and Leslie still got together almost every week to bitch about work and clients. Or in Nicole's case, school and the job she'd worked to offset the costs.
"So, is it incompetence, assholery, or both?" Leslie asked as she pulled out a pair of tequila glasses. They were sitting at her mother's kitchen table, with the dainty floral wallpaper, lace curtains, and quaintly-worn country-style furniture that her mother favored. Nicole at least looked relatively normal in her jeans and t-shirt. Leslie, wearing black leather and kohl, her hair spiked and dyed blue, might as well have been an alien.
"Both," Nicole said. "I don't know if I can stand a third week."
"That bad?"
"The owner is Mark."
"Sheee-it."
There wasn't much more that needed to be said after that. Leslie had been the one privy to the nightmare that was the one-and-a-half dates with Mark. They tossed back their respective glasses of tequila in silence, slamming the glasses to the table with a firm “bang”.
“Maybe you could do private work,” said Leslie, after a moment.
“What?”
“Well, you know—go to a bunch of rich people’s houses and make a bunch of food for them.”
Is the tequila that strong? Nicole didn’t feel that drunk. “That’s a thing?”
Leslie shrugged. “Rich people outsource everything, dontcha know? Anyway, it probably beats making second-rate guacamole for eight hours a day.”
“It is so second-rate,” Nicole grumbled. That was the thing with the Aviary: for all that it pretended to be fancy, serving pommes frites instead of French fries, it was neither very good, nor very original, but in their town it was what counted as high-class dining, and most people didn’t know enough to know that they should be demanding better.
“I’m sure there’s some website out there,” Lesl
ie said, grinning. “Come on.” She pulled Nicole over to the little side table that Nicole used as her desk—these days an elaborate desk wasn’t needed, with everything stored in the cloud and what-not. Leslie turned on Nicole’s laptop and opened up the browser, and typed in “Private chef services” to the search bar.
What came up was a bunch of erotic services. “Oh fuck no,” Nicole said. For a moment the memories of what Mark had made her do to earn the privilege of working like a dog in his kitchen threatened to overwhelm her. “I ain’t doing that shit.”
“Let’s refine the search,” said Nicole cheerfully, adding “cooking” to the list of search terms. “There we go. See?”
It was a website called “Tastemakers”, and it looked promising: no mention of erotic services, just a simple, straight-up cooking service you could sign up for. “Look,” said Leslie. “They do background checks of their clients and their chefs. Less chance of skeevy business. Do you have a nice picture?”
“Hey, I never said I’d do this,” Nicole protested.
“You’re fucking doing this,” Leslie said. “Because I’m not going to come by every week just to get drunk with you. I have other friends who need my alcoholic services, too, you know, and only one liver between you all. Now, what kind of food do you like to cook?”
***
Three days passed before Nicole got the chance to open her email. Her mother had some kind of crisis that landed her in the county hospital for a day, so between shifts there was a lot of driving and very little sleeping. By the time Nicole was able to bring her mother home again she could swear that her mother had lost another ten pounds somehow. “Don’t worry,” her mother said, “I’m fine.”
It was a lie, of course. Nicole could see her body falling apart in front of her eyes—in the blood that ended up in the toilet instead of urine, in the increasing number of foods that she could no longer handle. But all Nicole could say was, “Of course you are,” and keep tending to her as best she could. She was aware that it was a kind of denial—but telling her mother “At least” was still easier than saying “You can’t”. Nicole found herself seriously contemplating a trial with methamphetamines—Gerson, the kitchen’s coke connection, probably knew someone who dealt meth, too. It wouldn’t be too hard to get some and stay awake for days.
Early one morning, after she finished filing the insurance claims, her email alerted to twenty-six new messages, most of them from Tastemakers. A shot of excitement went through her—this could be her ticket out of this exhausting, grinding life. She opened the first one: an email from a mother who wanted someone to prepare “healthy, vegetarian, gluten-free, dairy-free, kid-friendly foods for my family of five, and one child won’t eat anything squishy, so no tomatoes, mushrooms, eggs (unless they’re hard-boiled)…”
Nicole deleted it.
There were emails that she was certain were trolls, because there was no way a human could exist on the restrictions that they had: people who wanted grain-free, fat-free, vegan diets (she was tempted to write back, “lettuce”) and people on all-liquid diets who needed organic juices enhanced with things like spirulina, which she actually had to look up. Delete, delete, delete.
And then there were the assortment of emails from men who clearly had every interest in sex and none at all in food. Just how many ways are there to say, “I want to eat your pussy?” She had some seven messages like this—she flagged them all. There was one email that gave her pause for a moment—the guy was clearly treating Tastemakers like a dating website, saying, “I’m a sensitive, caring man who’d love nothing more than to spend a little time with you in the kitchen,” going on to add how he was looking for a long-term thing and how he thought their tastes meshed with each other. He was probably right—but a new relationship didn’t pay the bills, and that was what she signed up for.
Delete, delete, delete.
At long last there was a message from a man by the name of GoodFood who wrote that he liked fine food and good wine, would she like to come over and cook for him? And the money he promised her was nearly double what she’d asked for—which was already double what she was getting paid from Mark. His profile picture was that of a man standing in a doorway, back-lit so that he was silhouette, but there was no question that his suit was impeccably tailored.
“I can be there in two days,” she wrote back. That was her day off. At least she’d be doing work that she liked.
A message was returned almost instantaneously: “Good. Let me know what you need to make a three-course dinner, butter chicken and lemon rice, ratatouille, onion-and-anchovy pie, and General Tso chicken (for storing to eat later), and three healthy and portable lunches.”
Jesus, she thought. This guy is not kidding.
“Give me about a hour,” she wrote back.
Thank God for the Internet, she thought as she fervently looked up recipes for everything. She knew, generally, how to make everything—it was a question of spice and proportion and flavor profiles that varied. And as for healthy, portable, and flavorful lunches, well, that was what Pinterest was for. She found some delicious Middle-Eastern foods that would taste good and keep for a few days. Based on the foods he was requesting he had a diverse and varied palate—he would appreciate something bright and bold, tangy and crispy. Creating the perfect recipe was as much about complementing textures as it was about melding flavors, something most cooks couldn’t appreciate, and as her imagination ran riot she found herself wanting to make more, do more.
Stick with the job at hand, she reminded herself. If he wanted someone to tell him what he wanted he’d be paying for a dominatrix, not a cook.
She sent him the list of ingredients she needed. It was long, and at first she paled when she wrote out everything she needed—but then she reasoned that a man who was willing to pay her four times what she was making as a minimum-wage slave probably wasn’t hurting for money to get the ingredients. And his profile said that he wanted good food—it didn’t say anything about being on a budget. Just for kicks she added her list of wine recommendations to pair with the foods. She’d nailed the wine part of her culinary school; she might as well use her hard-won knowledge somehow, right?
The reply was a few minutes in coming this time: “Very good. Everything will be ready. Address will be forthcoming.”
When she turned off the computer, Nicole found herself breathing a sigh of relief. This job could be her ticket out of the minimum-wage drudgery. At the very least, she could cook again.
That night, she found herself sharpening her knives with glee.
Work the next day was a breeze. It was amazing how tolerable Reginald’s bumbling incompetence was when she knew she had a way out. She ended up taking over Reginald’s job, on top of doing the prep work that she had to do, because even when she was distracted with line work she still managed to get the dishes out on time and hot. She even said, “To hell with it,” and re-made the second-rate guacamole so that it was creamy and fresh and delicious, setting up the line so that it could be made quickly, and to order.
It went over so well that they ran out of avocados before the night was over. Drew gave her a nod of approval, and during the after-closing meal, the staff toasted her and ignored Reginald’s protests. It’d been a great service, and Drew sighed and said, “I wish you didn’t have a day off tomorrow.” Reginald almost fired Drew on the spot, but the rest of the crew started applauding and when the tips were factored in they all made nearly double their wages.
Tough shit.
The address that Mr. GoodFood had given her was a good thirty-minute drive, so she started off early the next morning, after making sure her mother was comfortable. “I wish you could stay home,” her mother said. The weakness of her grasp startled Nicole but she tried not to let it show. “I’ve got to pay Jordan somehow,” Nicole said, smiling.
“You’re so sweet,” her mother had said.
“You’re my mother,” Nicole had said.
The nausea, the vomiting, the lis
tlessness—her mother was getting worse, there was no two ways about it. As she drove along she had to wonder how much longer her mother had. One month, maybe two? The last few weeks were the hardest—that was what the doctors had told her, when the pot stopped working, and there was no relief from the relentless progress of the cancer as it destroyed the body one cell at a time. Death by a thousand cuts—and the worst part was that the body would keep fighting for as long as it was able to. The body didn’t know how to give up, even if the mind did.
The GPS unit pinged, jarring her out of her sadness. “In 300 feet, turn left.”
Where the fuck am I? She was now in farm country—you could go fifteen minutes without seeing a single house, just corn or soybeans on all sides. Her gut began to stir, mildly alarmed: if Mr. GoodFood was some kind of serial killer there would be no hope for her.
The things we do for money, she thought, swallowing. The little arrow on her GPS was still following the pink path, though, so she kept driving.
There were trees on either side of the road, screening her view, but as she followed the turn she saw the house, rising out of the hill. It was a gray slate house with black shingles—and solar panels, she noticed—and white shutters, with a wraparound porch that had a quaint porch swing in one corner. There was a standalone garage off to one side of the house, and a shed behind it. Mr. GoodFood was standing on the porch, drinking from the glass, watching her as she pulled up to the house. He was wearing a sweater and worn jeans. He had startling, ice-blue eyes, neat blond hair, and square jaw looked vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t remember where she’d seen his face before. He could have been one of the extras on Law & Order—he was certainly handsome enough for it—but she didn’t think acting paid well enough to own a house like this one.