Aftertaste

by Meredith Mileti

  “How about I take Chloe for a swim in the big girl pool, give you and Carlos a little space?” Fiona says. I nod, and Carlos and I huddle together on the edge of the towel, watching as Fiona and Chloe head off hand in hand.

  Fiona sets Chloe down on the edge of the pool, and, placing one hand gently on Chloe’s stomach, eases herself down the ladder until she is standing just underneath her. Then, I watch amazed as Chloe scoots herself off the edge and hops into Fiona’s waiting arms. The two of them bob easily around in the deep water, and I can tell by the way she allows Fiona to swing her around that Chloe’s not the least bit afraid. One day she will be a good swimmer, and I will have Fiona to thank.

  “You know, it’s a mitzvah to teach your child to swim,” Ruth told me the last time we’d taken the kids here, when Carlos sat screaming by the edge of the kiddie pool. A mitzvah, Ruth explained, is a basic precept of Jewish law, somewhere between a good deed and a commandment. Fulfilling a mitzvah is considered a blessing. “Too bad, too,” Ruth said, turning to look at me, the helplessness in her eyes piercing. “It makes a lot of sense to me. You need to teach your child to survive in the world because one day you won’t be there.”

  Based on a few offhand comments Ruth has made, I know her mother didn’t approve of her decision to adopt Carlos or raise him as a single parent. It makes me angry at this woman, whom I’d never met, for undermining Ruth’s confidence as a parent, when she needs all the building up she can get. It also makes me appreciate my father and Fiona who, incredibly, has managed to be just the right blend of friend, maternal figure, and doting grandparent.

  I am blessed, I think.

  A couple of hours later, when the sky clouds over and the rumbling of thunder is heard in the distance, we load the kids into the car and drive to Eat’n Park on Murray Avenue.

  Fiona has just finished telling me about a lead she thinks Ben has on a buyer for my apartment.

  “Someone who already owns one apartment in your building, I think,” Fiona says, piercing a rippled dumpling. She furrows her brow. “Or maybe someone from work. I forget. You’ll have to ask him.”

  The kids sit on booster seats, eating macaroni and cheese with their fingers, Chloe between my father and Fiona and Carlos next to me.

  I pick at my grilled chicken salad. It’s raining now in earnest, and outside the window I can see people rushing down Murray Avenue, umbrellas raised. A man trailing an old-fashioned shopping cart behind him and a young mother wheeling a stroller, its tiny occupant completely encased in plastic, approach each other from opposite directions. They meet just outside our window, and I watch as they lower their respective umbrellas and embrace.

  “You know, we never even had a housewarming party,” Fiona says. “With Richard being sick and all. It’s bad luck not to have had at least one party there. Let’s throw you a going away party.”

  “I’m not going,” I say.

  “It’s your party, you have to go,” Fiona says, laughing as Chloe picks a piece of dumpling from her plate.

  “No, I’m not going.”

  Is there ever a single moment of clarity, when everything comes together, when drums sound, bells ring, lightbulbs glow? If I were directing a movie of my life, I’d be tempted to bathe the people outside the Eat’n Park window in a soft, apricot glow, close in on their quickening steps as they run forward to meet each other. The lowering of umbrellas, the spray of rain on the glass, the way the woman had stepped delicately around the stroller and laid her hand on the man’s arm as she moved to embrace him. But it was actually a perfectly ordinary moment. The truth, I realize, is that I made up my mind a while ago. It was as if I’d written it down on a scrap of paper, shoved it in a drawer, and forgotten about it, only to happen upon it some time later, the message in my handwriting something I’d always known but didn’t quite remember writing down.

  My first call is to Jerry Fox. I need to tell him to tear up the signed contracts before I change my mind again. My cell phone begins beeping ominously just as his secretary tells me he’s in a meeting. As soon as I finish telling her to have him call me immediately, my phone dies completely, which means I have to get home to my charger before he calls me back.

  I fly up the stairs to Ruth’s townhouse, Carlos and Chloe in tow. The three of us burst in through the open screen door. “I’m not going. Stop. Forget about it.”

  Ruth is pacing in the dining room, her cell phone cradled to her ear. “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to call you!”

  “My cell phone died. My charger is at home,” I tell her.

  “Here, plug it into mine,” Ruth says, fishing her phone charger out of the drawer of the buffet. “Wait a minute, what do you mean you aren’t going?”

  “I changed my mind. I don’t know. I realized that it’s unfair of me to take Chloe away from everything she has here. Our lives will be so much more difficult. I’ll never see you, or Richard, or my dad and Fiona. Or Ben. I’ll miss you all. I like writing my column. There are a million reasons.”

  “Thank God,” Ruth says, clicking her cell phone shut and clutching it to her chest. “That’s what I was trying to tell you,” she says. “I found something. In the documents.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Ruth leads me over to the dining room table. “I assumed eventually I’d be able to nail down the source of all the capital used in the projections.”

  “You mean where they are getting the money? I thought they were getting it from me. You know, the investors.”

  Ruth hesitates. “It’s not exactly that simple—or at least it shouldn’t be. The source of capital really refers to AEL’s investment strategy. They have to have some way to grow the money enough to cover the projected returns, right? Take a look at the number of investors and the payouts. Twenty percent returns in thirty days, pretty atypical even for high-yield investment programs. The number of re-investors is ninety percent. Again, atypical, although not unrealistic, given the high rate of returns. But since the restaurants won’t be showing that kind of profit, where does the money for the large payout come from? That’s where the investment strategy comes in. Think of it like a recipe. AEL pools everyone’s money and invests it in some funds or series of funds. Twenty percent of the pool in X fund for thirty days at a projected return rate of ten percent. Thirty percent of the pool into Y fund for sixty days at twelve percent. Like that. But I got all the way through the first box and couldn’t find how AEL would sustain the promised returns. They’ve only provided backup for the projections for the first two years. That raised a red flag.”

  “But they’ve been paying people.”

  “Exactly,” Ruth says. “It’s early yet, and new investment money is coming in. So I’m deep into the second box, and I see that they have planned at least two more layers of investors—essentially doubling the number of investors. Although nothing in the documents explicitly shows it, if you extend the restaurant profit projections beyond the two years, and then compare that with what will be required to meet projected payouts, the math only works as long as they continually expand the pool of new investors. You can only maintain that kind of strategy for so long before it all comes crashing down. You remember Bernie Madoff? This has the earmarks of a classic Ponzi scheme.”

  My cell phone rings. It’s Jerry.

  “Jesus, Mira, what do you mean rip up the documents? The closing is tomorrow!”

  “Listen, Jerry. Ruth thinks she found something.”

  “Well, she better have, and it better be big. You want AEL to sue you for backing out at the last minute?”

  I hand Ruth the phone.

  While she is filling Jerry in, I put the kids down for a nap.

  Ruth spends the next hour on the phone, first with Jerry, then with Avi Steiner. By the time she hangs up, Jerry’s secretary is booking her on a flight to New York first thing in the morning to go over things in person. I follow her around the apartment, watching as she pulls a navy blue suit from a plastic dry cleani
ng bag and inspects the heels of a pair of brown Jimmy Choo pumps. “Hopefully, I’ll be home tomorrow night,” Ruth says. “You’ll watch Carlos?”

  “Of course. You’re the one doing me the favor, remember?”

  “You keep saying that, but I don’t know, it feels like the other way around,” Ruth says, rummaging in the back of her closet. “Aha! There it is!” she says, her voice muffled. She emerges holding a large, tattered box.

  “I didn’t think I’d be using this any time soon,” she says, throwing off the lid and pawing through inches of tissue paper. She pulls out a beautiful briefcase. “It’s vintage Hartmann,” she says, stroking the glossy leather. “It belonged to my father.” Ruth has never mentioned her father, but I can tell by the wistful look in her eyes that she adored him.

  “I know I originally planned on taking a year off, but I’m thinking about going back to work part-time. I think it might make me a better mother. Does that sound crazy?” she asks, opening her suitcase. Even though she’d spent most of the last thirty-six hours hunched over financial documents, she looks bright eyed and more relaxed than I’ve ever seen her.

  “Not one bit,” I tell her.

  Enid answers my call on the first ring.

  “Don’t suppose you’ve changed your mind?” she asks.

  I hesitate. The eagerness in her voice is nearly overwhelming. “I have, but not about the restaurant. I’d like to stay on—writing for the Food section, if you’ll still have me. I’ve decided to stay in Pittsburgh.”

  “I’ll take that as your opening offer. I accept.”

  “Enid, I’m not ready on the restaurant. I don’t know when I will be.”

  “Just promise me you’ll at least think about it.”

  “I will, but—”

  “That’s good enough for me. I don’t want to push you, but I’m here, Mira, when you’re ready.”

  “If I’m ready,” I add.

  “Okay, I get it. If.”

  chapter 34

  Ruth returned from New York having managed to convince Jerry and Avi that what she’d uncovered in AEL’s financials merited a call to the authorities. Since then, Ruth has also been interviewed by an SEC investigator who found what she had to say pretty interesting. Any remaining question about the legitimacy of AEL disappeared when, one week into the investigation, AEL’s outside accountant—who turned out to be the only accountant in the agency—disappeared without a trace. It then came out that he’d previously been investigated in regards to a similar pyramid-style scheme discovered several years earlier in which he allegedly had only a peripheral role and claimed not to have known about the fraud.

  Tony may be out most of the fifty thousand dollars he initially invested, but because of Ruth’s eleventh-hour rescue, he was able to save the rest of his sabbatical fund.

  It was too late to save Grappa. The restaurant was so heavily mortgaged that when the scheme collapsed, a trustee was appointed to oversee the orderly shutdown of the restaurant. After Grappa folded, Tony went to Italy to cook for a year. He took Grappa’s loss hard. We both did. As for Jake, I have spoken to him only once. I called him after I heard about Grappa’s closing. Virtually all of his funds were invested with AEL, and he lost everything. I have no idea if he and Nicola will remain together, although I somehow doubt she’s the type to stick around after the money has run out. Jake now has no choice but to look for a job in someone else’s kitchen. He’ll find one—a talented chef always can find a place to cook. Before we hung up, he offered me his recipe for cassoulet. “I’ll write it down and send it to you,” he said. “I’d like to think of you enjoying it, Mira.”

  True to her word, in the weeks that followed Enid didn’t bring up the restaurant again. Not once. Until yesterday.

  After I e-mailed my latest column to her, she called me to follow up on the changes and to discuss the Thanksgiving spread. “It’s only a month away,” she said. “Here’s what I’m thinking. Each of the four remaining weeks we choose one dish, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, and focus on it. Teach the method and give a bunch of different interpretations. What do you think?”

  “Great,” I said. “I’m on it.”

  Then she asked me if I’ve given the restaurant idea any more thought. When I told her I was still thinking about it, she said only this: “Okay. Fair enough. I won’t mention it again; I promise.” This has been bothering me. I can’t stand the feeling that my own inertia could cause this idea to wither and die, yet I’m having a hard time mustering the energy to do anything about it.

  Lately, I’ve found myself remembering Grappa’s early days, the most difficult parts: the huge start-up costs; the losses most restaurants experience the first year—if they even survive the first year; dealing with banks and financial types—which I hated; the hiring and rehiring of cooks and notoriously unreliable dishwashers; finding a decent laundry service.

  It isn’t that I’m suffering from a dearth of ideas—I’ve got plenty of those, from breakfast joint to tapas bar, from sandwich shop to enoteca, each of which I approach with an all-consuming intensity, rather like a case of twenty-four-hour flu. Then, when the fever has run its course, I discard the idea as being too much like Grappa—or not enough.

  “Listen to this,” Richard calls out to me from the living room, where he is poring over What to Expect: The Toddler Years. “It says what she’s doing is completely normal.”

  I’ve just attempted to give Chloe pasta with peas and a nut-free pesto, which she’s eaten before and liked, but which tonight made her wipe her tongue with her bib and gag. Tired of her crying, I gave up, boiled her some plain noodles, and served them with a boring tomato butter sauce.

  “Kids’ palates are sensitive, and most kids go through a picky phase around the age of two,” he reads. “So our Chloe is precocious, just as we’ve always suspected,” Richard says proudly. In the months he’s been living here, I’ve been surprised to discover that Richard has a real paternal streak. As his recuperation has progressed, he’s taking an increasingly active role in caring for Chloe; he’s always happy to read her a story or help with her bath, even change the occasional diaper. I love that Richard takes pride in Chloe’s accomplishments, dubious though this one may be. The phone rings, and Richard calls, “Do you have it, Mira?”

  At the moment I’m holding Chloe, who is covered with tomato sauce, attempting to remove a piece of ziti from her grasp. As I answer the phone, balancing it in between my shoulder and chin, Chloe loses interest in the piece of ziti and reaches her saucy hands toward the receiver.

  “Hello, Mira? It’s Ben. Are you busy? I need a favor.”

  “I’m about to give Chloe a bath,” I tell him, as Chloe’s tomatoey hands settle in my hair.

  “How’d you feel about flipping some burgers for a couple of hours? A friend of mine had an accident. He burned himself in a small grease fire at his restaurant, and he’s totally freaking out. He just opened this place in Bloomfield, and if he can’t find someone to help him out he’ll have to close for the evening. It’s Saturday night, and he can’t afford to lose the business. I’ll even help. How about that? The best offer you’ve had all evening, right?”

  “Ben, I’m sorry. I’ve got Chloe.”

  “Not to worry. I already thought of that. I called Aunt Fi, and she said to drop Chloe off at your dad’s on the way over. We can pick her up after we’re done. Come on, what do you say? Please?”

  “I didn’t know you had a friend who owns a restaurant,” I say, thinking it funny he hadn’t mentioned it before.

  There’s a knock at the door, and when I go to open it, Ben is standing there with his cell phone to his ear.

  “Oh, yeah,” he says, still holding the phone. “He’s my buddy Jim’s brother, Dave. Jim is the heating and cooling guy from Bessen’s.” We hang up our respective phones, and Ben makes his way to the kitchen, where he picks absently from the pot of ziti on the stove.

  Richard walks into the kitchen and holds out his arms for Chloe. �
��Hello, Ben,” Richard says, patting Ben on the arm. “You know, I could have watched her, Mira,” Richard says.

  He probably could have. Although Richard still isn’t driving, his recuperation is just about complete. He’s taken to going into the shop a few days a week and has hired an assistant to handle the overflow. He’s really ready to go home, but I think he’s staying for me; he’s worried that I’m not ready to be alone. Maybe I’m not.

  “Aunt Fi needs Chloe so she can finish Chloe’s Halloween costume anyway,” Ben says. Fiona has been working on Chloe’s costume for weeks, an ear of corn made out of felt.

  I put Chloe down, and she makes for the living room. “Richard, would you mind giving her a quick bath and putting her in her pj’s while I change?”

  “Done,” says Richard. “Ben, would you mind helping me corral this urchin?”

  I’ve changed into a chef’s tunic and a pair of drawstring pants and am in the kitchen packing my good knives into my leather knife case when Richard and Ben emerge from the bathroom with Chloe, pink cheeked and freshly pajamaed.

  “What are you doing?” Ben says. “The guy owns a restaurant. He’s got knives.”

  “Chefs are picky about their knives. If I’m going to be cooking in a strange kitchen, I should have my own knives. It’s a comfort thing.”

  “Nice outfit,” he says, giving me the once over. “Very official. Come on, we better get going,” Ben says, picking up my knife case and the diaper bag.

  Chloe and I kiss Richard good night. “Don’t wait up,” I tell him.

  Delano’s is a local Bloomfield watering hole sandwiched in between an Italian groceria and a little take-out stand called Paula’s Pierogie Palace. In addition to the worn wooden bar, they’ve got a half dozen tables, most of which are empty, so I’m guessing not too many people come here to eat. Ben walks us through an alleyway to the delivery entrance at the back of the restaurant.