by Mindy Klasky
But here in the studio, there was nothing he could do. Nothing he could say. Nothing that would keep Angel from displaying her handful of photographs to the cameraman, who was eagerly zooming his lens in.
“Josh learned from my recipes,” she exclaimed. “We traded, so he could be ready for your show.”
Morton laughed like he’d never heard such a hilarious joke. “And what did Josh give you in exchange, Ms. Cantor? What could be worth your years of expertise?”
“Angel!” Josh interrupted, throwing himself into conversation like he was blocking a runner to the bag.
“I told my Josh—”
“Grandmother!” he shouted, earning himself a dirty look from Angel, who just kept right on talking.
“—he could use my recipes, if he brought me proof that he was dating again. I’m not getting any younger, you know. I want to hold a great-grandbaby in my arms before I die.”
Great-grandbaby. Wonderful. Her memory was intact today. She remembered her family history. A fucking lot of good that would do Josh now.
Morton was having a field day, clearly realizing his surprise guest was turning out to be a million times more entertaining than he’d ever planned. “What sort of proof did you demand, Mrs. Cantor?” Morton asked with absolute seriousness.
Now Angel was eating this up. She held up her photos to the camera. “Pictures!” she said gleefully. “Of my Josh and Ashley Harris. I traded him one recipe for one picture, and my boy came through with shining colors.”
He knew exactly what was in those photos. The first was taken at Mangia. The second was from the library. But he also knew what Ashley had to be remembering—the bedroom photos. His ears were buzzing as he turned to her. “Ashley,” he said. “I didn’t… It wasn’t—”
The slap of her hand against his cheek rang out on the silent set. He tasted blood on his tongue, and he heard Morton gasp, heard Angel choke on his name. Impossibly, incongruously, he smelled the food on the plates still sitting in front of the judges—barbecue and roast chicken and pan-fried pork, all baking under the studio lights. He watched Ashley pivot on her heel, stumbling toward the wings and the frantically gesturing producer who was signaling something to Morton, waving her hands more desperately than any third base coach in the history of the game.
But Josh didn’t feel anything. He knew his face must bear the red imprint of Ashley’s hand. He knew his cheek must have cut against his teeth. But all of it was like a third degree burn—an injury deep enough to destroy his flesh, to kill his nerves. It hadn’t registered yet, not fully. But he got a glimpse of the agony he was in for as he watched Ashley disappear into the shadows offstage.
CHAPTER 8
Ashley stared at Dustin’s plate. He’d made a vague attempt to move his food around, shifting the stewed chicken from one side to the other, shoving some of the glop under the mound of sticky rice that he’d barely touched.
“I’m sorry,” she sighed, shoving her own plate away. “This is disgusting.”
He shrugged and crossed to her refrigerator, shuffling among the bottles in the door until he found the red-topped Tabasco. “Nothing a little hot sauce won’t cure.”
He dumped half the bottle over his food as she cracked open another Corona. She drank directly from the bottle and watched as Dustin valiantly choked down another bite.
“Here,” he said, shoving his plate toward her. “It’s not so bad now that it’s spiced up.”
“Yeah. Right.” She picked up both revolting plates and scraped them into the garbage. “Try this instead,” she said, tugging open the pantry door and pulling out a king-size jar of peanut butter and a sleeve of Saltines. She tried not to see the expression of relief in Dustin’s eyes.
“You know, a splash of cider vinegar would have brightened that stew right up. Vinegar and cayenne, to bring out the flavor.”
Vinegar and cayenne. Like the traditional North Carolina barbecue Josh had served to the Apron judges. The traditional recipe he’d wrangled from his grandmother, using pictures of her as bait. She was never going to combine vinegar and cayenne again.
“Oh God, Dustin,” she sighed. “Everything would have been fine, if I’d come in first place. Then they would have brought you out on stage, and we would have babbled in front of the camera. No one would ever have seen those pictures.”
“For the hundredth time, there was nothing terrible about the pictures. You got friendly with one of your competitors. He came to the restaurant where you worked. You met up at the library—it was like a study date for God’s sake!”
But it was more than that. So much more than that. And she could never tell Dustin. She couldn’t tell him about the other pictures on Josh’s phone, about how she’d trusted the guy, how she’d exposed herself, literally and emotionally. How she’d dared to spend the night, and the next one and the ones after that.
Bottom line: She made terrible decisions about men. She trusted them, gave her heart to them, and she ended up ruined in the end.
Because no one gave a damn about the amazing food she’d prepared for Who Wears the Apron. Her accomplishments had gotten buried in all the online gossip, all the news articles, all the restaurant-world chatter that had exploded the second Marjorie Cantor revealed that Josh and Ashley were—had been—a couple.
And it had taken less than a day for someone to dig into her past at Mid-Atlantic.
Martin Davies had kept his mouth shut, thank God for that. But her onetime classmates hadn’t been as circumspect. It seemed like everyone had an opinion about Ashley sleeping her way to academic success, a memory of how she’d coasted to an easy A, how she’d cheated the system by sleeping around.
It didn’t take long for people to extrapolate. They were claiming the entire Apron competition had been a publicity stunt for the Rockets. They said the show had been rigged from the beginning. Even without using the heavy-duty ammunition on his camera, Josh Cantor had reduced her to a slut, to just another girl who’d slept her way to success. Again.
Dustin spread another cracker with peanut butter and urged, “Shouldn’t you be working on your dessert for the final round?”
“I don’t care about the final round.”
“But Josh has four points on you. You need to win the dessert fair and square or he’ll end up with the restaurant at Rockets Field.”
“He should have it,” she said. “He’s the hot-shot baseball player.”
“Come on,” Dustin cajoled. “You can’t just give up now. What’s your dessert going to be?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll bake chocolate chip cookies. A pan of brownies. I just want to get this over with.”
Dustin set his knife on the counter with a jarring clang. “Okay,” he said. “I wasn’t going to say this, but you aren’t leaving me any choice. I’m giving notice at Mangia on Friday. I’m clearing my schedule to help you open up your restaurant at Rockets Field.”
“Don’t do that!” Her flash of alarm was the first real emotion she’d felt in a week.
“You know Throckmorton’s an ass. With you gone, that place is a worse pit every day.”
“You can’t quit! What if I don’t win? What if I can’t hire you?”
“Then I’ll be the most over-qualified guy who ever flipped a burger at McDonalds.”
Dustin stood up and twisted the lid onto the jar of peanut butter. “You’ve got to pull yourself together, Ash. I don’t know what went on between you and Cantor, and I don’t want to know. But you’ve got to put it behind you. You’ve got to figure out your dessert so you can win that damn contest.”
“I can’t do it,” she said.
“You can,” Dustin contradicted. He leaned down and kissed her forehead. “You will.”
She watched him cross the tiny kitchen and let himself out the front door of her apartment. But when she turned back to her empty stove, she was no closer to having any idea what she should make for Round Four.
~~~
Josh ignored the doorbell the fir
st time it rang. It was Saturday night, and he wasn’t expecting anyone. He tossed back another slug of Knob Creek and turned the pages of the stiff cookbook he’d picked up that afternoon.
Joy of Cooking. Not a hell of a lot of joy in his life right now. He’d read through every one of the dessert recipes before he’d broken out the whiskey. They weren’t looking any better with the amber liquid substantially lower in the bottle. Desserts were a pain in the ass. They weren’t the simple, straightforward, manly cooking of fire and smoke, like the barbecue he’d made without any input from Angel. With desserts, he was screwed.
The goddamn doorbell rang again. He should disconnect it. Rip out the wires. Leave ’em hanging. He poured himself another drink.
Baked Alaska. Maybe that would impress the judges. Right. It would melt under the studio lights, probably slide right off their plates. But what difference did it really make? It wasn’t like anything he could make would equal Ashley’s efforts. He’d eaten those tropical fruit bars she’d thrown together on a whim. He didn’t have a prayer of winning Who Wears the Apron.
Not a prayer of winning the contest. Not a prayer of getting Ashley to pick up her phone. Or answer his texts. Or ever say a single word to him, ever again. It was bad enough, his trying to reach her the first day, when all he’s wanted to do was apologize for giving Angel the pictures behind Ashley’s back. But now that the entire world had gone nuts about her time at Mid-Atlantic…
The goddamn doorbell rang again, and this time, he decided not to wait for whoever it was to get bored and leave. He grabbed his glass and lurched through the living room, flinging open the front door hard enough to make it crash into the wall.
And he glared down at his grandmother’s face. She stood on the front porch, huddled inside a down coat that made her look like a sparrow drowning in a navy snowbank. Her reddened fingers gripped the handles of a battered shopping bag, and her eyes were watering in the harsh December wind. Glancing at the driveway where Janice was huddled inside her minivan hunched over a paperback book, he sighed. “What are you doing here, Angel?”
“You didn’t come see me this morning.”
“I couldn’t. I had to find a recipe for the TV show.”
She held up her shopping bag. “That’s why I’m here. May I come in?”
He swallowed half a dozen curses and stepped back, letting her into the hallway. When he looked back out and waved a welcome toward Janice, the aide only shook her head and held up her book. He was on his own.
“Can I get you a drink?” he asked, heading toward the bar in the living room.
“It looks like you’ve had enough for both of us.” Angel’s eyes cut toward his glass. As she headed toward to the kitchen, she glanced at the coffee table in the living room. He watched her take in the magazines still lying on the floor from the weekend he’d spent with Ashley. Hell, the blanket was there too, bunched against the cushions. For once, the room looked like someone lived there, like it wasn’t a goddamn tomb. And Angel gave him a knowing glance, like she understood exactly what he’d been doing a week ago.
She was on her game today. Small mercies.
She sat down at the kitchen table, balancing primly on the edge of a chair. “I’ve come to apologize, boy. Janice explained that I got a little confused at the TV station. I said some things I shouldn’t have said.”
Do you think?
But what good would it do to light into her? She hadn’t acted out of malice. She’d been doing what she thought Bill Morton wanted, what she thought was best for Josh.
It was his own damn fault for playing along with her as long as he had, for giving her the photos in the first place. He took another slug of bourbon and rubbed his free hand down his face, from his forehead to his whiskered chin. “Water under the bridge, Angel. I’ll get over it.”
“Better do that quickly. You’re running out of time.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you love that girl, you need to go talk to her. Explain what happened. Tell her I didn’t know it was a secret when I showed those photos on TV. I didn’t know she’d care.”
“I’ve been trying, Angel. She’s not answering her phone, not responding to my texts.”
His grandmother shook her head, and the pity in her eyes made his stomach lurch. “I know one place she can’t avoid you.”
He’d already considered breaking into her apartment. “She’d have me arrested before I could change her mind.”
Angel laughed. “I’m talking about Who Wears the Apron. You still have the final episode to shoot. She has to show up at the studio, and you’ll be up there with her.”
“I don’t know, Angel. I don’t care if I win the competition any more.” As soon as he said the words, he knew they were true. A month ago, Who Wears the Apron had been the answer to his prayers; it had given him a chance to win the money he needed, the consultation, the restaurant space itself.
But who was he to run a real restaurant? An investment gig, sure. A tax deduction as part of his overall financial portfolio, yeah, he could do that. But he wasn’t a chef—he was a baseball player. If he’d learned anything from the constant stream of media attention in the past two weeks, he’d realized he would never make it through the first week of culinary school. He would never have the sheer ability that Ashley had. He wouldn’t have made it this far without the huge advantage of Angel’s recipes.
But Angel was staring at him now. It had taken a lot for her to come to him. She never got out of the house these days. She never showed the focus and determination she was directing at him now. She reached into the shopping bag and pulled out a familiar binder. Flipping open the leather cover, she pointed at the section labeled “Desserts.” “Here,” she said. “There are lots of good options.”
He had to look at the pages. Caramel cake. He remembered her baking one for him the night his parents announced they were moving to Texas, that he’d be staying behind to finish up school, living with Angel. The rich yellow cake, crumbling between slabs of sweet golden icing…
She turned to the next one. Coconut cake. She’d made one for his father’s wake, insisted on staying up half the night, even though she was in mourning herself, even though she was exhausted, as stunned as the rest of them by the car crash that had stolen her son. He could still taste the white cake, the vanilla icing, the sweet shaved coconut that yielded up its juice between his teeth.
Banana pudding with meringue. Pecan pie. Buttermilk chess pie. Lemon layer cake. They were all there, the flavors of his childhood, the memories laid out between the lines of his grandmother’s spidery handwriting.
She pushed the book across the counter to him. “Here. You’ve got time to practice before next week.”
He hunched his shoulders. “I don’t have anything to trade.”
“I was wrong, Josh. I thought pushing you toward that girl would make you happy.” She raised a hand to his cheek. “I only wanted what was best for you. And right now, what’s best is you choosing one of these recipes. Make the best damned dessert you’ve ever made in your life. Get back into that studio and talk to that girl. Make sure she knows you love her.”
Angel might be skating on the edge of dementia. She might have her good days and her bad days. But she was right about one thing—he did love Ashley.
He loved her determination, her absolute drive to get what she wanted. He loved her courage, showing up on his doorstep, giving every bit as good as she got. He loved her competence, her pure skill in the kitchen without the crutch of any recipe. He loved her attitude and her mind and her body—he loved her—and he wasn’t going to let her walk away without putting up a fight.
But first he had to ask Angel, “Why are you giving me these? What happened to Beau Dumont?”
“Beau Dumont? What would he want with a ratty old notebook like this?”
He looked at her, unable to tell if she was pulling his leg. Did she really not remember that she’d threatened to turn all her recipes over to the nursin
g home? Or was she telling him she’d changed her mind, that blood was thicker than water, that she’d be there for him the way she always had been?
Shit. It had to be the bourbon talking, making his eyes well up. The bourbon, or the fact that he hadn’t gotten more than three hours of sleep any night in the past week—he’d been tossing and turning and trying to breathe in the last of Ashley’s scent on his pillows.
Angel shook her head and pushed the recipe book toward him. “You. Read. But first go get Janice out of that car. She can help me make us some dinner, while you settle down and get to work.” It was the best offer he’d had in a week.
~~~
Ashley looked around the green room, realizing this was the last time she would ever stand there. The coffee maker still wheezed in the corner, filling the air with the stench of burnt java. The door to the hallway still stood open, showing a dozen people rushing back and forth, putting together this very special episode of Wake Up Wake County.
The room felt empty without the other contestants. The room felt empty without Josh.
She pushed her hand against her belly and reminded herself to breathe. What she really wanted to do was run her hands through her hair, but she was back in professional mode—had been for the past week. Her hair was pinned into its French twist, neat, careful, out of the way. She had to settle for wiping her palms against the chef’s whites she’d decided to wear for this final segment of Who Wears the Apron.
Marta poked her head through the door. “Ready, Ashley?” she asked, checking something off on her clipboard.
“Ready,” she answered, even though it felt like she was accepting a one-way trip to the gallows.
She walked down the hallway, just like she had so many times before. She blinked at the edge of the stage, willing her eyes to adjust to the bright lights. She waited until the producer called for a commercial break, and then she stepped into the arena.
Bill Morton was waiting for her, as courtly as ever. “Chef Harris!” he exclaimed, shaking her hand with his usual bonhomie. “We’re all looking forward to tasting your dessert.”