They paid at the cash register and walked out to their cars. Wyatt looked back at the old-timey neon GUS’S DONUTS sign. “I gotta remember this place. Bo would love it.”
“If you feed that child Krystal sliders and Gus’s for the same meal, I’ll report you to Stackpole myself,” Grace threatened.
“Hey,” Wyatt said. “Thanks for listening to me tonight.”
“You’re welcome,” Grace said, meaning it. “See you next week.”
“If Paula’s conscious. Do you think she’s really on drugs?”
“She’s definitely on something,” Grace said. “My mom would say she’s one ant short of a picnic.”
Wyatt laughed. “One brick shy of a load. I can’t believe I have to come up with three hundred dollars a session for this crap, on top of all the child support I’m paying Callie.”
“Do you think it would do any good to report her?” Grace asked, fumbling for her car keys.
“Report to who?” Wyatt asked. “Stackpole? I’ll mention what’s going on to Betsy, but I already know what she’ll say. ‘Shut up and turn up.’”
17
Grace sat cross-legged on her bed, her laptop balanced on her lap, tapping away at the keyboard.
Lately, I’ve gotten interested in the farm-to-table movement. Here on Florida’s Gulf Coast, where I live, there’s the tendency to think farms are all in the Midwest, or up north. But that’s not true. We have amazing small farms all around us. Citrus growers, of course, and small avocado groves, but once I started looking around, I was surprised to find honey producers, organic chicken and egg farmers, and even small family “row-crop” farms producing gorgeous lettuces, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, corn, and, of course, strawberries. In addition, we’re lucky here to have local seafood brought to port by fishermen who keep us supplied with fish, crabs, and shrimp caught right in the gulf and bay, and beef from the cattle farms that have been in the interior parts of this area since I was a little girl.
My mother’s generous friend Felipe brought us a bushel of white corn on Sunday. Picked that morning, it had the sweetest taste you can imagine. We feasted on it for dinner, but then I started thinking of new ways to combine it with other locally produced goodness, and I came up with this corn-crab chowder recipe. It utilizes the corn, plus sweet blue crabs, which are being harvested here right now, not to mention red bell peppers and jalapeño peppers, readily available anywhere. I hope you’ll try this at home, and let me know what you think.
She glanced over at the notes she’d scrawled in the kitchen earlier in the day. The corn-crab chowder really had been a triumph. She’d diced sweet yellow onions, jalapeños and red peppers, and some garlic, then sautéed them in bacon drippings in the cast-iron Dutch oven. Rochelle had grumbled about what a pain in the ass it was to cut all the corn off the cobs, but once she’d dumped them in the bacon drippings, along with diced tiny new potatoes and added chicken broth, the aroma wafting through the Sandbox kitchen had been irresistible. After the corn had simmered for twenty minutes or so, Grace had dumped in the crab. It was just back-fin crab, because Rochelle insisted you really didn’t need lump claw meat for a soup, and, although crab was in season, her supplier still charged her $6.99 a pound.
Half-and-half was carefully added to the corn and crab mixture, along with a generous sprinkling of Old Bay seasoning—at Rochelle’s insistence. As that simmered another five minutes, Grace diced up the crisp bacon she’d set aside from the pan drippings.
She’d gone outside to snip chives from the pots of herbs she’d started growing by the Sandbox front entrance, and when she reentered the kitchen, she caught her mother, standing over the stove, the Old Bay tin poised over the pot of chowder.
“Hey!” Grace protested, snatching the can from Rochelle’s hand.
“I was just adjusting the seasoning.” Rochelle dropped a wooden spoon into the big stainless steel sink.
“It doesn’t need any more adjustment,” Grace said, through gritted teeth. “Do you know how much salt is in that stuff? Not to mention the sodium in the bacon?”
“I don’t need to know. I just know you can’t make soup—especially soup with corn and crab, without a good douse of Old Bay,” Rochelle retorted. “I’ve been making soup for way longer than you’ve been alive, young lady, so don’t go lecturing me on salt. Or on cooking.”
Grace bit her lip. She wanted to remind her mother that she was already on medication for high blood pressure and that her doctor had been urging her to cut back on sodium. Instead, she began snipping the chives into a milk-glass custard cup. “If you want more Old Bay in your soup, you can keep the shaker by your bowl. But please don’t add it to the pot. Please?”
“Hmmph.” Rochelle began tossing dirty dishes into the sink, a sure sign that she was miffed.
Ignoring her mother’s tantrum, Grace found two old ice cream sundae glasses and placed each on a white plate. She started for the bar, to grab the sherry bottle, then, quietly, picked up the Old Bay can and took it with her. Just in case.
She turned the burner down to low and added a splash of sherry to the soup. Tasted, then added another splash.
A few minutes later, she made diagonal slices in the loaf of Cuban bread that had been delivered to the restaurant that morning, dribbled olive oil over the slices, and ran them under the broiler just long enough to toast them a light brown.
She placed a slice of bread on each plate, then dipped a ladle into the Dutch oven, carefully spooning the chowder into each sundae glass. A sprinkling of chives and diced bacon topped each glass.
Grace grabbed her camera and began snapping photos.
“Who serves crab chowder in a sundae glass?” Rochelle asked.
“I just like the way it looks,” Grace said, snapping away. “Eccentric.”
“Weird,” Rochelle muttered, watching from the sink. “Are we eating or shooting?”
“Eating,” Grace said, setting the camera down. “But if the finished product tastes as good as it looks, I think this will make a terrific blog post.”
She grabbed two blue and white striped dish towels from the stack on the stainless steel prep counter and draped them over her arm before picking up the soup dishes and pushing her way through the swinging door into the bar.
Grace unfolded the dish towels and spread them out as a placemat on the bar. She grabbed a couple of wineglasses, poured in some white wine, and stood back to look. Finally, she added a paper-thin slice of lemon to the side of each plate for a shot of color. Pleased with the effect, she went back for her camera and took a couple more exposures. “Let’s eat,” she called, over her shoulder.
Rochelle eyed the place settings at the bar. “Pretty fancy, just for Saturday lunch for the two of us.”
“You eat with your eyes, as well as your tastebuds, you know,” Grace said, refusing to let her mother bait her.
“Hmmph,” Rochelle said. But she dipped her spoon into the soup, tasted, and closed her eyes.
“Well?”
Rochelle took another bite of the soup. “Not bad. Not bad at all.” With a fingertip, she fished a small limp green fragment from her soup and held it up for Grace to see.
“What’s this?”
“Sorry,” Grace said. “It’s just a sprig of tarragon. I was supposed to remove it before I served the soup, but I got distracted. So … you really like it?”
“I do,” Rochelle said. She dipped a piece of toasted bread into the soup and chewed.
Grace ate slowly, pausing to make notes on her ever-present yellow legal pad. Next time, she thought, she might do cheese toasts to go along with the soup, maybe adding slivers of goat cheese to the bread before broiling. She pondered the soup’s consistency, finally deciding she’d need to add an immersion mixer to the kitchen equipment at the Sandbox, so that in the future she could puree part of the soup. Her own immersion mixer was back in the kitchen at the house on Sand Dollar Lane. Ben’s house.
When Rochelle finished her soup, she got up from her
seat, found a piece of chalk, and began writing on the blackboard on the wall by the cash register.
Today’s SPECIAL—CORN CRAB CHOWDER à la GRACE. $10.
“You really think the customers will like it?” Grace asked, secretly pleased. She’d been living with Rochelle for nearly two months, and it seemed like the first time she’d done something in the kitchen or the bar that Rochelle approved of. “And more importantly, that they’ll pay ten dollars for a bowl of soup?”
“They’ll lap it up,” Rochelle predicted. “We just won’t tell ’em how healthy it is. And if anybody gripes about the price, I’ll show ’em my bill from the seafood wholesale house.”
They’d had a busy evening. One of the local softball leagues was having a tournament, and word had apparently gone out that the Sandbox was the place to meet after the games.
The first batch of soup was gone by 7:00 P.M., and Grace made another gallon, using up all the crab in the big walk-in cooler. At 9:30, she had to tell Rochelle to “eighty-six” that night’s special.
A loud groan rose up in the bar as Rochelle crossed the special off on the blackboard.
They were both exhausted by the time Rochelle’s late-night shift, consisting of Almina, a young Latin woman, and her husband, Carlos, showed up to take over at 10:00.
While Rochelle showered in the apartment’s only bathroom, Grace settled down to write her blog post, referring to her notes and editing and refining the photos she’d shot earlier before uploading to her blog, accompanied by a list of local farms, complete with their links.
It was after midnight when she tapped the PUBLISH button. She viewed the blog in its final form and smiled. “Take that J’Aimee,” she muttered, right before padding off to take her own shower.
* * *
Sunday morning, Grace was still sleeping when she heard the cell phone on her nightstand ding softly, signaling an incoming message.
She sat up and yawned, looking out the window. It was barely daylight. But the message on her phone woke her in a hurry.
HAVE U SEEN YR OLD BLOG TODAY?
The text message on her phone was from ShadeeLadee, one of her earliest Gracenotes followers and another lifestyle blogger based in Miami. Over the years they’d met at various blogger meet-ups and gotten friendly, and, although ShadeeLadee had a real name, which was Claire King, Grace always just called her Shadee.
Grace clicked over to what she thought of as Faux Gracenotes, and swore. Loudly.
The photo was the exact one Grace had posted on her own blog, but with the headline Grab Some Crab.
Beneath it was Grace’s corn-crab chowder, which J’Aimee (or more likely Ben, Grace decided) had rechristened Crab-Corn Bisque. She’d cleverly changed the recipe in the slightest ways, calling for a sprig of rosemary instead of tarragon and decreasing the amount of half-and-half. But otherwise, it was Grace’s recipe. And it was definitely Grace’s photo.
“Oh, hell no!” Grace exclaimed. She scrolled down to see the number of comments J’Aimee’s post had garnered. There were seventy-six, and it was barely 7:30 A.M. on a Sunday, usually her slowest day for blog traffic.
She quickly typed in a comment of her own. “THIS RECIPE AND PHOTO WERE HIJACKED FROM TrueGrace.com. To see the original, much better, recipe, click over to here.” And she added a link to her own blog.
Most likely, Ben, whom she assumed was the blog’s administrator, would delete Grace’s comment and block her from trying to comment again, but Grace didn’t care.
She opened her own blog. Nothing. Her new banner was there, but the only thing beneath it was a vaguely worded link. She instinctively clicked on it, and immediately regretted it. The link took her to the vilest, most sickening display of pornography she could have imagined.
Grace stared at the screen in stunned silence. How? She didn’t have to ask who had done this, who’d not just erased her blog post, but sabotaged her entire blog. It was Ben, that she knew. She just didn’t know how.
How could he have infiltrated her blog? She had a new protected password; he couldn’t have accessed it, or could he?
Fuming, she left the blog and went to check her e-mail. Her in-box showed she had eighty-eight new messages.
She read the first one, from another lifestyle blogger, Shana, of Design or Die, and cringed.
Grace, what’s going on with you? Your blog has been hacked, and it’s not only got a porn link, it’s infecting anybody who opens it with a virus. Love ya, girl, but for the sake of my readers, I’m removing you from my blogroll until you get your act together.
The next e-mail was from Nathan Woods, an influential interior design blogger with nearly half a million followers. Grace had been on cloud nine the day Nate had e-mailed to tell her how much he loved her post “Window Treatments That Ought to be Outlawed,” which he’d privately called “Swags for Hags.” He’d done two cross-promotions with Grace that had gained her a slew of new followers, and had even given her invaluable business advice about which advertisers to avoid on her own blog.
Nathan’s e-mail was terse and to the point.
What the fuck is this??? It was followed by a link, which took her to an infamous online forum called SnarkSauce, where contributers posted venomous items about Internet celebrities.
I HATE NATE was the post’s headline.
Closet queen Nathan Woods’s tenuous hold on the title of “Biggest Boozer” has never been challenged, but recently the Manhattan-based designer and blogger was knocked down a rung when textile giant F. Shumacher & Company ended their five-year contract with Woods, whose lame-ass line of botanical-based fabrics never quite lived up to its early promise. Apparently the only person in the tightly knit New York design community who was surprised by the move was Woods himself. Insiders tell me Woods is also about to be asked to leave his post as contributing editor at Architectural Digest. Also? We hear Woods’s love interest, boy-about-town Marc Klein has moved out of Nate’s East Village love nest. Stay tuned y’all!
Although the posts on SnarkSauce were usually anonymous, the Nate item was signed. Grace from Gracenotes.
Her fingers flew over the keypad. “I never wrote any such thing. This is all Ben, my soon-to-be ex. You have to believe me, Nathan, I would never, ever write anything like this. Ben has hijacked my blog, and he’s sabotaging me every way he can. I don’t know why he’s decided to do this, but I’m going to get this post taken down, and make SnarkSauce print a retraction. I swear.”
A moment later, she saw that Nathan had replied. His message was succinct. “You are dead to me.”
Grace was devastated. She closed the laptop and put it on the floor, like a diseased thing, best avoided.
18
Grace stormed downstairs to find Rochelle sipping coffee at the bar. “I’m going to kill Ben, so help me. Right after I tear that little bitch J’Aimee limb from limb.”
“What’ve they done now?”
She poured a mug of coffee for herself and plopped onto the barstool next to her mother’s. “I spent hours yesterday making that crab soup, photographing it, editing, then writing and posting my blog. Hours!”
“So? If you’re still fishing for compliments, I’ll say it again. The soup was damned good.”
“The soup was amazing,” Grace cried. “And the photos were amazing. So amazing that Ben lifted the recipe, nearly word for word, and the photos, my photos, and put them on J’Aimee’s blog. And, somehow, he managed to erase my blog post. In its place, he put a link to the foulest, most degrading porn site on the planet. A site that, if you were to click the link, would give your computer a virus.”
“You’re sure it was Ben?” Rochelle asked.
“Who else? It had to be him. I can’t figure out how it’s possible, how he could figure out the password to the new blog, but somehow he did.”
Rochelle rolled her eyes. “What a slimy bastard. It’s a damned shame Ben wasn’t locked in the trunk of that car when you drove it into the pool.”
“And that’s not
all he did,” Grace said. “When he was done hijacking my blog post, he hopped all around the Internet, poisoning people against me. He left nasty comments on my friends’ blogs signed with my name, and he wrote this incredibly bitchy piece on SnarkSauce about Nathan Woods and signed my name to that, too.”
“Who’s Nathan Woods? And what’s SnarkSauce?” Rochelle asked. She could never keep all this Internet stuff straight.
“Oh, Mom, you’ve seen his show on Saturday mornings. He’s probably the best-known interior design blogger in the country. His blog has like, I don’t know, probably seven hundred thousand followers. He did a cross-promotion with me back in February, and my analytics took a crazy jump, just because of my exposure on his blog.”
“You still haven’t explained SnarkSauce,” Rochelle reminded her daughter.
“I don’t know if anybody can explain SnarkSauce. I guess you’d say it’s hater central for lifestyle bloggers. People post these vicious remarks about well-known bloggers. I never read it, but Ben always did. He thought it was hilarious. That’s how I know it must have been Ben that wrote that crap. Now Nathan is furious with me. He says I’m dead to him. And all my other blog buddies hate me, too, all because of Ben.”
Grace banged her head on the bar top. “Why me? Why?”
“Did you let these people know it wasn’t you that wrote the stuff? That it was Ben, trying to get even with you?”
“Of course! But I don’t think anybody believes me. People are dropping me from their blog rolls and defriending me on Facebook. At this rate, I won’t have a single friend in the business.” Grace jumped up and paced back and forth in front of the bar, close to tears.
“Grace?” Rochelle’s voice was stern. “Sit down and listen to me.” She caught her daughter by the elbow. “Sit.”
“What?” Grace knew she sounded like a spoiled brat, but she couldn’t help herself.
“Anybody who thinks that you would be capable of doing something like that doesn’t really know you. And if you tell them you didn’t do this stuff, and they still don’t believe you, well, screw ’em. They were never your real friends at all.”
Ladies' Night Page 14