by Doyle, Mae
Not exactly the most maternal woman ever, but if she could see me now, she’d be shocked.
I should know. I was shocked.
“Smells good,” Tiffany said, having scrubbed the oven until it shone. “And I got the meat juice off of the oven.”
“Can you call it something else? That’s just…gross.”
“Meat spray? Meat extract? Meat liquor?”
I rolled my eyes but didn’t look at her. The last thing I wanted to do was burn the meat. “You’re disgusting.”
“I know. And you’re browning meat.”
“I am, aren’t I?” Carefully, but like I knew what I was doing, I grabbed a plate and pulled the chunks of sizzling, browned meat out, before throwing in a bit more butter and more chunks. Things were going well.
After I got the meat browned, I turned off the stove and grabbed the recipe. It hadn’t escaped the meat juice debacle, and I had to hold it by one corner to keep from getting my fingers dirty.
“Ooh, it smudged some, right there,” Tiffany said, pointing at the recipe. “Can you still read it?”
“Of course, I can.” I wasn’t sure that I could. “I need to scrape the carrots, peel the potatoes, chop them into smaller chunks, dice the onion and cook it down, then add water and seasoning, thicken it with flour, and let it all simmer with the meat in it. Easy.”
“What can I do to help?”
I eyeballed my best friend. As much I loved having her around for moral support and to clean up the messes that I was going to make, the kitchen was a little small for both of us, and we only had one cutting board and knife.
“You can turn on some tunes,” I said. “And give me half a glass of wine.”
“That’s my girl.” She grabbed the wine and poured me a fresh glass, the liquid sloshing around the rim. “Well, it’s a bit more than half, but you can always stop when you’ve had enough.”
“Yes, I can.” I told her, taking the wine confidently in my hand. All I was missing now was an apron, and I’d look like I knew what I was doing. “Opera music, I think, please.”
“Opera? You’re not a real chef, you know,” she pointed out. “You can still listen to booty rap from the 80s if that’s what you want.”
She was right. “Yeah, that’s what I want,” I told her, grinning as she ran off to find the bluetooth speaker. Even though it was time for me to move on, I’d liked living with Tiffany. She knew me as well as I knew myself, and she had always been there for me.
But some things, like finishing this stew and making dessert, I need to do on my own.
In just a minute, rap was blaring through the townhouse, and I began washing the carrots and potatoes. The recipe didn’t say to do that, but I didn’t want any dirt in the stew. It was going to cost me a little time, but there wasn’t any way that would impress Dr. Marshall.
And, as much as I hated to admit it, I wanted to impress him. Part of me was scared to death that the caterer had backed out, but the other part of me was thrilled at the idea of cooking for a man as sexy as he was.
Not that he’d ever be able to know that I was the one who cooked for him. I was pretty sure that I’d lose my job if Linda found out that I couldn’t even hire a caterer without them backing out the day before I needed them.
Humming to myself, I scraped the carrots and peeled the potatoes, trying to chop them into even sized pieces. It was harder than it looked, but infinitely more easy than getting the onion chopped small enough.
The pieces kept slipping under my knife, which was probably too dull to chop easily, but I kept at it, and in under an hour, the ingredients had been transformed into things that looked like…well, like they belonged in a stew.
Turning the stove back on, I threw the onion in with some butter, then stirred the three pots, waiting for the magic moment that it would become translucent. I had a pretty good idea that this just meant that the onion was more clear than not, and I was smart.
I’d figure it out.
As soon as the onion started to change, I dumped in the potatoes and carrots, doing my best to evenly split them up between the three pots. “Oh, don’t stick,” I muttered, scraping at some onion that was beginning to brown more than turn translucent.
It came up with a little work, and I dumped some wine in to deglaze, as the recipe suggested, before adding water to the pots.
In went the meat, a bay leaf in each pot, and I grabbed lids to put them on to keep the moisture in while cooking, but hesitated. I knew that I needed to add spices, but that part of the recipe was smudged.
“Salt and pepper,” I reasoned, dumping in what seemed like a good amount. “And garlic.” I flipped through the bottles in the cupboard until I found some granulated garlic. It was a little clumpy, so I took off the lid and dug some out with a knife, dropping the hard balls into each pot.
There were still more spices listed, but I had no way of knowing what they were, and I was running out of options to add without having to go to the store. Poor Alexis had probably assumed that we had a fully stocked kitchen and wouldn’t need any spices for the meal. Even if I did have everything, I couldn’t read the recipe, but there wasn’t any way I was going to bother her to ask.
Just then, Tiffany popped her head into the kitchen. “Smells amazing! Everything going smoothly?”
“So smoothly. Just adding the…” I squinted at the recipe, trying to make out the spice. It was a longer word than some of the others on the list. “Cinnamon.”
“Cinnamon? You sure?”
No, not at all, but I nodded anyway. “Definitely. Adds a bit of warm spice to the stew. And it will tie in with the pumpkin theme.”
She opened her mouth like she was going to argue, but then clapped it shut again, giving me a nod. “Well, it sounds like you have everything under control, so I’m going to go finish up this contract for a client, okay? But call me if you need me.”
Flashing her a grin, I shot her double thumbs up. “All good, no worries.”
She left the kitchen and I sagged against the counter. Cinnamon? What was I thinking? I hefted the little bottle in my hand. If it was just for me, I’d add some hot sauce or jalapeños, but didn’t think that that would go over well.
No, the stew needed something, but not something so spicy that people would complain. Nodding to myself, I unscrewed the lid and tilted the jar over the biggest pot. Just a little dash and I was sure that it would add enough depth of flavor, enough spice, enough…something to make Dr. Marshall swoon.
The cinnamon was stuck. “Come out, you,” I said, giving the jar a little shake.
In slow motion, as terrifying as if I were watching a horror movie, the entire cylinder of cinnamon started to slide. Panicking, I tilted the jar up, hoping to stop the cinnamon from slipping out, but it moved faster than I did, exiting the bottle with a soft whoosh and plopping right into the bubbling stew.
I froze.
“No,” I whispered, then grabbed the wooden spoon to try to fish it out. It had fallen out of the jar like a solid, and all I could do was hope that it was stuck together enough for me to fish it out in one piece.
But as soon as I touched it with the tip of the spoon, it broke apart, floating on the surface of the stew for just a moment before the bubbles broke and pulled the cinnamon under.
“No, no, no, no,” I said, digging the spoon into the stew. “How can you dissolve so quickly? You were practically a solid! Nothing dissolves that fast!”
A cold panic broke out on my body and I stood with horror, watching the bubbling stew.
It no longer smelled like stew. It smelled like a Christmas cookie soup.
Closing my eyes, I counted to ten, then counted backwards. That was a trick that my therapist had taught me when I was younger to try to calm down, and it hadn’t ever failed me in the past.
“You okay?” Tiffany’s voice broke through my counting and I started over.
I was on a cloud. I was at the beach. I wasn’t standing in her tiny kitchen having just messed
up what was possibly, probably, definitely the most important stew of my life. Nothing was wrong.
“I’m fine!” I called back.
I lied.
Chapter 7
After the great cinnamon stew debacle of the night before, I’d not only sat on the floor to cry, cried in the shower while the stew simmered away happily on the stove, making the townhouse smell more and more like a Christmas candy factory, but also cried while making pumpkin mousse.
It was fine.
It was all going to be fine.
The mousse was in the fridge, staying nice and chilly, although I could have put it outside on the sidewalk and it would have been just as cold, the stew was heating in three company crockpots that Linda had begrudgingly pulled out for me, bread was in a giant basket that Tiffany had had stored, quite inexplicably, under her bed, and I was putting out mini pumpkins.
God bless Tiffany and her handwriting and for the fact that the luncheon was, so far, phallus free. I made no promises for what would happen when Dr. Marshall tasted my stew, but I was hoping that he’d be more inclined to take me home and ravish me than fire me.
No, I hadn’t tasted it. I wouldn’t have known how to fix it, anyway, and I could tell just by sniffing it that it was…well, unique. Different. And different isn’t always good, especially at a place like Marshall Medical.
“Are there any pumpkins left at the farmer’s market?” Linda’s sniff after she asked the question made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, but I plastered a bright smile on my face before turning around to greet her.
“I think so, and I’d be happy to call and have them put some aside for you,” I said brightly. “Are you ready for the luncheon, Linda?”
She was wearing a beige dress that hung down to her ankles. It looked like she’d wrapped herself in burlap and thrown on a pair of pinching heels to make the outfit even more painful.
I’d gone for something fall related so that I matched the luncheon. My skirt was a warm orange wool and I had brown tights and a brown sweater on. My hair had dulled a little after washing it only twice, which is what I got for going with the discount red dye.
Tiffany had taken one look at me and told me that I looked like a pile of fall leaves, to which I said that I didn’t mind if Dr. Marshall wanted to take a flying leap on me, and she’d just swatted me before leaving for work.
Now, though I couldn’t get the mental image out of my mind, but I needed to shake it, and fast, so I didn’t drool all over him when his guests were here.
Well, guests was a strong word. They were investors who had more money than sense and were apparently helping to fund some of the more experimental work that the good doctor was doing.
Not only was he known for being the best at performing facial reconstruction surgery for people with birth defects or those injured in an accident, but he was also working on a little pet project.
These donors loved the idea of streamlining cleft palate surgery so that he could spend less time abroad while still helping as many people as possible. The specifics of it all were lost on me, but I knew that it was a big enough deal for them to want to get together with him regularly to hear about how his work was coming.
I just happened to be lucky enough to start work right before the next luncheon, so it all fell on my super inexperienced shoulders.
“I will not be at the luncheon,” she said, like it was something that she’d told me a hundred times before, even though she definitely hadn’t. “Someone has to make sure that this place doesn’t just fall apart, you know.”
Honestly, I didn’t know how much falling apart the place could do, since Dr. Marshall seemed to have it all running like a Swiss watch, but I could be wrong. After all, I was relegated to the back hall office and didn’t get to see people.
I knew they came and went, though. Sometimes when I was bored I went into my little hall and did squats and lunges just to keep awake, and sometimes I just happened to lean my ear up against the door and I could hear people talking to Linda.
Once, I even thought that I heard her laugh, but I couldn’t be sure. It was like when people claim to have seen Bigfoot or a chupacabra. Until I laid eyes on it myself, I wasn’t going to believe it.
“Well, you’re doing a good job,” I told her, turning back to my pumpkins. I’d placed out all of the ones with names on them according to the seating chart that had been in my notebook and was trying to scatter the other pumpkins down the middle of the table without making it look like I had robbed a pumpkin truck and was setting up shop in the office.
For a moment, I considered stacking them like Tiffany had suggested, but they kept tipping over, so I grabbed an armful of them to carry to the food table.
The stew smelled amazing, and I had all of the bowls and silverware out for the guests to come and serve themselves. I’d pulled the bread out of the oven at exactly 37 minutes, according to the recipe, and it looked…well, like someone else made it, which was the best I could ask for.
Tiffany and I debated long and hard this morning over bowls of cookie cereal whether or not the catering company staff was supposed to serve at the luncheon, but we decided that they wouldn’t.
I’d be here to make sure that the lunch got started, then disappear until it was time to bring the mousse out from the fridge. The crumble topping didn’t have any cinnamon, since it was all in the stew, and it was a bit chewier rather than crunchy, but I thought that it would work.
It would all be fine, and then next time, I’d make sure that we had a real caterer doing all of the work.
“This looks nice.” The voice came from behind me and I missed a step, tripping on an invisible speck of dirt on the floor. I had too many pumpkins in my arms, and then all tipped forward, falling to the floor and rolling off in every imaginable direction.
The solid thunks they made as they hit the tile floor made me wince, but luckily for me, none of them cracked open.
I whipped around, my hair getting caught for a moment in my lip gloss, but even before I pushed it out of my face, I knew who was behind me.
There wasn’t any other man on this earth who sounded like the angels themselves when he spoke. I’d never had such a physical reaction to a man before. My stomach muscles clenched and I thought very briefly about whether or not it would be worth losing my job for the chance to accidentally fall into him and try to land on his lips with my lips.
Pretty sure that sexual harassment in the workplace went both ways.
“Dr. Marshall, hi. I’m glad you like it.”
I’m glad you like it?
I sounded like a little kid showing off a glued macaroni art project to an over-tired parent. What I should have said was I-busted-my-ass-working-on-this-for-you-all-night-and-this-morning-so-you-better-like-it-you-gorgeous-man.
I mean, really? A doctor, a model, and a kind person who travels around the world performing free medical miracles? He was like that elusive little spot in a Venn diagram of the guy you want to date.
I gasped to myself. He is my own personal Bigfoot. And he exists!
“Please, call me Nick. Unless I’m operating on you of course.” He flashed me a grin and I felt my knees go weak, then I remembered the pumpkins on the floor.
“Okay. Nick.” I said, rolling his name around in my mouth. It felt good. I could get used to saying it, but then I realized that I was still staring at him. He probably thought that I was having a stroke or something, so I pointed around at the pumpkins. “I gotta pick these up, okay?”
Now I was asking his permission for picking up pumpkins? My face flamed red and I turned away from him, squatting down to grab the first two by my feet. The last thing I wanted to do was wave my butt in his face and have him get the wrong idea about me.
“I’ll help.” To my surprise, he squatted down next to me and grabbed pumpkins as fast as he could before standing up and stacking them on the table by the stew. “There you go,” he said. “Oh, and I’m sorry about yesterday. Things were falling
through with a trip I wanted to take, which is stressful. When you know that you have people depending on you, you want to do right by them.”
My heart soared. So he wasn’t a jerk? He was just dealing with some things out of his control? Mentally, I moved him from the file labeled Curmudgeon into the one I had labeled Hot and Kind. So far, he was the only one in that file, which made him a bit of a unicorn.
“Yeah, no problem,” I said. “I was a bit flustered too, first day and all.”
“Well, you seem to have a done a good job in here. But where is the caterer?” As friendly as he had just been, it was obvious that there were a few things he didn’t like. So far, I just had one concrete one to add to my list.
1. People who didn’t do what they were supposed to
2. Liars (I didn’t know this one for sure, but I had a pretty good feeling that I could just go ahead and slap it on the list.)
My heart sank. “The caterer?”
He nodded. “Yes, they normally come and serve the food, but I don’t see anyone here. Who did you use?”
Panic.
It started in my toes, a cold feeling that was like stepping into a pool when it’s not warm enough out to go swimming. I felt goosebumps break out all over my body, but I knew that I didn’t have much of a choice of what I was going to do.
I could tell him the truth, but I honestly didn’t see how that would pan out other than me being told to clean out my office and hit the road, and there wasn’t a chance in the world that was going to happen.
Not after all the hard work I put into this lunch.
Not after how excited Tiffany had gotten knowing that I wasn’t going to be crashing on her sofa for much longer.
No, even though I knew that what I was going to do went against everything that my grandmother had ever taught me, I didn’t have a choice.