by Dana Bate
CHAPTER 27
I am wearing boxers. Not just any boxers: Jeremy’s boxers. Jeremy’s red boxers with bright yellow chickens, which are now rolled up around my waist, beneath my skimpy camisole. I’m not sure how I could look any worse or if that’s even possible. Maybe if I’d chosen the turtles? No. The chickens are worse. Probably the worst of the three. But I’m not changing now. I don’t want to seem like I’m trying too hard, as if that’s even an option when I am wearing a grown man’s underwear.
I take a deep breath before opening the bedroom door and heading back into the living room, where the ambiance has undergone a noticeable transformation. The room is still a sweltering eighty-some degrees, but Jeremy has dimmed the lights and lit a few candles on the small, square table behind the breakfast bar. The table is set for two, with two tulip-shaped glasses filled with mahogany-colored beer, each topped with a thick crown of white foam. The apartment smells of sesame, eggs, and yeasty beer all at once.
Jeremy puts the finishing touches on our dinner, taking care to keep everything as far away from the brewing beer as possible. He moves quickly, sliding a fried egg on top of each dish and scattering some sort of garnish over the top. Then he carries the bowls, one in each hand, to the table.
“Bon appétit,” he says as he places a bowl in front of me.
Steam rises from the surface, smelling of soy and ginger and hot peppers. A fried egg sits atop the slices of braised pork, the golden yolk loose and glistening in the light of the candles. A thick layer of white rice covers the bottom of the bowl, sopping up the rich, porky juices.
“So what exactly is this? Bibimbap?”
“Similar. It’s a riff on a Japanese dish—donburi. Meat and an egg with rice.”
“Sounds delicious.”
“I thought it would go well with the beer. Speaking of which, tell me what you think of the red ale.”
I take a whiff before swallowing a large gulp. The beer smacks of sourness but with a fruity kick, reminiscent of raisins or plums. “It’s good,” I say. “Fruity.”
“I added some prunes during the fermentation. It just about works.”
I rest my beer on the table and tuck into my meal, poking the egg so that the gooey yolk bursts and trickles down into the rice. “When did you get into homebrewing?”
“A few years back. I was always into beer and science—I almost majored in chemistry in college—and I’d always wanted to try my hand at homebrewing. And then a few years ago I had a lot of time on my hands due to some . . . career changes, so I decided to join a local brew club and give it a whirl.”
I push the rice around my bowl with the tines of my fork. “Can we talk about that now? Those ‘career changes’?”
He takes a long sip of beer and then places the glass back on the table and sighs. “Sure. What do you want to know?”
“Well . . . what happened, exactly?”
“You’ve read the articles, right? You’ve seen Wikipedia? That’s pretty much it. A PR company paid me for columns I wrote, and the Chronicle found out and fired me.”
“Yeah, but . . . what really happened?”
“That is what really happened.”
“But why did you do it?”
He swirls his tulip glass around by the base. “I was broke, and almost all of my Chronicle salary was going toward my student loans. It seemed like a good way to make a few extra bucks.”
“But you were basically selling your opinion.”
“I never wrote anything I didn’t actually believe. All of those reviews, whether they were of a product or a place, were my honest opinions.”
“It isn’t honest if you’re effectively being paid by the subject of your review—and if you didn’t tell your employer about it. You had to know the Chronicle wouldn’t be okay with that.”
He picks at his pork. “I should have. But I was twenty-five and needed the cash, and at the time it didn’t seem like the end of the world. I wasn’t hurting anyone. I wasn’t writing lies.”
I rub my fingers around the edge of my glass and look into his eyes. “Did you know, at least on some level, that what you were doing was wrong?”
He tears his eyes away and shovels a forkful of pork and rice into his mouth. “Yeah, but it’s . . . At first, it was just one piece. A little story on Pizz-o-rama’s national rollout of their new gluten-free pizza crust. My mom has celiac, so I’m always looking for new products for her, and the crust was really good. I figured, what the hell? What was the big deal in getting paid extra for something I’d write anyway? But once I wrote that one piece, my PR contact kept sending me new pitches, and with all the bills and debt I had piling up, it got really hard to say no. It’s not that I thought what I was doing was right, but at the time I didn’t necessarily think it was wrong either.”
“And what do you think now?”
He drops his fork on the table. “That I made a mistake, okay? A bunch of mistakes. And it used to be that if you made a mistake, you’d have a second chance. You could wipe the slate clean. Some people would forgive you, others would forget, and you could move on. But that isn’t true anymore. The Internet isn’t written in pencil. It’s written in ink, and now no matter what I do, no matter what I achieve, I will always be the sleazebag who got fired from the Chronicle. Forever.”
I glance down at my bowl. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too. I’ve done a lot of good work since I left the Chronicle. I did a lot of good work at the Chronicle. But it’s like my whole identity is caught in an Internet trap—a time capsule of a fraction of the work I’ve done my entire life.”
I think about what an Internet snapshot of my life would look like. In first grade, I would have been the space-crazed introvert. In high school, the food columnist glued to her boyfriend’s side. In college, the driven broadcaster. And a snapshot taken today would be different than any of those three. But does that make any of those prior snapshots less true? Aren’t all of those moments a part of who I am today?
Jeremy shovels another forkful of pork, egg, and rice into his mouth and washes it down with a long sip of beer. His movements are sharper now, brimming with frustration. It isn’t clear whether he is annoyed with me for bringing this up or with himself for what he did, or a combination of both. But whatever the reason, he is irritated, and to my surprise, I feel worse about having possibly contributed to his mood than I do about being on a date with food journalism’s persona non grata.
I glance down at my watch. “About two hours into date number three, and I’ve already ruined it, huh?”
He smirks. “I wouldn’t say that. . . .”
“I just . . . I had to ask about it. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“It’s okay. The subject was bound to come up eventually. Better to get it out of the way now.”
He polishes off the rest of his beer, and, in the silence that follows, I load my fork with a heap of pork, peppers, and rice. “So what’s it like now, working on the other side?”
He shrugs. “Took a while for me to get used to pitching ideas rather than being pitched, but I caught on pretty fast. Frankly, I was happy anyone would hire me after what happened.”
“Do you like working in PR?”
“Most days. But lately . . .” He trails off.
“Lately what?”
He shakes his head. “Nah, it’s nothing.”
“No, what? You can tell me.”
“One of my projects is sort of stressing me out, that’s all.”
“The Green Grocers deal?”
He fixes his eyes on mine. “Yeah, how did you know?”
“You mentioned on the phone that you’d been working on the farmers’ market partnership.”
He lets out his breath. “Oh, right. I forgot.”
“What’s going on? Is the deal not going through?”
“Oh, no, it isn’t that. It’s . . .” He bites his lip. “Never mind. I shouldn’t talk about it.”
“Listen, if something is bothering you,
you can tell me.”
He rubs his temples and leans back in his chair. “Okay, but this is just between you and me, got it?”
“Sure.”
He leans forward again and rests his elbows on the table. “So I’m working on the rollout of this pilot project, which is going to be a pretty big deal, and we’re helping the company plan a big launch campaign. Since I’m the company’s point person, Green Grocers sent me a bunch of documents to help with the launch, but someone obviously didn’t scrub the correspondence too closely because I’ve definitely seen something I shouldn’t have.”
I lean forward, suddenly alert. “Something . . . like what?”
He rubs his eyes with his palms. “Apparently before Bob Young became CEO, when he was the chief operating officer, he found out one of the suppliers for Green Grocers’ private label was using horse meat instead of beef in their frozen meals. But instead of going public, he just sort of . . . swept it under the rug.”
“Wait. Green Grocers’ ‘organic beef bourguignon’ is actually ‘horse bourguignon’?”
“Not anymore. At least I don’t think so. But it was for a period of time.”
“How is that even possible? I thought horses weren’t slaughtered in the US.”
“They aren’t. But they are in China and Mexico, and that’s where these frozen meals were made.”
“But . . . Green Grocers is all about ‘local.’ That doesn’t sound very local.”
“Another reason this is really bad.” He grabs his beer and takes another sip. “I went to my boss to ask how I should handle this, but he basically told me to keep my mouth shut because it isn’t my business. Our job is to focus on the launch of this new initiative, and we shouldn’t do anything that would scupper or detract from the launch.” He sips his beer. “The whole thing is really stressing me out. If I say anything, I could lose my job, but keeping this a secret—it just seems wrong.”
My ears are burning. “So . . . what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. Probably nothing. I’d love to say something, but I don’t think anyone will ever hire me again if I get fired from another job.”
“But this time it would be for a good cause.”
“I guess.” He lets out a long sigh. “Anyway, I don’t really want to talk about it anymore, if that’s okay. I shouldn’t have told you in the first place.”
“Sure. I understand.”
And I do understand. But as we finish our meal and make our beer and start kissing each other passionately, there is only one thing on my mind:
I just landed the scoop of a lifetime.
CHAPTER 28
This is huge. The new CEO of one of the biggest grocery chains in America, the guy everyone thinks is an Earth-loving, local foods guru, knew his company was selling horse meat instead of beef—produced abroad, no less—and, instead of owning up to it, covered the whole thing up. This isn’t a one-off column for some experimental food blog. This is the sort of story that could make a career.
I spend the night at Jeremy’s apartment, but the entire time I am preoccupied with what Jeremy has told me. Even as I lie in his bed, our bodies twisted together, all I can think is, “I need to call Stu Abbott. I have to tell him about this story.” This, I will admit, is kind of a problem because (a) I am now sleeping with my source, and (b) Jeremy shared this information in confidence.
But here’s the thing: Jeremy knows I’m a journalist. He knows I’m working for Stu Abbott. And he is obviously very uncomfortable with what Bob Young has done. Subconsciously, he probably wants this story to come out. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have told me. Right?
The wheels in my head spin wildly all night, as I watch the digital clock on Jeremy’s nightstand and wonder how early I could reasonably call Stu Abbott on a Sunday morning. I have to be at the Dupont farmers’ market at seven. That’s probably too early. Unless he is a morning person? No, I’d better wait until at least eight. Or maybe I will text him. Yes, that’s what I’ll do: I’ll text him on my way to the market, and then he can call me when he gets up. Which, if I’m lucky, will be soon.
I roll out of Jeremy’s bed at just after six thirty and sift through the pile of clothes on the floor, casting aside the Han Solo T-shirt and chicken print boxers. The bed creaks as Jeremy rolls over.
“Come back to bed,” he croaks, his voice scratchy with sleep.
“No can do. I have to work at the market this morning.”
“Oh, right. I forgot.” He yawns. “Couldn’t you skip this morning? I could make us breakfast in bed.”
I consider this, the idea of Jeremy and me curled up in bed together, him feeding me toast, me feeding him bacon. Instead of bristling at the idea, like I might have done a few weeks ago, I find myself comforted by it. I like him. I can’t deny it. He might have made some pretty bad decisions in his past, but he thinks Bob Young’s cover-up was wrong, so his moral compass isn’t completely out of whack. If I write up this story and credit him as the whistle-blower, maybe I could even redeem him. At the very least, I can redeem myself for letting Zach talk me out of covering a similarly juicy story in college, something I’ve always regretted.
“So? How about it?” he says.
“Not this morning.” I creep over to his side of the bed and kiss his forehead. “But maybe another time.”
“Your loss,” he says. “I make a pretty mean eggs Benedict.”
“Or so you say.”
“Hey, did you or did you not enjoy that donburi? And what about those cannoli?”
“Not bad for a beer nerd.”
“Not bad? Oh, you’re in for it now.” He grabs me and tosses me onto his bed, rolling on top of me and pinning me down as I squeal. “Wait . . . Are you . . . ticklish?”
He wiggles his fingers beneath my arm, and I wriggle and shriek with laughter. “Stop—stop!”
He lets go and rolls off me. “Okay, okay—I don’t want the neighbors to get the wrong idea.” He grins. “Though my guess is, if they heard you last night, they know everything is fine.”
I elbow him. “They didn’t hear anything.”
“I don’t know. . . . There was a lot of moaning. . . .”
I elbow him again. “You’re the worst, you know that?”
“That’s not what you said last night. . . .”
I throw a pillow in his face and hop out of bed. “All right, I’m out of here. I have muffins to sell.”
“Okay, okay. But I’ll see you later this week?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure you’ve earned a fourth date.”
“Oh, really?”
“Really.”
“So this is it. The end of you and me. Sayonara.”
I shrug. “Might be.”
But as he smiles at me and I smile back, we both know, with absolute certainty, that nothing could be further from the truth.
In an entirely unexpected turn of events, Rick is in a frighteningly jolly mood when I arrive at the market. I say frightening because this is Rick the Prick, whose curmudgeonly ways I have come to expect and tolerate. Seeing him smile, with those yellowing teeth and that pervy grin, is enough to make my stomach turn over. Toss in a few inappropriate epithets and a bit of over-animated whistling, and I am thoroughly uncomfortable.
Thankfully, Heidi arrives only three minutes after I do, so I don’t have to deal with Rick’s friendliness for very long.
“Dude, what’s up with the boss today?” she says as Rick sneaks behind the truck for a cigarette break. She tosses her canvas tote beneath one of the tables.
“No idea. But I want no part of it.”
“And here we thought we’d like him better if he weren’t such a Grumpy Gus.”
“Who knew?”
She laughs and grabs for an empty basket. “So Drew says he hasn’t heard from you in a while. I thought you had fun at coffee the other weekend.”
“I did. It was fine.”
“Fine isn’t a ringing endorsement.”
“He’s jus
t . . . I don’t know.”
“Gorgeous?”
“I was going to say bland.”
“The guy is, like, saving the wilderness. How is that bland?”
“Do you want to talk about the short-tailed albatross for two hours?”
She snorts. “I don’t know. Is Drew naked while this is happening?”
I knock her playfully in the shoulder. “You are ridiculous.”
“Whatever. At least he is trying to improve the world, unlike your other gentleman caller. . . .”
“Here we go again.” I unload a crate of molasses cookies, their puffy tops sparkling with glittery turbinado sugar. “For your information, Jeremy Brauer is a decent guy.”
“Says you.”
“Yes, says me.”
“So he didn’t do all those things we read about online?”
“No, he did. But he’s sorry.”
“Aren’t they all?” Heidi purses her lips as she arranges a stack of fudgy brownies on a white porcelain cake stand. “What makes you think he’s changed? How can you trust him?”
“Because he’s told me things that show he isn’t morally bankrupt.”
“Like what?”
I break off a piece of cookie and, when I’m sure Rick isn’t looking, pop it in my mouth, every chewy morsel laced with a sweet, burnt-sugar flavor. “I can’t say.”
“Oh, you can’t say.” She dusts off her hands. “Well, perhaps someday you can enlighten me. Until then, I stand by my warning: Stay away.”
“Trust me—in a few weeks, everything will be a lot clearer.”
“And why is that?” She waits for me to respond, but when I don’t she grins. “Let me guess: You can’t say.”
And though I’m dying to tell her, to let her in on this massive secret that could upend an entire company, I know I can’t. Not yet. So instead, I simply nod and say, “No. But I will soon. I promise.”
During a lull in the market foot traffic, Rick shares the reason behind his uncharacteristically good mood.
“Hey, sugar tits, guess what? Looks like Green Grocers is going to take a massive order for my sourdough.” He arranges a stack of twenties in the cashbox. “They want it in all their mid-Atlantic stores.”