Waitstaff kept track and managed to find their diners, deliver the correct dish and barter dishes with one another so all the dishes for one table were served at the same time—even if two people at the table had been seated somewhere else when dinner began.
None of the diners noticed, of course. Which was how it should be. A restaurant should run smoothly, with all bumps and burps covered by the competency of the staff. The diner’s job was to enjoy the food and drink.
And they were doing their job just fine. Plates came back to the kitchen all but licked clean. Steve passed on every compliment about the food, which meant he passed on a lot of compliments.
No sign of her saboteur. Babka was closed to the public. He or she wouldn’t strike tonight.
* * *
DAN WAS FEELING more relaxed. One surprisingly earthy and spicy cocktail—some beet and ginger ale combination Candace had mixed up—and a refreshing pilsner that cut the richness of his braised chicken dish was all it took for him to stop worrying that one of the guests would make a crack about the gossip column. Well, he corrected himself, two drinks and the fact that no one had done it yet.
If someone was going to ask Tilly about their supposed sexual escapades on the bar, they would have done it before everyone sat down to eat. Now, with Tilly’s delicious food in front of them, everyone was too busy eating to worry about talking to anyone not sitting next to them. With the sounds of flatware scraping across plates echoing through the restaurant, many people weren’t bothering to talk.
He was miserable. She was so close and, when she passed him by after the entrées were served, he couldn’t even reach his hand out to touch her.
Steve collected empty plates and another staff member brought around coffee cups, French presses and coffee timers for the tables. Dessert would be coming out soon; they would eat and leave. After the dinner, he would say goodbye to his sister and try to talk to Tilly. Dreams of her welcoming him into Babka with open arms were shot. His current prayer involved her letting him stay long enough to talk with him and build a foundation for forgiveness.
Don’t lie to yourself, Danny. You hope she invites you back to her place; you’re just not stupid enough to believe she actually will.
He took a cookie from his plate and used his spoon to nudge some of the crumbly farmer’s cheese and coral apricot compote onto it. As usual, Tilly’s food was exquisite. Part of her culinary magic was her ability to take the humblest ingredients and infuse them with family and history. The cheese tasted of fresh spring grasses and the apricots of the summer sun. Together with his crumbly butter cookie, they tasted like a perfect summer’s day spent outside on a picnic blanket with the sun on your feet and the shade from an old oak tree over your head. Maybe there were some kids playing Red Rover and butterflies dancing in the flowers. The bees buzzed, but didn’t intrude. A simple summer day that existed in paintings, but never in real life.
She had to forgive him. For all the attraction her body held for his, more than anything Dan wanted to be a part of the passion that created her food. He wanted to know the history of every dish she had learned from her grandmother—Babunia, he corrected—and to be a part of the future she imagined when she tweaked a dish to make it her own. When she stood in the kitchen, rolling out pierogi dough with her children, he wanted those children to be his.
“Dan.” His sister leaned into him, her plate of chocolate cheesecake scraped clean. “When you said the food was good, I had no idea.”
“Most people don’t,” he replied. Not a single plate on the table had food left on it. Even the woman across from him who had been “appalled when Michelle said we were eating at a Polish restaurant, she knows I’m on a strict diet” had eaten every last crumb of her babka.
“It makes what I wrote even worse. I was wrong about so many things. I have to hope time does heal all wounds.”
“You marry your blue-haired chef and every person in our family will gain twenty pounds. I might gain thirty,” Beth said with a mournful glance at her empty plate.
“Mom could use it. She looks more and more like a skeleton every day.”
“I’m not certain she would eat Polish food again. Dad hasn’t let her last experience here go.” They shared raised eyebrows about their parents and their father’s disrespect for his own wife’s feelings. “Seriously, Dan, I like Tilly. I would like her because you like her, but her food is delicious and one night in her restaurant has told me enough about her work ethic that I have a healthy respect for her.”
“No pressure, though, right, Beth?”
“Don’t scowl at me. I’m not the one who screwed up. If you’d done the right thing the first time you came here, you probably would have written a glowing review and gotten the girl.”
“Meiers don’t make mistakes. Meiers make cheese.” He didn’t believe the stupid family saying anymore. He probably never had, but he said it out of habit. The lie was comforting, especially as he confronted the biggest mistake of his life.
Beth rolled her eyes. “Meiers make both mistakes and cheese. Good on ya for being man enough to admit it.”
Dan knew the instant Tilly walked into the dining room. His body felt her trajectory through the tables until she stopped at the table next to him. “How was everything?” she asked the father of the groom.
“Great,” the man replied with the enthusiasm of someone who’d given up drinking beer and had settled for doing a taste test of Tilly’s excellent selection of Polish wódka. “But I expected a butter, uh, better, a better show.”
“Bill...” His wife had grasped his dress shirt. “We’re here to celebrate the upcoming wedding, remember?”
Tilly gave a smile Dan recognized as the one waitresses around the world gave drunken men acting weird, but not yet completely crazy. “It is a happy occasion...”
“No one can tell he screwed you,” the father of the groom said in a voice only an inebriated fool would think was a whisper.
“Bill!”
“It’s fine, Margaret.” The drunk pried his wife’s fingers off his shirt, the wrinkles left clinging to his sleeve evidence it wasn’t fine. “The lovely chef is profess...a prosess, a professional. She knows how to handle her private life on a blog.”
“Shut up, Dad,” the groom said as his mom again tried to silence her husband.
“Is he talking about...?” Beth asked.
Dan got up from his table and slid into a chair. “Bill, congratulations on your son’s marriage. He is a lucky man.”
His decision to intervene was a mistake. For the first time that night, Tilly looked directly at him, her brown eyes disgusted by what they thought they saw. “Do you know what he’s talking about?”
The goddamned drunk wouldn’t be distracted by his son’s happiness—or his wife’s increasingly fervent urgings to be quiet. “I thought this guy—” the drunk jammed his thumb in Dan’s shoulder “—was the one who spilled details of your hush-hush relationship, but maybe it was you. Good publicity. Good strategy.” His nods looked more like a headbanger at a rock concert than indications of approval. Watching him gave Dan a headache.
Or maybe it was the dawning sense of understanding in Tilly’s eyes that was giving him a headache. “Did you write another blog post?”
“It wasn’t me.” His protestations were as useful as a cheap handheld fan trying to blow a tornado in the other direction.
“Strange, but I don’t believe you’re as innocent as you’re trying to look.”
“Tilly, would you listen to me for a minute?”
* * *
WHAT WAS SHE GOING to listen to? How he hadn’t gotten enough internet hits from trashing her restaurant and now had to boost his name recognition by crowing about how he’d almost managed to get her in bed without apologizing? She could see the headlines in ChicagoScoops now: “Reviewer Screws Chef Twice.”
“Oh, God.” She put her hands over her mouth to block out the scream desperate to escape. She had read that headline; it had been o
n Karen’s iPad screen yesterday. Only, Tilly hadn’t imagined the article was about her. She wasn’t a celebrity, so there was no reason for ChicagoScoops to write about her love life. Or lack of love life. Or lying like a dirty bath mat lack of love life. “Get out.”
“Tilly, I didn’t...”
She managed to keep her voice modulated, but her control couldn’t last forever. Soon the humiliation of having her stupidity posted for all Chicago to read and laugh at would overtake her and she’d have a mental breakdown. If she could only get him out of Babka, she could postpone the collapse until all the guests had left. She pointed to the front door, since he seemed to be both stupid and a scumbag. “Get out.”
Movement out the front window caught her attention. Outside her restaurant, on a busy Friday sidewalk, stood her runner. His arm was raised above his head, reminding Tilly through her grief-clouded brain of a baseball pitcher, though shakier. Then, like a baseball pitcher, Steve released whatever he held in his hand and the large plate-glass window at the front of Babka shattered.
All her dreams and aspirations exploded in sharp, shiny pieces.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
DAN RAN AFTER Steve at a full sprint. Shattered glass crunched under the soles of his dress shoes as he raced out the door and down the street.
Steve was younger, but Dan was more fit and any onlookers quickly got out of his way. With one final push of speed, Dan was able to tackle him from behind and pin him to the concrete. It was a Tight Waist Far Ankle into a Half Nelson his college coach would have been proud of. Steve oofed as Dan pushed his head down onto the sidewalk and twisted his arm up and his shoulder down. Steve struggled, but a well-executed Half Nelson was hard for even an experienced wrestler to muscle his way out of and Steve was a skinny, spindly thing.
By the time Dan had dragged the man to his feet and marched him back to Babka, the police were there. He looked at the man struggling against his hold, then to the two uniformed officers speaking Polish to each other. “Just your luck to piss off a beloved member of the Polish community in a city with a large number of Polish cops,” he said to the squirming man. “I’ll bet half the force has eaten at Tilly’s mother’s restaurant.”
The two officers talking with Tilly noticed Dan with his prisoner and walked over, but Dan wasn’t paying them any attention. Tilly’s cold stare pierced through him. She blinked and her eyes focused on him, but she still didn’t acknowledge him. By the time the officers reached him, Tilly was gone from sight.
“Who do we have here?” the shorter cop asked.
“Tilly’s runner, Steve. Everyone in the restaurant saw him throw something through her window and run off.”
“Officer Czaja will take your statement, and you,” the older one said as he took the runner from Dan’s grip, “can come with me.” Steve struggled until one of the cops jingled some handcuffs. Steve stopped struggling when the cuffs were clicked on and meekly ducked his head as the older officer pushed him into the back of the patrol car.
When the door slammed on the dishwasher, Officer Czaja turned to Dan and took out his notepad. “All right, Mr. Meier, tell me what you know,” the younger man said with a glare. “No hiding behind a blog.”
Dan sighed. He wasn’t in the back of a cop car, but clearly Officer Czaja wished he was. Apparently everyone in the city of Chicago thought he’d blabbed to the gossip blog.
“Can I talk to Tilly first?”
The officer laughed a hard, unforgiving noise. “I hope Tilly won’t talk to you ever again.”
Dan looked over at the runner now safely in the back of the cruiser. At least he was in official custody and the cops had rules about how they could treat him. Dan was out on the street, having betrayed and humiliated the daughter, granddaughter and sister of prominent members of the Polish community in a city with a lot of Poles.
He was surprised he’d made it from the posting of his original review of Babka to today without getting noise violation tickets for breathing too loudly. Unexplained boots on his car. Jaywalking tickets. Tilly must’ve been holding them off. If the cops thought he was responsible for the gossipy blog post, the tickets would bankrupt him.
The guests from the rehearsal spilled out of the restaurant, buzzing like bees released from a hive and their faces alternating blue and red in the flashing patrol car lights. An ambulance pulled up. Some of the guests had been cut by broken glass.
Tilly didn’t come out. He could see her through the broken window, sitting at the bar with her head in her hands. Candace and Renia sat on either side of her, one stroking her hair, the other rubbing her back. Renia caught his glance, held it for a moment, then looked away, giving him no more notice than she would give a dead opossum on the side of the road.
He wanted to scream out, “But I didn’t do it!” Instead, he turned to find Beth and go home, wondering why he was the villain when Steve had been the saboteur.
* * *
TILLY SPENT THE REST of the night with Candace and Renia. After talking to the cops and explaining the series of events, the trio cleaned up the glass and boarded up the window while they waited for Tilly’s insurance agent to assess the damage. Dan was nowhere to be seen. For all Tilly knew, he’d been taken away by the police—arrested for crimes against her sanity.
Renia and Candace had tried to talk to her about Dan and Steve, but Tilly ignored them. She had no interest in Dan, Steve, Babka, reviews, anything. Thinking about the big picture caused too much heartache right now. Instead, she concentrated on each small piece of glass she swept into the dustpan and the tearing noise of duct tape as she pulled silver strips from the roll. The rough edges of the scrap wood from a neighboring bar bit into her fingers as she held the piece against the window for Renia to tape.
Details. She could think about details today. The big picture—her failure—could wait until tomorrow.
“Tilly.” Renia came toward her, her camera bags strapped across her body, followed by Candace, who held Tilly’s purse. “I don’t think you should stay at your apartment alone tonight.”
Tilly looked around for something else, anything else to do. The window had been boarded, taped and nailed to the best of her ability. She’d talked with the insurance agent and found out how much the company would cover and, oh joy, her deductible would go up.
“But your rates will probably go down because of it,” he had said—as if a lower monthly rate made the entire episode worth it.
The cops left, after promising not to call either her mother or her brother. A couple of officers who’d grown up in her neighborhood looked shifty while promising, so she’d gotten her rosary from the office and made them swear on the cross, after reminding them she’d gotten the rosary at World Youth Day and it had been blessed—by a Polish pope. Their final promise included a time limit, but Tilly ignored the hedge. She was planning on telling the rest of her family tomorrow.
Her other employees had already left, not knowing when they would be able to return to work. Tuesday at the earliest. Tomorrow—no, Tilly corrected herself after checking the clock on the wall—today was Saturday. Babka had to be closed today and was closed Sunday and Monday. Hopefully the window could be repaired on Monday and they could reopen Tuesday.
Reopen to whom, she didn’t know. Tonight’s episode would make the papers. She could hope Chicagoans would be drawn to Babka like paparazzi to Britney Spears, but notoriety was a finicky business. She needed customers to show up and buy dinner, not just take pictures and tell their friends.
Like Scarlett O’Hara, she would worry about that tomorrow. After she had a good night’s sleep. Tilly would have a good night’s sleep, even if she needed chemical help. She had some antihistamines and cold medicine at home. Either one was guaranteed to knock her out, and keep her out for at least eight dreamless hours. She could wake to her personal nightmare rested and ready to pretend it had never happened. At least until her first cup of coffee.
“I’ll be fine,” she assured Renia. “I’ll be in
my own bed, at my own home, with my own cat and I’ll be fine. I’ll even take something to help me sleep.”
“No, you won’t,” Renia said with a shake of her head. “You’ll sit on your couch with your medicine on the table, petting your cat, thinking about every single moment and how one step to the left or the right would have meant tonight never happened. And you won’t stop at Imbir’s dramatic entry into your life or believing Steve when he said he wasn’t using. You’ll go all the way back to some ridiculous memory of Babunia teaching you to make pierogi as where your life went wrong.”
Tilly bristled. “None of my memories of Babunia are ridiculous and she could never be responsible for my life going wrong.”
“Some other memory, then. You know what I mean.”
Tilly scowled, but Candace spoke before she could respond. “She’s right, you know. You mean to go straight to sleep, you know you need to, but the temptation to pick at all your open wounds will be too overwhelming. Go home with Renia, or come home with me. We’ll make sure you sleep. Hakim might even have something for you to take.” Candace’s boyfriend was an E.R. doc.
“I need to take care of Imbir.”
“A lame excuse and you know it.” Renia rolled her eyes. “Even if your cat wasn’t fat and spoiled, he can survive one night on his own. You don’t know how long he lived on the streets and he seemed to do fine for himself there.”
“But...”
“I have a key,” Renia said with a voice that didn’t allow for argument. “Candace or I can take care of Imbir. I don’t think you should stay by yourself.”
“If you don’t want to stay at our house, I can go home with you,” Candace offered. “I’ll need to call Hakim and let him know.”
Tilly wrinkled her nose at this idea. “I’ll go to Mom’s.”
As soon as she said the words, Tilly knew it was what she wanted. She wanted more than sympathy. She wanted a mother hen to cluck over her. Mom may have wanted her to take over Healthy Food, but once her mother accepted her children’s decisions, she supported them one hundred percent. Sometimes her mother just took her time deciding she didn’t always know better.
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