by Amy Brent
He said, “Follow me.” The inside of the house looked like something out of Country Living. The living room was done in painted wood furniture and seafoam green—and all of it looked impressively expensive. Nothing out of the IKEA catalogue here. There were actual pressed flowers framed in the walls. Nicole began to wonder if he actually lived here, or if he just rented a model house. There weren’t any pictures of family members on the walls. You’ve got a chance, he’s probably still single.
Wait, what? Stop. You’re not here to get laid.
But you could be.
She found herself blushing and tried to think about something else—anything else—to get her mind off of him. He did have a very nice body—the sweater and jeans hid everything but the way he moved left little to the imagination. It was a good thing that she was behind him.
“This is the kitchen,” he said, opening a door. The space opened into a beautifully light and airy kitchen. There were no cabinets on the walls, everything was on open shelves. “It’s pretty self-explanatory,” he said, after a moment. The pots and pans hung from hooks all along the wall above the stove. “Baking utilities in here,” he said, opening one set of drawers, showing a series of Pyrex baking dishes, muffin tins, and cake tins nested inside each other. “Mise en place containers are here,” he said, showing her another drawer, full of bowls of various sizes. “Spatulas and other cooking utensils are here.” There was another drawer inside that one, where a series of spatulas, tasting spoons, wire whisks, graters, thermometers, and everything a cook would need were sitting neatly. “Electronic things are here,” he added, opening a door to reveal a food processor, a blender, a stand mixer. Everything was professional grade—she felt her heart skip a beat as she saw the Kenwood logo. Heaven.
“You know a lot about cooking,” she said, as she pulled on her apron.
“I know a lot about food,” he corrected her, scowling critically. She wondered what she’d said that was so wrong. There go your chances of a nice tip. “Is everything clear?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I hope—”
“Then I’ll leave you to it,” he said, abruptly. “I have to go take care of a few things in the city. Make sure dinner is ready at six.”
For a moment she thought he was kidding. She was a perfect stranger, in his beautiful house—and he was just going to leave her? “One last thing—the wines are in the base of the vitrine closet, along with the service.”
She nodded, still speechless with surprise. She watched him pull out of the driveway and drive off.
Well, at least we know he’s not a serial killer. That was all that could be said for him. She didn’t have to like him to cook for him, though—as long as he paid.
***
It was a good thing that he wanted a lot of food: it kept her hands busy and the seven things she had going at once kept her mind too occupied to think about her mother. She felt it again—the pure joy of a job well-done as the sauces came together in that perfect blend of silkiness and flavor, the meat came out perfectly browned with that delicious crust. Most people thought of cooking as grunt-work, repetitive and boring and dull, but she’d always been fascinated by the transformation of food into art. The ratatouille held its shape when she turned it out, beautifully showcasing the layered vegetables and their colors. The lunches she’d prepared were wholesome, filling, jars of layered salads and tangy dressings, thin crackers layered with shredded chicken breast mixed with a homemade tampenade of dried tomatoes, olive oil, and lemon zest. Everything was neatly packed away in glass containers that she put in the refrigerator, making sure to plate them beautifully. All told, once everything was frozen, there were enough meals for two weeks—which was right around the time when she’d have to get her mother more pot.
He came back at six, as he’d said he would, but she was so engrossed in finishing the preparations for the dinner that when he appeared in the kitchen she nearly jumped. “Sorry,” she gasped, setting down the pan she was holding. “You startled me. I hope you weren’t waiting long.”
He just cocked his head and looked at her with a funny expression. “It’s my house. I can wait as long as I want to. Is everything ready?” he asked.
“It is,” she said, nodding—she needed to nuke the first course but there was enough time for that. But she could feel the seed of nervousness that had been planted that morning sprouting like wildfire again. He stood, watching her, and after a minute she finally couldn’t take his cold stare. Was he angry? Or did he want to say something?
“Show me,” he said.
It took a moment for her to realize that he wanted her to show him to his seat. “Right,” she said, sliding the glass of consommé in to the microwave. “Right this way,” she said, thanking God that she’d had the foresight to set the table: he had some very nice china and silverware, and she’d found some silver candlesticks and white candles in the vitrine closet. She pulled out the chair and he sat down.
He nodded, satisfied. “Just a minute,” she said, and went back to get the first course. For dinner that night she’d made him a consommé to start with, a dark rich broth garnished with a few green rings of spring onion on top. She tried to keep her hands from shaking as she presented him with the glass. “Are you nervous?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Is it good?”
She should have expected this odd, abrupt line of questioning by now, but the way he asked her still set her on edge. “I hope you like it,” she said.
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“I—” she began, but her nerves got the better of her and she backed out of the room.
She heard him sigh and murmur, “I’ve been looking forward to his all day.”
She didn’t want to be the annoying personal chef who stands in the corner waiting for a verdict, but she couldn’t help throwing a backwards glance at him as she headed back into the kitchen. A smile played about his lips as he drank down the contents of the glass slowly, his eyes closed, the better to savor the rich meatiness of the broth.
Well, he’s a connoisseur, at least, she thought. She’d already figured that he was rich—a person didn’t own a house this big and gorgeous without a substantial fortune, though she was surprised that his car was a standard, run-of-the-mill black Honda Civic. But her time at Billingsgate had taught her that money didn’t mean a thing when it came to appreciation, so she was glad that he at least seemed to appreciate that the broth had been concentating for 8 hours on the stove. She plated the seared scallop on a bed of chicory lettuce, dressed with a lemon-dill sauce, and served with a coil of homemade linguini tossed in butter infused with just a touch of garlic and rosemary.
When she stepped out to serve the main course and collect the glass, she thought at first that he’d fallen asleep—his eyes were closed, and he was sitting very still. She set the plate down on the table and silently leaned over to collect his empty glass. His hand shot out and grabbed her wrist. “That was an experience,” he said, but she almost didn’t hear his words through the deafening roar in her ears as her mind took her back to that disastrous job interview with Mark. Her knees buckled—she collapsed against him, her breath coming in short gasps.
Damn it, she thought, swallowing and trying to force herself back to her feet. But her body remembered, even if her mind remained blissfully divorced from it.
He got up and helped her to her feet, gently. “Is something the matter?”
There was something different in his voice. He almost sounded like he cared—as if he were actually capable of caring for someone else as a human being. Her mind felt like a bulb that was on the verge of burning out, working only in fits and starts, as she tried to understand where this sudden concern was coming from.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have grabbed you like that.”
“No,” she agreed. “That was bad.”
There was a moment of awkward silence between them. Finally he sat down again, and she se
t the plate down in front of him. He picked up his knife and fork and cut into the pearly white flesh of the scallop. She backed out of the room, leaving him just as he put a neat wedge of it into his mouth. His eyes rolled back in his head as he chewed and smiled. She hoped that was enough to make up for the misstep.
It wasn’t your fault. Touching wasn’t part of the deal.
After she served him dessert he came into the kitchen while she was putting the last of the dishes into the dishwasher. She’d cleaned up all of the other pots and pans, and returned everything back to their place—she’d always worked mise en place so the final cleanup never did take too long, something that she’d started drilling into the staff at the Aviary. How the kitchen had ever managed to survive as long as it had was beyond her!
“You’re very good,” he said, watching her from the entrance. He held a glass of red wine in his hand, swirling it.
“Thank you,” she said, closing the dishwasher and starting it. This was the part where he’d give her the money—she hoped.
“It was five-hundred, right?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Here,” he said, reaching into the pocket of his jeans. He pulled out a fat envelope. “There’s a little extra for a job well-done.”
“Thank you,” she said, taking it.
It felt ask if there was something more he wanted to say, but he just stared at her with those cold blue eyes of his and after a moment she scurried out, not knowing what else to do. Didn’t people usually say, “Can you come back?” and then make another appointment? Was he lying when he praised her cooking? Did she really seem that delicate that she couldn’t handle the truth?
Tears welled up in her eyes as she drove home. Maybe she had fucked this up, after all. Maybe he was lying to her—that he hated her cooking. Maybe she was lying to herself—she’d never be anything more than a line cook pulling ten and twelve-hour shifts seventy dollars a day.
By the time she got home her mother had turned off the light and gone to bed, apparently. The house was dark. She opened the envelope Mr. Good had given her—it would be nice to have a number to tell her mother when she came in to break the news—and began counting.
There was a thousand dollars in it.
For a moment she thought that she’d miscounted, but no: there were ten Franklins in it. So he did like her cooking—he wasn’t lying. Her hands were shaking again as she put the envelope in her purse, from the relief this time. She’d made more than ten times what she’d normally make in a day. If this kept up she could probably quit at the Aviary. Serves ‘em right.
She couldn’t wait to tell her mother, but the moment she set foot in her house she realized that there was something wrong. The silence was too much—the stillness was overwhelming. There was something odd about the fact that there was nothing out of place, and as she went through the house, and up the stairs, she realized that there was something very, very wrong. She was on the verge of screaming for her mother when she saw her—lying in bed, her face slack—dead.
Strangely, she didn’t panic. She didn’t even cry. Her body moved into her mother’s bedroom and drew the blanket up to her chin. She found a note on the nightstand.
“Nicole, I love you. I know I don’t have much time left. I don’t want to be the one holding you back from your dreams. The things you do for me are the things that no daughter should ever do for her mother. I’m so proud of you. You’ll do well. Let me go. I’ll be at peace soon. No more pain.”
What am I supposed to do with this?
Nicole sank to the floor, the despair of loss overwhelming the triumph of achievement. Her mother, in such great despair that she’d taken her own life somehow—and all she could think of was something as crass as making money? I’m such an awful daughter. She wanted to cry, but she couldn’t—it would’ve all been crocodile tears at this point, because she wouldn’t have been crying for her mother, but for herself. “I’m sorry, Mom,” she whispered.
The silence was the only answer she got.
Before and after the funeral, Nicole felt nothing—she moved through her days on the line like a zombie, chopping stuff and arranging it and then sending it on down the line. When her fellow cooks didn’t work mise en place, she couldn’t summon up the anger to correct them; when Reginald floundered at the peak dinner service, she just watched him from across the kitchen, her eyes dead do the world. Drew took her aside. “What’s the matter?” asked Drew. “My mother died,” she’d answered.
“Whoa. That’s tough.”
But was it? Was it really that hard when she felt nothing? Her mother, whisked from her by an accidental overdose of pain medications (so ruled the medical examiner, on account of the pain she must have been in—Nicole had kept the note to herself), had gone so quickly that the grief of her loss still hadn’t caught up to her yet. In the meantime, the funeral happened—Nicole was sure she was the one to make the arrangements and pick out the flowers and send out the funeral notices, but she didn’t feel as if she were the one controlling it all—and she went back on the line and that was that. She noticed people giving her space, and she knew that that was what she was supposed to take, even if that wasn’t what she needed. Even Mark was a bit less smug on the rare occasions that they ran into each other in the parking lot. He even said, “Sorry.”
But what did she need? She didn’t know. She went to work, came home, made Hamburger Helper or baloney on white bread, slept, and went to work. One day followed the other, but she barely noticed, until she was out of bread. Once she showed up at work and Drew, surprised, told her to go home. “It’s your day off,” he told her.
She checked her calendar and realized that it was, in fact, her day off. It’d been a long time since she’d looked at her phone, she realized. The first few days after her mother’s death, she’d gotten so many condolences that she shut off her phone and refused to touch her computer. After those first few days it’d simply never occurred to her to turn it back on. She’d missed 164 calls.
Nicole turned around and went home. Leslie had come by in her absence and left another casserole dish on the front step, with a little hand-drawn card. She picked it up and scraped the contents into the trash, washed out the baking dish, and added it to the pile of Pyrex growing on her counter. In the days since the funeral she’d eaten little more than cereal and apples—it wasn’t a matter of skill, it was the fact that she couldn’t care enough to do it. She’d lost her last moments with her mother, because she wanted to make money—because she wanted to be happy.
The oppressive silence in the house was a balm to her soul. She thought, not for the first time, about drinking the entire contents of the liquor closet, but the fact that it required getting a glass and then finding the bottle seemed to be too much work. She couldn’t manage it, slipping into a restless sleep on the sofa instead.
She awoke to the sound of someone knocking at the door. What? It’d been three weeks since her mother died and ten days since the funeral—the well-wishers had long since stopped coming. She considered staying on the couch until her shift tomorrow, but then the banging became more insistent, and then she remembered that her car was out front. She couldn’t deny that she wasn’t home.
Nicole sighed but she dragged herself off the sofa and over to the door. It was probably Leslie, come to collect her baking dishes. She flung open the door, saying, “They’re on the counter, go help yourself.”
“What’s on the counter?”
It was Mr. Good. For a moment Nicole was shocked out of her stupor. He handed her a box of chocolates. “I was told you were going through a hard time,” he said. “I would have brought flowers but I think it’s a little late for that.”
“Thank you,” she said, hollowly. He was looking at her expectantly, and she realized that he still expected her to follow the script of politeness. Really? But then she found that her manners were coming back to her. Invite him in, make tea. “Would you like to come in?”
“Yes,” he said. �
�I don’t mean to impose, but I’m very busy and I wanted to define our business relationship.”
He sat down on her chair, uninvited—Nicole bristled but decided that there were worse things he could do. Besides, he’d paid her double the amount they’d agreed upon last time. She needed the money, there were no two ways about that. There were other bills to pay, even if she hadn’t quite gotten around to doing them just yet.
“Tea?” she asked.
“Only if you make it the English way,” he said. “I can’t stand the way Americans make tea.”
“You mean in a Styrofoam cup?” she asked. He looked horrified. “I’m kidding,” she said, “but you do know that most English people drink their tea out of Styrofoam cups, right?”
He frowned. “I’ll have to go back to London and see if that’s true,” he said.
She poured boiling water into the kettle and cups, to heat them up first. Then she set another pot to the boil—this would be what the tea actually steeped in. “It’s so nice to finally know someone who can cook,” he said. “I’d like to ask you to come and work for me as my private chef.”
She blinked, surprised. A private chef? “There are some friends of mine who would also enjoy your culinary services,” he added. “Between the four of us you could make a pretty penny. More than Mark Tremain pays you, at any rate.”
“I was working for you when my mother died,” she said, hoarsely. “I don’t think I could—”
His face softened and he said, “I had no idea.”
“I didn’t, either.”
The accusation stood between them, unspoken—that somehow he’d caused the state of her life now: if she’d only been at home instead of chasing dollars, if she’d only had fewer things to do, if only…then her mother would still be alive. She expected him to be flippant, cold. Based on what she knew about him, Mr. Good was hardly an example of compassion. But to her surprise, he got up and went over to her, and after a moment, he hugged her, holding her close.