Girlfriends

by Patrick Sanchez

  She was in an extremely good mood. Earlier in the day, there was a clip on the news about an illegal porno ring being raided in her building. Not only were the culprits filming in the back of a D.C. bookstore, they also leased an apartment in Gina’s building. It was only a brief spot on the news, but the anchorman mentioned words like “criminal behavior,” “jail time,” and even “illicit drugs and prostitution.” It was one of Gina’s happier moments in life when she saw the police drag a fat little man out of her building in handcuffs. And what a relief it was to hear that in an effort to avoid being arrested, Griffin had destroyed all the films taken with The Big G Cam.

  From the steps in the sanctuary, Gina could see everyone in the church. She smiled at Annie, who was sitting with one of Linda’s friends who Gina had introduced her to. In addition to her job at the bank, Gina was doing some part-time work for Annie while she took some computer classes. It wasn’t the ideal situation, but until Annie landed a few more contracts and was able to hire her full-time, Gina had to stay at the bank. Luckily, Premier had a tuition reimbursement program and was bankrolling Gina’s ticket out of there.

  Gina looked at Peter sitting next to Cameron and then exchanged glances with Cheryl. Cheryl was particularly hurt by Peter’s sudden relationship with his nemesis, but she had little right to voice any complaints. She agreed from the get-go that she and Peter would just be friends, and deep down she knew it was best to let him go and get on with her life. It had been a rough year, but she wouldn’t have traded the experience for anything. The whole ordeal brought her friends back in her life and offered some closure to her pointless relationship with Peter. She learned how strong she could be and that good friends and a sense of humor could get you through almost anything.

  Looking at Peter, Gina thought about how she and Cheryl had come to loathe Cameron, the perky little bitch who stole Peter’s heart. They also held the information that could destroy Peter and Cameron’s relationship in a nanosecond. One mention of Peter’s involvement in the Virtual Cameron occurrence, and he could kiss Cameron good-bye. But for all his faults, the girls cared deeply for Peter and wanted to see him happy.

  Shirley was in the pew next to Peter, clutching her gift to Linda. It was a hand-painted tea set from Ireland that Shirley actually bought with her own money, something she recently had more of. Her pet-sitting business was taking off, and soon she would be able to quit her waitress job at Friday’s and take care of animals full-time. Her two jobs kept her so busy, she had to turn down the foster child the agency wanted to send her. No one knew what happened. Did the agency get Shirley’s paperwork mixed up with someone else’s, or did they figure she needed a foster child to take care of her?

  Penelope was a few aisles over with Donny. Gina wasn’t even feeling jealous of her today, even though Penelope driveled on and on before the ceremony about her job and how she was remodeling her kitchen. She even bragged about how they had just hired a cleaning lady—some woman named Bianca who just moved to D.C. from Boston, and how, since he mostly worked at home, Donny was always there to let her in and keep an eye on her.

  After giving the church one final sweep, Gina again focused on the happy couple at the altar. For the first time, she was happy as a bridesmaid, and she actually liked the evergreen velvet dress, which Linda let her pick out herself. She wanted for herself what Linda and Rosa had found, but she truly was happy for both of them, especially for Linda. And Gina was glad that she had played a role in bringing them back together. She’d learned a lot over the past year, and having so many awful things happen to her gave her a new appreciation for the little things in life. She realized how stupid it was to be at war with Cheryl for so long when they were so good for each other. She also realized that life had to be about more than just finding a man. The more she thought about it, the more she realized how full her life was without one. It wasn’t like she was going to stop trying to land a man with every feminine bone in her body, but, until then, life was going to be okay—life for Gina Perry was going to be okay.

  Feeling only genuine happiness and joy for Linda, Gina could hardly believe it herself. There was no envy, no fear of losing a friend, no hopes for disaster. That’s how she knew Linda was a true friend. That’s how she knew she herself was a true friend.

  Following the initial blessing, Linda and Rosa took their seats behind the altar, and Gina and the others stepped down from the sanctuary into a pew. The priest stepped to the pulpit and began the Mass. He was a tad long-winded, offering all sorts of advice, thoughts, and feelings on marriage. He rambled for quite some time about fidelity, trust, “until death do us part,” blah, blah, blah. By the time they got to the first reading, Gina was uncomfortable in the hard church pew. Damn Catholics, she thought. Their weddings are just too fucking long.

  Please turn the page for an exciting sneak peek of

  MURDER WITH FRIED CHICKEN AND WAFFLES

  the first book in Patrick Sanchez’s

  Mahalia Watkins Soul Food Mystery series

  coming from Kensington Publishing in March 2015!

  Welcome to Mahalia’s Sweet Tea!

  When I launched Mahalia’s Sweet Tea I dreamed it would be a success, but I had no idea it would become THE restaurant of choice for delicious soul food. When I came up with the idea to open my own establishment, which that would allow me to prepare and serve my favorite foods, I couldn’t have predicted that “my baby” (which is how I often refer to Sweet Tea) would make the Top 100 restaurant lists of local magazines and newspapers, or that people traveling from as far away as California and Texas would make a point of stopping by for a glass of iced tea and a taste of my collard greens topped with homemade hot sauce.

  Many of the mouth-watering items you see on the menu are based on my grandmother’s recipes . . . if you can call my grandmother’s way of adding “a dash of this” and “a sprinkling of that” a recipe. I prepare many of the dishes the same why I did thirty years ago when I learned how to cook by helping Grandmommy make Sunday dinner for crowds of up to thirty people every week. Entrées like my fried chicken and waffles and my cream of turkey over thick cut Texas toast are made just as they were when I was child. The complementary sour cream cornbread we bring to your table—that’s Grandmommy’s recipe through and through. And, although I’ve updated a few recipes to make them a bit more contemporary and add a little flair (e.g., Grandmommy didn’t include roasted red peppers in her macaroni and cheese), I mostly like to keep things simple here at Sweet Tea. You won’t find any cilantro or curry in my kitchen, and a few menu items, like my creamy mashed potatoes for instance, are simply seasoned with only salt and pepper.

  We make virtually everything here at Sweet Tea—from my chicken and dumplings to my fried catfish to my salad dressings and even my croutons—from scratch. About the only thing not made in-house is that bottle of ketchup you see on the table (and don’t think I haven’t considered making that as well).

  I could go on for days about my food, but let me take a moment to talk about something even more important than that: YOU.

  You, the customer, are what makes Sweet Tea great, and no matter how many best-restaurant lists it graces or how long a wait we have for a table on a Saturday night, my staff and I strive to treat each and every one of you as if our very existence depends on you thoroughly enjoying your guest experience with us. Why? Because it does!

  We make every effort to ensure we provide the best food and the best service at reasonable prices. If you ever find we are doing otherwise, I hope you’ll let me know. I’m usually on the premises and easy to spot, running around keeping this wheel of a restaurant in motion.

  Sincerely,

  Mahalia Watkins

  Proprietor

  Chapter 1

  I still remember the first time I tasted my grandmother’s cornbread. I was maybe four or five. It was some time in the seventies. If I close my eyes, I can still see the heavy cast-iron skillet being set on her wobbly table with a couple of pot ra
gs underneath to keep from burning the laminate.

  “Now, don’t you touch that pan, ya hear. It’ll burn the skin right off your fingers, Halia,” she said as she sliced into the piping-hot bread . . . all golden and steaming and smelling of sweetness. I watched her lift the first slice onto a plate and wished it was for me, but the first slice always went to Granddaddy.

  “When you work the night shift at the factory to pay the bills around here, you’ll get the first slice,” Grandmommy said to me as I watched the slice of cornbread pass on by me and land in front of my grandfather. I guess I really didn’t mind though. I loved Granddaddy. I didn’t see him too often. He worked nights and slept during the day, but he always had a kind word for me, and, according to Grandmommy, “he was one of the good ones.” She’d say it all the time: “I’ve got myself a good man. He’s one of the good ones.”

  When I did get my slice I wasted no time in cutting off a big piece with my fork and plunging it in my mouth. It had a taste that danced on my tongue . . . a sweet yet salty flavor with a texture somewhere between bread and cake. Unlike a lot of cornbread, there was no need to spread any butter on my grandmother’s recipe. It was so sweet and moist that more butter would have been overkill. She made it with corn meal, flour, sugar, an entire stick of butter and a full cup of sour cream. She’d add a can of cream corn and a can of regular corn, and then mix it all up before pouring it into a cast iron skillet to bake to a golden brown in her prize possession, her 1964 Lady Kenmore oven.

  From then on, whenever I ate that decadent cornbread, I thought that it should be served in restaurants. And now, more than thirty years after I first tried it, I serve it to all my customers—small two-top tables get a small pan, four-tops get a medium pan, and six-tops get a large pan. Eight-tops? Those get two medium pans. And don’t ask me about ten-tops. If customers come in here with more than eight in their party, I tell them I can only accommodate them at two tables. As my cousin, Wavonne, who has a way of telling it like it is, says, “Ain’t nothin’ worse than a large party. They’ll run us ragged with special requests and complaints ’til our tongues be hangin’ out our mouths and then leave a five-percent tip.”

  The first pan of Grandmommy’s cornbread is on the house, but we do charge for additional pans. I love and appreciate my customers, but we do get the occasional low-class fools in here who would have no problem filling up on my free cornbread and ordering virtually nothing else. I’m a cook (I’ve never felt comfortable with the term chef considering I don’t have so much as a day of professional culinary training), and I love to see people enjoy my food, but I’m also a businesswoman, and a sister has to make some money.

  When I opened Mahalia’s Sweet Tea four years ago, I thought long and hard about whether or not my grandmother’s cornbread was going to be free or available on the menu for a charge. I didn’t like the idea of my customers filling up on heavy cornbread and later skipping appetizers or desserts . . . and affecting my bottom line. But I think restaurant patrons really like the idea of getting something free with a meal, so I decided to work it into my prices and make it complementary, one of the many times I’ve followed the advice of Wavonne. “You know, Halia,” she said to me when she was helping me launch the restaurant, which mostly amounted to her doing her nails or reading the latest issue of Us Weekly while I did all the work, “what would Red Lobster be without those free salty biscuits with the all the cheese up in ’em? Hell, I wouldn’t even go to the Olive Garden if I didn’t get that big ol’ free basket o’ bread sticks . . . even if those greedy buggers do charge you for somethin’ to dip ’em in.”

  I thought about what Wavonne said. I certainly wanted my restaurant held in higher regard than Red Lobster and Olive Garden (not that I don’t like to help myself to one of those “salty biscuits with the cheese all up in ’em” every now and then myself), but she did have a point. Wavonne is not a girl of academic intelligence—I swear the only reason she graduated high school was because the teachers couldn’t bear another year of her mouthing off. She’s more concerned with Beyoncé’s latest video than who was confirmed onto the Supreme Court, and, if she didn’t work for me (and I use the term “work” loosely), I’m not sure she’d be able to hold a job at all. But the thing about Wavonne is that she has a sense about what makes people tick . . . what makes them behave the way they do. She warned me that the customers who kept their Bluetooth ear pieces on during dinner were most likely to be the ones to run my staff to death with complaints about everything from the location of their table to the prices on the menu . . . and then tip worse than a certain former Washington D.C. mayor. She gave me some good advice about going with black linen napkins instead of white: “The white napkins’ll get lint all over those tight black hoochie dresses your customers gonna be wearin’.” And I even followed her advice about the dinner lighting in the restaurant. “Halia, you gotta lower the lights in here. A sista wants to look good for her man over dinner and ain’t all the Oil of Olay in the world gonna make some of the heifers who be comin’ in here look presentable in this light.”

  So the cornbread, thanks to Wavonne and her vast insight, comes with my meals along with a small . . . tiny really, house salad. I’m looking at that very cornbread right now as I take it to table fourteen while thinking about my grandmother, Mrs. Mahalia Howell. Everyone assumes my restaurant is named for myself, but it’s really in honor of Grandmommy after which I and my restaurant were named. Grandmommy’s name on the marquee is much deserved—almost half the items on the menu are based on her recipes.

  “Girl, he makes my wig go crooked!” Wavonne says as I head back toward the kitchen after making a cornbread delivery. I turn to see who her gaze is on and find Marcus Rand coming through the door of my restaurant. I suppose I should say our restaurant—Marcus is practically a co-owner. I didn’t want his help or his money, but I got in a little over my head when I opened the place and turned to him as a last resort. I don’t like Marcus nor do I trust him . . . and I’m quite certain that the money he invested in Mahalia’s Sweet Tea isn’t exactly clean. Not that I think Marcus is involved in anything illegal. Unethical? Yes. But illegal? Marcus is too smart for that.

  I think he makes some of his money as a financial planner although financial salesperson is probably a more accurate description of what he does for a living, considering the mutual funds and other products he sells pay steep, some might say predatory, commissions. He’s also involved in some of those Ponzi-type schemes where you recruit members to sell all sorts of nonsense and everyone pretends that members, or “associates” as Marcus calls them, make lots of money selling quality items when the real money is made by finding other suckers to join the scheme as your underlings so you can take a percentage of their sales (think Amway, Avon, Mary Kay). Marcus is as smooth as butter and uses his charisma to recruit associates, most of them women, all over town. Despite his success in this area I don’t think you net a mansion on five acres in Upper Marlboro or a BMW 5-series by recruiting members for pyramid schemes. I’m not sure where his big bucks come from, but some of the people he brings in here for business meetings over my fried chicken and waffles look like they’re into things far more serious than Tupperware or scented candles.

  I met Marcus more than ten years ago when I was a line cook and occasional server at a restaurant a few miles outside D.C. in Virginia. Marcus was in his early thirties at the time and looked about the same as he does now. He has a shaved head, big brown eyes, and a smile for days. He’s charismatic and charming and confident. What he isn’t, though, is tall. I’d go almost as far as to call him petite. He tops out at about five-foot-six with a good heel on his shoes, but he does keep his body firm and likes to wear tight shirts that show no hint of fat around his abs and highlight sculpted biceps so fine you just want to squeeze them. His skin is a rich dark color and, to this day, his complexion reminds me of those Palmer hollow milk chocolate bunnies they sell at the drug store before Easter, which is quite fitting—much like those
hollow bunnies, while pretty to look at, Marcus is made with cheap ingredients that leave a foul taste in your mouth, as I’d learn shortly after I met him so many years ago.

  “Hi sugar, how’s it going today?” Marcus, decked out in one of his Hugo Boss suits with coordinating French-cuffed shirt and silk tie, says to Wavonne as he reaches for her hand, giving it a quick kiss.

  Wavonne smiles. “I’m just fine,” she says, titling her head and doing that thing she does with her eyes whenever an attractive man is around. “Don’t you smell nice.”

  “Thank you, sugar,” Marcus says. “It’s my new custom scent. I had it made just for me.”

  Wavonne inhales deeply. “It smells good. Sort of like spiced rum.” She takes another deep breath. “And maybe some dark chocolate.”

  Marcus, like so many brothers, wears too much cologne. I don’t care if it smells like spiced rum, or dark chocolate . . . or Taye Diggs for that matter. I’m just not a fan of cologne and perfume. It gives me a headache and irritates my sinuses. Marcus’s cologne is so strong, and he wears it so heavily, that it often lingers in the restaurant for hours after he’s left. Sometimes, just from me standing near him, the scent gets in my clothes and doesn’t come out until I wash them. I ask my staff to refrain from wearing cologne or perfume, even though Wavonne defies me here and there and sprays herself with all sorts of stinky nonsense. When customers come into Sweet Tea, I want them to smell my food, not Mary J. Blige’s latest overpriced fragrance.