Aftertaste (40 page)

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Authors: Meredith Mileti

BOOK: Aftertaste
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“Of course. You're the one doing me the favor, remember?”
“You keep saying that, but I don't know, it feels like the other way around,” Ruth says, rummaging in the back of her closet. “Aha! There it is!” she says, her voice muffled. She emerges holding a large, tattered box.
“I didn't think I'd be using this any time soon,” she says, throwing off the lid and pawing through inches of tissue paper. She pulls out a beautiful briefcase. “It's vintage Hartmann,” she says, stroking the glossy leather. “It belonged to my father.” Ruth has never mentioned her father, but I can tell by the wistful look in her eyes that she adored him.
“I know I originally planned on taking a year off, but I'm thinking about going back to work part-time. I think it might make me a better mother. Does that sound crazy?” she asks, opening her suitcase. Even though she'd spent most of the last thirty-six hours hunched over financial documents, she looks bright eyed and more relaxed than I've ever seen her.
“Not one bit,” I tell her.
 
Enid answers my call on the first ring.
“Don't suppose you've changed your mind?” she asks.
I hesitate. The eagerness in her voice is nearly overwhelming. “I have, but not about the restaurant. I'd like to stay on—writing for the Food section, if you'll still have me. I've decided to stay in Pittsburgh.”
“I'll take that as your opening offer. I accept.”
“Enid, I'm not ready on the restaurant. I don't know when I will be.”
“Just promise me you'll at least think about it.”
“I will, but—”
“That's good enough for me. I don't want to push you, but I'm here, Mira, when you're ready.”
“
If
I'm ready,” I add.
“Okay, I get it. If.”
chapter 34
Ruth returned from New York having managed to convince Jerry and Avi that what she'd uncovered in AEL's financials merited a call to the authorities. Since then, Ruth has also been interviewed by an SEC investigator who found what she had to say pretty interesting. Any remaining question about the legitimacy of AEL disappeared when, one week into the investigation, AEL's outside accountant—who turned out to be the
only
accountant in the agency—disappeared without a trace. It then came out that he'd previously been investigated in regards to a similar pyramid-style scheme discovered several years earlier in which he allegedly had only a peripheral role and claimed not to have known about the fraud.
Tony may be out most of the fifty thousand dollars he initially invested, but because of Ruth's eleventh-hour rescue, he was able to save the rest of his sabbatical fund.
It was too late to save Grappa. The restaurant was so heavily mortgaged that when the scheme collapsed, a trustee was appointed to oversee the orderly shutdown of the restaurant. After Grappa folded, Tony went to Italy to cook for a year. He took Grappa's loss hard. We both did. As for Jake, I have spoken to him only once. I called him after I heard about Grappa's closing. Virtually all of his funds were invested with AEL, and he lost everything. I have no idea if he and Nicola will remain together, although I somehow doubt she's the type to stick around after the money has run out. Jake now has no choice but to look for a job in someone else's kitchen. He'll find one—a talented chef always can find a place to cook. Before we hung up, he offered me his recipe for cassoulet. “I'll write it down and send it to you,” he said. “I'd like to think of you enjoying it, Mira.”
True to her word, in the weeks that followed Enid didn't bring up the restaurant again. Not once. Until yesterday.
After I e-mailed my latest column to her, she called me to follow up on the changes and to discuss the Thanksgiving spread. “It's only a month away,” she said. “Here's what I'm thinking. Each of the four remaining weeks we choose one dish, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, and focus on it. Teach the method and give a bunch of different interpretations. What do you think?”
“Great,” I said. “I'm on it.”
Then she asked me if I've given the restaurant idea any more thought. When I told her I was still thinking about it, she said only this: “Okay. Fair enough. I won't mention it again; I promise.” This has been bothering me. I can't stand the feeling that my own inertia could cause this idea to wither and die, yet I'm having a hard time mustering the energy to do anything about it.
Lately, I've found myself remembering Grappa's early days, the most difficult parts: the huge start-up costs; the losses most restaurants experience the first year—if they even survive the first year; dealing with banks and financial types—which I hated; the hiring and rehiring of cooks and notoriously unreliable dishwashers; finding a decent laundry service.
It isn't that I'm suffering from a dearth of ideas—I've got plenty of those, from breakfast joint to tapas bar, from sandwich shop to enoteca, each of which I approach with an all-consuming intensity, rather like a case of twenty-four-hour flu. Then, when the fever has run its course, I discard the idea as being too much like Grappa—or not enough.
 
 
“Listen to this,” Richard calls out to me from the living room, where he is poring over
What to Expect: The Toddler Years
. “It says what she's doing is completely normal.”
I've just attempted to give Chloe pasta with peas and a nut-free pesto, which she's eaten before and liked, but which tonight made her wipe her tongue with her bib and gag. Tired of her crying, I gave up, boiled her some plain noodles, and served them with a boring tomato butter sauce.
“Kids' palates are sensitive, and most kids go through a picky phase around the age of two,” he reads. “So our Chloe is precocious, just as we've always suspected,” Richard says proudly. In the months he's been living here, I've been surprised to discover that Richard has a real paternal streak. As his recuperation has progressed, he's taking an increasingly active role in caring for Chloe; he's always happy to read her a story or help with her bath, even change the occasional diaper. I love that Richard takes pride in Chloe's accomplishments, dubious though this one may be. The phone rings, and Richard calls, “Do you have it, Mira?”
At the moment I'm holding Chloe, who is covered with tomato sauce, attempting to remove a piece of ziti from her grasp. As I answer the phone, balancing it in between my shoulder and chin, Chloe loses interest in the piece of ziti and reaches her saucy hands toward the receiver.
“Hello, Mira? It's Ben. Are you busy? I need a favor.”
“I'm about to give Chloe a bath,” I tell him, as Chloe's tomatoey hands settle in my hair.
“How'd you feel about flipping some burgers for a couple of hours? A friend of mine had an accident. He burned himself in a small grease fire at his restaurant, and he's totally freaking out. He just opened this place in Bloomfield, and if he can't find someone to help him out he'll have to close for the evening. It's Saturday night, and he can't afford to lose the business. I'll even help. How about that? The best offer you've had all evening, right?”
“Ben, I'm sorry. I've got Chloe.”
“Not to worry. I already thought of that. I called Aunt Fi, and she said to drop Chloe off at your dad's on the way over. We can pick her up after we're done. Come on, what do you say? Please?”
“I didn't know you had a friend who owns a restaurant,” I say, thinking it funny he hadn't mentioned it before.
There's a knock at the door, and when I go to open it, Ben is standing there with his cell phone to his ear.
“Oh, yeah,” he says, still holding the phone. “He's my buddy Jim's brother, Dave. Jim is the heating and cooling guy from Bessen's.” We hang up our respective phones, and Ben makes his way to the kitchen, where he picks absently from the pot of ziti on the stove.
Richard walks into the kitchen and holds out his arms for Chloe. “Hello, Ben,” Richard says, patting Ben on the arm. “You know, I could have watched her, Mira,” Richard says.
He probably could have. Although Richard still isn't driving, his recuperation is just about complete. He's taken to going into the shop a few days a week and has hired an assistant to handle the overflow. He's really ready to go home, but I think he's staying for me; he's worried that I'm not ready to be alone. Maybe I'm not.
“Aunt Fi needs Chloe so she can finish Chloe's Halloween costume anyway,” Ben says. Fiona has been working on Chloe's costume for weeks, an ear of corn made out of felt.
I put Chloe down, and she makes for the living room. “Richard, would you mind giving her a quick bath and putting her in her pj's while I change?”
“Done,” says Richard. “Ben, would you mind helping me corral this urchin?”
I've changed into a chef's tunic and a pair of drawstring pants and am in the kitchen packing my good knives into my leather knife case when Richard and Ben emerge from the bathroom with Chloe, pink cheeked and freshly pajamaed.
“What are you doing?” Ben says. “The guy owns a restaurant. He's got knives.”
“Chefs are picky about their knives. If I'm going to be cooking in a strange kitchen, I should have my own knives. It's a comfort thing.”
“Nice outfit,” he says, giving me the once over. “Very official. Come on, we better get going,” Ben says, picking up my knife case and the diaper bag.
Chloe and I kiss Richard good night. “Don't wait up,” I tell him.
Delano's is a local Bloomfield watering hole sandwiched in between an Italian groceria and a little take-out stand called Paula's Pierogie Palace. In addition to the worn wooden bar, they've got a half dozen tables, most of which are empty, so I'm guessing not too many people come here to eat. Ben walks us through an alleyway to the delivery entrance at the back of the restaurant.
The kitchen is small and the remains of a grease fire over one of the grills still apparent. A kid, with just a wisp of whiskers under his chin and a soiled apron slung low on his hips, is halfheartedly cleaning the fire extinguisher chemicals from the hood over the large griddle. He looks up, raises a rubber-gloved hand in greeting, and says, “I got two orders up for burgers. I told them it would be a while. These chemicals stick like a bitch.”
“Forget the grill. We can clean it when we shut down for the night. We'll use the oven, broil the burgers, and, if things pick up we can fry them on the stove over here,” I tell him, shooing him away from the griddle so that I can check out the oven underneath. He looks at me for a moment, clearly wondering who this crazy lady brandishing a knife case is, but I take advantage of his hesitation to further seize control. “Grab me a couple of broiler trays and fire up this oven,” I tell him. “And dump all those condiments and start chopping some new ones.”
I look over at Ben, who has found himself a clean apron and is already grabbing the bins of lettuce and tomato for the trash.
The kid, who is wearing a chef's tunic bearing the emblem from the local culinary academy with his name, “Ryan,” embroidered over his chest, quickly gets on board, fires up the oven, and delivers me a tray of thin, premade burgers.
In less than ten minutes the burgers are out the door, each with a side of onion rings that Ryan tells me are the house's singular specialty—thin, crispy, and coated only with a light dusting of flour. They are, judging from the prepackaged soups and premade iceberg salads stacked in individual bowls three deep in the walk-in, the only thing, besides the burgers and the frozen chicken wings, requiring any real preparation.
Around nine thirty or so, the orders pick up. People sitting around drinking tend to get hungry eventually, and by the time they do, Ryan, Ben, and I are working more or less harmoniously. I've reorganized the kitchen and given each of us a station to cover. Ben finds a small portable CD player, and we flip burgers to Santana's “No One to Depend On,” while Ben occasionally belts out lyrics in fake Spanish.
There's a rhythm to cooking, even flipping burgers. That's part of what I love about it. Because chefs are almost constantly in motion, we learn to be parsimonious with our movements, instinctively conserving them, stirring the sauce with one hand, flipping the contents of the sauté pan with the other. Each movement is precisely choreographed, according to the particular beat of the kitchen; the key is knowing just how long the buns need to rest atop the griddle to achieve a particular shade of gold, and when to take the food, in one simple flick of the wrist, from pan to plate. While Ben claims to be a competent home cook, it's clear he hasn't cooked professionally. He makes several unnecessary trips from the condiment station to the deep fryer, each time placing his hands lightly on my waist so as to move past me without bumping my hand or my arm, and each time flustering me, disrupting my rhythm, and once causing me to toast the buns to an unacceptable shade of umber.
The orders keep coming steadily until last call. Ryan goes out to help wipe down the tables and to get himself a beer. Only when I have stopped moving do I realize that it's almost two in the morning and I've totally forgotten about Chloe.
“Oh, my God! It's almost two!”
“Relax,” Ben calls from the sink, where he has dumped two large cheese-encrusted sheet pans. “When things started picking up, I called Aunt Fi to tell her we'd be late. She said to tell you they'll keep Chloe overnight. No sense waking them now. Besides, this way you get to sleep in tomorrow. When was the last time you did that? After tonight you're going to need it. I don't know about you, but I'm whipped.” Ben's hair is rumpled, and his apron bears spots from several run-ins with errant condiments, but otherwise he seems to have held up well. I, on the other hand, feel like I could run a marathon. There's an honest ache in my legs from being on my feet, but I'm upbeat and exhilarated like I usually am after a busy night in the kitchen. It reminds me of my Grappa days, of Jake and me working this late, the kitchen larger and the food more complicated, but the feeling's the same. I've missed it. I just hadn't realized how much. I turn away, startled to find there are tears in my eyes.

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