The Secret Letters (8 page)

My restaurant. My restaurant. Each time I said these words or even thought them, a tingling feeling ran through me as if my blood had turned to champagne. Every morning when I woke up, I ran downstairs to my restaurant—
my restaurant
—and before I knew it, it was time to go to bed again. There was so much to do, so many decisions to make, but it didn't feel like work. After taking orders from other people my whole life, now I was in charge of every detail from the napkins to the toilets. Sure, it was an awesome responsibility because so much money was on the line, but that just made it more exciting, like hang gliding or bungee jumping (two things I was pretty sure I would never actually do).

Every day, all day, was total chaos as deliverymen stomped through the dining room, tracking dirt across the floor and bitching about the bad access to the kitchen. Deliveries could only be made through the front door because the restaurant backed onto the creek. I knew this had driven everyone at the Chelsea Grill nuts, too, but nothing could be done about it. I couldn't afford to move the kitchen. In fact, there wasn't much I could afford. But as everything moved along, the Chelsea Grill faded away and in its place, the picture I had in my mind began to appear. Maybe it didn't look like much yet, but I could picture exactly how I wanted it to end up. It wasn't going to be easy or cheap, but I was going to make Falling Water real.

Pam was helping me with the decorating, since she was an artist and good at that kind of stuff. We painted the walls a shade of orange-pink called Salmon Peach with a trim called Kiwi. At the top of the walls, she stenciled herds of buffalo, though you couldn't tell what they were unless you were up close. They paraded across an accent wall called Mango Punch. All the colors she chose were named after foods, which
seemed like a good thing.

But I couldn't get her to paint a sign for me. She said she didn't do lettering because it wasn't real art. I told her it didn't have to be art, just a fucking sign, but she flat out refused to do it. I wanted something that looked amazing, not just an ordinary sign, and I had no idea where I was going to get it, until one day that weird guy Ray turned up, looking for a job as a dishwasher that he said I had promised him. I didn't remember promising, but since I didn't have anyone yet and he was a good dishwasher, I said okay.

“You know what you need here,” he said. I was expecting him to say I needed a heliport on the roof so we could shuttle customers in from Pluto, but he said, “You need an amazing sign for the front.”

“You're so right, Ray,” I said. “That's exactly what I need.”

“I could paint one for you.”

“Seriously?” I thought about it.

While I was thinking, Ray added, “I could do it on spec.”

“Oh, sure, on spec.”

I guess he could tell I had no idea what that meant, so he explained, “I could paint it and then if you like it, you could pay me. If you don't like it, you don't pay me.”

“How much?”

“How does fifty bucks sound?”

It sounded like a bargain so I said, “Done,” and we shook hands.

“What's the place called?” Ray asked as he was leaving.

“Falling Water.”

“Like the Frank Lloyd Wright house?”

Everyone seemed to know about this. “No, two words. Falling. Water.”

“Amazing,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, walking him to the door—
my
door. “It
is
amazing.”

About a week later, Ray showed up with a big sign that said “Falling Water” in weird lettering with a bunch of rainbow colors dripping from it. At first I thought, hey, no fucking way I want all this psychedelic crap hanging up there, but as I stared at it, it grew on me. I pictured it outside the front door, different from the other tasteful, boring signs on Main Street, crazy and colorful like our food was going to be. There was no doubt I was going to catch some shit from the town's Historic Commission, since they only allowed colors that were part of the “color wheel,” but I decided to go with it.

“Ray, my friend,” I said, “you just made yourself fifty big ones.”

He smiled his pirate's smile.

***

Once our tables had been laid out, the crazy walls behind them were like scenery in a play. My food orders were starting to come in, and I had to find places to put everything. The kitchen wasn't how I wanted it yet, but it had the basic stuff I needed, and I kept tweaking it. I had hired Heidi from the Chelsea Grill as manager and maître d', but I still needed a few more waitrons (a term I picked up from Milo, who said it was “gender neutral”), and for the life of me, I couldn't find a bartender.

I was complaining about this to Pam one afternoon as we sat at the bar. (My bar.)

“No,” she said.

“No what?”

“No, I will not be your bartender.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You keep hinting around, and I just have to tell you, the answer is no. I'm
way
too busy.”

“I wasn't hinting around.” This was true—it hadn't even occurred to me. “But
now that you mention it—hey!”

“No, Julie, no. No. Sorry.”

“Oh, come on. It would just be temporary. Just till I find someone else.”

“No. Really.”

“But you'd be so great. You make great drinks. You're friendly and efficient.”

“NO.”

“But—”

“Do you know what ‘no' means?”

She knew I didn't. We argued for a while. She sounded firm, but after a while I sensed she was weakening. “It's just temporary,” I said again.

“How temporary?” she asked. This was progress.

“Just a couple of days. A week, tops.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course.” I did more badgering, then some actual begging, and finally, she was in.

***

Every day when she finished her real job, Pam would walk down the hill from the courthouse to help me out. Some days she came in before lunch, and I had a feeling she was blowing off clients, or trials, or whatever it was she was supposed to be doing, but no one at the law firm seemed to care. I was sure she thought up convincing excuses, since she was always good at that in high school. All I knew was she was a big help, and I appreciated it, since we were going crazy trying to make it to opening day on time. I had bought ads in the local papers, so we were locked into September 1
^st
, and that just made things crazier.

One side effect of Pam's new schedule was that she had no time to sell the Grand Dame, though as far as I knew she was still driving it. Some people emailed
about it, she told me, but they never turned up. I figured she got rid of them somehow. She was also stalled on clearing out the house, where she still spent her nights. Although it was still crammed full of decades' worth of old junk, Norma had put it on the market. I wondered how that was working out. I could just imagine Ricky showing prospective buyers the spot on the living room carpet where he built a snowman out of Elmer's Glue and Mom never could get the stain out. “This is the bathroom Tim used to lock me in,” Ricky was saying in my imagination, “and one time I had diarrhea so bad Mom had to pour Gatorade down my throat.”

“How's the house?” I asked. “Any customers?”

“Who knows.” Pam was setting up bottles in neat rows with their labels facing out. They were brand-new, like everything else, and the bar was clean and shiny. “She keeps bugging me about it.”

“Imagine that.”

“She thinks we're sabotaging the sale somehow.”

“Why would she think that? I'm sure Ricky's a great salesman.”

“I can't help it if no one wants to live on a dangerous curve above a creek.”

“At least the outhouse don't empty into the crick no more,” I said.

“It's true the creek has kind of an aura,” she said.

“Yeah. Not a smell, exactly. More of a—”

“Stench.”

“And there's that whole flooding thing.” Sometimes during bad storms, the creek rose to the bottoms of our windows. “Well, I hope it sells soon. I need the money.”

“You do?”

“This is all costing way more than I figured. I have loans, but the problem is, I need to pay them back.”

“That's the thing with loans.”

“And I had to put down my share of the insurance policy, so I have kind of a cash flow problem.”

“Really.” She stood behind the bar, wiping the same glass over and over, not saying anything. “Okay, Jools. Don't say no.”

“No,” I said.

“
Don't
say no. I'm going to be your investor.”

“No! I can't let you do that.” I was completely shocked.

“Sure you can.”

“You should buy bonds or stocks or something. Whatever people buy. Get Tim's friend to advise you.”

She laughed.

“I'm serious. This is a big financial risk. Restaurants go belly up all the time. I don't want you to lose all your money.”

“But what if it's successful? Don't you want me on the gravy train, too?”

“Sure, but—”

“No buts. I'm doing it. That's it. I'm in.”

We argued until I was too tired to argue any more.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked.

“I don't know. Do I need a reason?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I don't have one.”

I wanted to tell her what a great sister she was, and how amazing it was that she wanted to help me, bailing me out with her time and money, but I just went over and punched her on the arm. She smiled. She knew what I meant.

“You look different,” Norma said. She was in the restaurant, spying on me, though there was no one to report to any more. “What's with the long hair?”

“No time for a haircut.”

“There's, like, five salons right next door.”

“Too busy,” I said, wondering why I was making excuses to her.

“And what's with the buffalos?”

I was wearing a new silver buffalo necklace and matching earrings from the fudge store. “I like them.”

She squinted at me. “You're turning into a hippie.”

“Am not.”

“Are too.”

I didn't have time for this. I flashed her a peace sign and asked if she wanted something to drink.

“No, thanks, I'm just stopping by on my way to the house. Someone's coming to look at it. The realtor says it's a motivated buyer so I figure I better be there for the showing. God only knows what's been going on. No one who looked at it has ever called back.”

“Maybe Ricky set the dogs on them.”

“You never know.” She looked serious. While I hadn't been paying attention, she had gotten older. There were lines around her eyes, and her hair, the same shit-brown as Mom's and mine, had a skunkish streak of white roots.

I saw Pam through the glass of the front door and gave her a warning wave, then turned it into a yawn. She spotted Norma and turned right around. I watched her zip
between passing cars and into the Wild Hare.

“When do you open?”

“A week from Thursday.”

“Well, good luck,” she said. I waited for her to add something mean or sarcastic, but she didn't.

When the coast was clear, Pam came back with Milo, who liked to stop by to see how things were going. He had given me lots of good advice about technical shit like fridge temperatures and how to store things in a nineteenth-century building. I knew he wanted to be helpful, but I also suspected he was always just trying to run into Pam.

“What's up with the Colonel?” I asked Pam.

“Why, what was she doing?”

“I don't know. Nothing.”

“You think something's up?”

“Just a feeling. An aura.”

She raised an eyebrow but didn't comment on my hippie choice of words. “I don't know. I've managed to avoid her for weeks. Since the Fourth of July fiasco, in fact. That whole hospital thing was a nightmare.”

“Well, don't go home—she's showing the house to someone.”

“Shit. Thanks for the heads-up.”

Later, I realized that I had called our mother's house “home,” and she knew what I meant. This was not good.

***

People would constantly feel compelled to tell me their wacky ideas about how to run a restaurant and I was getting tired of hearing them, since, except for Milo's, they were mostly batshit crazy. Ray, in particular, was driving me nuts. “You know what we need?” he would say, like it was his restaurant, too. “We need a chick who sits in the
window and pretends to be a manikin,” or “We need a rickshaw out front to pick people up from the parking lot.” I always thanked him and went on about my business, since it was no good trying to reason with him.

One thing he kept blathering about was that we needed a big painting on the back wall, just below the buffalo trim. He would stand looking at the wall with his hands making a little window, nodding and twitching like he'd just discovered uranium. Finally I said, “Okay, go paint something.”

“I don't work with canvas.” He worked with napkins.

“Well, where am I supposed to get a painting from?”

“That's
your
problem. I'm just saying you need one. Get your sister to paint one. She's an artist, right?”

“She's a lawyer.”

“She was telling me she went to MICA. She was there a few years before me.”

“You went to art school?”

“For a while.”

I couldn't imagine Ray in school at all unless it was one for astronauts. I went with him and stood by the empty space on the wall, and he talked me into putting my hands up like a little window and peering through it. He was right, it would be good to have a big painting there. I began nodding and twitching, too.

“No fucking way,” Pam said when I asked her to paint something for me.

“Oh, come on. Don't say no until you've really thought about it.”

“No fucking way.”

I argued with her for a while, but after winning the fight about her bartending for me, I didn't want to press my luck. I went back to Ray with my report. “She won't do it. Should I buy something from one of the art galleries in town?”

“I would rather you smeared the wall with excrement.”

“Come on, they're not that bad, are they?”

“They sell
Disney prints
,” he hissed.

I forgot about it, but a few days later, he came in carrying a big, flat thing. “I thought you didn't do canvas,” I said.

“It's cardboard.” He held it up so I could see. “It's the side of a box.”

“What is it?” I asked, though I remembered from Pam's art days that paintings didn't always have to
be
something.

“It's a sun dagger.”

“A what?”

“A celestial calendar. The Anasazi used it to show the changing seasons.”

“The who?”

“Your ancestors. The ancient Indians.”

I had forgotten I had told him I was Native American. “Wow. So what is this, exactly?”

“It's a rock. The light from that crack falls on the cliff, and you can tell what season it is. It's like a clock.”

“Really?” I took a step back and looked at it. At first all I saw were dark blue lines and circles and a streak of yellow that looked like hollandaise sauce. He'd spread a thick coat of gray above a grainy spiral, with slices of a lighter sky-like blue between them. It just looked like a bunch of colors and patterns, but once you knew what it was supposed to be, you could tell the white-yellow thing was the sun shining through a crack in the rock.

“It's a moment,” he said, like this explained anything.

“It's fucking awesome,” I said, and I meant it.

Ray looked down at his paint-covered hands as if compliments embarrassed him and mumbled a thanks.

“It's exactly the right size.”

“I know. I measured it. But don't feel like you have to hang it. It was just an experiment. I wanted to see what happened when I tried a new medium.”

“It's perfect,” I said. I thanked him, and we hung it on the mango-colored rear wall beneath the dancing buffalos.

***

The morning before we opened, I came downstairs while it was still dark out. I was way too jacked up to sleep. There'd been a bunch of screw-ups—shipments of moldy cheese, broken glasses, burst pipes that sprayed water across the kitchen ceiling, delivery guys tracking dirt over the floor we had just waxed. Now the tables were set with southwestern stoneware and earth-tone tablecloths and napkins. The long mahogany bar was so shiny you could see your face in it, and the metal door to the kitchen was polished and looked brand new. From the back wall, Ray's painting of the sun dagger, whatever that was, pulled the whole room together.

I stood there and looked around me. For the first time in my life, I felt—
I felt
—there were no words, or if there were, I didn't know them. I was gut-wrenchingly terrified of what might happen, how it could all go south and I would lose all that money, including Pam's, but at the same time, I was popping out of my skin with excitement. It was a bigger adventure than I ever dreamed of, like walking in space only way more miraculous. And I owed it all to J. Fallingwater—my father. Whatever was about to happen was because of him. And I was a member of the proud people who had built our country, the people who really owned it. No one on earth was luckier than I was.

Now I had to make sure all the food was off the charts. I'd invited a bunch of people for dinner and was planning to pull the whole menu, restaurant-speak for cooking every item. This was Milo's idea—he said he did it when he opened the Wild
Hare, and it gave him a lot of helpful feedback. There were a few things that still worried me. I thought my fish tacos needed a little more heat, and maybe the green chili soup needed color. I had taught myself to hand-make corn tortillas, but I needed to refine my technique, since the last batch was crumbly. The truth was, I still wasn't sure what the hell southwestern fusion food was, so I was making it up as I went along. I couldn't always get certain ingredients, so I'd been using substitutions—Thai peppers instead of poblanos, zucchini instead of chayote, goat cheese instead of queso blanco. Parts of my menu had definite Asian influences, since we were close to a big Korean grocery: my lemon grass salsa definitely rocked. I had invented something I called a burrilo, another weird combination of Hispano-Asian flavors that I thought was pretty great, and my cilantro-pesto tamale was outstanding. But it was all tricky, and I wanted to make sure everything was perfect for opening day.

I spent the day in the kitchen in a trance, outside of time, like only the kitchen was real. I could hear sounds in the dining room, classical music (Heidi's idea) and thumping sounds, and sometimes, a glass breaking. Through the diamond-shaped window in the kitchen door, I saw the waitrons come in the front door and look around with dumb, wide eyes. Heidi put them right to work and soon they were thumping and breaking things, too. I knew Heidi didn't take any crap off anyone and was going to run a tight ship, so I left that to her. Ray washed the pots I had dirtied and some that were clean, keeping up a running commentary about a bunch of shit that didn't interest me. I ignored him. I was in my own little world of food.

I wanted everybody to try everything, so we decided to serve it buffet-style. When I gave the signal, Heidi and the waitrons swarmed into the kitchen like bees and started grabbing dishes. Ray arranged edible flowers on the plates, proving there was something he could do in the kitchen besides talk. When I finally came out into the dining room, it was full of people—Milo, Norma, Ricky and Star, a bunch of people I
knew from high school, and from the Wild Hare—and they were all stuffing their faces. When they saw me, everyone rushed to tell me how great everything was. Even Hector was all smiles. “Fantastic,” he said, popping a stuffed pepper appetizer into his big mouth. A while later, I heard him telling Norma that he taught me everything I knew about cooking. This was total bullshit, but I let it go.

I cruised around the room interrogating everyone. A few people had suggestions (Norma was full of them), but mostly they just said a bunch of nice stuff. It wasn't as helpful as I'd hoped it would be, but I figured that was a good sign. When everyone was gone and we'd cleaned up, Pam came into the kitchen, where I was prepping vegetables. She stood there like there was something she wanted to say.

“What?” I held my knife in midair.

“It was amazing. Totally amazing. You're an artist.”

I waited for her to turn the compliment into a joke like we normally would, but she just stood there looking serious. “Shucks,” I said, and went back to chopping.

“I'm so proud of you, Jools.”

“Thanks.”

“I mean it.”

“I know. Thanks. It means a lot.” I got a little choked up, and turned away so she wouldn't notice and make fun of me, which anyone in our family would.

“Okay, let's get to work.” She picked up a knife. We chopped for a while, not saying anything. When I went back into the dining room, it was spotless and the tables were set up for the big day. Heidi and Ray were at the bar, talking about nights, or knights, and chivalry, or Chivas Regal, I was too tired to care. I was just about to tell them to go home when Pam went behind the bar and pulled out a bottle of champagne. Before I could stop her, she popped the cork and poured us each a glass. “To Falling Water,” she said, raising her glass. I knew she didn't just mean the restaurant. I raised
my glass, too, and we all drank.