Simmer Down Page 11

  I knew from talking with Kayla the other week that Isabelle had been kicked out of her house at sixteen and hadn’t had a permanent place to live since then. She’d bounced around, staying with friends and living on the streets for years, until her room at Moving On had become available. Kayla had said that she had no idea how someone as shy and withdrawn as Isabelle had toughed it out on her own for so long.

  For once, Adrianna had the sense to look sheepish. “Oh, God. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’ll take care of her.”

  Thirty minutes later, Isabelle’s hair had been washed and conditioned in peppermint-scented products, and Adrianna was finishing a chin-length cut with chunky layers that would help her curls fall softly.

  I scooted my chair close to Isabelle, who looked near panic as strands of her hair continued to fall to the floor. “So, Kayla told me you have an interview tomorrow morning? What’s the job?” I asked.

  “Well, um, it’s in Westwood, at a medical building. They need someone to do some office stuff, I guess. You know, filing and making copies, I think.”

  “Westwood? That’s quite a hike from here.” How this girl was going to get from Cambridge to Westwood on public transportation five days a week was beyond me. That was at least a forty-five-minute drive by car, barring traffic jams.

  “Well, I worked out a route. If I get the job, I’d have to be there at nine, so I think if I leave here by five thirty, I should be okay.”

  “What?” Adrianna stopped her styling. “Five thirty in the morning? You wouldn’t even get back here until late at night! Are you kidding me?”

  Isabelle clasped her nervous hands in her lap. “I’m not really qualified for a lot of jobs ’cause I never finished high school. I’m trying to get my GED, though. Kayla is helping me and a couple of the other girls here with that when she has the time. I’ve had a few other interviews closer to home, but I don’t have much work experience, so no one will hire me.”

  “No, no. Chloe, do something,” Adrianna instructed me. “We can’t send her off with this great new hair to spend her entire day commuting to frickin’ Westwood!”

  “Oh, uh, okay. Let’s see.” I glared at Ade. I wasn’t exactly a headhunter. “You’re looking for office work? Or is there something else you might like?”

  “It might sound silly, but I’ve always wanted to work in a bakery. I love the way it smells—sort of homey and safe. I never really had that when I was growing up, but I used to go into this bakery near my house when I was a kid, and the owner would give me a cinnamon roll every afternoon on the way home from school. She’d let me hang out there for a couple of hours if I needed to when my parents…” She broke off for a moment. “It seemed like a nice place to be.”

  Adrianna smiled at me. “I bet Chloe could help you out with this.”

  “Let me make a phone call. I might have something better for you, Isabelle.” I pulled my cell phone out of my purse. “I’ll be right back.”

  I dialed Josh’s number, and he picked up quickly, sounding significantly more harried than he had when I’d left Simmer.

  “Hey, Josh. Sorry to bother you. What’s going on there? You sound busy.”

  “Oh, Christ. It’s havoc here,” he groaned. “I’ve got a big staff meeting so we can prep the front and the back of the house and try to make this opening go as smooth as possible. And I forgot I have to go out later to take care of some other stuff.”

  That stuff better not have to do with Hannah.

  Josh continued. “Just becoming one of those days, you know? What’s up with you? How’s it going with you and Adrianna?”

  I ignored the possibility that Josh might be seeing Hannah later. Well, I ignored it for now. “Good. Only I’m wondering if you can help me with something.”

  I begged Josh to find some way to hire Isabelle to do something in the kitchen. Anything! Simmer wasn’t a bakery, of course, and the hours would be horrible, but the commute would be easy. Mainly, I thought that what Isabelle needed was a work setting with a family feeling. Restaurant kitchens were hot and demanding and sometimes chaotic, but Josh always took excellent care of his staff.

  “Does she have any restaurant experience?” Josh asked hopefully.

  “I’m not sure, but I don’t think so,” I confessed. “She’s always wanted to work in a bakery, so she’s interested in cooking on some level. And she needs a break. If you don’t give her a job, she’s going to have a long commute and be miserable.” Guilt, guilt, guilt!

  “All right, you got me. Send her in, and I’ll give her a kitchen job. The money won’t be wonderful, and I don’t know how many hours I can give her, but send her in if you want. Can she be here for the staff meeting today?”

  If I could’ve hugged Josh over the phone, I’d have done it.

  When I shared the news, I couldn’t tell who was happier about it, Adrianna or Isabelle. Adrianna started maniacally blow-drying Isabelle’s hair with a diffuser, shouting above the din, “Oh, my God, this is so great! Are you so excited? Do you have anything to wear?”

  Although Isabelle didn’t say much, she couldn’t stop smiling and must have said thank you a hundred times. Moving On had provided her with some outfits for interviews. Since there was no need to be formal with Josh or Gavin, we helped her to select plain black dress pants and a pretty yellow sweater. Working in Josh’s kitchen, she would be provided with chef pants and a kitchen shirt, so she wouldn’t be spending hard-earned and much-needed money on work clothes. All she’d have to buy would be a pair of good shoes.

  Adrianna rummaged around in one of her bags and pulled out hair and makeup samples to leave with her new client. While she did Isabelle’s makeup, I wrote down directions to Simmer. When we finally got our protégée out the door, we were beaming like proud parents and waved overzealously as she walked down the street to the T station.

  “Okay, we’ve got to keep moving,” I reminded Adrianna as I swept up hair from the floor. “We’ve got four more women here who need to get ready.”

  I stayed with Adrianna for another two and a half hours while she worked wonders with more residents of the house. Now that she understood where these women were coming from and the challenges they were facing, she dropped her normally brash, outspoken, and headstrong style and showed remarkable compassion and sensitivity.

  “I can’t believe we’re done,” Ade said, rolling up the cape and beginning to pack away the mountain of supplies that had accumulated on the table. “That was great.”

  “You were wonderful!” I commended her. “You about ready to go?”

  “You go ahead. I want to stay and talk to the director. I was thinking I might volunteer here whenever they need me.”

  Would wonders never cease? I hugged Adrianna and left for home. When I arrived, it was almost five, and Gato yet again welcomed me by urinating in a plant. I took off my uncomfortable shoes and then threw on some sweatpants and a T-shirt, and sat down at my computer to check my e-mail. I deleted even more copies of almost the same letter that had snuck through my spam blocker earlier today, a version now urgently suggesting I get my penis enlarged.

  A bunch of e-mails were from my lawyer friend, Elise, who lived in Chicago with her husband. To judge from the number of e-mails I got from Elise each day, being a lawyer primarily involved surfing the Web for entertaining stories and interesting sites. She’d sent a bunch of links to sites with music clips from Kevin Federline—in Elise’s opinion, listening to him never ceased to be violently amusing—and one link to photographs of celebrities caught with wardrobe malfunctions. Elise also forwarded me an e-mail from her ex-boyfriend, Alex, with a picture of himself, his wife, and their new baby and a pretentious note detailing how happy he was with his family life and his snooty academic professorship. Elise was pleased to see that his wife was quite possibly the homeliest creature on the planet and that their baby was a squished, wrinkled little blob who looked remarkably like a cross between Winston Churchill and a bulldog. Elise and I took
a sick pleasure in creating an imaginary life for Alex based on the scant details she received from his sporadic e-mails. Our latest was that he’d taken up knitting bulky, brightly colored Argentinian-style sweaters and was forced to work summers in Alaska catching crabs from boats that sailed through high storms.

  Next I checked voice messages. The first was from the lawyer in charge of Uncle Alan’s estate, and this lawyer apparently had time to do things other than send e-mails to friends making up stories about his exes. His message was an unamusing lecture reminding me yet again that the credit card I had been given was strictly for the purpose of buying myself school-related items. He remained irrationally convinced that Williams-Sonoma, Gap, and J. Crew sold nothing related to social work.

  The next message was from Sean. “Chloe, I really need to see you. It’s important. Can you call me back as soon as you get this?” I jotted down his number on the back of a gas bill and sighed. Clearly, Sean had seen me and was bowled over by an intense desire to reunite with his past love. Did I really want to call him back? I decided to start dinner and mull over the question.

  I opened the fridge to see what I could throw together and had to fish through a whole mess of other food to find what I wanted. Josh had stocked my fridge with what seemed like hundreds of free samples of food he’d been given by purveyors. When restaurants need food, they don’t go to supermarkets; rather, they get deliveries from meat, fish, vegetable, dry goods, and alcohol companies, among others. And even when a restaurant was all set up with its purveyors, representatives from rival companies stopped in periodically to try to win the restaurant’s business by dropping off packaged samples of products. Some samples were ordinary things like chicken breasts and sirloin steaks, but others were fancy cuts of meat and various high-end products that Josh didn’t need. I now had ten individual-sized packets of gourmet pasta, including one of black-and-white-striped ravioli stuffed with lobster, and another of Gorgonzola and roasted red pepper tortellini; two sealed bags of ground lamb; a Cornish hen; venison sausage; a package of pork chops; and an unidentifiable duck part. When Josh gave me samples, I usually threw them into the freezer, which was now crowded with them. Once I’d sorted everything out, I happily realized that I had all the ingredients for one of my favorite winter dishes.

  I started to assemble ingredients: kielbasa, onions, garlic, white beans, canned tomatoes, kale, chicken broth, and a variety of dried herbs from the spice rack. “That Kielbasa Thing,” as I ineloquently referred to it, was a thick, delicious, hearty, comforting stew. It was not named something like Kielbasa Surprise, because I avoid cooking or eating anything called a festival, a carnival, a medley, a party, or, especially, a surprise. In my experience, Pasta Surprise all too often means Surprise! There are jelly beans in your macaroni! Furthermore, festivals, carnivals, surprises, and such reminded me of the disaster known as Recipes and Memories of the Carter Family, which was a nightmare collection of supposedly touching stories and secret recipes gathered by some distant relative of my father’s. My parents, Heather, and I had each felt obliged to fork over twenty-five dollars for the small three-ring binder that contained mysteries of the Carter clan. When the book arrived, I opened the binder and immediately found a hint of problems to come. Paper-clipped to the title page was a small sheet with the heading, “Errors Discovered After Cookbook Returned from Publisher.” When making the King Ranch Chicken, I should not use 1/2 cup of chili powder, but 1 teaspoon. The Popcorn Cake recipe required an angel food cake pan and not an angle food pan. The Bundt Cake Supreme-O needed 3/4 cup water, not the “3/4 bunches of water” called for in the book. When I made Outdoor Cooking Banana Boats, I was not to be confused by the phrase “with o cutting,” which should be read as “without cutting.” Whew!

  The book included the following gastronomic calamities: Magic Marshmallow Crescent Puffs, Centipede Surprise, Pretzel Salad, Dishpan Cookies, and Old-Timer’s Soggy Cherry Cake. Million Dollar Salad was made from canned cherry pie filling, canned crushed pineapple, Cool Whip, condensed milk, and, anomalously, a fresh ingredient, namely, bananas. When I bravely showed Josh the cookbook, he was admirably tactful. His only comment was that Fritos did not belong in a cheesecake.

  A chapter devoted to cooking tips and household hints advised the reader to dress up buttered, cooked vegetables with canned French-fried onions and never to use soda to keep vegetables green because it destroys vitamin C. I learned that instant coffee mixed with a little water makes a great paste for cleaning wood furniture and that ice cubes will help sharpen garbage disposal blades. The latter was actually a useful idea. The garbage disposal was exactly where most of the food from the book belonged. I began to worry about my lineage and to wonder how my father escaped the familial craving for something called Stuff (a combination of hamburger meat and canned mushroom soup) and a genetically determined longing for ham loaf containing ground ham, ground pork, oatmeal, fruit juice, and ketchup. His foodsnob genes, I decided, must have come from his mother’s side of the family. I’d inherited them, of course. Even so, no snooty food queen, I loved homemade casseroles, soups, and good old-fashioned lasagne. I just didn’t want Jell-O in my casserole, Red Hot candies in my soup, or canned peas in my manicotti.

  I went ahead and sliced the kielbasa and onions, put them in a big pot over low heat with some olive oil, and threw in some dried herbs. While I waited for the onions to soften, I smashed four cloves of garlic with the flat of a knife and opened the canned tomatoes and cannellini beans. In other words, I avoided returning Sean’s call. I still could not believe that he had called me. And wanted, no, needed to see me. It felt wrong to go off and see Sean while I was involved with Josh. Not that Sean had invited me to a pay-by-the-hour motel or anything, but the prospect of having any contact with him made me a little uncomfortable. Plus I had all that leftover baggage and guilt that comes from a breakup, and I had no interest in getting together to rehash the past, or worse, hurt Sean again. On the other hand, if Josh could go running off to cook dinner for Hannah the night before Simmer opened, why should I feel guilty about a friendly visit with Sean? Especially because I was willing to bet that I could get Sean to go to one of the Full Moon restaurants with me. Maybe I could get a feel for how the employees were treated and whether or not Naomi’s anonymous caller was telling a credible story. That Kielbasa Thing would keep nicely. In fact, it always tasted best on the day after it was made.

  I picked up the phone and called my ex back while I tossed the garlic into the pan.

  “Hey,” Sean said, “I’m really glad you got back to me. Can you meet me somewhere so we can talk?”

  “Sure. What about Eclipse? Can you be there at seven?”

  Sean agreed. I hung up and finished cooking. I added the tomatoes, the beans, and some chicken broth, waited for the stew to reach a slow simmer, crammed two huge handfuls of kale on top, and put the lid on. When the kale had wilted, I stirred the pot and turned the temperature way down to let the dish cook gently.

  I didn’t have the energy to go through the whole blow-drying thing, so I took what I called a half shower, which meant tying my hair up in a knot and dodging the water spray while sudsing up. A raid on my closet yielded a fuzzy pale blue scoop-neck sweater and simple pants. When I’d finished redoing my makeup and flatironing my hair, I pulled the kielbasa off the stove and filled the sink with cold water. I dumped four trays of ice cubes in and set the hot pot in the water bath to cool for a few hours until I got home. Josh had taught me never to transfer hot food directly to the refrigerator, where it became a haven for bacteria, and he’d warned me that if I covered a hot dish and then immediately refrigerated it, I might just as well inject myself with the evil-sounding Bacillus cereus. Safe temperatures for perishable food were very hot and very cold. I hoped I was following his directions correctly. I had a nagging feeling that I should’ve divided the stew into small portions to make sure it cooled rapidly, but there was a limit to my supply of Tupperware.

  After delivering a le
cture to Gato on peeing nowhere except in his litter box, I left to meet Sean.

  It was finally getting cold in Boston, so cold that I was happy to step into the warmth of Eclipse. The seasonally brutal winds had numbed my ears and cheeks, and I cursed myself for not having bothered to wear a hat and scarf. For the night before New Year’s Eve, Eclipse was quite busy; I’d expected everyone to be home saving money and building energy for the big night. Good Lord, this place was tacky! The solar system had apparently exploded in it. Three-dimensional neon planets hung on the brick walls, a planetary mural had been graffitied behind the bar, and the ceiling was littered with tiny lights meant to look like stars. Even with all the neon business everywhere, the room was so dark that I could barely find Sean. I eventually located him at the bar nursing a Guinness. In a simple pullover and khakis, he looked remarkably, and even irritatingly, well-dressed. When we were dating, he’d been a notoriously poor dresser.

  “Hi, Sean,” I said as I removed my coat and sat down on a barstool next to him.

  “Hi, Chloe. Thanks for meeting me. I hope I didn’t interrupt your night.”

  “No, not at all. I’m just starving though. Can I borrow your menu?” I felt suddenly nervous, as if at any minute Sean might confess his undying adoration and propose. “Have you eaten? Do you want something?” I was trying to avoid whatever topic Sean had in mind. The last thing I wanted to do was rehash our past or discuss our nonexistent future.

  “Sure, I could eat,” Sean said, picking up his menu. “But, listen, the reason I called you—”

  I cut him off. “Look, it’s Barry.” Eclipse’s owner was at the other end of the bar speaking with one of the bartenders. He caught my eye, smiled, and came over to our seats.