by Pat Henshaw
Before I got too lost in my meandering, Jeff poked me. I looked up to see my distant cousins Bobby and Tony being led in and seated across from us.
“They said they had something to tell you,” Lloyd said. He was leaning on the only door.
“Mr. B, Tony and I are real sorry,” Bobby said in a rush. “My dad said you was against the fags and all. He said all you really needed was a sign we was all behind you. We thought we should be showing support. It was all we could figure out to do. We don’t hate any fags. Hell, we don’t know any fags.”
Tony elbowed him.
“Oh yeah, except Mr. Patterson and Mr. Stone,” he said. “Maybe a couple others. Anyway, we just wanted you to know we weren’t doing it out of hate. We was doing it out of support. Our dads told us you’d understand. They said you’d do it yourself, only you couldn’t.” He looked up at Lloyd. “We tried to explain it to the sheriff, but he don’t understand. We was hoping maybe you could explain it to him.”
What the fuck? They didn’t hate anybody, but were spray-painting to support the company? I was speechless. Maybe there was some truth to the rumor that some of the Behrs were stupid.
Jeff nudged me with his shoulder. I looked at him. His eyes were twinkling. He thought this was funny? Sure, in a way it was. To me, though, it was sad. Two idiot kids who couldn’t think their way out of a paper bag. Their homophobic fathers getting them to act by reassuring them it’d be okay.
I looked at Lloyd.
“I got nothing to say,” I told him.
He and a deputy rounded up the boys and led them back to their cells. When he returned, Lloyd thanked us for coming down and promised to keep me informed about what happened to my misguided cousins.
“So much for hate crimes and the community against gays,” Jeff said as we got back in the truck.
“You think?” I asked.
“You don’t?”
“No, all this goes much deeper than a couple of high school dropouts getting their hands on cans of spray paint. This community is undergoing change. I’m just hoping it’s a good change. It’s coming and coming soon.”
THAT EVENING, Ben and Connor declared a family night out—with friends. They’d reserved the Rock Bottom for a special meal to celebrate Behr Construction’s reorganization and Connor’s new career. Nobody said it was going to be a mocking of yours truly.
They planned it as a white-tablecloth, four-course meal, which meant a tight fit to get everybody around the pushed-together diner tables. Jeff wanted me to wear a suit and tie, but I vetoed the idea before it’d hardly left his mouth. No tie on this Behr when I don’t have to. And I definitely don’t wear a tie twice in the same day.
I knew Connor had been cooking up a storm. I was anxious to get to the dessert course even before seeing what other delights Bud had cooked up.
Everyone was quiet as the soup was served. I was starting to worry they thought I was going to say grace or a few words, and I wasn’t prepared. So I missed it when the bowl was put in front of me.
“Uh. Let’s eat,” I said without looking down.
Everyone smirked back at me. Seemed like everyone was taking lessons from Jeff. I shook my head. Funny people. Ha, ha.
Then I picked up my spoon and peered into my bowl. What the hell?
Mine wasn’t soup. It looked a lot like pudding. Pudding wasn’t soup, was it?
Fredi started talking to Connor about vichyssoise and asking Connor how he made his. Nobody acted like eating pudding was unusual at the beginning of the meal.
I looked over at Jeff’s bowl, which had something brown in it. Brown with vegetables. I stirred my pudding. No veggies. What the hell?
I checked out everyone else’s bowls. Veggies and maybe beef in all of them. I was the only one with what looked like butterscotch pudding with sprinkles on top.
I took a bite. Damn this was good! So I got lucky? I wasn’t looking a gift pudding in the mouth. I slurped it down as talk shifted from French soup to baseball. A couple of the guys were in fantasy leagues, so they were arguing the merits of their favorite players.
I looked over at Jeff, who gave me one of his soft smiles. I gestured to my bowl.
“What’d you think of the soup?” he whispered to me.
“I didn’t get the same stuff everybody else did,” I whispered back.
“But did you like it?”
“Yeah, it was great. My favorite.”
“Good. Glad you liked it.” His smile made his eyes light up, and I thought about how glad I was I’d given him the benefit of the doubt and hired him. Maybe all Masons weren’t bad.
The bowls went away, and the salad course was served.
Everybody seemed to have a small house salad except me. I had some sort of ambrosia on a bed of green coconut. Damn. I love ambrosia. I checked out everyone else’s plates and then looked down at mine. It was like I’d won the lottery of dinners.
Again, I snarfed down my salad and pitied the rest of them with their rabbit food.
The main course made me realize what was going on. I had a huge brownie, a cream puff, and a serving of carrot cake with cute little frosting carrots.
“Connor!” His head came up and he looked at me with a startled glance when I bellowed his name. “You did this!”
He started to laugh just as everyone else did.
“I knew you always wanted an all-dessert meal,” he agreed. “What took you so long figuring it out?”
I was laughing so hard tears were streaming down my cheeks.
I grabbed Jeff’s hand and squeezed. I loved my family. I loved him. I loved my life.
To Jake, Becca, Sarah, and Jill, without whose help and love, I would have given up long ago. Thank you all so much. I love you!
1
NOT TO brag, but I’m famous. Maybe infamous to some. Most people’ve heard of me even if they haven’t seen me on streaming media or TV. I’m Adam de Leon, the “brilliant young gay chef” who swept the Millennium Cook-Off, then capped that win with the Gift to the Gods Challenge five years later.
What being gay had to do with my cooking ability beats me. I’m the product of hard work and luck. A killer gigolo, my version of the better-known cocotte, propelled me to stardom.
There’ve been a lot of rumors about what happened to me afterward, whether I tried to off myself like the celebrity media brayed or if I plotted to poison Anthony Bourdain, Emeril Lagasse, and a dozen other celebrity chefs. Life should be so fucking dramatic, right?
Yeah, I thought about killing myself, but it had nothing to do with cooking. The chefs? Didn’t even occur to me to try to take them out. Hey, I get it. I know I look like a thug. It’s the scar across my eyebrow and on my cheek, right? Maybe my size. People say I have RTF, resting thug face.
My good friend Guy Stone and I might appear out to destroy ourselves while dragging the world down with us, but reality doesn’t match up to our looks. He owns and runs Stonewall Saloon and is tight with barista and coffee shop owner Jimmy Patterson. How middle class can you get?
Me? After the turmoil of the previous ten years, I got out of the celebrity-chef business, out of the San Francisco Bay Area’s seven point four million people, and started cooking locally grown food for people in a small town of twenty-five hundred, not counting tourists from the city and Lake Tahoe. I fix what I want for the people who show up to eat at my Sierra Nevada Mountains Bistro. I create one prix fixe meal three nights a week, sometimes two on Saturdays, from May until the snow starts in the fall. I cook for friends, acquaintances, and strangers, and host galas. For the past five years, my bistro has been a part of Lake Tahoe’s destination wedding scene.
The tabloids had a field day when I first moved here, saying stuff like “Gourmet Chef Cuts Out Lover” with smaller headlines like “Celebrity Chef Bets It All in Tahoe.” Yeah, yeah. Haven’t lost a dime yet, baby, but they’ve had me bottom out ever since I left Jason and the Bay Area.
Unlike Stone and Jimmy, Fredi and Max, and a bunch of my oth
er friends, I’m not looking for love or to settle down. I’m perfectly okay as I am. I’ve got money, food, and friends. What more can a thug want?
THE DAY was shaping up to be one of those a guy’d like to eat slowly and savor. The air was crisp, cool, and clear, like the first bite out of a ripe Fuji right off the tree. Even in the dark of six thirty in the morning, before the sun and the birds rose, I hoped it was going to be another great day worth living.
I ran my hand over my face. I could use a shave. The area around my scar was feeling bristly. Was I starting to look like a pirate? People would be wincing more than usual when they saw the gash surrounded by jet-black facial hair. I’d tried growing a beard once, but the way the hair came in around the scar seemed to emphasize it rather than hide it. Fuck. No shaving today. Naw. I could live with being a pirate.
My sous chef arrived whistling. Tonight was going to be our last meal at the Bistro until next spring. I could smell the promise of snow in the air.
“Boss,” Little John greeted me, his voice cracking in the early morning. “Chef, there’s a man sitting outside the front door. He wants to talk to you. Now.”
I let out a sigh. Damn. I ached to savor this pristine morning and watch it turn into a gorgeous, life-affirming day. I needed to wash my soul in sunshine and feel my spirits lift. I didn’t feel like butting heads with some idiot who was up too early or stayed out too late.
“You deal with him. I think we have some of the salmon left over from last night,” I said. “Make him a takeout with it and the rice, a couple of rolls, and whatever else we’ve got in the little fridge.”
“No, I don’t think he’s a panhandler. He wants to talk to you. He looks like someone I used to know, only I can’t place him.” LJ shrugged.
“Yeah, yeah. Okay. I’ll get it. We’re doing the crab mignon with winter soup tonight, so you know the drill.” Every meal started fresh with us.
Little John nodded. To call him a gnome or leprechaun would be a mistake. Little John was a pinch over five feet—as tall as Danny DeVito and Prince, he’d told me. John Barton—Little John or LJ—was born with one of those timeless faces. He was in his early thirties, same as me, but depending on the day and his mood, he looked like he’d recently been released from either continuation school or a twenty-year stint in Folsom. We met in San Francisco when I desperately needed a sous. I had no idea about his past or his present outside the kitchen. He didn’t socialize. Never joined me for a couple of beers after hours. Just vanished until the next day. I didn’t even know where he lived. I had a phone number and a post office box to locate him.
The points he lost in a beauty pageant he made up in loyalty. He’d stuck by me when I’d stormed out of a well-known San Francisco kitchen after Jason was ripped from my life—or rather, after I’d finally grown the balls to dump him.
He had everything I required in a right-hand man—loyalty, punctuality, and dedication. He’d made a sacrifice to drop everything in the city and move to the sticks with me. What more could I ask?
“Oh yeah and, boss?” He turned to me before I got very far toward the front door. “Triple X called and said they told him not to come up here this afternoon.” He was shaking his head and frowning.
“Don’t call him by his wannabe gang name. He’s Xavier.” LJ looked at me, giving me the evil eye since he and the teen were currently butting heads. LJ thought Xavier was a hoodlum in training. I thought the kid was a run-of-the-mill teenager. “Okay, I’ll handle it.”
Xavier was my latest do-gooder project, an at-risk freshman who’d told the counselor he wanted to become a chef someday. Les Walker, the personable and cute high school counselor whom I’d thought about asking out on a date, hadn’t been as sure about this kid as he had been about the other two he’d given me in the five years since I’d first volunteered.
“Xavier Ramos isn’t the, uh, easiest kid I’ve worked with.” Les had looked apologetic. “To his credit, the kid’s had a hard home life. He got kicked out and was scrabbling on his own for about a year before the school noticed he needed help. The intake people couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t starved to death after he ran away from his foster family. Personally, I think he’s bright and loyal. I figure if anyone can help him, you can.”
Shit. How could I turn the kid away? We were struggling through our third week together. I wasn’t convinced I was doing anything to help him.
As LJ donned his apron and scanned the knives and ingredients for tonight’s dinner, I trudged up the stairs to the front door. My three-story Sierra Bistro looks from the street like a cross between a two-story log cabin and a Swiss chalet, but in reality, it hangs dramatically down the mountainside.
Most diners think everything is on one floor, both kitchen and dining area. As my aching feet can tell you some days, the place has a kitchen on the bottom floor. Above the kitchen is an intimate dining room with a tiny serving area that most diners think is the kitchen, which would be a joke if it were true. A half-floor balcony overlooking the valley juts between the dining floor and my apartment on the top.
This place has it all. My food and the view from the dining room are what call everyone from miles around to make the trip. Or as one critic put it: Come for the food. Stay for the view. Both will enchant you.
The dining level was chilly as I came up from the kitchen. Summer was nearly a memory and fall had crowded in, with winter not far behind.
I had to decide what to do. Last spring I’d bought an abandoned building in Old Town Stone Acres, a foothills community nearby. I’d had Fredi Zimmer design an apartment above the restaurant space, and Abe Behr’s construction company had done the remodeling work on the restaurant and apartment. Last week Abe had called me to say the job was nearly finished.
Since the floor space was a bit bigger than my tiny Bistro in the mountains, almost as big as where I worked in San Francisco, was I ready to start pounding the larger treadmill again? Was I ready to create lunch and dinner for the groupies who’d been begging me to return? My head fucking hurt thinking about it.
Shit. I had no choice. I either had to become the has-been celebrity chef working now in Stone Acres or hire someone else to cook. I couldn’t just let the place sit empty.
As I opened the front door, my mind didn’t immediately register the figure on my porch.
“Hey, Adam.”
Well, goddamn. It was Jason, a vision from years past. But not quite. He looked similar to the Jason I’d loved and who’d moved with me to the Bay Area fifteen years ago, ready to take the city by storm. This guy seemed older, maybe a little worn around the edges, but definitely not the Jason I’d left in the gritty Tenderloin of San Francisco. He wasn’t as emaciated as the living skeleton he’d been. His light blue eyes weren’t bloodshot and roaming, unable to make contact. Fuck, this was what I always imagined Jason would look like after we got married and lived together for years.
He was my Beautiful Man, my Pretty Boy grown up.
This was the Jason of my dreams, not the nightmare I’d left behind.
2
“WHAT THE fuck?”
I must have yelled, because I heard LJ bellow from the kitchen, “Whatcha need, boss?”
“Nothing, LJ!”
I watched Jason rise from the stoop.
He looked good. His golden hair sparkled in the day’s first light. A happy smile tinged with nervousness spread across his lips. He was wearing a silver-gray Bogner jacket, some sort of expensive pants, and sturdy boots. Hanging from his shirt collar, his sunglasses looked like those high-priced titanium ones. All in all, the guy standing in front of me could easily have fit into the young, hip app crowd now flooding the valley. Too much money and no idea where to spend it. He looked like a guy who’d eat at the Bistro and then fucking strut up to me after dinner, put a wad of Franklins in my pocket, and whisper, “Quit this job and come cook for me.”
Nothing tempted me, especially not the hundred-dollar bills I’d thought were Monopoly money the firs
t time I’d seen them. Nothing had moved me like this, seeing Jason rise straight up in front of me like a fucking miracle.
Standing there in my scuffed clogs, beat-up jeans, and ratty Stanford Cardinal T-shirt, I felt underdressed for this particular dream. Shouldn’t I at least be wearing my chef’s regalia, toque and all? Shouldn’t I have a Henckel in one hand and a Wüsthof in the other? Or maybe clutching a shield made of my cooking classics, which I’d written with an angry, tormented mind but a clear eye to royalties?
“Cat got your tongue?” the vision asked.
“Fucking A, man. Is it really you, Jason?”
“Sorta. Who else would come knocking at your door looking like me?” He flung his arms out like he wanted me to hug him or some shit.
I backed away and kept my hands to myself, though my dick perked up immediately. Did Jason have a twin or a younger brother, somebody who resembled him? I didn’t think so. All I’d thought for five years was nobody—and I mean nobody—could ever have come back from where my Jason had buried himself. At least I never thought so.
There’ve been moments in my life when I was sure I was losing my mind. When I knew whatever tenuous grasp on reality I thought I had was really smoke up my ass. This moment smacked of those. As the legendary John Fogerty sang and the great Yogi Berra is supposed to have said, it was like déjà vu all over again. Only not.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked. Suspicion tasted bitter on my tongue.
Slowly his arms came down, and he gave me a pained but understanding look.
“Yeah, well, it was too much to hope we’d just kiss and make up.” His husky croak had once made me roll over and do anything he asked, but not now. “Can I come in? It’s a little chilly out here.”
I wasn’t cold, but then I’m tall and stout, a real cliché chef image. Fuck, I guess somebody’s got to be the cliché, right? It’s how clichés are born.
