Devil's Food at Dusk

by Anna Martin

  “Come on in.”

  Three hours later he’d visited four more restaurants, talked with chefs, and sampled their must-have dishes. It was still the same story. None of them were what Joe needed. They weren’t in the right place, weren’t available for the right price, or they were just flat-out not what he needed. Joe felt sick to his stomach. He didn’t know if it was from the huge amount of rich food he’d had or the sinking feeling that something about the whole project in general was starting to feel a little wrong. He figured a chug of Pepto and a good night’s sleep would cure whatever was churning in his stomach. If not, then, well, he was fucked.

  * * *

  Remy stood outside Grace’s school just as he always did and waited for his little sister to finish her final class. He only had a few minutes to wait, and it was a gorgeous day. Summer was fading into autumn, the heat turning mild, the days sweet instead of sweaty. Remy loved the fall—what they had of it. He turned his face up to the sun and propped his back up against the tree that grew on the sidewalk across from St. Claire’s.

  He messed with his phone until he heard the final bell from inside the school. A few minutes later, girls started spilling out of the building, a sea of white shirts and black skirts. Most of them had their blazers off, tucked into backpack straps or draped over their elbow. The girls looked relieved to be free, bouncy and happy. Remy saw Grace before he realized exactly what he was seeing.

  Oh. Oh.

  She was coming out of the gates with Susannah, but they were leaning. Like, different than the other girls. Closer. Remy knew what that was; he knew it in the bottom of his gut and everywhere else. Grace and Susannah had always been close. Maybe he and everyone around them had misread that closeness. Or maybe it had just changed. Whatever had happened, it was clear as day.

  Why can’t she talk to me about that?

  Fuck, if there was anyone in the whole wide world who would understand, it was Remy. He’d be there for her, no matter what. Remy watched the girls slip into the back of Susannah’s car, and the sleek gray Mercedes pulled away from the curb. His sister hadn’t seen him. She must’ve forgotten what day it was. Remy walked back home, searching his memory for clues, things he could’ve missed. He wondered if he’d possibly misread what he’d just seen, but he knew he hadn’t.

  Grace had fallen for her best friend, and from what it looked like, things were mutual. She just hadn’t told anyone. Remy had no idea why.

  Chapter Eight

  “Okay, heads up!” Remy called out. They were midway through the dinner shift, and it was busy and hot in the kitchen. The air conditioner was acting up again, but no one had time to get up there and mess around with it. Instead they sweltered in the soupy heat. “One shrimp entrée, two gumbo, one duck, one veggie special.”

  “Got it!” Andre said.

  “Got it,” Gerard echoed.

  Remy nodded, stuck the order on the board, and wiped his arm over his forehead. Gerard and Andre were running entrées for dinner, and he was working the pass, plus appetizers and desserts. Remy was actually fine with that. He liked desserts, the chance to add the delicate finishing touches—drizzles of chocolate sauce or sliced fruit and a dusting of sugar—to the work they’d done earlier in the day, sending the sweet dishes out looking beautiful and delicious.

  And the chance to be away from the heat of the ovens was an added bonus.

  It was a beautiful Thursday night in the French Quarter; the street musicians were out, as was a low, heavy moon, and outside there was a light breeze floating in the air that kept the city from being too warm. It was the sort of evening best spent with good friends over a bottle of wine.

  This was Remy’s favorite thing about the job. Making those special evenings a reality for so many people.

  With Andre and Gerard working on entrées, Remy nudged over to the counter where they made up the desserts, which was conveniently right next to the freezer. One drunken devil cake, one crème brûlée, two pecan pies. He dished up the pie first, two perfect slices with homemade real vanilla ice cream melting delicately on the side. The crème brûlée was easy—those were premade earlier in the day, so all he had to do was sprinkle sugar on top, then blast it with the blowtorch to make the caramelized topping.

  The devil’s food cake was his baby, so he always took a little extra time making them just perfect on the plate, decorated with halved strawberries and a few mint sprigs before sending them out into the restaurant with one of the servers.

  “Gumbo,” Gerard said, sliding a dish over to the servers. “And the tenderloin.”

  “Table six?” Remy asked with a frown.

  “I dunno,” Gerard grunted and moved back to the stove.

  Remy grunted, annoyed with himself for taking his eye off the ball. It was table six, and that was everything.

  “Table six!” he called and stuck the note with the order printed on it under the bowl of gumbo for the server.

  “Uh, Remy?”

  Gerard’s voice was hesitant, and Remy closed his eyes for a moment. “What?”

  “You might want to look at this.”

  In the half second it took for Remy to turn around, he felt it: the sudden surge of heat as the oven door creaked on its hinges. It was hanging at an awkward angle, the ancient fittings obviously giving up the ghost halfway through the evening.

  Then it fell to the floor with a loud, ringing clang.

  “Fuck!” Remy exclaimed.

  “Don’t try to touch it!” Andre said, stepping around the damaged door to turn the oven off at the wall. It was an old industrial model, the type that heated up through the day, then stayed on all through the evening. They used it to broil when the heat of the brick oven wasn’t predictable enough. At least they used to. He’d replaced the cooktops with top-of-the-line equipment. The damn oven was next on his list. But it was too late.

  “Shit,” Remy muttered. “Okay.”

  The kitchen was suddenly roasting hot again from all the heat pouring out of the broken oven. Even with it turned off, the thing carried a lot of residual heat and would take a while to cool down.

  “Right,” Remy said. “I’m stopping the servers for five minutes. Five fucking minutes. Andre? Can you please see if there’s anything we can do with that fucking air conditioner? I’m going to check what we need to take off the menu and what can be cooked on the stove instead. Gerard?”

  “Yes, boss?”

  “Can you keep an eye on everything that’s currently in progress?”

  “Got it.”

  “I’m going to call the waitstaff in.” Remy shook his head and stuck it into the restaurant, where things were still swimming along like they always were. He caught the attention of Lissy, one of the more experienced servers, and called her over.

  “What is it?” she asked, pushing a lock of dark red hair over her ear. “Did something just crash in the kitchen?”

  “Yeah,” Remy said with a sigh. “Oven door fell off. Look, I’m going to check if we need to go back to any customers. I think we should be okay, but everything is going to be delayed by five minutes or so. If anyone has been waiting more than twenty for their entrees, offer them a free glass of wine and apologize for me, okay?”

  “Of course.” She gave Remy an apologetic look, then ducked back out into the restaurant.

  For a few seconds, Remy did something he hadn’t let himself do in a long time. He leaned back against the wall, dug the heels of his palms into his eye sockets, and fought back tears. Then he straightened up, squared his shoulders, and went back into the kitchen to finish the damn shift.

  * * *

  At midnight Remy sat alone in the kitchen on the dessert counter, looking across the room at the broken oven door. He had a short tumbler of bourbon in his hand and sipped it slowly.

  The others had left—he’d ushered them out of the building, saying he’d finish the close-down and clean up on his own. The takings that night had been good, despite the ten-minute disaster in the middle of the nigh
t.

  It was what Remy was clinging to—that they were a profitable business. If he was just contending with the day-to-day costs of running Lumiere, they would be in the black. That wasn’t his problem. It was things like the restaurant’s long-standing business debts from way before his time, maintenance that should’ve been done when he was a kid. That was tearing Lumiere down. Not him.

  He sipped the bourbon again, then sighed. “Fuck it,” he muttered to the dark kitchen.

  Despite his best efforts, Remy couldn’t help but wonder if he was wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to sell the building to Joe. The place was falling apart anyway. He wasn’t sure if Magnolia’s apartment would see her through another winter without the pipes bursting or the heating system falling to pieces, and there was the small matter of the basement too. Surveyors had discovered, a few years previously, that some of the structure beneath Lumiere needed to be strengthened. That would cost thousands and thousands of dollars, so they’d made do with a patch-up job and got on with it.

  But there were other things. The booths his great-grandfather had installed, building the curved benches from local wood himself, the floors scarred with years of traffic. The tables and chairs that had been bought, so Babineaux tradition said, when the contents of an old plantation house were auctioned off. Lanterns and fairy lights hung from the ceiling, dripping with tiny pools of light. The wine and whiskey bottles that sat on the tables, candles dripping wax down the outsides until their labels were nearly obscured. Cheesy? Maybe. But in Lumiere, light mattered.

  Back in the kitchen, the tiles on the wall above the dessert counter had been installed by Remy and Andre when they were teenagers, helping out their grandfather one day after school. He remembered the hazy evening, time spent with his brother and beloved, patient grandfather as they picked each tile carefully out of the box.

  They were just plain white tiles, but that wasn’t the point. This place had been built on love, on family and tradition.

  He couldn’t throw it away.

  Remy knocked back the last of the whiskey and closed his eyes. He’d keep fighting for this place until his last breath. Whatever it took.

  “Hey,” Remy said, leaning against the doorframe of Grace’s room. She kept her door open most of the time, welcoming people in. It was a family thing. If the door was closed, Remy would have knocked or walked on past. That respect was what kept the whole dynamic of the house alive.

  “Hey,” Grace said back. She was working at her desk, both her laptop and several textbooks open. Remy watched as she saved her document, then swung around in her chair to face him with a smile.

  His little sister wasn’t so little any more. He wasn’t about to do the truly cringeworthy “young woman” thing with her, but she was getting close to that age. In her Victoria’s Secret sweats and a long-sleeved tee, with hair pulled back, she looked almost like a miniature college girl. Which was a terrifying thought.

  “I was waiting for you on Monday,” Remy said, stepping into the room and sitting down on the edge of Grace’s twin bed. It was the same one she’d had since childhood, the one with the white, wrought-iron frame. These days the walls of her room were covered in posters; Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Moulin Rouge. St. Vincent and Sam Fender.

  Grace was frowning. “Monday?”

  “Yeah. You walked out with Susannah and got into her car. I guess you forgot.”

  “Oh.” Grace shook her head. “Yeah, I’m sorry, we’re working on this project together and—”

  “Honey, really?”

  Grace put her head down. “Rem, please don’t push me, okay? I just don’t know….”

  That’s all she had to say. “Hey. I won’t. You know I’m here if you want to talk. Always will be.”

  Grace snickered. “Yeah, when you’re not with Joe. I know how you operate.”

  “Jesus. Please go back to being twelve.”

  “No, thank you.” Grace rolled her eyes. “Even if that would make you twenty-eight.”

  Remy groaned and shoved her. “Thanks a lot.”

  “Joe, it’s Sal.”

  Joe cringed. He’d answered the phone without checking his screen to see who was calling. He was expecting Howard, who was getting more and more impatient by the day. Like everyone back in LA, Howard wanted the deal closed down so they could move on to the next location. Joe was not expecting Houston to be better than New Orleans. He wasn’t expecting anywhere to be, in all honesty.

  After he finally dealt with getting New Orleans set up, it would be away from Remy and back to the same blur of cocktails and schmoozy dinners, the same shit over and over in a blurry high-end wheel of nothingness. Sal reminded him of that wheel—surface level, a little slick. In it for himself and nothing else.

  “Hi, Sal. How are you?”

  “Great. So, I’ve been talking to my father, and I think we’re almost in a position to accept.”

  “Oh? Are you sure? Because you’ve been in a position to accept for a while now, and nothing seems to be happening.”

  He wasn’t being pissy on purpose—that was almost a side benefit. He just didn’t like Sal, and he was tired of dealing with him. It was starting to look as though he’d be better off with one of the far less desirable properties. Maybe they weren’t the best buildings or in the right places, but at least it would be less of a pain in the ass.

  And you won’t have to hurt Remy. He didn’t want to hurt Remy. As much as Joe hated to admit he had a soft spot, apparently he did.

  Joe got up from the cozy armchair in his apartment and walked over to the window. He was on a quiet side street blocks from the bright lights and noise of Bourbon. His street was treelined and shadowed. Only a few people wandered by in the balmy night. It was a lot like the street Remy’s house was on—the real New Orleans, not the touristy, plastic, shiny part, but he’d liked that too, in its own way, after he saw it through Remy’s eyes. Sure, it was a little tacky and seedy, but there was charm in it just like there was charm in the tiny side streets and the mansions in the Garden District.

  “No need to talk to me like that,” Sal said mildly. “My dad is getting sick of Remy’s whining about the place. There’s no way the family can afford to keep it, and everyone knows that.”

  “Are you sure telling me that is a good idea?”

  Sal humphed into the phone. “You still want to buy the place, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” Joe closed his eyes. He’d been awake until the early hours again, trying to find a suitable alternative space where they could stick the New Orleans branch of Pineapple Joe’s. It had dawned on him for the millionth time as the antique clock on the wall chimed two thirty—there wasn’t anywhere. The magic Goldilocks “just right” space was Lumiere. Nowhere else had everything they were looking for. If this deal fell through, then they’d have to move on to the next city and give up the idea of New Orleans altogether—at least until the next year. Joe would lose his bonus, Howard would be furious or disappointed—Joe wasn’t sure which was worse—and his sterling reputation as the guy who could close anything would be forever gone.

  For all of that, Joe couldn’t find it in himself to care.

  “The sticking point is going to be Magnolia and the apartment above the restaurant.”

  “Huh?”

  “Magnolia,” Sal said. “She’s the resident in the—”

  “I know who she is.”

  “Well, my dad won’t budge until he knows Magnolia and her daughter have a place to live at a price they can afford.” Sal made a noise. “I told him she’s not their problem, and you know that, but he’s not listening.”

  “I’ll look into it. Honestly, I don’t know what I can do about them.” Joe hated saying that. He thought about little Stella and her stubby crayons and how much Remy loved her, how much Andre loved both of them. If they were his family, he’d want to look out for them as well. He honestly wanted to hang up. But of course he couldn’t.

  Joe crossed into his kitchen
and poured a large glass of water from the bottle in the fridge, listening to Sal sketch out some plan about government handouts for the needy and women’s refuge charities that there was no way Tom would go for. As Sal chattered away, Joe knew one thing for certain: there was no way he’d let little Stella go to live in a women’s refuge place, either. No way in hell.

  Thirty minutes later Joe had managed to get Sal to stop talking and get off the phone. He had a headache and rooted around in one of the kitchen drawers until he found a bottle of Advil. He took two, then went back to the comfy armchair.

  He still had plenty to work on, even before the paperwork was signed on Lumiere. The first of the retrofit contractors he typically worked with had come back with a quote for the work and proposed blueprints, so there was that to go through with a fine-toothed comb.

  It was normally what he excelled at, the small details that made up the whole. Looking over the blueprints and the quote made one thing quite clear: the plans were to entirely gut the inside of the building, reinforce the structure, and start again. All of the quirky qualities of the existing restaurant would be lost, to be replaced with the magic Pineapple Joe’s formula.

  Joe could see it, the vision clear in his mind’s eye. The beach theme started right inside the front door. The host’s desk would be a tiki hut, and she’d have the bright yellow Pineapple Joe’s T-shirt their employees wore all over America. Where the serving area currently was, a new cocktail bar would sit. The bartenders would be typical—pretty girls and boys in shorts and tight shirts. The cocktails would be served in—what else?—hollowed-out pineapples, for the specials at least, or in a souvenir plastic cup for two dollars extra. Or a fishbowl, with long straws for when the bachelorette parties came through the door. Those were always popular.

  In another location Joe might put an escalator up to the second floor, but there wasn’t really space for it in the old building. Instead this builder had suggested a spiral staircase and a loft feel to the second-floor area. Joe had to admit it would look good. Upstairs, more tables and a second bar. The décor throughout, well, Joe couldn’t exactly call it classy. It was some archaic dream of what “beachy” looked like, a mashup of Caribbean, Hawaiian, and a bit of a tacky mess if you asked him, but people seemed to like it. There would be boardwalk-style flooring, bright, exotic flowers painted on the walls—the works.