Hello, Sunshine

by Laura Dave

  “People are going to think exactly what we tell them to think,” he said. “I mean, listen to Meredith’s statement,” he said as he pulled out his phone and started reading. “My husband, the esteemed producer Ryan Landy, has worked with Sunshine Mackenzie since he discovered her first video on YouTube, making this very recipe. With the exception of being a fan (and I like to think a valued early taster), I have no claim to any of Sunshine’s scrumptious creations.”

  “Why is everyone talking to me like I wasn’t the one who wrote that?” I said.

  He smiled. “I’m just praising your good work.”

  I nodded, but there was no relief sinking in. It had all gotten a little close. And neither of us was saying the truth out loud. Meredith was the real chef. They were her recipes. Her vision. Or, rather, Ryan’s vision, and her execution.

  “You don’t think Meredith is behind this, do you?”

  Ryan laughed, the thought of his wife betraying him apparently hilarious. “No fucking way!”

  “What if she—”

  “She didn’t. It would destroy us financially. She would never do that.”

  “So, who?” I said.

  Ryan shook his head. “A hacker, someone who got into your email . . .”

  His nonchalance was really starting to irritate me. “How would a random get so close to the truth?”

  He shrugged. “I told you, the bigger you get, the more people come after you. And someone is apparently after you. Probably with the Food Network deal, they’re excited . . .”

  The Food Network deal. I hadn’t wanted to mention it. I was slated to be a cohost of a new farm-to-table cooking show. Competition shows were now the Holy Grail on the network. No one was offered a straight cooking show unless they were a movie star turned culinary star. But that’s how popular A Little Sunshine had become. The show was premiering in September—at least it was supposed to. Unless this hacker ruined everything.

  Ryan jumped down off the countertop. “The point is I cut off his access. There’s nothing he can do now.”

  He. Ryan said he. “You think it’s a he? That’s interesting. That’s my gut too.”

  He walked up to me, so we were face-to-face, his palm gently cupping my neck. “Can we be done with this already? I have other things to discuss, okay?”

  I looked away, not wanting to engage with any of his other things. “Like what?”

  “Tonight. The party.”

  I closed my eyes. In the chaos, I had forgotten. Danny had planned a surprise party in the back room of Locanda Verde for fifty of our closest friends.

  “We should cancel it,” I said.

  “Cancel it? No!”

  I already knew where he was going. He was going to use my party to fix this.

  “You’re going to spin the story.”

  “I’ve trained you well, young Sunshine.”

  I drilled him with a dirty look. But he wasn’t wrong. He had.

  “I’m inviting the press. People, Us Weekly. Great opportunity to put these rumors to bed.”

  Ordinarily, I would have rolled with it. But I hesitated. The hack, the day, the song—some of it, all of it, had gotten to me. And I was feeling . . . something.

  “Danny doesn’t want publicity tonight. He specifically said.”

  “And I care about what Danny wants, why?”

  I shot Ryan a look. I wasn’t in the mood to stroke his ego—to pretend he’d won the latest battle of work husband versus real husband.

  And I didn’t want to upset Danny, especially when birthdays were a big deal around here. We’d been together since we were twenty-one, college sweethearts. And every year, we tried to top the year before for each other. Danny was already irritated that I’d peeked at his email and seen the details, asked him to make a few changes to all that planning (to the guest list and the menu and the time—I did keep the venue).

  “Look, you can pretend you had no idea,” Ryan said.

  That was the last thing I wanted to do. While I had become somewhat of a seasoned liar over the years—a job requirement—I used to be a very honest person. And that was the person Danny knew—the one he had fallen in love with. Whenever I tried to stretch the truth with him, he would often see through it. And I didn’t want to fight.

  “Handle it however you want,” Ryan said. “But we have to do this, okay?”

  “Fine, whatever, just keep it under control.”

  “When don’t I?” He paused, considering. “This morning notwithstanding.”

  “Ryan, we have to deal with him.”

  “Danny?” he said, confused.

  “The hacker.”

  He rolled his eyes. “I’m dealing with him! Five people at the studio are devoting all their time to figuring out which weirdo living with his mother in Idaho who jerked off to your videos one too many times did this thing.”

  “Gross.”

  Ryan sucked down the juice. “I aim to please.”

  “Uh . . . guys?” Violet waltzed into the kitchen. “Amber is weighing in . . .”

  Amber was Amber Rucci, aka Toast of the Town. A fellow culinary YouTube star. All of her dishes used toast as their base. Thick, old-fashioned brioche; salted, grainy rye. Some of her recipes were as simple as homemade almond butter on burnt brioche. Did that even count as a recipe? It counted enough that she was beloved. She was also young and attractive—and the host of the second-most popular YouTube cooking show, tracking only behind A Little Sunshine. Years ago, she had reached out and sent me an array of kitchen utensils (Let’s get cooking!!) to cement something like a friendship between us. I was more than happy to play nice too and sent her back a knife set (Your stove or mine?). Our “friendship” led to joint appearances on each other’s shows and a New York Times “Night Out” piece. On the menu was my tomato pie, accompanied by her avocado and mint toast.

  Now, apparently, she wanted the world to know she wasn’t a fair-weather friend.

  Believe in the power of Sunshine! #chefsunite #loveandpepper

  She linked to a photograph of us on Instagram, preparing dinner in her kitchen.

  Violet put her phone away. “That’s nice, right?” she said. “Why didn’t she email personally, though?”

  “What good would that do?” Ryan said. “No one would have seen it!”

  “I hate toast,” I said.

  Ryan smiled. “There’s my girl!” he said.

  “Violet, I need you to get a few tweets out in the next fifteen minutes,” I said. “Something like . . .‘Hello, guys, this is Sunshine (the real Sunshine), what a morning!’ You understand.”

  She headed toward the living room. “Already on it.”

  Ryan called out after her. “Use one of those inspirational quotes on Instagram about how scary it is to have someone else speaking for you, pretending to be you. How strong you feel using your own voice again. Something.”

  Violet turned around. “Ooh! I have a great one from Maya Angelou!” she said.

  “Did I ask you for the details?” Ryan said, waving her off. “Use a yellow background!”

  Then Ryan turned to me.

  “Yellow makes people think of truth,” he said.

  Had I read that somewhere? Or was Ryan just so convincing when he spewed his bullshit that I not only believed it, I believed I had always believed it?

  I reached for my coffee. “Good to know.”

  “I could do without the sarcasm.”

  “So fix it, Ryan,” I said. “What if someone starts digging around? The Food Network will pull the plug. Everyone will pull the plug!”

  “Not going to happen,” Ryan said.

  I looked at him, uncertain.

  “We have Meredith saying it’s not true. What kind of digging makes sense after that? Besides, no one wants to open that can of worms. There are two people who have released cookbooks in the last decade who had anything to do with the actual recipes in those books. At the most, you have a celebrity who created the dishes. The recipes are worked out in a
test kitchen by some ghostwriter who actually knows what he’s doing.”

  “A ghostwriter who received credit,” I said.

  “So you want to tell the world now that Meredith is the ghostwriter? It’s a little late to give her credit.”

  I thought of what I wasn’t saying out loud—the stuff that would surely sink our little empire if it got out. “We know it’s not just the recipes,” I said.

  “Sunny . . .”

  Ryan’s eyes softened, and for a second, it stopped feeling like he was producing me. It felt like he was being my friend.

  “We also are the only ones who know. Trust me. We are safe,” he said.

  He nodded with absolute conviction.

  I felt myself sinking into his assured tone. And it was enough for me to push it aside.

  “We good here?” he said.

  “We are,” I said, almost meaning it.

  It’s amazing, after all, what you’ll ignore when you want something to be right, isn’t it? Like in this case, the truth.

  3

  If I haven’t made it abundantly clear yet, Ryan had always had something of a loose hold on the truth. One of the first things he told me, in fact, was that he hated the words lies and truth. He said they were needlessly categorical. He liked to say instead: the story.

  And the story, as far as the world knew, was a familiar one. It was a story that a lot of women could relate to. I was a small-town girl who, after college, decided to move to New York City. I was young, newly engaged, and struggling to make a name for myself as a journalist. I was working terrible hours at a sports magazine. (We settled on a sports magazine because Ryan thought a woman’s magazine was too clichéd.) The point was, I had moved far from where I’d come from—but instead of feeling great about this, I felt a strange pull toward my roots. So, the Sunday I turned twenty-six, I headed to the farmer’s market in Park Slope and made a family favorite—tomato pie—walking Danny through the various ingredients with stories of growing them on the farm. At some point, Danny picked up the video camera and filmed me putting the pie in the oven—later revealing the decadent finished treat.

  We had enjoyed the night so much—far more than the sticky sesame chicken we treated ourselves to on Sunday nights—that the next Sunday, I did the same thing. And the Sunday after that.

  And so it started a tradition. Every Sunday night, I cooked a new farm-fresh meal, recipes developed to highlight in-season produce, local farmers. Everything was easy to make (every chef loved promising ease), but also fun: Danny on the other side of the camera, laughing at the embarrassing anecdotes I shared about growing up on the farm, how they related to the recipe, how they related to our life together now. From the first video, I wasn’t just promising a farm-fresh meal: I promised something else. Friendship. Honesty. Someone saying it was okay to embrace wherever you came from as a part of where you wanted to go.

  Danny started posting the videos to YouTube to share with our family and friends. He called them, “A Little Bit of Sunshine: Sunday Night with a Farmer’s Daughter.”

  He, of course, had no idea they would go viral.

  Well, viral is an exaggeration. But fifty thousand people did tune in for the first one. And after we posted about five of them, they caught the eye of a Food Network producer, Ryan Landy, who saw in this unabashed small-town girl the opportunity to bring cooking to a new generation. It wasn’t just my recipes he liked, he would later say in the first profile of A Little Sunshine in New York magazine, it was the feeling. Small-town girl turning into city woman. My East Village apartment was rustic and homey. My fiancé in his jeans and button-down was handsome without trying. And while I was just wearing a T-shirt and jeans, my hair swept into a bun, I looked like you’d want to look with your hair swept into a bun: friendly, sincere, girl you wanted to be friends with pretty.

  A Little Sunshine, he said, was aspirational for young, ambitious New Yorkers: twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings who didn’t shop for clothes anymore, who bought pieces; who turned 800-square-foot apartments into glamorous, mid-century homes; who through sheer force of will (and eighty-hour workweeks) turned relationships and jobs into the family and career they wanted. But these women, in their efforts to become the women they thought they should be, sometimes lost sight of the women they used to be—the women they truly were. Here was someone being who she truly was. And being embraced for it.

  My grainy videos made people feel like I was their most authentic friend. And, from day one, the fans (how weird, at first, to think of fans) craved that authenticity. They wrote emails, they wrote letters, they wrote in the comments: Who knew that in the kitchen I would rediscover a piece of myself? #justadentistsdaughter. (She was a hedge fund manager who’d won two Midas Awards and lived in a ten-million-dollar loft on Hubert Street.) We put her testimonial on the top of the webpage.

  This woman, all these women, who had their fifty-dollar blow-outs and Pilates lessons and green juice in the morning, now, every Sunday, instead of takeout, they had A Little Sunshine. It was cooking as a way of escape, cooking as a way of joy. Cooking as a way to make their boyfriends and husbands feel wanted and make them feel like they were more than their busy jobs. It was cooking as a way to spend time with Sunshine Mackenzie—a pretty (but not too pretty) girl who, just like them, was taking a little time away from trying to be everything to everyone to stay true to herself.

  It was a great story, right?

  If only any of it were true.

  The day I turned twenty-six, I wasn’t uploading anything to YouTube. I was working at a bar and grill in Red Hook. At the time, it was one of the only bar and grills in Red Hook—a small community at the tip of Brooklyn, named after the hook at its end that stuck out into Upper New York Bay. Nowadays, it was nearly as hip and pricey as the more convenient and yuppied-out Brooklyn neighborhoods near it—but at the time, it was still fighting its gentrification—an IKEA going in, artists purchasing town houses, a Michelin-starred chef setting up shop in an abandoned Chevron station. Most important, while completely inconvenient to everything in Manhattan, Red Hook was relatively convenient to the graduate school where Danny was getting his master’s in architecture.

  Of course, over time, Red Hook had become more than just convenient. It had become a plan. There was a brownstone off Pioneer Street that we couldn’t begin to afford. It needed a gut renovation, landscaping, indoor plumbing (no joke). But we loved it all the same—its small backyard, an exposed brick wall that ran the length of the living room. Danny had become friendly with the owner, who had several equally dilapidated properties around the neighborhood. He was considering selling to us, if, in exchange, Danny would renovate the brownstone as a show property: an example of how the other properties could be lovingly refurbished. Danny agreed that he would build out those properties as well, if buyers were interested.

  So, in theory, it was to everyone’s benefit. I loved the idea of having a home—a real home that I wanted to come home to (something I’d never had). Danny needed clients. The owner wanted to cash in on Red Hook’s burgeoning popularity.

  I was tending bar to pay our rent, and Danny was moonlighting at an architecture firm in Tribeca on the weekends to pay for everything else, including our down payment. We weren’t going to be able to celebrate my birthday together that night. We weren’t going to be able to celebrate my birthday until we each had a corresponding day off—which looked like it was going to be sometime in August.

  Ryan walked in around 10 P.M. I’m sure of the time because a drunk couple—two regulars, Austin and Carla—were arguing at the bar. Right as the front door opened, Carla poured their pitcher of beer over Austin’s head.

  “Sorry!” Austin said. I didn’t know if he was talking to me or to his girlfriend. I knew he didn’t mean it.

  I perched on the floor, wiping up the sticky, yeasty mess, staring at the clock, counting the minutes until closing. So I didn’t quit. So I didn’t fill another pitcher of beer and throw it right back at th
em.

  “You’ve certainly gone and made a mess of things now,” Ryan said.

  This was the first thing he said to me, sitting on the corner barstool, wearing a pinstriped suit. I looked up at him, taking a final swipe at the floor.

  “Not my mess,” I said.

  He shrugged. “If you’re the one cleaning it up, what’s the difference?”

  I smirked, preparing to ignore him. Sometimes they ended up here—smarmy guys in fancy suits, their wives asleep in their Park Slope town houses. They usually arrived with a woman they didn’t want to be seen with anywhere else. I looked toward the door, half expecting someone to join him.

  “It’s just me,” he said, as if reading the thought. Then he flashed me his smile.

  Ryan would later say that I smiled back at him, welcoming him, but I doubt that’s true. I don’t remember having any interest in even serving him a drink—this guy talking to me from his height of the bar stool, my low of the floor.

  “Guess I’m a little overdressed for this place,” he said.

  I shrugged. “All the same to me.”

  “Well, I didn’t feel like heading home just yet. I just lost my job.”

  “Oh . . .”

  “Yeah, well, officially, I resigned to pursue a secret project.”

  “And you thought you’d find it here?”

  I worked on tips. You would have thought I’d try to keep the sarcasm in check. But I had beer on my knees and I didn’t feel particularly badly for a guy who could sell his suit and make more than I was paid in a month.

  He laughed. “No, I thought I’d get drunk here. And I’ll start looking tomorrow.”

  “So what can I get you?”

  “Do you make martinis?”

  “Not well.”

  “Just a beer, then.”

  I filled up a pint and put it in front of him. “Five dollars,” I said.

  “Five dollars?”

  He shook his head, taking out a ten, motioning for me to join him in a beer. It was an offer I had to accept, pouring myself a pint, so I could pocket the other five.

  “Maybe you should learn how to make a martini,” he said. “Increase that profit margin.”