When in Doubt, Add Butter

by Beth Harbison

  I could already anticipate how that would go, and I did not want to be anywhere near here when it blew. “Everything here will be ready in five minutes. I’ll leave it on the counter and slip out.”

  “Thank you, Gemma.” His eyes met mine again, and gratitude softened them. “You’re the best.”

  He went upstairs, and before he reached the landing, I heard Angela’s voice rising in anger.

  I don’t know what they said. I didn’t want to know. I couldn’t stand it.

  It was quite telling that every time I left their house after cooking for them, I felt sick.

  Quickly I finished the dish, pouring the hot tomato sauce over the vegetables on a platter, then grinding the nutritional yeast, sesame seeds, salt, and pepper in the blender to make Angela’s poor substitute for Parmesan cheese.

  I shook that into a bowl, set it next to the dinner platter, put a serving spoon next to it all, and did a quick cleanup so I could get the hell out of there.

  This was not a good situation, and not just for Peter and Stephen. Angela had become increasingly … difficult (unhappy? hormonal? unbalanced? I had no idea) over the past few months. She’d always been sharp with her husband and son, but the worst she used to be with the nannies or me was condescending. Lately, she’d gotten downright snotty with me, and I wasn’t at all confident about my place on their staff.

  My days here felt numbered.

  It was time to write an ad for the Washingtonian classifieds and start marketing myself again. Self-promotion was never my forte, but there was no choice. I needed to replace Fridays quick, before I needed to replace Mondays as well.

  * * *

  I was buzzing on my way home that night.

  Irritation kept rising in my chest about Angela, and regret kept washing through me when I remembered the events of Friday night. I had to keep taking deep breaths to calm both emotions. I needed to do something to distract myself. I took a hard left, on an impulse, and decided to get my groceries for the next couple of days. It’s not like I’d be able to sleep when I got home, anyway.

  Privately rationalizing that I was going this way for convenience and not for any other reason, I drove down Connecticut Avenue and passed No Plans on my left. As soon as I passed it, I shook my head, feeling stupid. What had I expected, just to see him hanging out outside, waiting for me to drive by? And if so, that’d be weird.

  I turned up the radio, trying to drown out my thoughts, and pulled up a few minutes later in front of Giant.

  I grabbed a shopping cart and let my purse sling into the top compartment. I laughed as I thought of what Angela would do if she saw her cook touching a grocery cart handle without Purelling it first.

  My cell phone rang, and I answered when I saw it was Lynn.

  “Hey, Lynn—ugh, I’ve had the worst day.”

  “Oh, no, really?” She sounded genuinely disappointed. “What happened?”

  I let loose, venting about all the frustrations of my evening. She listened carefully, agreeing in all the right spots. I finished with “She’s just so … eergh, you know?”

  “God, she sounds like it.” She sighed. “You should just quit.”

  “Ha!” I said, resting the phone on my shoulder as I picked out a few cloves of garlic. “As if it were that easy.”

  “Once you get Fridays covered, you can just put out another ad for Mondays. Maybe someone will even need both nights!” She gasped at the convenience in her dream scenario.

  I smiled at her support and interest in my personal dramas.

  “So,” she went on, “have you heard from him?”

  “How would I have heard from him? He still doesn’t have my number. And I still don’t know what the note said. It could very well have said, ‘Ehh, it was all right. Thanks, though.’”

  She laughed appreciatively. “I don’t know, I thought maybe he might have tried to track you down. It’s like Serendipity.”

  “Uh-huh, except with slimmer odds. By the way”—I lowered my voice—“I owe you condoms. I should pick them up now.”

  She laughed. “Um, did we make a bet I don’t remember?”

  “No, I dug them out of your bedside table on Friday night. It was kind of an emergency.”

  “Good Lord, I don’t even remember having any there. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Well, still, I rifled through your drawer like a truffle-sniffing pig and helped myself to your stuff, so I really should replace—” I turned down an aisle. I almost dropped my phone. I backed out of the aisle again. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  “What?”

  “It’s him!” I whispered. “The guy from the bar is here!”

  “Go talk to him!”

  “I—what do I say?”

  “You might start by getting his last name.”

  “Very funny. I’m serious, what can I say? I’ve never had a one-night stand before. This is very awkward.”

  “Play your cards right, and maybe it won’t end up being a one-night stand.”

  As soon as she said the words, a little zing went through my chest. The idea certainly had its appeal.

  “Suddenly you’re recommending long-term relationships?”

  She laughed. “God no. But there’s something in between a one-night stand and marriage. Just make sure you stop short of that crucial point.”

  “Marriage?”

  “Engagement.”

  “I hear you.”

  “Good. Now, I’m hanging up!” Lynn said when I didn’t answer right away. “Go talk to him, you dumb girl!”

  And my phone went silent.

  I mustered the courage and took a deep breath to steady the butterflies—no, they weren’t butterflies; they were elephants trampling my stomach.

  I turned down the aisle again, and I saw him reaching into his pocket. I was just about to call his name when I saw him pull out his phone.

  “Is it bad?” he answered without preamble. He put his head in his hand and rubbed his eyebrows. “Shit … Yup. Yup, I can come back.” He was nodding silently. He looked very tired, I was noticing. “I shouldn’t be more than fifteen minutes or so.”

  I didn’t know what to do, so I just stood there, frozen. This was not the time. This was clearly not the time. Not only was he obviously leaving, but he was leaving in a hurry and didn’t need the inconvenient delay of a conversation he didn’t have time for with a woman he didn’t know.

  I was ready to back out of the aisle once more (I must have looked like an idiot to anyone watching), when he saw me.

  “What’s the guy saying?” he asked into the phone. He held up a hand to wave at me. I held up my own.

  I could say nothing. He mouthed, One minute.

  I smiled and nodded, hoping he couldn’t actually see or hear my heartbeat. Okay, I mouthed back.

  He returned his attention to the phone, shook his head, and looked a little desperate. “Tell him not to say anything else.” He patted his pockets and pulled out his wallet, cradling the phone awkwardly in the crook of his neck. He reached into the compartment and pulled out a card and handed it to me just before whoever was on the other end of the line said something that made him say, “Stop him now! Put him on the phone and let me talk to him.”

  He handed me the card and mouthed the words Gotta go, looking apologetic.

  I nodded again, feeling like he was water running through my fingers.

  He started to hurry out of the store, then stopped. “Hold on one second, Jason.” He turned back to me. “Call me, okay? Please, I want to talk to you!”

  And then he dropped his basket by the door, pulled keys from his pocket, and walked quickly out of the store. I just stood there, gaping. I’d had him, and then I’d lost him.

  I looked at the card in my hand. SUSAN PILLINGTON, FLORAL ARRANGEMENTS.

  What the fuck?

  This had to be a mistake. Obviously he wasn’t Susan Pillington. And I seriously doubted he was intentionally sending me on a scavenger hunt to find his name and identity via on
e obscure clue at a time. No, given the hurry he was in, he must have meant to hand me his card, not hers.

  We’d missed again.

  Was this fate? Was God, or whatever, going to great lengths to keep us so far apart that we didn’t even know each other’s whole names?

  I called Lynn back as I grabbed the chips I’d walked into the aisle for to begin with. Mr. Tuesday’s favorite, and ones he once told me in a note that he could never resist as a midnight snack. It was ironic that I was kind of pining for one man even while I was essentially acting as the perfect wife to another.

  Not his real wife, but perhaps something better.

  I threw them into my basket just as she answered. “Well, fuck,” I said unceremoniously.

  “Oh, no, what happened?”

  I told her the whole thing.

  “What were you gonna do, though?” she asked when I’d finished. “I mean, you could hardly go running after him to tell him you don’t have his number.”

  I shrugged, and then remembering she couldn’t see me, I said, “Yup.”

  “Maybe he’ll be at No Plans this Friday. We could go back. Casually check the place out.”

  The idea was appealing, but I didn’t know that I could just be That Girl.

  “Maybe.” I wound around a corner, suddenly feeling not at all like shopping. “I don’t know. We’ll talk about it later in the week, okay?”

  “Okay. Feel better, babe.”

  “Okay.”

  And I hung up, leaving with a strange sense of emptiness, whereas I had gone into the store seeking only a few groceries.

  * * *

  The Washingtonian ad I placed advertising my services went pretty well. It appeared over the weekend and I interviewed with six possible clients, two of whom seemed … doable. Not great—honestly, the people who want to hire a private chef aren’t always what you’d consider the most “normal” people in the world—but I was pretty comfortable with all the people I interviewed with that day. My instincts told me there weren’t any serious wackos in the bunch, though my instincts had also told me that Cal was the right guy for the rest of my life, that Yugoslavia would be an “interesting” vacation destination in 1994, and that pillowcase blond would look good on me for my thirtieth birthday.

  In short, my instincts were sometimes way off.

  I would have preferred a personal referral. It also takes a lot of the guesswork out of the personalities involved. Look, you’d have to be a fool to think that in one half-hour interview you can really tell enough about someone’s personality to know whether or not there’s anything to be extra cautious about.

  Obviously, the same is true of those people interviewing me, asking a stranger to come into their home and wield knives (and sometimes have a butterknife-on-the-counter-incident) one night a week. The relationship requires mutual trust, but basing it on someone else’s personal knowledge of a person was a much more comfortable springboard into that relationship.

  Unfortunately, I needed to earn a certain amount per week, and I absolutely could not afford to lose one of those nights for long. Granted, I was able to pick up a Friday or Saturday catering job here and there, and luckily I’d done enough of those to sock away some money that would keep me afloat until I replaced the Lemurras, but like I said, Suze Orman would have torn me a new one if I’d called her TV show and told her the honest state of my financial affairs and savings at age thirty-seven.

  This was my weakness. I was a right-brained person, a nurturer. Not a numbers girl. My left-brain capacity was not nearly so good as my right. So I was deficient in the savings department, but at least I knew enough to know I had to get more work, and quick. The old me might have taken those days off, combined them with my savings, and gone on vacation, but new me knew better than to sink in those waters.

  Now all that new me had to do was find a good piece of driftwood.

  And if driftwood couldn’t be found in the form of the job I preferred—cooking—I would have to take it in whatever form I could find it.

  Which was one of the most motivating things I could come up with: I did not want a desk job.

  I had to get cooking.

  Chapter 6

  “I have some special needs.”

  It wasn’t the words—I’m used to talking to people about their dietary concerns, especially during a job interview. It was something about the tone the guy used when he said it.

  And the fact that he was wearing half a clown suit.

  The bottom half.

  And the nose.

  The minute I’d walked into his apartment, I knew it was a mistake and that this wasn’t going to be a good fit. Part of me stayed out of morbid curiosity—what could he possibly perceive his special needs to be?—and part of me stayed out of sheer politeness. It just felt too awkward to turn tail and run the minute I’d gotten there.

  It was Wednesday, and I had the afternoon and evening off. Lex, my usual, had forgotten about a party he’d promised to attend, but paid me for the night anyway.

  “What in particular?” I asked.

  “Well, for one thing—” He shifted his weight and clapped one huge-shoe-clad leg over the other. Something, somewhere, squeaked. “—do you have a problem with dogs?”

  I looked around the apartment. There was no sign of a dog. Or a maid, for that matter.

  God, hopefully he didn’t mean cooking them.

  “I … like dogs,” I answered cautiously.

  “I like dogs, too.” So it was the right answer. “And I really hate people who don’t like dogs.”

  Again, it wasn’t 100 percent clear in what capacity he liked dogs.

  “Okay, you mean as pets?” I asked.

  “Obviously.” The red nose twitched. “What, do you think I eat them?”

  “Of course not!”

  “I did once,” he went on, as if he hadn’t heard me. “Overseas. It was an accident.”

  “How do you accidentally—?” I stopped, thought better of it.

  He didn’t seem to notice. “How much do you charge?”

  I told him, explaining that the cost of food was dependent upon, well, the cost of the food, but that my rate for preparation was always the same.

  He cocked his head. “Do you take payment in other currencies?”

  “No.”

  “What about in something other than money?” He uncrossed his legs and let them lag open, inviting the terrible question of what he was suggesting.

  “No. What kind of—?” I stopped as I thought better of it. I didn’t want to know his answer. The tamest of which that I could imagine would be Monopoly money and chocolate coins. “Actually, Mr. Lutz, I don’t think this is going to work out.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “Me working here.”

  “Who asked you to work here?”

  I opened my mouth and then breathed deeply instead of speaking right away. “Isn’t that why you called and asked me to come talk to you about work?”

  “It’s Klutz.”

  “What?”

  “You said Mr. Lutz, but it’s Mr. Klutz.” He gestured, indicating a brown leather suitcase, presumably something he took to work when he went to scare children out of their wits at birthday parties. It had MR. KLUTZ written on it in what appeared to be black Sharpie. It also appeared that a left-handed person might have written it with their right hand. “I had it legally changed.”

  “You had your name legally changed from Lutz to Klutz?”

  “From Lutz to Klutz? No.”

  I bit my tongue, regretting that we were both sounding like a Dr. Seuss rhyme.

  He looked at me as if I were the one who was crazy. “From Rosenfeld.”

  “Wow. Okay.” Honestly, if I could have been sure he wasn’t about to whip out a bowie knife and call it a mitten before slicing my throat with it, I would have stayed just to see where else this conversation would go. “Anyway, Mr. Rosenfeld, it was very nice to meet you.” I started for the door.

  “Yo
u can call me Klutz.”

  I let out a noisy breath. “Right.”

  “You have the number, right?”

  This was why I used a disposable phone when interviewing potential new clients. So they didn’t have my number, or any way to find me, if they turned out to be nuts.

  “Yes, I do,” I said calmly. “My husband’s waiting downstairs, so I wish you luck with … whatever it is you’re looking for.”

  “Geraniums. I’m looking for geraniums.”

  I nodded, looking wide-eyed and wishing anyone else were around me to hear the conversation. “Perfect.”

  I took the stairs. I did not want to take a chance on getting stuck on the elevator in this whack job’s building. But even as I ran down the stairwell, I had to laugh. I had run into some oddballs in my time—it wasn’t all that rare—but that one was up there.

  Most people were normal, or normal-ish. We all have our peculiarities. And just because a potential client falls under the umbrella of normal, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be a good fit. A lot of times, it’s clear to both parties that it won’t be.

  But I have to say, those oddballs really are the spice of life sometimes.

  * * *

  The next appointment was more promising.

  They were a middle-aged couple in southern Chevy Chase, right on the D.C. border. They’d lived there for all their thirty-odd-year marriage and had a solid reputation in the community.

  “Can I get you some tea?” Reva, the wife, asked me. “It’s fresh raspberry and basil.”

  We were sitting in their huge country kitchen. Every upgrade imaginable had been made, from the professional Wolf stove to the wide Sub-Zero fridge (an oldie but goodie) to the slightly angled cement counter with a movable stainless steel hose over it in order to make cleanup a breeze.

  I was dying to cook in there.

  And if great ingredients and combos, like raspberry and basil, were in the pipeline, it was going to be all that much better. “Wow. Sounds amazing. Thanks.”

  “She’s into her witchy concoctions,” her husband, Tom, told me. “Loves to make teas and those smelly sachet things, but I can’t get her to make a salad.” He smiled. “I assume you know your way around a salad?”