Out of the Frying Pan

by Robin Allen

  Four

  “I know what you’re doing, Dove!” Dana shouted.

  Conversations dribbled to a trickle as everyone stared at the incoming and outgoing presidents facing off.

  “Trying to keep my business afloat?” Randy said. “Report me to the authorities.”

  “You hired him on purpose,” Dana said.

  “As opposed to hiring him accidentally?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I would if you made sense.”

  “This is why they elected me president,” Dana said. “I don’t play dirty.”

  “Let’s ask your waiters if that’s true.”

  “I don’t know what you’re up to, Dove, but my attorneys will figure it out.”

  “Have at it, my dear.”

  Dana opened her mouth to rebut, but shut it when she noticed all of the attention. “This isn’t over,” she said before she left.

  “Who did Randy hire?” Daisy asked. “And what did he mean about her waiters? Are you withholding intel?”

  “Must be an embolism in the grapevine,” I said, watching Dana leave through the archway and walk a wide perimeter around Randy’s sales rep returning to base.

  “I wish I was spending the evening with you two blossoms,” a man said. I turned to see Brandon Vaughn in front of us holding a napkin-lined tray. “This waiter business stinks.” He lifted his tray to reveal pale yellow egg smears in the area of his rib cage. “The tray keeps tipping.”

  “Hold it away from you and be ready for the weight change when someone lifts an egg,” I said. “Like this.” I stood and pulled the tray a couple of inches away from his body then made eye contact and said, “Ready?” He nodded. I took an egg and the tray moved up, but stayed level. “It just takes practice,” I said. I handed the egg to Daisy then took a cucumber for myself. The tray barely moved. “See? Practice.”

  “Thanks, Pop,” Brandon said.

  “Where’s Core?” Daisy asked.

  “He stayed behind after the demo to make up a few more boxes. Tomorrow’s a CSA pickup day.”

  “Bran-don!” Kevin called as he strode toward us with an empty tray.

  “I should have stayed behind, too,” Brandon mumbled.

  Kevin stopped in front of his cousin, a sneer of superiority on his flushed face. “I’ve already given out four trays of food. Stop playing with the girls and go serve people!”

  “Jawohl!” Brandon said in his best German accent, then rolled his eyes and moved to the next table. Kevin watched him serve a couple more people, then he made for the archway.

  Daisy and I giggled at Brandon’s response, but also that all of us were right back where we had been as kids—Kevin trying to bossy boss everyone, and the rest of us snickering at him behind his husky back.

  Erik returned with a stack of bevnaps for me and a glass of white wine for Daisy.

  “No, baby, I didn’t mean for me,” Daisy said, holding up her half-full glass. “For Poppy. Something red.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  “I’ll get it, Erik,” I said, wiping at the drying Meritage splashes from my boots with the napkins. “Set a spell with your wife.”

  I walked through a swarm of familiar faces I have seen mature and then wrinkle over the years, thinking about the lives and circumstances they represented—births, deaths, marriages, divorces, stints in prison, appearance-altering surgeries, substance abuse problems. These dinners feel like family reunions. And like all families, there are those weird cousins who always seem to have their internal GPS set to your coordinates and find you no matter what.

  I got within a yardstick of the bar when Jerry Potter, the cook Dana fired for spitting in a Mornay sauce, blocked my way. As short and slight as a racehorse jockey, he wore wrinkled jeans and a burnt orange Longhorns T-shirt and held a can of beer in each hand. “Have you sent anyone out to General Chow’s yet?” he asked, focusing bleary red eyes on me. “I left a anonymous tip.”

  “Regarding?”

  “They’re washing raw chickens with a hose and letting ’em dry on clothes hangers.”

  A chicken carcass fashion show. That was weird and interesting, but not a violation as long as they used plastic clothes hangers and didn’t hang them above any other food. Raw chicken is lousy with salmonella bacteria. “Are you working there now?” I asked.

  He burped. “I’m cooking at the Flashlight. I can see their back parking lot from my balcony.”

  “They’re doing this outside?”

  He nodded and sipped his beer.

  “Thanks, Jerry. I’ll look into it.”

  “You can use my place for a stakeout if you want,” he said. “I’m in apartment four oh six.”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  He held out a can to me. “Want one? They’re free, so I got two.”

  “Thanks, but I’m drinking wine tonight.”

  I excused myself when he began ranting against Dana White’s unfair treatment of cooks who had a “mild drooling disorder.”

  A line had formed at the bar, and I queued up behind Bjorn Fleming. He helps Tanya prepare quiches, preserves, and other goodies from the farm’s ingredients to sell to CSA subscribers and at farmer’s markets. The original plans for the farm hadn’t included preparing food, but they had christened their private, sustainable venture with the idealistic name of Good Earth Preserves, as in preservation of the land, and so many people thought they sold fruit preserves that they started making them. Tanya couldn’t keep up with demand, so they hired Bjorn a few years ago.

  Curious about his argument with Dana earlier, I said, “Lots of life in the kitchen tonight, huh?”

  He looked over his shoulder, then turned to face me. “That woman,” he said, running his hand through white-blond hair half a shade darker than his skin. “She’s as ruthless as Hitler.”

  I searched for a joke in his blue eyes but found only conviction. “There are a lot of ways to interpret that description,” I said.

  “She’s always making everything into an emergency so she can order people around. I went to tell her the reach-in door sometimes doesn’t click shut and she said I was ruining the deviled eggs and ordered me out of the kitchen. My kitchen.”

  “She’s a chef,” I said. “It’s part of the job.”

  “I’m a chef and I don’t treat people like that.” He turned around to move up with the line.

  “Then why did you ask her for a job?” As a rule, I don’t gossip, but I do like to be on top of the truth so I know when a rumormonger has it wrong and can correct them. Dana’s cook may have lied to me about the cause of their argument, but from the way Bjorn whipped his head back to me, I knew she hadn’t.

  “Who told you that?” he said.

  Why don’t people know that if you’re trying to conceal guilt, you should never answer a question with a question? “One of Dana’s cooks,” I said.

  “They’re wrong,” he said. “You couldn’t pay me enough to work for that Nazi.” Then he peeled off into the Field.

  I was second in line for a drink when Kevin started worming through the crowd, encouraging us to take our seats at the tables by clapping his hands and yelling, “Dinnertime, people. Let’s go.” Kevin needed to follow up that MBA degree with finishing school.

  We should have all settled down quickly because the tables were only fifty feet away from the bar area, which is where everyone had congregated, and these dinners have assigned seating. However, as always happens at this and most dinner parties everywhere, the guests thought they knew better than the person who made the assignments—the person with the big picture in mind, who is privy to rivalries and friendships, who thinks that a certain chef of exotic food should sit next to a new vendor of imported ingredients—and began to switch tables to sit near friends and existing business associates.

  But because the
y did not wait until all eight people arrived at the switched-to table before they sat down, they found themselves next to competitors, former employees, vendors they swore they would never do business with as long as Texas was part of the Union, and health inspectors who consistently gave them the poor score they deserved—creating the very situations the party planner tried to avoid—which necessitated more switching and some on-the-spot arbitration.

  So the last dinner plates weren’t brought out until 6:30 PM.

  A couple of minutes after that, Randy Dove started choking.

  Five

  The Friends’ vice president, Mike Glass, shot out of his chair and threw his arms around Randy. With one quick upward drive of both fists into Randy’s sternum, he Heimliched a hunk of meat out of Randy and onto the table.

  After a recovery period of approximately 1.8 seconds, enough time to draw a raspy breath, Randy coughed out, “She tried to kill me! First she steals the election, and now … ” He made eye contact with several of his Friends friends, nodding them into agreement as he said, “All of you saw. She’s trying to kill me!”

  Mike said something to Randy that I was close enough to hear, but his words were drowned out by all the background giggles and twitters. If it were me, I would have told Randy that the outgoing president of the Friends accusing the incoming president of attempted murder cemented his reputation as a sore loser in front of clients and colleagues.

  Mike’s particular words, however, had an inflammatory effect on Randy. He snatched up the expelled meat and tried to hurl it over the hedge, but because a cube of lamb weighs only a couple of ounces, even with all the spices, it didn’t make it past the next table, which happened to be ours.

  Since we were on a farm, I’ll stay with the theme and say that Nina had a cow when the roasted kebob landed on her shoulder, which took everyone’s attention away from Randy. Except mine. Nina’s docudramas no longer rate with me, and I wouldn’t lay odds against her already planning to shop for a replacement pant suit, plus a few accessories to soothe her mental anguish. Randy glared at Mike, then stomped through the Field toward the archway. Mike dropped his shoulders and followed his leader.

  “Who’s that with Randy?” Erik asked.

  “Mike Glass, recently former vice president and treasurer of the Friends,” I said. “He’s also a sales rep for Waterloo Linen.”

  “He looks scary,” Daisy said.

  “It’s all for show,” I said. Mike shaves his head, has an over-­developed upper body, and stays perennially coconut brown with a lifelong tanning salon membership. “He moonlights as a bouncer at Casino El Camino on the weekends. He’s actually kind of sweetly dumb.”

  “Look at me!” Nina cried. She used both French-manicured index fingers to point to herself in case we didn’t know who she meant by me. “I am not staying here like this.”

  “Just take off your jacket,” I said.

  She pushed back her chair, and I looked around for any waiter serving the vegan offering, which was rumored to be green bean casserole. The carnivorous dinners had been served first.

  “Take me back to Hyde Park, Poppy.”

  I’ve been cursed with Nina as my stepmother for more than three years, so I should have known that not only would she not take my suggestion to sacrifice a piece of her Outfit, she would escalate the situation to hog more attention. (Naming the tony neighborhood

  she lived in, however, was well-played.) Nina didn’t want to go home; she wanted to be coaxed into staying.

  Fortunately, coaxing isn’t part of my genetic makeup. “You drove yourself,” I said.

  Nina made a disapproving disappointed sound that I’ve only ever heard come out of her and her two spoiled dogs, then snatched her purse from under her chair. Earlier, she had set it on her napkin in the grass, then took my napkin, which made me have to ask for another. Kevin still hadn’t returned with a new one or the glass of wine I asked for. I had been at this event for an hour and a half and had sipped only one stinking drop of wine and eaten two miniscule slices of cucumber.

  Nina stood and made for the exit, but Perry was leaving too and hurried to meet her at the archway. I don’t know what he said to her, but she came back to our table without an explanation. Her silence would last long enough for her to think of something else to embroil us in, and I was already down to the dregs of my patience with her, so I leaned over to Daisy and said, “I’m going to call Mitch again.”

  Yes, I know I’ve wanted to bit and bridle anyone who uses cell phones in social situations, but I had tried to get a hold of my father since before the tour, placing the first call while I sat in my Jeep in the parking lot waiting for Nina to arrive. Since his mild heart attack a few months ago, that man has been a consistent source of worry for me. He has the reckless spirit of a young man, but the heart and body of an ancient mariner. He also has something like a four hundred golf handicap that he’s trying to improve.

  I went to the washing shed, which is less like a traditional shed where people store garden tools they can’t get to for all the boxes of sentimental junk inside, and more like a large open area between the kitchen and office buildings, and twice as big as either. It had been unproductive space until a few years ago when Good Earth decided to make the CSA subscriber experience more comfortable. They tacked on a corrugated metal back wall and slanted roof to keep out the elements, and added counter space and a sink where farmers and interns could wash up.

  I like neatness and order, straight lines and right angles, so every time I come to the farm, I’m a little uneasy surrounded by all of the unplanned development and slapdash buildings. During the tour earlier, I had lingered in front of the long, neat rows of arugula to restore mental order—and to calm myself after Nina asked whether it would be too dark later to see the cows come home.

  I opened my phone, but didn’t redial Mitch’s number because a much more interesting conversation was happening within eavesdropping distance in the shed’s storage pantry in the back right corner. I put my silent phone to one ear and backed up a few steps to get close enough to listen with the other.

  “We have a farm full of people tonight,” a man said. It took me a moment to realize that it was Perry because I had never heard him sound irked. “Why are you bringing this up now?”

  “You never want to discuss it,” another man said.

  “We’re an organic farm, son. There’s nothing to discuss.”

  Perry has two sons, so either Brandon or Cory said, “We don’t want her here.”

  “You’ve all been clear on that, but the vote is final,” Perry said. “Now, let’s tend to our guests.”

  I heard something thud on the dirt floor as I hurried away from the pantry. I stood just outside the shed and extended my arm and moved my cell phone through the air, pretending to scout for a signal while I waited for Perry and his son to emerge. I wanted to see which one he had argued with. Cory is the younger son and has always been a bit of a lamb chop, but Brandon butts heads with Perry over everything from how to water the crops to what price to charge for cauliflower at the farmers’ markets.

  Discovering which one of the Vaughn boys had a problem with Dana being president of the Friends wouldn’t affect my life one way or another, but it gratified me to know that I wasn’t the only child who wanted to discuss family business matters at the wrong moment. Even though I had traded a paycheck from Markham’s for one from the Travis County Health Department two and a half years ago, I will always be part of our restaurant.

  Perry came out of the pantry and smiled when he saw me. “Are you surprise inspecting private parties now?”

  I shook his righteously calloused hand. “I’m just here for Dana’s cooking.”

  “Did you hear?” he asked. “She’s the new president of the Friends.”

  “Yes, I came early for the tour,” I said. “I think she’ll make a good leader.”

&nbs
p; “Me too.”

  “What did you say to Nina a few minutes ago to get her back to her table?”

  “I told her we’re making a big announcement at the end of dinner that she won’t want to miss.”

  “What’s that?”

  He laughed. “You’ll have to find out with everyone else.” He rolled his wrist to look at his watch. “I haven’t seen Mitch.”

  “No one has, except the golf staff at the SNOBS club.” I held up my phone. “I’m fixin’ to hit redial for the twenty-seventh time tonight.”

  “I’ll leave you to it while I check on the vittles,” Perry said. He has a master’s degree in horticulture, so the simple farmer talk is just for show.

  Mitch answered on the fifth ring. “Hi, honey.”

  “You were supposed to be here an hour ago,” I said.

  “I’ll be there soon.”

  “Do we have a family crest? Because that should be our motto.”

  “Save me a glass of wine,” he said. “Without the H.”

  “I’m not whining, Daddy. I—”

  “We’re almost finished,” he said, then hung up.

  Aside from Mitch, we were still missing three other dinner companions. I scrolled through my contacts until I got to Ursula’s name at the bottom of the list, then thought better of calling her. As a professional chef, she’s more precisely aware of timing than the guy who sets Greenwich Mean Time, and she knew exactly when the dinner started. Plus, I don’t much like her. The main reason I quit my family’s restaurant is because Mitch had forced me to share chef duties with her. After seven months of her grouchiness, unpredictability, and tantrums, I had to decide between permanently maiming her or disappointing my father. The decision was harder than it should have been.

  It would be pointless to call Trevor because he’s always set to Ursula Mean Time. And I knew that Drew would arrive as soon as he could.

  I closed my phone and peeked into the storage pantry. Except for the shelves stocked with natural soil enhancers, small garden implements, and other supplies, it was empty. Whoever Perry argued with must have slipped out while my back was turned.