The Last Super Chef

by Chris Negron

  “And it’s only going to get worse. Eventually Parkinson’s steals everything you’ve taken a lifetime to build, all your skills. The simple stuff, like tying a shoe, buttoning a shirt, getting dressed. And the kitchen stuff. Oh, the kitchen stuff. That’s been a revelation. You know, Curtis. You’re a chef. All these skills we build up, the ways we use our hands. All the stuff I need to be what I am. I can’t be the Super Chef when I can’t even carve up a chicken.”

  The way he stepped aside and let Wormwood do it. The week before he announced The Last Super Chef.

  “You know,” Taylor continues. “A few weeks ago, I missed the last step into the arena.” He nods toward the door leading to the stairway down. “Fell flat on my face. At first I worried someone would stumble upon me lying there. So embarrassing. And, depending on who found me, potentially hard to keep quiet. I told myself to hurry. Get back up. But I couldn’t. And eventually I started to wonder: What if I just . . . didn’t? Thought even, maybe, I shouldn’t. It might be easier to stay down. Not just for me. For everyone else, too.”

  Still turned around, he sighs. “I’ve had some doubts now and then during this competition, wondered whether I was doing the right thing, but at that moment, I knew for sure. I can’t wait around for my disease to get so bad that worse things start happening on TV.” He stretches his neck, eyes on the ceiling. “You know, though, the time I’ve had has been so wonderful. I would never say different. This thing—cooking—it’s all I ever wanted to do, ever since I was little. Chef is all I’ve ever wanted to be.”

  Yeah, I know that feeling. “That’s why you wanted to pick a kid and not another adult.”

  He turns around to face me. “Yeah. I guess . . . I’ve heard a few times this idea I’ll be the last great chef. Which, of course, is simply preposterous. There will always be a next great everything. Chef, basketball player, physicist . . .”

  “So Bill Nye the Science Guy’s not always gonna be the GOAT?”

  He snorts. “Let’s hope not.” His expression flattens again. “I love this show. I love being the Super Chef. But if it has to end . . . I didn’t want it to be a sad ending. I really didn’t. I wanted The Last Super Chef to be about the future. I wanted to show it could be shiny and bright, not depressing and dark. I wanted to make sure no one would call me the last Super Chef. I wanted that to be someone else. Someone who would be around for a while.”

  Taylor takes a deep breath. “That could only happen with kid competitors.”

  He pauses and stares at me, as if he’s waiting for agreement. “Makes sense,” I say.

  “Claire—Chef Wormwood—she thinks I should wait. That I can get by for a while with a little help. Like this is a—” He bites his lip, and I can tell it’s because he almost cursed. He lowers his voice. “Like it’s a Beatles song and not my actual life. But she knows how I grew up. With a single parent, just my father, traveling all around the world with his mother, my grandmother, who was very sickly, me taking care of her all that time . . . I’m used to a lot of responsibility. I’m used to doing things on my own, being self-sufficient. I can’t . . . it doesn’t make sense to suddenly . . .”

  “Did your grandmother have it, too? Parkinson’s?”

  “No. Not hereditary.” He lays a hand over his chest. “She had trouble with her lungs.”

  I’ve heard the stories. More like lived and breathed them. How he learned to cook traveling the globe with his family. But now I realize no one ever said what his “family” was. I always figured it was him with his mother and father. Even the other night, in our meeting, when he’d agreed with me that “three’s a good number.” Sure, because his family was three, too, but like mine, not the three you’d expect. Not one child, one mother, one father. Maybe not that many families are that way anymore. Maybe there’s no such thing as normal when you’re talking about families. They are what they are.

  “I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately, actually,” the Super Chef says. “Wishing she were still here. I’d love to ask her if I’m making the best decision.”

  “I think it’s working,” I say right away, before flicking my eyes toward both closed doors of the dorm, girls and boys. “All these guys you picked . . . they’re amazing. They’ve definitely shown me the future of cooking. I’m sure everyone else has seen the same thing.”

  “Thanks, Curtis. That’s . . . That means a lot.” Again he holds my gaze a moment. “Don’t forget yourself, though. That okonomiyaki was out of this world. And your scallops, your soufflé . . .” He trails off.

  “Only the first one,” I say, wondering if he’s just being nice. “These last two . . .”

  “Must’ve been pretty scary to get thrown onto national TV like you’ve been. So maybe there’ve been a couple of missteps here and there. Overall, you really did great.”

  I cast my eyes downward. I don’t want to admit how difficult or scary these past few weeks have been, not even to him. Or maybe especially not to him.

  “You know, the truth . . . Curtis . . .” The tremor in his voice makes me look up again. “The truth is, sometimes I’m pretty scared, too.” He taps his temple. “Scared and really, really tired.”

  His trembling voice grows thick. He turns around again, facing the sink.

  With every movement he’s made, each word he’s uttered, I’ve understood a little bit more. About him, and about this competition.

  Not being able to cook like he’s always cooked, losing his knife skills? And talking weird? Walking weird? Falling? Shaking all the time? Plus, it’s going to get a lot worse?

  I can’t imagine getting as good at something as he has, then having to stop being that good. Reaching your dream—for me, for both of us, the only dream—and then seeing it end because of some disease, one he doesn’t even understand where it came from.

  Part of me wonders why he’s told me all this. Why not Joey or Pepper, Kiko or Bo? But of course I know why. None of them are his children. Whether he’s ever going to admit it out loud or not, he’s telling me all this now because I’m his son. Maybe this is his apology, his explanation for all our lost years. The best one I’m going to get, probably.

  I feel a door slamming shut in my mind. Behind it are all the times I questioned whether he was my hero or my nemesis. Good guy or bad. Because he’s none of those things. And he’s all of them, too. In the end the Super Chef’s just a person, like me, dealing with his own problems.

  Maybe he doesn’t deserve all the admiration I’ve felt for him all these years. He probably deserves none of my resentment. Well . . . okay, maybe a little bit of it.

  The fact is, I don’t want to know or talk about the years behind us anymore. Not when his future has such a dark cloud over it. I don’t want to do anything to make the struggle he’s facing even harder. If I say something, it should be to help him. But what? What could I, a kid, ever say to make the actual Super Chef feel a little better?

  He said tired. Scared. I’ve felt both for almost two weeks. For him, it’s been more like a year? Man.

  “Maybe we can be scared together.” I spit the thought out without thinking about whether it’s the right thing to say or not.

  He turns around. The Super Chef. Chef Lucas Taylor. My father turns around, his face lights up, and he smiles at me. “You know what? I think I’d like that, Curtis.”

  As if that were some cue they agreed to, Mel’s door quietly opens, and he emerges from his room. Like twins, he and the Super Chef glance toward the clock at the same time.

  “But right now,” Chef Taylor continues. “It’s getting late. You’ve got a big day tomorrow.” He exhales again. “I really hope you’re able to get some sleep for it, Curtis.”

  “You too.”

  In bed, as I feel my eyes growing heavier, the whole conversation replaying in my mind, I have this idea I understand so much more about Lucas Taylor, about my father, than I did only one hour ago. There’s just one thing that keeps bothering me, one thing that I keep trying to run through my br
ain like potatoes through a ricer to get them as smooth as possible.

  Why would the Super Chef think the future of cooking has to be about just one person?

  42

  On Thanksgiving morning, we stand around the common room in our chef’s jackets, watching the seconds tick toward eleven a.m. No one talks. There’s hardly any eye contact. Just five kids with growling stomachs, waiting for the start of the day that would change one of our lives forever.

  No one volunteered to cook a group breakfast. Kari warned us that the morning part of today’s finale involved brunch. We’d be eating it, we knew that much, so none of us wanted to fill up on a big meal, then push Super Chef food around our plates on live TV.

  I’d gotten maybe three hours of sleep last night, even after the walnuts and tart cherry juice. All the things Taylor confessed to me across the kitchen island bounced around in my head for another hour, as if the Super Chef had whipped a super ball into my brain, just to see how fast it could ricochet across the inside of my skull and knock over everything inside it.

  Parkinson’s disease. Little puzzle pieces had been falling from the sky since I heard those two words, locking together neatly as they landed. The reasons why this contest existed snapping into the reasons why the five of us had spent over two weeks in New York, perfect matches for how Wormwood had been behaving. And Taylor, too.

  “Chef Wormwood and your handlers will be back to pick you up a little before eleven.” Those were the last words Kari spoke before leaving the dorms a couple of hours ago. What was “a little before”? 10:30? 10:45? All of us grew paranoid, so what we did eat, we ate super fast, just toast or energy bars, then got dressed and, one after another, assembled in the common room. We’d been waiting for a half hour or more, pacing, sitting, then standing, picking at threads on our jackets, doing one final check that turned into ten final checks of our hair in the mirror. Anything but actually talking to each other.

  Last night, Taylor said that Wormwood hadn’t wanted him to hold this contest at all, that she thought he could continue being the Super Chef if he just accepted a little more help from the people around him. Like a ghost, I feel her hand squeezing my shoulder the other day, pulling me close, protecting me from getting burned during the Handling Criticism challenge. And that’s when I realize it: that scowl she’s been sporting for two weeks hasn’t been about the Super Five.

  Wormwood’s not against us. She’s against this contest. And I’m not sure she’s wrong.

  “Where are they?” Kiko asks, and it’s maybe the first time I’ve heard that level of impatience in her tone. “How long do we have to wait?”

  It’s like her voice doesn’t just break the silence in the room. It tears down the wall of thoughts stuck inside all of us.

  “And what’re we going to eat?” Joey asks. He rubs his stomach, then looks longingly toward the fridge.

  “All I know is they better not make us critique each other again,” Pepper says.

  I want to tell her they’d never do that, but then they repeated mise en place, didn’t they? And I made that soufflé how many times? Could it have been only three? Felt like a thousand.

  But the words seem trapped behind my tongue. Or maybe locked up behind some door in my brain. It makes me think about the Super Chef flubbing that dessert order the other night, having so much trouble coming up with the words right there in his hand.

  One lava cake, two crump . . . two . . . the sorb—

  I’m still thinking of it when the door bursts open. Not the door in my mind, the actual one, to the dorms.

  When I turn that way, though, there’s no Wormwood in sight. It’s only our handlers—Mel and Ashley, Brett, Renata, and Craig. “Everyone down there is ready,” Mel says. Somehow he looks excited and very serious at the same time. “Let’s go.”

  Super Chef Arena is reconfigured yet again. The biggest change is up on the stage, where one long dining table with about twenty chairs sits waiting. Places are set at each seat—candles, plates, glasses, napkins. It looks like the Thanksgiving dinners I see on TV, how the really big families decorate their fancy holiday tables. I’ve never seen such a thing in person before. Mom used to make it a point that we sit at our kitchen table for any once-a-year dinners, but the last few Thanksgivings we’ve eaten in our laps on the couch, like almost every other meal.

  Our stations are set up in the normal configuration again, so when we stand at them, we’ll be facing the stage. The audience is back up top in the balcony, too, cheering and stamping their feet. I’ve learned to ignore them so well, I don’t even bother looking that way. We march in like Kari taught us, and I wonder, as I split off from the line at the right time and land at my station like a seasoned TV star, if it’s for the last time.

  “The Super Five, ladies and gentlemen,” Chef Taylor announces, encouraging another shower of applause from the balcony. The Super Chef, this time instead of becoming more animated with the power of the cheering, flattens his expression. “I want to thank each of you. You kids have sacrificed so much. So much. To be apart from your family for weeks, and now, to be here on this holiday, ready to cook again, willing to miss your loved ones on Thanksgiving. Another big sacrifice.”

  Even from one row behind and on the other end of the stations, I hear Bo’s deep sigh at the mention of the word “family.”

  “It’s frankly too much to bear. For you, for your families, and for us.” Taylor gestures at Wormwood and Graca. “Even the audience can’t stand it!” Laughter from above. “But!” He raises a finger into the air. “Maybe a few members of our crowd can help the situation.”

  I look up for the first time. There’s a lot of shuffling in the balcony. A few audience members turn sideways to make room for others to move forward. Still, I don’t get it. How can the audience help? I don’t understand at all until I hear Bo’s shout. “Mamá! Papá!”

  The paths between the people in the crowd widen, clearing the way for Mr. and Mrs. Agosto to separate from the throng. They weave their way toward the stairs, then start to carefully lumber down them.

  Next to me, Kiko shouts something in Japanese and points to the opposite side of the balcony. I follow her finger to find her parents up there as well, along with both sets of grandparents. There’s a moment of wild, back-and-forth shouting in rapid Japanese.

  That’s when I get it. That’s when I understand.

  Our families. We’ve been so focused on when we could get back to them, longing for the distant contact of those too-far-between Skype moments, that none of us thought of the opposite happening. It never occurred to us—not to me, anyway—that the Super Chef would bring our families here, to us, on Thanksgiving.

  My eyes hunt the balcony. It’s like an awful game of Where’s Waldo. Somewhere in this sea of faces, they have to be here. They have to be, but as I search with no luck, I get a sinking feeling that my family are the only ones who didn’t make it. That you had to pay your own way or something, and Mom couldn’t afford it.

  Joey shouts recognition, then Pepper. I don’t follow their pointing, though. I’m too busy looking for Paige, for Mom.

  I squeeze my eyes shut and tell myself to slow down. When I open them again, there they are. Right in the center of my vision, under the giant arena clock.

  Mom wears a fancy green dress I’ve never seen before, with heels and earrings. Everything looks expensive. She’s smiling, but when our eyes meet, she starts laughing. Some tears escape her eyes. At her side is Paige, wearing a nice skirt for the first time since Mom’s work friend got married a few years ago. She’s giggling too, so hard her tongue pokes out of her mouth, caught between her front teeth. I recognize them both, but then again they seem different. Paige looks older, like she’s grown a whole foot. Mom seems to have aged too.

  They both start to push their way through the crowd. People pat them on the shoulder, or just squeeze against each other to make room for them to pass.

  I race to the bottom of the steps, passing Kiko hugging one
of her grandmothers, Pepper showing her parents her station. I hear Joey talking a mile a minute with his uncle and father, gesturing toward the pantry, showing them where the sensory deprivation booths were. Bo’s in a quiet group hug with his mom and dad that looks like it will go on forever.

  One of Mom’s heels clacks onto the concrete floor of Super Chef Arena. I hear the sound of it echoing, as if it happens in a completely silent stadium, even though it’s as noisy with excitement and cheering here as it’s ever been. Mom steps down with her other foot at the same time as Paige hops down with both of hers.

  Then Mom’s bending and reaching for me. She wraps me in a hug so strong I catch my breath. She lifts me up and swings me into the air. I have a weird thought, some sense that not so long ago, I wished that the Super Chef, my father, would do exactly this someday, but why? How many times has Mom lifted me into the air just like this? Tons.

  But not for a while now. A couple years ago she started telling me I was getting too heavy. I didn’t realize how much I missed it. Now I understand I don’t need anyone else but her doing it.

  Even if Mom hadn’t told me over Skype, I knew somewhere deep in my heart that she must’ve been missing me as much as I missed her. But I had been trying not to think about it. When she whispers it into my ear, though, it slams into me, sends a tingling from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. “Oh, Curtis. We missed you so much.”

  Paige is tugging at my chef’s jacket, talking a mile a minute, even though I can’t hear her words. Mom squeezes me tighter, like she’ll lose me if she allows her grip to loosen.

  There’s no crying in kitchens, unless maybe you’re chopping onions. Even then, blink a few times if you have to. But just then, when I start bawling in Mom’s arms as she keeps telling me over and over how she missed me, how I should never go away again, as everything that’s happened in the past two weeks runs through my head, ending with last night’s talk with the Super Chef, my first truly private talk with my father, the news that he’s sick, the reason I’m here more clear, the moment all my anger and resentment melted from my body like butter in a pan, I finally understand those contestants I used to make fun of. Because it doesn’t matter if I’m in a kitchen or not. I couldn’t stop crying if I wanted to.