Intercepting the Chef

by Rachel Goodman

  First points on the scoreboard awarded to Gwen Lalonde. But there was still a lot of time left in the game.

  * * *

  With only ten minutes left on the lasagna, I walked to the freezer to get the garlic bread. And maybe use the blast of cold air to cool down from our earlier conversation.

  “What are you doing?” Gwen asked, wineglass frozen in midair, a horrified expression replacing her earlier confidence.

  “Defrosting garlic bread. To dip in the extra sauce.”

  “I wouldn’t trust that processed garbage to fend off a gluten-free vampire.”

  “So what? It saves time and it tastes good.”

  Gwen shook her head. “You know the road to hell is littered with shortcuts, right? If it’s worth eating, it’s worth making from scratch.”

  Polishing off her wine, she set her empty glass beside mine, dumped the grocery store garlic bread in the trash, and rummaged around in the cabinets and fridge gathering various ingredients. When she grabbed the dried parsley and oregano, I almost told her the jars had been in the pantry since I’d bought the condo, but she’d probably drag me to the local nursery and I’d wind up owning an herb garden.

  The way Gwen moved around my kitchen—comfortable, effortless, efficient—made it feel as if she’d been a permanent fixture from the moment I’d designed the floor plan. Like she’d always belonged here. It was a scene I could easily grow accustomed to.

  “You’re in charge of the garlic. Mince six cloves,” she said, passing me the bulb and a knife. “I’ll deal with the rest.”

  “That’s my only task?” I asked.

  “Given your level of skill, I think that’s about all you can handle. Otherwise, it’ll be midnight before the bread is ready to eat.”

  “I resent that. I prepared the lasagna on my own.”

  She placed a sauté pan on the stove, fired up the burner, and added olive oil, salt and pepper, and a palmful of the dried herbs. “How many hours did it take you to accomplish that?”

  “Two.” Gwen cocked her hip against the counter and raised an eyebrow at me. “All afternoon,” I admitted.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said with a smirk, then sliced the loaf of ciabatta bread I was saving for toast in the morning and slathered one side with butter.

  I tried removing the garlic cloves from the base of the head, but they wouldn’t budge. Were these things glued together? And who had the patience for this anyway? There was a reason garlic powder existed. “This bulb is defective,” I said, tossing it onto the counter.

  Gwen laughed and nudged my side. “Scoot over. As much as I enjoy watching you suffer, I’ll show you a trick to peeling garlic in less than a minute. First, crush the head with the heel of your hand, gently rocking back and forth to break apart the cloves and loosen the skin.” She situated the bulb in the center of the cutting board and demonstrated the movement, and sure enough, the garlic cloves had completely separated from the base.

  “Impressive, but I’ve witnessed better,” I said.

  She sighed. “Find me two large bowls, will you?”

  Opening the dishwasher, I grabbed the stainless steel ones I reserved for icing my feet and gave her a look that said, Now what?

  “Those clean, Wonder Bread?”

  “You have no faith.” I sighed. “Of course they’re clean.”

  “Next, place the cloves into one bowl and set the other bowl on top so it forms a domed lid. Go on.” Gwen nodded at me to follow her instructions. After I’d done as she’d asked, she said, “Now put all those hours you’ve spent with the Shake Weight to good use and jiggle for twenty seconds.”

  “Gave that to Chris as a Christmas gift last year,” I said, grinning at her quip. I’d never met anyone with such a quick wit or a sharp tongue, and I doubted it’d ever get old.

  “Fascinating, but please get on with it already.”

  Once again I did as Gwen had instructed, and to my surprise, the trick actually worked. All the skin had fallen off the garlic, leaving perfectly peeled cloves at the bottom of the bowl.

  “How did you learn to do that?” I asked, not even bothering to hide the awe in my voice—this time I really was impressed.

  “An old coworker taught me.” She shrugged, then turned her attention to mincing the garlic into a fine paste and stirring it into the olive oil and herbs warming on the stove. Immediately the pungent, spicy scent hit my nose, and my stomach rumbled.

  “Care to elaborate?” I asked.

  Her expression shifted, becoming almost embarrassed. “It’s not really something to brag about.”

  “Tell me anyway,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t shut me out—it’d taken me until now to get even this close to her again. I had to risk it. “The story can’t be worse than the time in middle school when Chris pantsed me under the guise of a tackle.”

  Gwen cracked a smile, no doubt imagining me flashing a crowd of spectators. Slowly but surely her walls were crumbling.

  “Okay, fine,” she said, removing the sauté pan from the heat and pouring the mixture onto the other half of the ciabatta bread. “So, first day on the job and fresh out of culinary school, I stroll into this swanky new Italian restaurant in the Cromwell hotel and casino in Vegas, ready to put everyone to shame with my classical training—”

  “I always knew Lalonde was French for ego.”

  “It’s not ego when you’re gifted,” she said. “At any rate, I arrive expecting to wow the entire kitchen staff with my talent, thinking I’ll be promoted to station chef within the week—I’d graduated top of my class, after all—only the lead prep cook dropped a gigantic basket full of garlic bulbs in my lap and told me when I was done peeling and chopping this batch that there were four others waiting for me.”

  “Bet you were pissed,” I said.

  “Furious. While everyone else around me got to concoct sauces, sous-vide steak, actually prepare dishes, I was stuck doing menial prep work.”

  “Which you thought you were above?”

  “At the time, yeah.” She pressed the two loaf pieces together and wrapped the bread in aluminum foil before popping the whole thing into the oven alongside the lasagna. “It took a month of peeling, chopping, and dicing vegetables before I understood that often the tasks that no one wants to do are the tasks that allow a kitchen to operate at a high level—and allow a chef to truly perform.”

  “Seems a lot like being on the practice squad. All of the pain, none of the glory. But if those guys didn’t show up to do their jobs every day, if they didn’t take the hits and run the plays, I couldn’t do my job either.”

  She nodded. “Right. Anyway, toward the end of that first shift, I guess I got tired or restless and the knife slipped. Resulted in a nasty gash and four stitches.” Gwen held up her hand, showing off the faint silver line along the edge of her pointer finger. “Thankfully, the blade hit mostly meat, but the skin’s still tight. After that, the lead prep cook clued me in on the smash-and-shake mixing-bowl trick.”

  I forced back a smile. “Need me to kiss your boo-boo, make it better?”

  “Not good enough for you? How about this.” She rolled up her sleeve, and bending her arm at the elbow, Gwen displayed a shiny patch of skin along her forearm. “Third-degree burn from an industrial oven.”

  “Well, you know what they say . . .”

  “No, I don’t think I do, Logan,” she replied, though the way her fingers twitched and her mouth firmed told me that if the next sentence out of my mouth included the words “can’t take the heat” and “stay out of the kitchen,” I might need a few stitches of my own.

  As a trip to the ER wasn’t on my agenda tonight, I pulled up my T-shirt sleeve to reveal a thick scar shaped like a scythe on my bicep. “Eighth-grade pickup football game. Broken glass. Thirteen stitches and a tetanus shot.”

  “Aww,” Gwen said, her lip jutti
ng out in an exaggerated pout. “Did peewee Logan get an ouchie?”

  “Okay, something more recent.” I jerked up the hem of my shirt, and yeah, I could’ve pulled the collar down, but damn I liked the way Gwen focused her gaze over each and every one of my abs. “Collarbone repair,” I said, pointing to the fine white line across my chest. “Surgery, three pins, and a metal plate.”

  “And here I figured you for the Scarecrow.”

  “I hold the standing high score on the Wonderlic, I’ll have you know,” I said, dropping my shirt.

  “You’ll forgive me if I fail to be impressed by your score on a cognitive aptitude test designed for knuckle draggers and crash-test dummies.”

  “I got a perfect score!”

  “On a test scored on a one-to-fifty basis—you should be aware that the rest of us are scored on a scale of one to a hundred. But congratulations, Wonder Bread, you’re intellectually superior to the rest of the gladiator horde.” She shot me a shrewd grin as she refilled her wineglass. “Or were. Given the rate at which you’re sacked, you’ve probably lost a point or two.”

  I threw my head back and laughed, one that came from deep in my gut and took over my entire body. I loved this, the back-and-forth between us, the gentle competition, my constant desire to learn what she’d do next if I pushed here or prodded there.

  Gwen strolled over to the table I’d set, sipping her Cabernet and inspecting the salads I’d already put at each place. “So, you sort of cook,” she said after a long pause. “Maybe you should be the person packing lunches next Monday during the Blizzards Bowl event instead of me.”

  “I can only re-create a handful of Mom’s dishes and not that well,” I said. “Sorry in advance if the lasagna’s inedible.”

  She quirked her mouth, a smart reply evident on the tip of her tongue, but instead she said, “Yet you own a steakhouse. Aren’t you the guy who used to recite, ‘food is fuel, not fun’?”

  “Yeah, I did claim that.” I scratched my jaw, feeling suddenly foolish and a tad sheepish, remembering all the times I’d given Gwen a hard time about her silly “passion.” One I’d secretly envied because she’d embraced it wholeheartedly, never worrying about judgment from others. Back then, I hadn’t realized how food had a way of tying you to the past, of embodying precious memories you never wanted to forget, of bringing people back to life that’d been stolen too soon.

  “But then Mom passed, which put things into perspective,” I continued, studying the way the sunset filtered in through the windows and cast Gwen in a golden glow. “It was her who really wanted the restaurant. And, well . . . it was long overdue. I was merely waiting for the right chef to execute Mom’s recipes.”

  “I really adored Jane,” she said. “Were you aware that she sent me her white-chocolate-chip cookie recipe as a present when I graduated from Le Cordon Bleu Paris?”

  I shook my head, chuckling. “No, but that sounds like her.”

  She’d always had those soft, chewy treats sitting out on the counter. Whenever Chris and Gwen had come over, Gwen devoured the whole plate while chatting with Mom and helping her organize a week’s worth of meals. At the time, I’d assumed Gwen had tagged along out of boredom because her father was off on another one of his culinary adventures and her mother was busy finalizing their dragged-out divorce, but perhaps in reality Gwen had enjoyed the normalcy, the ebb and flow of a family that ate dinner together nearly every night and wore matching pajamas on Christmas morning.

  “I baked those cookies for the kitchen staff in San Francisco on every major holiday. It became sort of a tradition.” Gwen moved into the great room, her gaze focused on every detail—the case displaying decades’ worth of trophies and memorabilia, the stack of DVDs on the media console left over from earlier today when Dad and I were analyzing film for the Raiders game on Sunday, the empty bag of goldfish crackers I’d forgotten to throw away. She stopped beside a sculpture of the Seahawks mascot on the coffee table.

  “Your father?” She held up the brass monstrosity.

  I joined her. “Who else?”

  Dad had commissioned an artist to create the piece for me as a sort of precelebratory gift. When I’d entered the draft, it was expected that I’d fill his famed position on Seattle’s roster. Imagine everyone’s shock when the Seahawks chose a safety from Tennessee and I’d been picked to lead the Blizzards’ offensive line. I didn’t know why I’d kept the statue—maybe because it reminded me of what could’ve been and how much I had yet to accomplish.

  “Think you’ll ever end up in Seattle?” Gwen asked, putting the statue back in its spot and turning toward me, her arm brushing my stomach. Standing this close, I could smell only her. Warm and enticing. Like autumn settling in.

  “And leave your brother? He’d castrate me,” I said, which frankly would be a kindness compared to what the local fans, not to mention the home office, would do. I’d begun my career in Denver. Competed here, grown here, failed here. And now, on the precipice of success, even contemplating a trade would be blasphemy. For better or worse, my career was tied to the Blizzards until I retired . . . or physically couldn’t play anymore. “No, Denver is home. And anyway, my focus needs to be on securing a championship for my team. The whole city’s hopes are riding on us this season and we have to deliver.”

  She nodded. “Speaking of which, did you see the Denver Morning News headline in the sports section today?” Gwen asked. “That head writer really has it out for you.”

  “ ‘Blizzards quarterback on a disaster course.’ Yeah I read it. Tom Phelps is an asshole,” I said, raking a hand through my hair in frustration. “Ever since I tore my ACL during the Rose Bowl in college, he’s shouted to anyone who’ll listen that I’m an overinflated waste of franchise dollars. But I’d rather talk about anything other than him. Tell me more about culinary school. What was it like?”

  Sighing, she sank into the leather couch and set her wine on a coaster. “Brutal. Cutthroat. Sometimes demoralizing. Things you wouldn’t understand.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You’re kidding, right?” I said, staring down at her.

  “Please.” She snorted, waving me off. “You’re the league’s golden child. To them you pee rainbows. And once a week you put on pads and traipse out onto the field in shiny spandex pants and invite people to tackle you. Honestly, it’s more or less how I imagine the seventies were.”

  “Oh, is that all I do?” I nudged apart her feet so I could sit on the coffee table opposite her. “You ever been blindsided, Gwen?” I asked, resting my palms just above her knees, satisfied when the muscles at the base of her thighs jumped and twitched under my touch. “Ever get into your bulletproof stance, your sights fixed downfield, sure you had the game locked in?” I scooted toward her, relishing the way her chest rose and fell a little faster, how her eyes flicked to my lips. “Then, bam—a hit to your blind side you never saw coming. It knocks you to the ground, shakes you up, and makes you wonder if it’s worth getting up again. Ever had that happen to you?”

  “Sounds familiar,” she said, her voice thin but steady. Hurt and something else—anger? betrayal?—flickered in her eyes. Maybe that was the real reason she’d returned home to Denver—not because she’d needed a job, but because she’d received a blow so hard she was still deciding if she wanted to get back up.

  I wanted to be the one to help her get back up.

  “Yeah?” I swept the ponytail off her shoulder, sliding a hand around her neck. “This feels pretty familiar, too, don’t you think?”

  “What?” she asked, shifting forward, her eyes falling shut.

  I couldn’t help my grin as I leaned in, her mouth a breath away from mine, and said, “Still convinced the only thing you want to do with my mouth is seal it with duct tape?”

  Just then, the oven timer beeped, and I pulled back, taking in her disoriented and slightly flustered expression. “Lasagna’s ready.”
>
  Her eyes narrowed and snapped to my face, a sure sign a snarky comment was headed my way. Oh yeah, tonight was going to be fun.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  Gwen

  The annual Blizzards Bowl started in an hour, and I was deep in artificial cheese product hell. I unwrapped another square, grateful I was wearing gloves, and slapped it on slices of ham between two pieces of bread.

  “Sweetheart, gentle. The children are going to eat that,” my mother said, neatly folding cling wrap around a sandwich and placing it in a brown paper bag. She added an apple, containers of mixed veggies and pasta salad, and an oatmeal cookie, then sealed the bag and adorned it with a smiley face. We still had dozens more sack lunches to assemble and she was drawing smiley faces? I shook my head. Only my mother.

  People say you should dress for the job you want, and never, in all my memory, could I recall my mother dressing for anything less than the ideal suburban stay-at-home mom—a walking advertisement for Ralph Lauren. Though how she’d believed my father would ever provide her with such a life, I’d never know.

  “Only because the kids don’t have another option.” I wiped the sweat from my hairline with the back of my hand. Whoever thought it was a brilliant idea to cram all these volunteers into a tent set up on the asphalt parking lot needed to be fired. Everyone was working furiously organizing promo items and name tags, folding mesh jerseys and towels, and arranging the food that Logan had donated on behalf of the restaurant in ninety-degree weather.

  The event supported various at-risk youth programs, where the kids participated in drills and exercises with professional football players. I got roped into spearheading the lunch prep because I was the executive chef of Stonestreet’s and the sister of the team’s coveted wide receiver. But in reality, it was because Chris and Logan had ganged up on me and played the guilt card. So here I was with figurative bells on, donning a T-shirt with Bruiser the Bear plastered across the chest and in the team colors of powder blue and silver. Not exactly how I’d planned to spend my Monday off.