by Jane Heller
“You’re a very supportive person, Elaine,” said Jonathan. “I don’t get much of that from my mother.”
“What about the rest of your family?” I asked, instead of coming right out and grilling him about his marital status and/or sexual orientation.
“I’m an only child, and my mother’s dependence on me got worse after my father died. I’m all she has, and since my latest divorce—there have been two—she’s afraid I’ll leave Palm Beach and run off to some foodie mecca in Brooklyn.”
“Everybody says Queens is the new Brooklyn. Maybe you should go there and bring her with you.”
“God no.” He laughed. “I take yearly trips with her. I spend Sunday afternoons with her. I handle her financial affairs and put in appearances at her charity functions, but that’s my limit. I lead my own life.” He sounded relieved to get all that off his chest. “Tell me about you? Married? Significant other? Still on the market? None of the above?”
A loaded question, given the circumstances. “I was divorced—once—from a businessman named Eric Zucker. He runs a chain of funeral homes in the Tri-State area. Right after we were married, he started sleeping with Lola, the employee who applies industrial strength makeup to the embalmed corpses. According to my therapist, I had essentially married my father, who was always shtupping redheads behind my mother’s back. When I was twelve, he found one who—quote unquote—‘really rang his chimes.’ He abandoned us for her and never looked back.”
“Must have been tough to deal with on both counts,” said Jonathan. “If it’s any consolation, I’ve got my own war stories. We’ll have a drink and see whose are worse. What about now?”
“For the drink?” We were in the middle of a cooking class.
“No, what about now in terms of any significant other? Is there a boyfriend?”
“Oh, that,” I said as if Simon were no big deal and not watching us from a few yards away. “I’m newly single after ending a relationship.”
“Good,” he said. “So there’s a window of opportunity.”
“For what?” I said, fishing. I found Jonathan more than a little appealing, and there was no harm in getting to know him better.
“For seeing how this goes,” he said, pointing to himself and then to me. “It’s not everyday that I meet a woman willing to stand up to the formidable Beatrice Birnbaum. My ex-wives either cowered in her presence or avoided her altogether.”
“Hey, I’m a pushy New Yorker,” I said. “We mug the muggers.”
He laughed again. “I was born and raised in the city, but I’ve lived in Florida since I was ten, the year my father decided he hated winter. I miss it up here. I’d move back in a minute. Maybe we’ll fall in love and you’ll beg me to move back.”
“Tell me the truth: Do you say things like that to every woman you meet on vacation?”
“No, but I like pretending I do. It’s all part of my smooth-and-sophisticated act. Is it working?”
“It might be.” It was fun trading rom-com retorts instead of stuffing pork tenderloins. “Would you really move back to New York though? What about your—”
I couldn’t finish the sentence because a very loud “Goddammit!” bellowed from across the room.
“What now?” said Jonathan. We looked in the direction of the commotion to find that Chef Hill was grabbing his finger and hopping around as if he’d been set on fire. “At least it’s not my mother this time.”
It turned out that Jackie, Alex, and Connie had been assigned both the amaranth soup and the bulgur-wheat-and-wild-blueberry salad, and that somewhere along the way there had been an incident.
“Missed it,” Jackie said with a helpless shrug, when I was breathless to know what had happened.
“I did too,” said Alex. “I was folding the blueberries into the bulgur, and Jackie was making the vinaigrette. She was asking about my fiancé’s brother, and I was telling her he might be ready to date again after a bad breakup.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose, Chef Hill!” Connie was protesting, her pudgy cheeks scarlet, arms flailing. “I swear I didn’t!” She seemed on the verge of a psychotic break.
“Damn right she didn’t,” Ronnie said in defense of his wife.
“Well, I sure as shit didn’t do it to myself,” said the chef, who yelled for an underling to help. Blood was gushing from the forefinger on his right hand despite his having wrapped it in a kitchen towel. “She could have hacked me to death.”
I’m sorry to report that my first thought was not for the chef’s health and wellbeing. It was for my own. I vowed not to let a single molecule of the soup cross my lips, not when there was a possibility that his bloodily fluid had contaminated it, and not unless someone made a fresh batch after the cutting board had been scrupulously scrubbed.
“I was just trying to do my best!” Connie cried. “I wanted to please you.”
“You said you had knife skills, for Christ’s sake,” Chef Hill muttered, while a young man with a ponytail and black stainless steel studs in his earlobes wrapped a bandage around his boss’s injured finger. “I was demonstrating how to chop the amaranth because you didn’t have a clue and neither did the other ladies. But did they crowd me at the cutting board? No. Did they get in my space? No. Did they grab a serrated bread knife and start chopping amaranth where my finger was? No. I mean who does that?”
“Listen, buddy, she didn’t mean to hurt you,” said Ronnie, puffing out his chest with indignation. “She has all your cookbooks. She wouldn’t hurt anybody.”
“She’s just a little… eager,” Jonathan chimed in, proving once again that he was chivalrous. “Why don’t I start from scratch on the amaranth soup, since I’ve read the recipe for it?”
“Fine,” said Chef Hill. “I owe you, guy.” He slapped Jonathan on the back with his uninjured hand.
“You’re good to go,” the medic underling told his boss. “Looks like a superficial wound, no stitches necessary.”
“Just keep that one away from me,” Chef Hill said, nodding at Connie.
“It was an accident!” she said emphatically, her tone angrier now, less pleading. “It’s not like I tried to kill you!”
Three Blonde Mice is available August 2nd, 2016.
Click here to preorder it now!
Connect with Diversion Books
Connect with us for information on new titles and authors from Diversion Books, free excerpts, special promotions, contests, and more:
