Hungry for More

CHAPTER 5



Is it worse to have psychic power and lose it or to never have power at all?” Oprah asked, leaning forward slightly, her voice breathy and expectant .

Amy smiled sweetly at the napkins she was folding. Ever since her humiliation on national TV, she had a continuous, imaginary feed of Oprah in her head, even when she was in some uptight restaurant in Philadelphia facing a pile of cloth napkins rising before her like Everest.

She grabbed a napkin and folded. “It’s much worse to lose it,” Amy said to her imaginary Oprah. She was pretty sure everyone had an inner Oprah they talked to in their head. How else could you sort out your life? Especially now, when the one presence Amy usually counted on, Maddie, was gone. “Because then you realize how lame the world is on the surface.” Amy stiffened at the sadness the truth of her words sparked inside her.

“But kissing James wasn’t lame. Maybe Maddie chose Roni as her new medium in order to lure me to this man. Maybe James is my One True Love. If I believe in soul mates, I must believe in destiny and fate. Nothing is just chance.”

Amy turned her best side to the pretend left camera as she imagined it zooming in for its close-up. The idea that James was her soul mate had occurred to her the minute she laid eyes on him.

But, then, she was afraid everyone she met was her soul mate. The Gypsy lore that swirled around Maddie, handed down generation to generation, was that once you fell for your soul mate, your spirit-voice left you. Forever. Supposedly it had happened to Natasha Cooper, the Gypsy who had Maddie before Amy, in 1978 when she met Cyrus Kern and went on to have his six children. And to Magda Orpheleous twenty years before that, even though she set sail to America to avoid finding her One True Love and losing her power. But her One True Love, Seymour Smith, had signed onto the ship as cabin boy, and, well, the rest was history.

Once those women—both powerful and respected psychic seers—spoke the fateful words “I love you” to their soul mates, poof, Maddie split to another Gypsy.

For years, this wasn’t a problem for Amy. After all, she just had to touch a person. If she heard another person’s name, Amy knew that she hadn’t stumbled onto her own soul mate, and she could relax. If she heard nothing, as Maddie would never tell Amy her own True Love’s name, she was in trouble. Not that that ever happened in the beginning.

But then, over the years, Maddie had become less reliable. Sometimes Amy could get a name, sometimes not. She had to be more careful. Whenever she felt a deeper pull for someone, any affinity at all, she split. If she liked their purple Converse sneakers, their dirty jokes, the way they played bass guitar—she was gone. No way was she going to be tricked into falling in love and losing Maddie like Natasha or Magda. Losing her power.


Not that it had mattered. Maddie ended up leaving her, anyway. Had Amy wasted the best years of her life, when she could have been with all those funny, sneaker-clad guitarists?

Amy shook her thoughts away. Gypsy legend was probably bullshit, anyway. Who knew if Natasha Cooper really existed? Magda Orpheleous might have been a bedtime story, made up by Amy’s father to keep her from having a boyfriend.

Still, Amy was superstitious. You couldn’t take chances with these sorts of things. In her experience, there was always at least some truth in every fairy tale.

Oprah was waiting for a reply. What had they been talking about? Right, James maybe being her One True Love and Maddie leading her here on purpose. Nothing doing. No spirit could con a con-woman as practiced as Amy. “I’m here for one reason and one reason only: to get Maddie back.”

“How are you going to do that?” Oprah was breathless for the inside scoop.

Amy felt a twinge of pride at being such a stimulating guest—even if it was all in her head. Still, she knew she was born for the camera, for fame, for success, for Maddie. “I’m going to wait patiently by Roni’s side. I’ll be her teacher in the ways of the voice. Her best friend. Then, when she realizes what a curse Maddie is, she’ll try to banish her. And I’ll be here waiting to help. Maddie will see that Roni hates her guts and that I have always been the perfect Gypsy for her.” Was that a plan or a wish? Amy felt the weakness of her situation and cursed it.

“But why not just move on?”

Amy shook her head in confusion. “Move on? To what?”

Oprah’s eyes melted with warmth. She said gently, as if talking to a child, “To whatever you could be without Maddie.”

This was so not in the preinterview script. “I’m nothing without Maddie. Look at me. Maddie is my calling. This is bullshit.” She gestured to the pile of napkins.

Oprah shook her head sadly. “Yeah, those napkins suck.”

The word suck coming out of Oprah’s mouth startled Amy back to reality. Oprah hadn’t said suck . A teenager stood before Amy, dark and sullen.

“Sorry, but it’s true. Worst napkin side-work I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen my share,” the dark boy said, nodding at her uneven napkin sculptures. He carried a case of Stoli on his hip, and the dissonance made him seem even younger than he probably was. Pink, plump lips like his came only on a kid.

“Troy, come on, man. Stop yapping with the ladies. Get those to James before customers come,” the bartender called from across the restaurant. As he spoke, the night’s first customers pushed through the door, loosening their ties and settling gratefully on the plush barstools.

“Later,” the boy said. He moved across the room under the heavy load, looking back at her with his enormous black eyes as if he had something more to say.

Just what she needed, a teenage napkin critic.



An hour later, Amy stood just inside the kitchen doors, watching for her chance while the cooks did their crazy dance. She was leaving. She’d had it. The consommé she had spilled in Dr. Trudeau’s lap was the last straw. She felt her face heat with shame. She wasn’t cut out to serve. She had at least forty bucks in tips. She could get a cheapo room for the night. She was so out of here.

But she couldn’t go out the front, past Elliot. He was like an eagle at the door. Plus, Dan and Stu had been so good to her all night, she didn’t want them to see her slink away in shame.

The kitchen, in marked contrast to the floor, was a madhouse filled with psycho, shouting lunatics. She could slip out the kitchen door to the back alley without anyone noticing. Her heart pounded as she worked her way to the door.

A runner blocked her path as he shouted for a roasted duck, and she pretended to be with him, waiting, too. What a night. She had never worked a place where people ordered three courses, in French , from a menu that each and every customer wanted to have described down to the dumbest detail. Amy mostly made stuff up. How could she remember if the oxtail was braised or roasted, since she didn’t know the difference between the two?

The tail of an ox? God, she hoped no one asked her about that . Just think where that thing had been.

The runner got his duck and darted past her. She made her way forward carefully, past Burt Jobs, the expeditor. Burt was the oddest part of this odd kitchen. She’d only worked in one other kitchen, but still, even she knew that no one writing orders down was strange. The servers screamed everything to the cooks, who nodded or cursed in reply. Burt, a squat man with no hair, stood in the corner of the kitchen behind a small computer that looked like a cash register. He typed everything the waiters called out into his computer, but only to produce a computer-generated check for the customer. Burt didn’t let a scrap of paper near the cooks. He called the orders to James and the other cooks in his accountant’s flat tone if anyone asked him for a reminder or if he noticed something not right. But mostly he just stood, eyes everywhere while his fingers flew blindly over his keyboard.

Dan smashed through the swinging doors into the kitchen. “Table two. Trudy, Amanda—rare, and two Iggie’s.”

“Got it,” James shouted back.

Burt typed, nodding.

She had made it to the door. She put her hand on the handle at the exact moment James spun to face her.

“Leaving?”

“Yes.” Damn . Had he smelled her or something? She stood as tall as she could.

He narrowed his eyes. “Coward.”

“I am not.”

“Are too.”

She put her hands on her hips. “Am not.” She felt like she was five years old.

“Then I dare you to stay,” he said.

“Why?”

“Why? Because you should. Because it’s the right thing to do. Not to bail on your mates.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.” The kitchen seemed to have quieted around her. Couldn’t he see that appeals to honor wouldn’t work with her? It was like he thought she was trustworthy. Her, a Gypsy hanging around until his flaky waitress showed up. A klutz who spilled soup in his best customer’s lap. What was wrong with this guy?

“I don’t kid. Look, I threw you in too deep. Just get them bedded, wetted, and breaded.” He tore his eyes from her. Then he yelled into the steam, “Dan and Stuey, take Amy’s tables. She’s your runner. Grab the kid. Go, go, go. Table four is up.” He went back to slamming pans around his eight-burner stove like everything was settled. The kitchen was instantly back in high gear. Maybe she had imagined the pause? His hands flew, grabbing from already-assembled bowls of chopped whatnot.

“Got it, Chef,” Dan called. “I’ll tell Stu.” Dan grabbed two plates from under the warmer and swept back out to the floor.

“Baby blues are up,” James called. “Pablo, fire the Josies.”

Amy considered heading back for the door. After all, what was with this place? Couldn’t they just call the dishes what they were on the menu without the kitchen patois? Each dish transformed into a woman’s name—

Oh, hell. The tama-whatever-reduction kiss. Each dish on this menu represented a woman that James had—kissed? Or had—

Ewwww . . . it was too gross and masculine and testosterone-laden to contemplate. She looked around the steaming, pulsing madness that was her new job. How could she have been so blind? I’m the only woman here. No wonder the staff women’s room was filled with provisions. Roni was probably too nice ever to say anything.


James spared her a glance. “Grab those plates from the window. Run ’em to table six. Then get back. You’ll be a runner. Don’t sweat it. We may be the Titanic , but if we’re going down, we’re all going down together.” His movements at the enormous stove were fluid and studied, not a wasted motion.

Stu crashed into the kitchen. “Table nine. Big Sally twice up no sauce, Susan and a round of Denise times four.”

“Got it,” James called as Burt’s fingers flew over the keyboard.

James’s sous-chef, Manuel, nodded as he tossed things into pans. Other men careened around the kitchen, somehow never touching despite the chaos.

Amy made her way carefully to James’s stove. Earlier in the night, she had seen firsthand what happened to anyone who touched one of the cooks in the kitchen when a runner accidentally nudged John-John and got a knee in the groin and a stream of vile curses in the face. She reached James’s side after dodging two runners and a manic Manuel. “Does Denise know about Susan?” she demanded.

James didn’t turn. “Do you always leave at the first sign of trouble?”

She scowled at him. Yes. “If I’m the lobster salad, then why is it called Josie and not Amy?”

“You wanna go public?” He was tossing chopped-up white things in a pan.

Right. He had a point. “But why Josie?”

He spared her a glance, and a wicked smile leapt across his face like the flames on his stove. “Like the p-ssycat. From the cartoon. She reminds me of you.”

Now it was Amy’s turn to blush. Josie was a rock star. The leader. The smart one. Maybe he saw that in her, despite the fact that, at the moment, she was the loser sneaking out the back door.

Stu grabbed three plates, laying the third in the crook of his arm like a precious child. “You heard him, honey,” Stu said. “Grab the plates. We’ve got your back. Don’t think, just run .” He swept out the doors just as another server careened back in, yelling into the chaos.

Amy took a deep breath. Right. Run. That was such a better plan. It was only eight o’clock. She could take her tips and get a crappy room for the night. Find the local Gypsies first thing tomorrow and track Roni’s trail instead of hanging around waiting for her like a wuss.

James thinks I’m Josie from Josie and the p-ssycats.

Stu has my back.

We’re shipmates, going down together.

James was immersed in his pans. He looked so sexy and happy behind his flaming stove.

Show-off.

He was in full pirate mode, his hands flying from pan to pan. He was drunk on the chaos, swinging from the rigging, rain from the storm bouncing off his gorgeous grin.

It looked like Roni had already taken the last lifeboat off this hulk. For some inane reason, Amy almost liked the idea of sinking with a crew.

Three months alone, adrift on a wooden raft, made a person soft like that.

She grabbed the plates and went back to work.





With every new flavor, you improve your palate.

—JAMES LACHANCE, The Meal of a Lifetime