By the time we actually pulled into John’s Pancake House’s parking lot, I was in a pretty surly mood, irritated by Montauk, irritated by all these people who were pretending to be something they weren’t. How was that any different from what I had done?
Then I was reminded about what I had done. On the way inside the restaurant, we passed the newspaper kiosk, full of the morning papers. And there was the New York Post, front and center. And on the upper half of the cover, there was a headline. CELEBRITY CHEF REVEALED AS PHILANDERING FRAUD p. 10.
I pulled a paper out, turning quickly to page 10.
AIN’T NO SUNSHINE. No Stars for This Farm-Fresh Phony, the header read, right above a small (unflattering) photograph of me sitting in a vegetable garden.
Sammy pointed at the photograph. “Why are you in the newspaper?” she said. “And why did they use that picture?”
I heard a knock on the window and looked up to see Karen McCarthy, a girl from high school—twenty pounds lighter, and twenty years older—but it was undeniably her. She kept waving through the windowpane.
“Get your ass in here!” she mouthed.
I quickly tossed the paper as Sammy froze.
“Oh, no,” she said.
I held the door open, but Sammy shook her head. “I don’t like to sit in Karen’s section,” she said.
“I have a feeling you’re not going to be alone in that,” I said.
Sammy looked upset. “I’m serious. She lets the toast get cold.”
But it was too late. Karen ran over. “As I live and breathe!” she said. “Sunny Stephens!”
She squeezed me toward her. Then she patted Sammy on the head. “And Sammy Stephens too.”
Sammy patted her hair back in its place. “Please don’t touch me.”
Karen laughed. “Right. Sorry, Sammy,” she said.
Then Karen folded her arms and turned back toward me.
“How long has it been?” she said.
“A long time,” I said. “You look fantastic!”
“I know, right?” She looked me up and down as if figuring out a way to return the compliment. “What’s going on with you? Returning home in infamy?”
I flinched. “So you heard?”
She tilted her head, confused. “What are you talking about?”
And for a great moment, I actually thought Karen had no idea. It was one of my favorite things about Montauk. It was suffocating when you lived here—everyone in everyone else’s business. But if you had the gall to leave town, you stopped existing. It was entirely possible Karen had not picked up the Post that morning and had no idea about what had happened with A Little Sunshine—or maybe she didn’t know about A Little Sunshine in the first place.
Karen leaned in. “If you believe that, I have pancakes from yesterday that I’m happy to serve you!”
Then she started laughing, beyond amused at her sense of humor. I made myself a deal that she had thirty seconds to stop laughing or I would swipe Sammy’s book and hit Karen across the head with it.
She caught her breath and smiled. “Of course I know. We are in the same biz!”
“Not exactly,” I said.
“Well, not anymore!” she said. “But you had a good run before the hack. I mean, thanks to our loyalty.”
I looked at her, confused.
“Everyone.” She motioned around herself—I assumed to encapsulate all of Montauk. “We all assumed you pretended to be from somewhere else to protect your father’s legacy. So we weren’t going to out you. I mean . . . he was famous. He couldn’t exactly have a daughter doing what you were doing.”
Was she seriously saying that having hundreds of thousands of A Little Sunshine viewers would embarrass him? Or was it selling 150,000 cookbooks? Perhaps it was having so many loyal followers that the Food Network had decided to feature me prominently in prime time? But then I realized the part that would embarrass him. The part where I couldn’t cook. The part where I was only pretending to be who I told everyone I was.
“I’m hungry,” Sammy said. “I want to sit and I want to eat.”
Karen looked down at Sammy. “Sit! By all means, sweetie,” she said. “Can I get you your toast?”
Sammy looked back toward her book, turning the page. “I don’t know. Can you?”
Karen laughed again. “You’re a hoot, Sammy!” she said. Then she turned to me. “We’ll catch up, okay? And, man, I should have reached out when it happened. I’m sorry about your father. He was truly a great man.”
I felt a tightening in my chest. I didn’t know what to say, never knew what to say when someone talked about my father. Especially someone like Karen, who seemed committed to talking about him as long as I would let her. Karen, who probably knew as much about him as I knew. He came to John’s every morning to read his paper, to enjoy a short stack of buttermilk pancakes. Not the usual three they brought. Bad luck.
“We still miss him around here,” she said.
“Oh, well, that makes one of us.”
I was unnecessarily harsh, but I was pissed off about her takedown, and I didn’t have the energy to pretend my father wasn’t who he was.
Karen stepped back. The insult of my father was apparently something she took personally.
“I’ll tell the hostess to get you guys menus,” she said.
Then she walked away.
On the upside, Sammy smiled. “Wow, you really told her,” she said.
She apparently liked rudeness directed toward her chilly-toast nemesis.
“Was she talking about Grandpa?”
I nodded. She had never met him, and yet there was a familiarity to how she said the word. What had Rain told her?
“Can we sit by the other windows now? Alisa is a way better waitress.”
“Great idea,” I said.
18
The story about my father was one I hated telling. He wasn’t an alcoholic. He didn’t hit us. He didn’t do much of anything, which I guess was the best way to describe what was wrong with him.
Steve Stephens. His parents had actually named him that, which he liked to say explained something about how he had grown up. I thought it was more telling that he was raised in Charleston, South Carolina, above his parents’ restaurant. They had planned for it to only be a lunch spot, but no one seemed to like their food. So, to make ends meet, they started dinner service as well. No one liked the food then, either, but they served alcohol, which everyone liked. They would play old ballads on the stereo, and people would stay late drinking, the music drifting upstairs into my father’s childhood bedroom until two A.M. If this sounds romantic, he didn’t consider it to be. My father would always say that it made him long for quiet.
Wouldn’t you consider it ironic, then, that he went on to become a famous composer? He was most notable for his film scores, composing the scores for eighty films. And he won all sorts of awards, his little gold statues and magazine covers lining his music studio.