He laughed, thrilled. “Seriously? That’s too perfect. I can definitely, definitely work with this. Sunshine Mackenzie. A farmer’s daughter! Keeping it real in the Big Apple.”
“That’s not my last name.”
“It’s a star’s name. A food critic eating at the restaurant tonight had that name. She had a way about her. That’s what we’re going with. You’ll be my Justin Bieber. For the cooking world.”
He was, at this point, talking to himself. I looked at him. “Who?”
“People love the discovery narrative. That’s how we’ll play it.” He paused. “A chef for the next generation. That’s what they don’t get. That’s what they never fucking got. How to do fucking modern.”
I pointed toward Carla and Austin, who looked dangerously close to undressing each other. “I’m going to check on those guys.”
Then I started to walk away.
He called out after me. “I’ll give you a month’s salary if you’ll have a cup of coffee with me tomorrow.”
I stopped walking. “Why would you do that?”
“The job opportunity I’m telling you about.”
“You just told me you were fired. You don’t have a job to offer.”
He smiled. “I think I just might.”
I leaned across the countertop. Did he not understand? “I make a pretty good grilled cheese,” I said. “That’s it.”
“A certain TV personality who just opened his fifth Tex-Mex restaurant made a SPAM taco when I found him. Nothing to do with anything.”
I stared at him in disbelief, slightly confused by what he was asking me to do: pretend to be a kind of cooking show host? “Look, I know you’re having a tough night, but . . .”
“Three months’ salary. Double the number of what they pay you here. Really, how would I know?”
We had no money, no heat. Danny was taking a second job moonlighting at a botanical garden. We had seen each other for five hours in the last week. “Are you insane?”
“Bring your fiancé tomorrow,” he said. “Then decide.”
Ryan reached out his hand to shake on the deal. It wasn’t slimy or cold. It was warm at the very moment that I needed warmth.
“I’m just saying yes to the coffee.”
“I got it. No promises.”
But he kept holding on to my hand, like a promise. And in that moment, I think I decided to do it. Not just the meeting, but the job.
Of course I never thought it would become what it became. No one did. Except Ryan; I guess Ryan did.
I sound like I’m making excuses. But why should I make excuses? There was a guy sitting before me telling me that he was giving me a way to stop waitressing, to earn a ton of money, to grow up. And I was going to do what? Pretend to cook a meal?
Even Danny, my gauge of what was good and bad in the world, just thought the whole thing was kind of funny. He didn’t seem concerned during that first coffee the next day. It wasn’t really a big deal—the first lie. After all, the stakes were low. It was just a recipe. It was just a video. Until the video became a hundred videos. And a produced YouTube show. And a cookbook that hit the best-seller list. And a second cookbook that also did. And an empire.
And the lie stopped being about what you cooked and how you cooked it. It was about everything in your life. Where you came from. Who you were. Where you were going.
How do you stop the train then? Even if you wanted to? And I wasn’t saying I wanted to.
It’s easy to pretend I’d made a deal with the devil. But Ryan genuinely didn’t think we were doing anything wrong. And somewhere inside, I think I knew we were.
So which one of us was the devil?
4
Danny came home at 5 P.M.
I flinched when I heard the front door open, not anxious to do the rundown of the day—not anxious to see the look Danny got on his face when the conversation turned to my work. I cranked up the record player, hoping Bob Dylan would mitigate an argument. But, surprisingly, Danny walked into the kitchen with a huge smile and a bouquet of Gerber daisies in hand.
“A little Dylan?” he said. “That’s certainly a nice way to come home.”
“A bouquet of flowers is even nicer.”
He pointed at the daisies. “Oh, these? They’re not for you.”
“Shut up,” I said.
He walked over, kissed me hello. “Something told me that you could use them. Are you hanging in okay?” he asked.
I waved off his concern. “Great.”
“Really?”
He tilted his head, not buying it, wanting to hear the truth in all its dirty matter. I used to love this about him, but recently I found it tiresome. I just wasn’t in the mood for too much honesty. And Danny was the one person who demanded it, who didn’t want me to perform for him—which, often, felt like the hardest performance of all.
“Meredith’s statement was just picked up by the Huffington Post,” he said, and started to read it aloud.
I nodded, not interrupting him, even though I wanted to correct him. The statement had posted to Huff Post hours ago.
Thanks to Meredith, the noise had quieted down. Everyone assumed (why wouldn’t they?) that I had been hacked: my followers sending out much kinder tweets.
@sunshinecooks Still my favorite chef in the world #sunshineforever @sunshinecooks Tomato Pie doesn’t know how to lie #apoetwhodidnt evenknowit “So you and Ryan pulled it all the way back?” he said.
I held the flowers to my nose, breathed them in. “Looks that way.”
“Congratulations,” he said.
I heard the slight edge in his tone. Danny’s relationship to this—to all of this—was complicated. He didn’t like that there was a fake story behind A Little Sunshine, that there were lies he had to remember about where I came from, about how the show had started. Somewhere along the line, though, he thought that the lie had become the truth. I let him believe that many of the recipes Meredith had developed over the years were my recipes. I let him believe I was actually doing my job. I let him believe a lot of things.
Danny reached into the cabinet and pulled out a bottle of wine. “No one seems to be blogging about it anymore,” he said. “And I read that one of the Real Housewives got pregnant by another housewife’s husband. So that certainly is more exciting than who really came up with your sweet potato hash.”
I rolled my eyes, though I couldn’t help but smile at the effort—given how much I knew it must have pained Danny to look up that headline on TMZ. “So . . . how did Central Park West go?” I said.
Danny uncorked the wine, shrugged nonchalantly. “Pretty good.”
“What does that mean?” I said.
He smiled proudly. “I got the job,” he said.
I threw my arms around him. This wasn’t just another job. It was a game changer for Danny: a five-thousand-square-foot dream apartment overlooking the park. The type of project that not only ended up in Architectural Digest, it ended up on the cover.
“That’s so great!” I said.