“Your family’s diner?”
“Yes, my grandpa opened Callahan’s a thousand years ago. I started washing dishes there when I was ten, maybe? Gotta love that child labor. When my grandpa died, it went to my mom. It’s nothing special, just kind of a meeting place in a small town.”
“Sounds great.”
“It totally is—that’s where I realized I wanted to make cooking my career. But I never wanted to run it, not even for a short period of time. Do you have any idea how much goes into running a barely successful family restaurant? Forget vacations. Forget freedom. Forget a peaceful evening. And even if you’re home, you’re fielding calls about a broken-down mixer or a walk-in fridge that’s leaking, or a waitress whose nail broke off in the salad bowl and should we close the place down until we find it?” I sighed, exhaling the tension that always set up shop when I thought about our charming slice of Americana.
“Plus forget about having any kind of privacy—in a town like Bailey Falls, everyone knows everything about everybody. You are who you are, and they don’t let you forget it. I spent my entire childhood living in my mother’s flakey shadow, waiting to be eighteen and move away from home just to get the chance to be a kid. So for my mom to think I’d just drop everything and run home . . . oh, it just pisses me off.”
“I can tell. You’ve peeled that pear down to the core,” she said gently, and I looked down. I had indeed.
“Oh for the love of—” All the peel was piled up in the sink, along with all the pear. “I’m so sorry, this is terrible. Let’s talk about you—what’s going on with you?” I swished all the peel down the drain and started on a fresh pear.
She gave me a look that told me we weren’t done with this, but she’d play along. She told me all about the new season of the show, then told me a few secrets from the set of the new Time movie Jack had just finished, a successful film franchise based on a series of erotic short stories. A time-traveling scientist schtupping women across time . . . not a bad way to spend an evening at the movies. By the time dinner was almost ready, I’d almost managed to forget that other than this wonderful client, I was now a private chef without a private kitchen.
I was just taking the steak out of the pan and setting it to the side to rest when headlights shone through the back window as a car swung into the driveway. I turned to see Grace beaming as bright as the headlights, even blushing a little. “Jack’s home.” She seemed so genuinely happy that I had to smile too, even if she did remind me of my perpetually lovesick mother for a moment.
I looked around the kitchen, with its warm honey wood and giant marble island. Pictures of the couple and their friends hung on the walls, not fancy artwork. Flowers spilled casually out of mason jars and Bakelite pitchers—no enormous florist arrangements in this house. Because it wasn’t just a house, it was a home. Unlike any of the other houses I’d cooked in. Grace and Jack were that impossibility in this plastic town: real people. I missed real people.
But I didn’t need to be the third wheel for the remainder of their real-people evening. So as Jack banged in through the back door, I gathered up my tools.
He immediately called to his fiancée, “C’mere, Crazy, I’ve been waiting to get my hands on you all—oh! Hey, Roxie.” Jack smiled lazily over the top of Grace’s red curls as he tucked her in for a hug. “I forgot you were here tonight. Smells great, what is it?”