Sweet Girl (9 page)

“To learn Greek,” I call back.

Chapter Seven

“Quiz me!” I demand as I slam the piece of paper down on the table in front of Joey triumphantly.

She looks at me with equal parts pity and annoyance, which might very well be the worst combination of expressions you can have aimed in your direction.

The kitchen staff members sit silently around the lunch table, looking back and forth between the two of us. I found them all here enjoying the cool air and the coffee in the break room. The audience is unavoidable.

It took me the last four hours hunched over my laptop in the hotel lobby, but I now know every possible letter, number, and code word she could throw at me. I am utterly confident in this.

“This really isn’t necessary—”

“My dream.” There, I say it. I lay it out there in front of all seven members of this crew. It’s mortifying, but whatever. “My dream
is
necessary. You said I couldn’t work here without knowing shorthand, and I know it now, so quiz me!”

She starts rubbing her back, a sure sign of agitation. Harris throws me a reprimanding glance. He doesn’t want me upsetting his very pregnant wife. I get that, but I’m not going down without a fight.

“Look, Max—”

“10X?” an old voice barks from behind me.

Joey drops her face into her palm with a groan. I spin around to see Avis standing in the doorway. She holds her box of cigarettes in one hand and flicks a lighter idly in the other. I don’t need to be prompted again.

“Powdered sugar,” I answer.

“What’s the ten stand for?” She narrows her eyes.

“It’s the coarseness of the grind,” I tell her. “How fine the sugar is, I mean.”

Avis lets out a slightly maniacal laugh.

“Uh-oh, the Stork’s been studying up,” she announces to the room.

I turn back to look at the much aggrieved sous-chef.

“Quiz me,” I demand again.

Joey rolls her eyes like she is dealing with a toddler.

“Do I
need
to quiz you?” she asks sarcastically.

“No,” I say emphatically. “I know it all.”

She mutters something in Spanish, and beside her Harris smothers laughter with his giant hand.

“Fine.” She sighs. “Then go make the cupcakes and don’t come to me again until they’re perfect.”

“I won’t,” I tell her.

“What’s that?” she asks.

It takes me a moment to understand what she means, but I finally catch up.

“Yes, Chef.”

As I walk out of the room past a table full of grinning bakers and the old woman I idolize even though she is kind of crazy, I don’t even try to hide my smile. I might go down, but at least I’ll go down swinging.

Four hours and five dozen cupcakes later, I leave the kitchen.

I am exhausted after all the emotional drama of the day but also running on the high of having managed to get my job back. I would love to follow the rest of the crew back to employee parking and head straight home to bed, but I am scheduled to work the eight-to-two shift at Gander. I try not to think about how tired my arms already are from hauling big trays around or how much more tired they will be after hours of making drinks. I focus instead on the new vocabulary I learned today and hurry off in the opposite direction, straight to the women’s employee locker room.

My gym bag is close to bursting at the seams, but it holds everything I need for both my shifts. I have just enough time to wash my face and reapply some makeup, though the cheap florescent lighting means that the results are less than stellar. A shower isn’t an option, but I guess that’s why God invented Victoria’s Secret body spray. Once I have
mostly
replaced the smell of the kitchen with a hearty dousing of Love Spell, I slip into the skinny jeans, black boots, tight white button-down, and suspenders that make up my uniform. Another glance in the mirror reveals that my hair is unattractively flattened to my head in random places because of wearing a bandana all day. The bandana is totally
Karate Kid
, but way better than a hairnet. I run my hands through my hair a few times to try to fix it, but it is the kind of mess that no amount of product is going to remedy. I normally don’t care all that much about my hair when I’m at work, but it’s pretty terrible-looking. When I say flattened I don’t mean Mia Farrow in
Rosemary’s Baby
; I mean Donnie Wahlberg in
The Sixth Sense
.

Not cute.

I finally give up, pull an old vintage scarf out of the bottom of my bag, and tie it around my head where the bandana had been. It looks a little more rockabilly than I would have liked, but it is the best I can do.

I use what remaining energy I have to run down the back hallway while scarfing down some almonds and chugging a bottle of water, and I make it behind the bar with no time to spare. I have a small heart attack when I realize Landon is sitting at the counter waiting for me. I have no idea how long she’s been there.

“Good grief, girl, where have you been?” she calls to me as soon as I am close enough to hear it. “I’ve been looking forward to this drink all day, and I’ve been sitting here for half an hour already waiting for you.”

Maybe if I focus on the second part of the sentence, she’ll ignore the first.

“You could have asked someone else for a drink,” I say, grabbing a lowball glass for her. “Jack rocks isn’t hard to accomplish; any one of the other geniuses here could have figured it out for you.”

“Yes, but it’s so much more fun to be served by you,” she says, slipping her phone into her black Cole Haan.

I can’t help but smile, remembering the intervention Miko and I staged to get her to move on from the pink-and-gold monstrosity of a purse she came to LA with. Our argument that no high-end client would take her seriously was finally enough to persuade her to buy a classier handbag.

I place her drink on the cocktail napkin in front of her, then casually lean my elbows on the bar. It is a Monday night and relatively slow, so it is easy enough to stop to chat. And truthfully, I am exhausted and not really interested in running from one end of the bar to the other. Landon takes a little sip, then reaches back to fluff up her hair. God forbid it should lose any volume in the eight minutes since the last time she fluffed it.

“So why weren’t you around today?” She raises her eyebrows dramatically. “Don’t tell me you have a secret boyfriend who took you on a day-long date.”

I snort in response.

“No secret boyfriend to speak of. How about you?”

As soon as I ask it, I regret my question. I want to change the subject, but I don’t really want to initiate a heart-to-heart about her and Brody’s relationship. I love both of them, and I worry about how close they are getting. If—or really when—they break up, it is going to seriously screw us all, so it is probably better if I don’t get too invested in their relationship now.

Landon gasps, her typical response to any given situation. “Are you actually interested in how things are going with us?” she asks excitedly.

“Actually, I—”

An older businessman sits down a few chairs away from us, and I have to take care of his request for wine before I can finish my sentence. When I come back to Landon, I pick up where I left off.

“Actually, I can think of several things I’d rather do than hear about you and my brother,” I tell her. “Off the top of my head, I’d say, oh, watching an obscure Polish film without the use of subtitles, or getting a bikini wax from a one-armed clown, or—”

Landon screeches with laughter. “A one-armed clown?”

The businessman scowls at us over his glass of cabernet.

“Well,” I tell her, “I was trying to think of the worst thing I could. Bikini waxes and sad-faced clowns are at the top of my list.”

“Just below hearing about Brody and me?”

“Exactly,” I say, but now I’ve opened some kind of door, and it’s only polite to ask, “But if you must, how are things with him?”

Landon smiles and takes another drink. “Oh, he’s fine. Granted, it’s harder to apply the wax now with only the one arm, but—”

I laugh loud enough to startle the businessman again. He picks up his glass and moves to a seat outside of my section. I grin over at Landon.

“You’re becoming quite the smart-ass, Landon Brinkley,” I tell her happily.

She shoots me a cheeky grin. “Yes, well, I’m learning from the best, aren’t I?”

“Pay attention or I’ll let you scorch the caramel at least twenty times before I show you how to make it properly,” Joey tells me the next day.

It’s not like I’d ever ignore her on purpose, but Avis is across the room making a profiterole tower with a spun-sugar overlay. Watching her stretch out the hot sugar strands like spun gold is kind of mesmerizing, and since I’ve never seen anyone do it before, I keep getting distracted. Joey’s threat works perfectly, though, because (a) I don’t doubt that she’d let me burn twenty cups of sugar if she thought it might teach me a lesson, and (b) I’ve never made caramel before and I am dying to learn how to do it properly. Joey reaches for a small saucepot, but I grab it before she has to struggle on tiptoes with a belly that is constantly getting in her way.

She pulls out sugar and water and then surprises me by getting a lemon.

“What’s the citrus for?” I ask curiously.

“It keeps the caramel from seizing up,” she says while cutting the fruit in half with a paring knife.

She puts water, sugar, and a squeeze of lemon into the saucepot and brings the heat up high. I reach for a whisk so she won’t have to make the grab, but she shakes her head.

“You don’t want to whisk caramel in the beginning.” She reaches for the handle of the pot and swirls it over the flame. “Just move it around gently over the heat.”

As we watch the pot, the water and sugar begin to boil, creating what looks like white foam.

“Isn’t there a way to make caramel without water?” I ask without removing my eyes from the boiling pot.

“There is, and it’s much faster, but it’s also easier to scorch that way. Since we make this in larger batches, it’s best to take the extra time rather than risk the quality.”

As she speaks she slides the handle in my direction, and I take over the swirling motion. We both watch the mixture boil with rapt attention.

“See there.” She points to the edge of the pot, where the sugar is just starting to turn brown.

As the amber color slowly permeates the bottom of the pot, she uses a spoon to pull out the tiniest bit. She drops a dollop of the light-brown liquid onto a plate, then gestures for me to try it.

I gingerly stick a fingertip in and bring it to my mouth. The flavor is sweet, with just the barest hint of the deep caramel flavor I’m used to.

“This is a medium caramel. You’d use this for a caramel sauce or to flavor an icing or a filling. Understand?” I nod and look back to the caramel in the pot, which continues to deepen in color. A few seconds later, she sticks the spoon in again and removes a bit of dark-amber liquid that smells like heaven.

“This,” she says, blowing on the spoon, “is what we use for the
budino
.” Joey slips the entire spoonful into her mouth and shivers a little in response to the flavor. With a blissful smile she starts to gather ingredients that I quickly recognize are for the pudding. As I watch her work I recognize in her a total focus and love for what she’s doing. I’m not typically one to make conversation, but I’m curious.

“Where did you learn to cook?” I ask.

A small smile plays around her mouth at some memory.

“I started washing dishes in a kitchen where Avis was pastry chef, and she pulled me up the ranks to assist her.”

“You were a stage!” I gasp. “Why did you give me so much grief about it, then?” I ask, handing her a whisk when she points to it.

Joey stops cracking eggs for a moment and looks at me.

“Because I know how hard this is,” she answers. “I worked under Avis for two years before I was able to manage independently. You’ve set yourself an impossible goal, and you’re going to kill yourself to do this job you’re not trained for. In all likelihood she’s going to fire you before you get the chance to do anything other than waste your time.”

“So why did you stick it out, then?” I challenge.