Читать книгу A Brisket, A Casket: - Delia Rosen - Страница 8

The morning after the karaoke calamity, I was having my regular Saturday breakfast with Cazzie Watts in the abundant sunshine bathing her kitchen table. The window was wide open, its yellow lace curtains parted to admit the scent of garden lilies.

“Caz, I’m a gefilte fish out of water,” I said.

“That doesn’t sound good,” Cazzie said. “But you know what’s worse?”

“What?”

“Being a gefilte fish in water,” Cazzie said. “Well, if by water you mean a lake or the ocean.”

I looked across the table at her. For the uninitiated, gefilte fish is a type of food, not a fish per se, though the recipe does contain fish as its main ingredient. You mix ground whitefish, matzo meal, eggs, carrots, and onions together in balls or patties and poach them in seasoned broth.

Soooo…gefilte fish can’t swim in water. Or even float. Since they’re cooked patties, get it?

Caz’s little witticism wasn’t bad. Never mind that the qualifying clause had cost her some pithiness points, it ordinarily might have gotten a half smile out of me. I couldn’t manage one, however, having started the day feeling pretty cooked myself. I’d applied super-concealer to the dark, puffy bags under my eyes, and lifter cream to their droopy lids, but had no illusions about the combo making me look half as fresh as the breeze riffling the curtains. In fact, my cosmetic objective was very modest…say, to avoid being mistaken for a female Morlock.

“I mean it,” I said after a moment. “It’s like I’m totally out of my element.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time you had a bad night.”

“But this time’s different.”

“How so?”

“When things go wrong for me, I always bounce back fast. A pre-bedtime chocolate binge followed by a few hours of optional sleep, and I’m good as new.”

“And today?”

“Bounceless,” I said. “Truthfully, Caz, I’ve started to doubt I can fit in.”

“At the deli? Or are you talking about Nashville in general?”

I shrugged, spreading my hands. Technically Cazzie Watts and her family were my neighbors outside Nashville, our adjoining villa-style condos being located in Antioch, a small suburban town about a dozen miles southwest of the city off Highway 41.

“It’s the whole deal, Caz,” I said. “I’m not sure I can cut living here. Or if I’ve got what it takes to run Murray’s. It’s awful.”

She just stared at me and shook her head.

“It isn’t awful?” I said.

“I think it’s very normal considering what happened yesterday,” she said.

I looked at her. Cazzie was an African American woman of about thirty-five with a nutmeg complexion, dark brown eyes, and fine, high-cheekboned features accented by a lush wedge of soft medium-length black curls. She was wearing a raspberry halter-neck blouse and faded skinny jeans of an enviously small size…one that would have led to a full, numbing loss of circulation in my legs had I dared try them on.

“Do you want to discuss it?” Cazzie said into the extended silence.

“Nothing to discuss,” I said with the shrug that had become my all-purpose gesture of the morning.

She continued to peer across the table. Too tired for a staring contest, I lowered my eyes to the cereal boxes between us. One was Lucky Charms, her seven-year-old Cole’s fave. The other was Cocoa Puffs, which his brother Jimmy, who was a wizened eight, deemed a superior product.

I had cast my lot with Jimmy. Probably the reason was my chocolate fetish. Also, I identified with the cuckoo bird mascot, since its crest kind of resembled mine before I dragged a brush through the frizz every morning.

As I turned the boxes sideways and diligently studied their nutritional ingredients, Cazzie reached over to her countertop for the newspaper and made a brief show-and-tell of its front page. The Nashville Times tabloid writers had been more pedestrian about slapping on their headline than I’d foreseen:

BUSTER SERGEANT DIES AT 56

Deli Dinner Becomes

Auto Legend’s Last Supper

“I thought maybe this was the cause of your funk,” Cazzie said, holding up the paper.

I poo-poohed her suggestion with a flick of my hand. “Why’d anybody let that stupid rag of a paper bother them?”

Cazzie made a face. “Gwen…do you or don’t you want to tell me what’s wrong?”

I breathed in the naturally perfumed air from outside, exhaled. “What’s wrong is that I felt irrelevant last night,” I said at last. “I’m the restaurant’s owner, but I might as well have been a spectator. It was like I’d stepped into a situation I didn’t understand…and that hardly needed my involvement.”

“Dealing with the police, you mean.”

“No,” I said. “Well, yeah. Except it all started before they came. With the hog that was supposed to be pastrami.”

“So a roast hog made you feel irrelevant?”

“Not the hog per se. But the screwup drove home how much I don’t know about running a delicatessen. It should have been a pastrami. It really should have.”

“Right, I think you’ve established that—”

“My uncle did the deli’s ordering himself, Caz,” I interrupted. “He wrote all his suppliers’ names in notebooks, but now they’re scattered everywhere…and even Thomasina’s clueless about where he bought half his stuff.” A sigh escaped me. “Bottom line, I called a meat wholesaler in Joelton for a pastrami and instead got Porky the Pig after a serious forest fire. I’m not prepared to fill Murray’s shoes—or cowboy boots as the case may be.”

Cazzie looked thoughtful. “You handled the situation, didn’t you?”

“No,” I said. “All I did was spend a fortune on crisis management. And look how things turned out.”

“Gwen, give yourself credit. You’re drawing a connection between two things that couldn’t be more separate. What happened to Buster had nothing to do with that pig.”

I shook my head. “I’m telling you, the pig was a honey-glazed bad omen. And I’ve got a hunch more trouble’s on the way.”

“Like what?”

“I wish I could put a finger on it,” I said with a shrug. “When the police detective arrived and took charge of the scene, I sensed some kind of tension between him and Thom. He seemed pleasant enough at first, but his attitude got downright nasty after they exchanged words.”

“Did you try asking Thomasina what it was about?”

“No,” I said. “And I got the distinct impression she didn’t think it was any of my business.”

Cazzie quietly reached for her coffee and sipped. I did the same, but only after eating a mouthful of Cocoa Puffs from my cereal bowl. I was thinking maybe I should’ve had the Lucky Charms instead. I needed a drastic reversal of fortune. A green shamrock marshmallow surely couldn’t have hurt my chances.

“There’s something more to this,” Cazzie said. “Isn’t there?”

I nodded slowly. “I don’t understand why the cops put us in lockdown last night,” I said. “McClintock—”

“That’s the meanie detective?”

“Right, sorry,” I said. “He not only orders his men to bag samples of our food, but has them seize our order pads and kitchen tickets.”

Cazzie’s eyes had narrowed. She was a junior partner with a law office, and though her expertise lay in intellectual property and copyrights, it was clear the attorney in her was paying attention.

“Did he tell you why they took all that stuff?”

“And actually not keep me in the dark for a change?” I said, and expelled another sigh. “Caz, you couldn’t have pried an explanation out of him with a crowbar. I only got one because—”

I was interrupted by the sound of clunky little feet thumping up behind me. Snapping my head toward the kitchen entry, I saw Cazzie’s youngest appear there in a T-shirt and over-the-knee cargo shorts. A toothbrush poked from one corner of his foam-slathered mouth.

“Jimmy, what are you doing?” Cazzie asked.

“Cl kpshgng thsnk!” Jimmy said.

Cazzie shot him a disapproving look. “Care to repeat that so I can understand you?”

He pulled the brush out of his mouth. “Cole won’t stop hogging the sink,” he said. “He—”

“Not true! I didn’t do anything wrong.”

In case you’re wondering, that adamant denial had come from none other than Cole himself, who was in the bathroom down the hall.

“Did so!” Toothpaste bubbled from Jimmy’s lips. “He wouldn’t get off the stool or stop smiling at his ugly puss in the mirror!”

“I wasn’t smiling,” Cole shouted. “I was checking for food crud—”

“Then finish checking and let your brother rinse his mouth,” Cazzie said. She glanced up at her wall clock, a green apple design she’d made in her ceramics workshop, don’t ask where she finds the time. “Aunt Grace said she’d be here in ten minutes, so you’d better have your beach bags ready.”

Cole spun his head around toward the entry. “See, I told you to get away from—”

“Go rinse!” Cazzie ordered. “This instant!”

Jimmy frowned, turned on his sneaker bottoms, and dashed from the room.

“Motherhood…such a pleasure,” Cazzie said with a small headshake. “Thank heavens for relatives that give me sanity breaks once in a while.”

I smiled. Grace, her sister-in-law, had two kids of her own and was taking the gathered bunch on an overnight outing to Nashville Shores.

“Chris is away on a long one, huh?”

“He’s back on an international track…Memphis, Chicago, London,” Cazzie said. “It’s a week-long trip sequence. Eight days to be precise. They’ve got him doing two a month, plus a domestic run.” She paused. “How’d you know?”

I shrugged. Her husband was a commercial airline pilot, and he’d been on a domestic routine when we first met. But the airline had done some reshuffling because of employee cutbacks.

“I don’t need to be psychic,” I said. “The boys always act up when their dad’s gone for long stretches.”

Cazzie raised her cup, took a sip of coffee. “His new schedule’s hard on them.”

I nodded.

“Hard on me too,” she said.

I nodded again.

Caz sighed. “Whiny, whiny,” she said. “I shouldn’t complain.”

I noticed that she looked a bit awkward. Cazzie knew about my ex, Phil, and his personal strip club revue. But I wasn’t that sensitive. Being divorced was lonely. But no lonelier than living with a man whose extramarital affairs would have left Tiger Woods holding his putter in exhaustion.

“You never finished telling me about last night,” she said, changing the subject.

I tried to recall where I’d left off.

“The food samples,” Caz prompted. “You mentioned that you eventually learned why the police took them.”

“Oh, right.” I ate some cereal. “Except it wasn’t me who found out. It was my waitress, A.J. I think you’ve met her.”

Cazzie nodded. “That pretty blonde who gets all the looks.”

“Looks aren’t the half of it, but let’s not go there right now,” I said meaningfully. “Anyway, one of the cops spilled the beans to A.J. when he took her statement. He mentioned a case in Lexington, Kentucky. This was just last month…a restaurant customer died from the food. The poor guy ordered the Harvest Chicken, which I guess is a chicken, herb and vegetable platter. But somebody messed up and he got the Caribbean Reef Chicken by mistake.”

“The dish tasted so bad it killed him?”

“Very funny, Caz. The fact is there was crabmeat in that Caribbean Reef dish. He was allergic to seafood and had a severe reaction.”

“That’s terrible.”

“I’ll say. It gave him fatal convulsions on the spot.”

“But it sounds to me like a freak accident,” Cazzie said, shaking her head. “What’s it got to do with you?”

“Nothing whatsoever,” I said. “Lexington’s a long way from here. And Sergeant didn’t convulse at all. I hate to sound cold about it, but he just dropped dead. Turned purple and, boom, hit the floor. Well, the floor of the stage.”

Cazzie looked thoughtful. She topped off her coffee, motioned toward my empty cup with her carafe. I shook my head, having already reached my two-cup limit for the morning. But I was admittedly ogling the cereal boxes again.

“You said this incident in Kentucky took place a month ago?” she asked.

“Right.”

“Then it’s possible the police here are only being extra cautious,” she said. “Did you ask if they noticed any parallels between the two deaths? Other than both taking place in restaurants?”

“How could I? I didn’t know a thing about the man in Lexington till A.J. gave me the scoop…and that was after the cops left.” I sighed. “Think about it a second. This is something a police officer confided to my employee while I was practically hanging out on the sidelines. I’d might as well not have been there. I was useless, not to mention helpless. A—”

“—gefilte fish out of water.”

“You’ve got it,” I said, dotting the sentence in the air with my fingertip.

We sat quietly in the warm June sunshine. With the Great Toothpaste Spitting War suspended by maternal decree, we could hear the boys hurrying around their room as they prepared to be picked up.

“From a legal perspective, you face a couple of potential issues,” Cazzie said, shifting into lawyer mode. “One is your restaurant’s potential responsibility…”

“Huh?” My eyes widened. “Wait a minute, Caz. Wasn’t it you who called Buster Sergeant’s death a freak accident!”

“That’s why I used the word potential,” she said. “I’m almost sure you won’t have any problems. But it wouldn’t hurt for me to speak with a colleague of mine who’s a liability attorney.”

“And spread the word that Murray’s Deli does toxic catering?”

Cazzie offered a thin smile. “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure everything’s discussed under privilege—”

“Okay, let’s change the subject before I hyper-ventilate,” I said, glancing out the window. “It’s a beautiful morning. I wonder how it’ll be the rest of the day? I love beautiful days. Have you heard the weather forecast, Caz?”

Caz sat there as her green apple clock ticked away into the silence. “Gwen, trust me, you just need to settle in a little,” she said. “I’m a South Side girl. Never thought I’d be happy living outside Chicago. Then I meet Chris in an O’Hare waiting lounge…and zap! We’re engaged before I know what’s hit me. Cut ahead a year, I’m in Nashville, married to him, listening to his favorite hometown country music stations on the radio. And these days…well, you know how much I like singing along when I drive the kids to baseball and soccer practice.”

“So you’re saying precisely what? That I should get preggers and become a soccer mom who’s memorized Tammy Wynette lyrics?”

Cazzie shooed me with a wave of her hand.

“Moving here was a big change for me,” she said. “It took a while to make the adjustment. I don’t know about feeling like a gefilte fish. But I was definitely an Aurelio’s pizza in a Domino’s box.”

I looked at her. “I’m not sure the comparison works.”

“Want an alternate?”

“Maybe next time.”

Cazzie smiled gently. I smiled back.

“I’m not claiming my experiences were identical to yours…but I can relate to enough of them,” she said after a bit. “Give Nashville a chance. I think you’ll fall in love with it, same as I did…and I do love this place. The weather, the people, everything about it. That includes those Goo Goo bars I gave you, and am wondering if you’ve sampled yet.”

I didn’t answer, afraid to hurt Caz’s feelings. How could I own up to passing on the Goo Goos so soon after she’d gone gaga over Nashville?

Fortunately I was saved by her sister-in-law. Well, the sound of her car pulling up to the sidewalk out front.

As Caz craned her head to look out the window, the boys stampeded into the kitchen with their beach totes, playfully flopped up my already mutinous mop of hair (I’m a lifer in the Unruly Hair Club for Jews), and took turns hurrying to get their sports bottles out of the fridge.

It gave me the perfect opening to exit gracefully before Cazzie could ask about the Goo Goo bars again.

“You leaving?” she said as I pushed up off my chair. “Grace is popping in for a minute—”

“I’ll catch her on my way out,” I said. “It’s getting late, and I have lots to do at the deli.”

She looked at the clock. “It’s seven in the morning. You don’t usually head over there for another hour.”

I halted with my fingers around the doorknob, glanced over at her.

“One thing’s for sure, Caz…this isn’t my usual day,” I said, telling the absolute truth.