Читать книгу Stir Me Up - Sabrina Elkins - Страница 5

Chapter One

I’m proud to say that after five years of virtual slavery, I am now allowed to make the soup on Wednesday nights for Étoile, my father’s restaurant. This may not seem like a big deal, but it is. Soup ranks fairly high in the kitchen pecking order, right up there with preparing the fish and working a stove.

I started at the bottom, peeling potatoes and apples when I was ten. I graduated to dicing onions and garlic. Then I was given the challenge of doing things like stripping and cleaning baby artichokes, which are actually worse than the onions because artichoke hairs can give you an infection if they get embedded under your fingernails—ask me how I know this.

Despite the onions, garlic and artichoke hairs, I managed to stick with cooking long enough to make it to salad prep—only to learn, the hard way, that bell pepper seeds on your cutting board make your knife slip.

Seeing as how knives were obviously too dangerous for me, I was then demoted to melon-balling and pitting cherries. After another year of this, the chef who usually does the soup, Georges, took pity on me and let me watch him. Not cook with him. Watch him. Then I was allowed to make garnishes for him. Then add ingredients for him. Then make soup with him. And now, at long last, I have my own night. The slowest night of the week. On Wednesdays, I get to be soup girl—and Georges gets to be sous-chef and babysitter to the soup girl—who, for her first solo soup ever, has decided to make a tricky-but-hopefully-stunning wild morel with vegetable confetti and a veal infusion.

Now, morels are rare wild mushrooms with caps like extremely delicate honeycombs that are almost impossible to clean. So, when Dad comes over and picks up a morel and taps on it, my already-pounding heart starts to sink. Sure enough, three miniscule grains of sand fall out. Dad’s face turns red.

“GEORGES!” he yells.

“Oui, chef.”

Dad starts yelling at Georges in French. I’m mostly fluent, so I can follow almost all of the bawling out my supervisor is getting. Georges gives me a sideways glare, then Dad turns his rage directly on me. “You expect me to feed my customers sand?”

“No.”

“You want to go out into the dining room and explain to my customers why they have grit in their mouths?”

“I’ll reclean them.”

“Yes, you will. Without water. And if you can’t get it right, you’ll be sweeping floors.”

“Oui, chef,” I say, though he’s my father. I call him this at work, just like everyone else.

Georges comes over and hands me a toothpick. I use this to clean each honeycomb hole, and I have to do it carefully because the stupid things are insanely fragile, and we can’t just wash the morels out—oh no—for that would wreck their flavor. No bugs. No dirt. No grit—and no water.

I set to work. It takes a tedious two hours, then Georges spot-checks about fifty mushrooms and gives me a nod. Dad sees the nod and comes over. He checks a mushroom—one single mushroom—and no sand comes out. None. Huzzah.

“Took you long enough,” he says.

I breathe a sigh of relief. I’m tired, but I still have to work seven more hours and then wait another extra hour or so for Dad to take me home. During the school year, I usually drive myself to and from work. But in the summertime, I tend to bum rides with my father. I have two reasons for this—one, to save the gas money. And two, because I like being with him on the drive home at night.

Our restaurant is in Northampton, which is about forty miles from the southeast corner of Vermont, where we live. Lately it’s the only time Dad and I have alone together. Usually on these rides, he lets go of the strict chef thing and just unwinds by talking about his day—how the new fish dish went, what other dishes he wants to try, and how much he wants to try to find certain ingredients, like tiny wild “mignonette” strawberries.

Tonight though, when the time comes, I climb into the passenger seat and within five blocks my head’s already leaning on the car window.

“Something’s happened I have to talk to you about,” Dad says, waking me a little.

“What?” I ask, inwardly cringing. This must be about cleaning the morels.

“Julian has been wounded in an IED explosion.”

“Oh,” I say, thrown. So Dad’s not mad at me? Then his words sink in. “Sorry, I’m so tired I can’t think straight. Who is Julian again?”

Dad frowns at me. “Estella’s nephew. The one she raised since he was a boy. He’s a Marine in Afghanistan.”

That’s right. Dad’s new wife, Estella, raised her nephew alongside her son after her sister died. I’ve met her son, Brandon, but not the nephew yet. “How wounded is he?”

“His legs are in very bad shape. He’s in critical condition.”

“That’s terrible.”

“It is. They’re planning on airlifting him to a military hospital in Germany until he’s stable enough to be sent to Bethesda. When he is, I want you to go down there with Estella to be with her and lend a hand.”

I blink. “But I barely know Estella. And I don’t know Julian at all.”

Dad holds the wheel and peers down the dark road. “Estella can’t be with Julian all the time. She’ll need help and Brandon and I both have to work. Besides, it’ll be a good bonding experience for you two.”

“What about my work?”

“I’ll get your shift covered.”

Wonderful, I think to myself. “Fine,” I say with a sigh.

“Look, just as a warning, Estella is extremely upset about this.”

“Of course...”

“First they hit one roadside bomb, then apparently as Julian was trying to pull the three others in the vehicle to safety, there was a second explosion. None of the others survived.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Yes.” Dad looks far down the road, shakes his head and grows quiet. We both sit lost in thought and worry. When we reach the house, I see the light is still on in the kitchen. Estella is usually a very well-put-together lady—manicured and meticulously dressed, an elegant brunette with soft brown eyes and a figure Dad can’t stop staring at. Now, of course, she’s a complete mess, hunched at the kitchen table in one of Dad’s old bathrobes. Her shoulder-length hair is pulled back in a ponytail. Her eyes are red and bloodshot. The phone is next to the tissue box. I was thinking I might try to console her, but Dad makes a beeline for her and the two of them aren’t letting go of each other. So, I just tiptoe away.

I brush my teeth, wash my face and hands, strip down to my undershirt and panties and climb into bed. Shelby, my little red-and-white spaniel, is already there waiting for me. I scoot her over a little, close my eyes and think of Estella crying for her nephew at the kitchen table. I think of this guy, Julian, possibly fighting for his life in the belly of a plane somewhere. Then suddenly, I hear yelling.