Nuts Read online

  “We don’t make that casserole anymore.”

  “We have to discuss your selective hearing sometime,” I said as my phone vibrated with another text. “Mother, I have to go. We can—”

  “We can’t talk about this later. I need to know if you can do this or not.”

  “You cannot call me up out of the blue and ask me—”

  “Wouldn’t be out of the blue if you called more often,” she sneaked in.

  Breathe in. Breathe out. I suddenly understood the phrase “my blood was boiling”: I could feel bubbles of stress forming inside my veins, knocking around and heating me up from the inside. I was a little past simmer, getting close to parboil. Before I could go fork tender, I tried once more.

  “Here’s the thing, Mom. I need you to be reasonable. I can’t do this every time you get into trouble or—”

  “I’m not in trouble, Roxie. I’m—”

  “Maybe not this time, but it’s the same thing, just dressed up in a package from CBS. It’s not going to work anymore.”

  “I paid for your college, Roxie—two years at the American Culinary Institute. The least you could do is this.”

  Okay. That’s it.

  “You know what, Mom? No. I’m not doing it,” I said angrily, just as another freakin’ text came in. “And you only paid for ACI because you’d just won the lottery. And you’ve gone through the rest of that money already, which is ludicrous.”

  She remained stubbornly silent. This was usually the point in the conversation where I’d cave. But not this time.

  “Okay, Mom. While you’re figuring out the real meaning of life and jumping into a shark tank off the coast of South Africa with Aunt Cheryl—who can’t swim, by the way—I’ll be here. In Los Angeles. Working my ass off, trying to build a business and keep my own lights on so I don’t have to live in my car,” I snapped—as yet another text came in.

  “You really think they’ll make us go in a shark tank?”

  “Oh, go smoke a bowl, Mother!” I hung up, steaming, wondering how in the world she could be ludicrous enough to think I’d drop everything to go home and run her diner. Unbelievable. I had a life, I had clients, I had . . . good lord, another text?

  I looked down at my phone, which showed six messages waiting for me. Nope, seven—another one just came in. What was going on? Opening the first, I saw it was from Shawna, a client.

  Roxie: I won’t need you to cook for me next week.

  Huh. That was weird. I opened the next bubble.

  Sorry for the last-minute notice, but I’m going to have to cancel the meals you have planned for next week, and the week after that. I’ll contact you in the future, perhaps.

  Wait, what? Miranda was another client. She’d been with me for a few months, referred by . . . Mitzi. Ah shit.

  I opened the next text bubble. By the time I’d read them all, every single client Mitzi had referred to me had canceled. Backed out. Quit me.

  Over B U T T E R???

  Or maybe over the obscene finger gesture?

  I fucking hate this town.

  Referrals were everything in a town like this, and because of Mitzi St. Fucking Renee, I was now a culinary pariah. Vapid, plastically beautiful women with more money than actual God had had decided to make my career into a game of herd mentality. The few clients I had left only used me occasionally, for events or as their schedules allowed.

  Though I loved California, I really was beginning to hate LA. The money was great here, but what it took to live here, to deal with these people—it was almost too much sometimes. And the money was only good . . . until it wasn’t. I’d just spent most of my savings on a new engine for the Jeep, and I was temporarily light in the cash-flow department.

  All those clients, all those dependable dollars, gone in the span of one phone call. My stomach knotted at the thought of having to rebuild my business. A bubble of worry floated up as I mentally ran through my client list, wondering who might be able to use me on a more full-time basis.

  Then my phone beeped with another text. Oh, God. Was someone else getting in on the butter gang bang?

  I’ll be back in town the middle of next week. Let me know if you’re up for some company.

  Thank God, it wasn’t culinary related. Although there was that one time with a jar of peanut butter . . . never mind that. I sighed as I let myself into my apartment. Mitchell was my . . . hmm. Not my boyfriend, that’s for sure. He was my . . . plaything. My latest in a string of men whom I enjoyed for the sexing, not for the vexing. Emotionally invested? No. Interested in long walks on the beach and a partner for life? I’ll pass. Sweaty, writhing, panting bodies a phone call away with a minimum of fuss and muss? Now you’re talking.

  No how was your day, dear? No hey, Roxie, we’ll get through this hard time. The kind of hard time he’d bring would be me bent over the easy chair, one of his hands full of my hair and the other hand full of my . . . Too bad he wasn’t here tonight—I could use something to take the edge off. My brain was churning, my career was potentially imploding, and there was a guilt trip barreling west from Bailey Falls, New York.

  I needed peace. I needed quiet. My eyes scanned my apartment—which I couldn’t afford unless I got every single one of my clients back—and settled on the Patrón. Besides peace and quiet, I needed a lime. . . .

  Chapter 2

  I woke up the next—hmm, let’s say afternoon, so I’m not a liar—with my face covered in lime pulp and stuck to my leatherette easy chair. I checked the clock. Nice—I’d managed almost four hours of tequila-assisted sleep. A good night, when I usually only averaged about three hours a night. Suffering from intermittent insomnia since grade school, I’d adapted to less sleep than your average chicken.

  I stumbled to the kitchen, reached blindly for the coffee, refusing to think about being fired. For B U T T- —oh, forget it. Yawning as the coffee percolated, I scrambled eggs with some tomatoes, garlic, spinach, and a touch of crème fraîche. I grated a little pecorino over the finished product, snatched a piece of perfectly toasted challah bread from the toaster, then grabbed my coffee and went back to the leatherette.

  As I munched, a tabloid magazine on the table caught my eye. My guilty pleasure. I propped them up on a recipe stand while I was cooking sometimes. As I deboned a roasting chicken, I’d catch up on who was boning who in Tinseltown. But this morning, I realized I knew the person on the cover. She was a client. And I’d like to think maybe a friend?

  I first heard of Grace Sheridan when the entire world was focusing on her other half, Jack Hamilton. An incredibly good-looking young British actor, he’d been the darling of the media world for a few years now, and just as his star was beginning to really rise, the press was constantly speculating on who the hot new movie star might be dating. As the world discovered that this unidentified redhead was actually Grace Sheridan, an actress as well, the media flurry became a storm, especially when she announced to the world they were a couple by taking him by the hand and publicly claiming him as hers on a red carpet. I knew all of this from what I’d read online. But when she called me one day to ask me to cook for her while getting ready for a new season on her hit TV series, I began to know the woman behind the magazine covers.

  She was funny. She was sweet. And she loved food. And—I was cooking for her later today. Crap! I’d completely forgotten about my actual existing client, one who was expecting me for dinner tonight. I took five minutes to scrub my face, pits, and bits, threw on some clean clothes, grabbed my knives, and raced to the market.

  I’d cooked for Grace on and off for the past year. She was a big foodie and loved to cook, so she only used me when her schedule got too demanding. Two actors in one house, both working crazy hours when they weren’t on location—having a private chef was a perk to some people and a lifesaver for others.

  Grace had been very outspoken in the press about her up-and-down weight, and she took her figure very seriously. Jack? Took it even more seriously . . .

  The
first time I met Jack Hamilton he’d been stealing as many kisses from his fiancée as he was carrots from the salad bowl I’d been working on. I was a bit giddy, being so close to such a big movie star, but giddy and a paring knife don’t work so well together, so I sucked it down and cooked an amazing meal. So amazing that I became their occasional private chef.

  I power shopped through the market, grabbing things I knew she’d like. Arugula. Frisée. Shallots. Lemons. Hanger steak. Jerusalem artichokes. Prosciutto. Bosc pears. A lovely slice of English cheddar. Because, bless my buttons, Jack and Grace liked dessert. In a town that frowned on dessert. So into the cart also went flour, sugar, eggs, and gorgeous, wonderful butter.

  An hour later found me in the sunny kitchen of two of Hollywood’s brightest stars, spooning pound cake batter into two loaf pans and shooshing Grace over to her side of the island.

  “It doesn’t make sense for you to pay me money to cook if you’re doing half the work.”

  “I’m like your sous chef,” Grace protested as I pulled out a kitchen stool and pointed at it.

  “Sit down, relax, stay on your side of the kitchen, and I’ll let you lick this.” I held up a beater.

  “It’s a good thing Jack’s not home yet; he’d never let a line like that go by,” she said with a chuckle. “But I do want to lick that, so I’ll stay over here.”

  I smiled as I thought about how I held sway over one of television’s biggest stars with just a battery beater. Why couldn’t all my clients have been like her? It was silent for a few minutes while she read through a script and I worked on my lemon cakes. But she couldn’t keep quiet for too long . . .

  “So they all just canceled on you? Just like that?” she asked, looking up from her papers.

  I kept my eye on my loaf pans. “I shouldn’t have told you. That was incredibly unprofessional.”

  “It was also incredibly unprofessional when Jack offered you a threesome for another serving of spotted dick. Unprofessional is how we roll.”

  I snorted in spite of myself. I’d made a traditional English pudding one night, and Jack the Brit was beside himself. So beside himself that he really had offered his body in return for future proper English sweets.

  I really shouldn’t have unloaded everything on Grace, as nice and as welcoming as she was. But somewhere between the grocery unpacking and the artichoke pruning, she’d guessed that something was bothering me. And before I knew it, the entire story had poured out.

  “So your mom wants to go on The Amazing Race, huh?”

  “Ugh, yes. Ridiculous idea.”

  “I don’t know, I’ve seen the show a few times. Always looks fun.”

  “Oh, it’s not that it doesn’t look fun. It’s just . . . hmm . . . how to explain my mother.” I paused, rapping the loaf pans against the counter to coax any air bubbles out before placing them in the oven. “She’s an eighties hippie. She got caught up in that whole second-wave thing.”

  She nodded. “I remember that. Buy your peace sign earrings at Contempo Casuals.”

  “Exactly.” I handed over the promised beaters and she began to lick. “But it stuck with her. She’ll tell you she’s a free spirit. I have another word for it.”

  “Flakey?” she asked.

  “Yep. Irresponsible. She means well, but when you’re all about the moon being in the seventh house, it’s hard to remember things like paying the electric company to keep the lights on in the actual house. Luckily, she had me. Not to mention the countless ‘uncles’ who were constantly around.”

  “Ah,” she said, switching to the other beater.

  “They were all nice guys; she just hated being alone. So she made sure she never was. She fell in love with any man who bothered to look twice at her.” My mother was convinced that every single man she met was The One. Or at least The Next One. And I’d seen the aftermath countless times when the guys eventually bailed, the carnage that was left behind. The crying, the yelling, the sugar bingeing, the Van Morrison playing endlessly on the record player. And then the inevitable mooning over the next guy who wandered into her hippie love snare.

  “So she’s a romantic?” Grace asked.

  “You say romantic, I say codependent.” I rinsed the pears in the sink. “You say romantic, I say afraid to be alone. You say romantic, I say why in the world would someone put themselves through the hassle and the heartache?”

  This is exactly why I liked my relationships simple, full of sex and free of love. My trouble sleeping was a great reason to ensure men never spent the night, since it was hard enough for me to fall asleep when I was alone. Compound insomnia with another snoring human in the bed, and I’d literally never sleep. Plus, I saw no reason to stare at a man awkwardly all night after the exercise portion of the evening had concluded, so I sent them on their way. They didn’t seem to mind, and I avoided all the bullshit.

  Grace looked thoughtful for a moment, and I could see her mind working. “Okay, so you don’t approach things the same way . . .”

  I shook my head. “Besides my mother’s search for love everlasting, the only constant in our lives was the diner. I need a better handle on my life than that.”

  “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. Unl
ike 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?”

  “Sliced hanger steak marinated in a little coriander and soy sauce, sliced on a bed of baby arugula and frisée, with roasted Jerusalem artichokes tossed lightly with lemon juice and pecorino cheese,” I said, taking their plates to the table. “Jack, you’re also getting prosciutto-wrapped bosc pears and a big slice of your favorite English cheddar. Grace, you just get pears.”

  “How come she doesn’t get fancy pears too?” he asked, sitting in his chair and trying to pull Grace onto his lap.

  “I don’t get fancy pears because I have a sex scene to shoot in two weeks,” she said lightly, planting a kiss on his cheek and barely escaping his grabby hands.

  “And since I’m skipping the fancy pears, I get to have cake later on,” she said, digging into her salad. “And I might have licked the beaters.”

  “Wish I’d been here to see that,” Jack said under his breath.

  I shook my head and quietly finished cleaning up the kitchen as they ate their dinner. Which they loved.

  After I poured lemon honey glaze over the still-warm pound cakes and prepared to go, Jack and Grace began imploring me to stay.

  “You should have some cake with us,” Jack said, moving easily around the kitchen.

  Jack Hamilton with an armful of Tupperware: I could sell that picture to a magazine and never have to work again.

  “Can’t, but thanks for the offer. I’ve gotta get home and figure out some stuff,” I said, sliding my last knife into its sheath just as my phone rang. Unreal timing, my mother. I’d deal with her later.