Chapter 24 Mischa #2
“So you like the guys, nino?” the sous-chef with a neck tattoo, Carlos, asks in a thick Latin accent when he brings the main. “Jack owes me twenty bucks.”
“I think a lot of people made money tonight,” Austen nods.
“The big money is on your brother.”
Austen scoffs. “I’m in for a grand then. He’s a womanizer.”
A black girl on the line near us bursts into laughter, really loud and really hard, an infectious sound sets off the others around her.
“Child,” she says, “I’ll take that bet.”
Carlos shakes his head, amused. “Abuela’s out of hospital. She wants a visit soon.”
“Definitely,” Austen says.
“Good to see you doing good, man,” he says, and hugs Austen and Austen hugs him back.
Then he turns to me. “I owe nino my life,” he says, and taps my cheek.
“We’ve known each other since we were kids, man.
He’s taken care of me and my brothers, cousins, my mom.
If you hurt him, nobody’s ever gonna find like even your finger or nothing. ”
He gets up and rushes back to his station. By the time dessert rolls out Philippe is fixing a screw-up on the line, and we watch the action while eating a chocolate parfait. It is so good that if I could have sex with it, I absolutely would.
“I never want to eat again,” I say, “unless I can eat this.”
“I guess I’ll have to be your personal chef,” Austen says.
I stop, and narrow my eyes at him. “That was very smooth. How many people have you brought here? How many dinners have you whipped up? How many people have you offered your cooking services to?”
“I’ve actually never...”
“Oh yeah, you have never taken anyone else here?”
“I’ve never been on a date before.”
“What?”
Austen shrugs. “How am I doing?”
“You’re definitely nailing it. How long have you been working here?”
“My parents spent the summer at this hotel for the first time when we were eleven.”
“You worked here when you were eleven?”
“And twelve,” he nods. “It’s a messy thing. I don’t know if you’d believe it.”
“Try me.”
“Okay,” he sighs. “Mom fired our beloved French nanny that summer—literally the only person on Earth who could tell us apart. We were supposed to go back to school in autumn, but my parents were feuding, and stormed out on each other. In the morning everyone had left the hotel. Mom must have taken our little sister back to start school. My um... father, who I mostly just call James, had left separately. He forgot to drop us off at our new boarding school, so we just sort of... stayed here.”
“What in the Home Alone?”
“To be fair, we called both of them. Their assistants said they’d call back.”
“They never did?”
Austen shakes his head, and seems resigned to the fact.
“Life was better without them anyway. We’d always been invisible. At first we’d stay in bed with room service and watch cable television. We had already been alone most of the time since we arrived, so the staff were used to us, and knew we were some guest’s kids.”
“You never got in trouble?”
“Never,” Austen’s eyes are wide. “We’d get bored and visit the chef, Philippe.
We would hide in the pantry and watch him until he got us working in the kitchen.
It felt good. Like the PBJ summer in Appalachia, you know?
At first we washed a lot of dishes, chopped onions, but soon we were junior chefs working on the line.
He’d train us what to do, and we did it over and over a hundred times.
I was on pastries and William was the roast chef.
When we got bored we’d swap and everyone would pretend they didn’t notice, and help fix mistakes while Philippe wasn’t looking. ”
“Did he know you were alone?”
“Not at first. He’d pay us a little money each night, and we’d go around the city and visit the parks or the library or museums during the day.
We became real city rats. Isobelle even visited us during her school holidays.
Then one day we got sick. Philippe went to our rooms to fetch our parents but we told him they left in September and he was furious, but it was midnight.
Philippe’s wife Marcella showed up and took us to their house in Brooklyn.
She was from Seychelles, couldn’t have kids, and here were two adorable French-speaking twins thrust upon her.
She kept asking us who we were and we told her ‘we’re the Twins’ and she loved Peter Pan so we won her over with the Lost Boys thing. We begged her to let us stay.”
“Did she?”
“Yeah, she basically stitched it up with Meemaw to share us. Things were uncomfortable at first. I don’t think Meemaw had never met a black person before, or been to a city, and she was struggling to understand almost everything.
She was a fast learner though, and saw the good in Marcella immediately, and vice-versa.
So that was our life until we were discovered by our other Grandma. ”
“She tracked you down?”
“No. She just bumped into us. We were in the restaurant before work one day, and there was a table of old ladies laughing away. One particular lady kept looking over at us eating our club sandwiches. She looked more and more alarmed and finally came over and said, ‘Boys?’ It was our dad’s mother.
She asked what we were doing there. We said, ‘We live here.’ She asked where our parents were, and we said they were gone.
Grandpa’s company had just been paying the bill.
My grandfather arrived and Grandma was going mental.
She kept screaming ‘FOURTEEN MONTHS VINCENT! FOURTEEN MONTHS!’ She paced around the penthouse.
Grandma did not believe Meemaw when she said that she was our meemaw and had physical custody because she was so young.
We just visited her for her fifty-third birthday last summer, so I guess Meemaw would have been like, maybe forty-four then, so we think she must have had Mom when she was like, thirteen or twelve maybe?
Grandma kept screaming ‘Who is she?’ and Meemaw explained that we were not leaving her care.
We’d stay in America, and there was nothing they could do.
Then Grandma said that she was going to kill our mother and father. ”
“Understandable really.”
“Grandpa was more chill. He asked where we had been for Christmas, and we told him we took our paychecks and bought each other presents from Macy’s, and went ice-skating.
He asked where we had paychecks from, and we said we had jobs.
He laughed and said he was so proud of us.
Grandma started screaming that she was going to call the police on whoever used her grandchildren as slave labor. We stopped saying anything after that.”
“It sounds like a dream.”
“It all feels unreal now. It became some wonderful timeless pocket of space we were hiding in. Turned out my Mom had taken off and everyone thought we were with her but she’d vanished.”
“Where was she?”
“They don’t know. Meemaw agreed to share custody if she got our school breaks and holidays, and lots of hush money.
Millions. Anything James would have inherited, Meemaw has it now.
And James went full psycho about losing that fortune, threatening everyone, trying to get us back, Then Meemaw shot a robber trying to break in and everyone got all paranoid and teamed up to keep us out of sight. ”
“Is James still after you?”
“Probably not, I don’t think he ever really was. All bark, no bite, plus a coincidence involving a dead burglar. We never even saw James again, or Mom,” he shrugs.
My gut-instinct tingles, so I know he has somehow “seen” his parents again, but I’m guessing only in the society pages of magazines and tabloids.
“So where’d you go?”
“Grandma sent us to a boarding school. They’re pretty regimented places.
From the moment we got up till the moment we went to bed there was somewhere we were meant to be, from horse riding at five in the morning till we brushed our teeth at nine.
Every minute was written down. Obviously we rebelled to start off with.
Hid in the traveller camp down the road.
We promised Grandma we’d behave if we could see Phillipe and Marcella, and we got chef training. And we have behaved ever since.”
“But you stole the plane? You were disowned.”
He shoots a look at me. “I try not to think about it.”
“Sorry,” I say.
“Actually, you’re right. Grandad wanted us away from everything, and safe, so Philippe and Marcella fostered us and Isobelle fulltime after we were emancipated. We lived with them until last year.”
“Why was Isobelle there?”
“To be with us. She’s our best friend. The point is, this kitchen represents the happiest time of my life, this is my family, and those were all my favorite dishes.”
“The happiest time of my life was in the hospital in Sydney, when you were massaging my head, and spin the bottle.”
“You poor sad bastard,” he frowns. “Please tell me that’s not true?”
“It really is.”
“Pathetic.”
“I know.”
“We have to fix that,” he says.
We say goodnight to the kitchen and Philippe hugs and kisses Austen. Then he embraces me. He tells me to take good care of his boy, that Austen is a delicate creature. I tell him I will, and thank him for an amazing night.
Austen takes me up to the penthouse. It’s huge. It’s like a house up there. I have to look in every room. My family has money, but me and my brothers have our boots on the ground. We never have perks like this.
He’s sitting on the couch watching me take it in. I’ve noticed it a lot tonight. Him watching me. In the car, the chopper, eating, and now. I take control of the sound system and music comes on. Sexy music. I’ve already decided.
I kick my shoes off. “I’m gonna give you a lapdance.”
He accepts. I loosen my tie and take my shirt off. I kneel in front of him and push his legs apart. I move up between them and take his hand, and run it down my middle, to my navel. He inhales sharply. I run my hands down his body. I rip his shirt open and the buttons go flying and he likes it.