21
Aerate: Passing ingredients through a sifter, changing the composition of the ingredient (i.e., flour).
2015
“Careful, it’s hot.”
Regina set a bowl of soup on Gladys’s TV tray.
The Burger Queen only had three bowls in her cupboard, but they were vintage, leftover, Regina imagined, from the elderly woman’s very first set of dishes.
“This is very nice.
Thank you.”
It was one of her bad days, Regina could tell.
Gladys had no idea who Regina was, only that she was a nice lady who’d brought her soup.
And still, she had to ask again, “And you’re sure you haven’t seen Troy around?”
“I had to dismiss him.”
Of course.
“Unreliable.”
She sipped her soup, daintily.
“I do believe he might have a drinking problem.
My daddy had a drinking problem.
It’s why we lost all our money.”
More insight? More delusion? It hardly mattered.
The old woman’s situation was becoming untenable.
The notice was still up on Troy’s apartment door.
Regina circled the block every time she delivered food to Gladys, as if that might turn over whatever stone he hid beneath. She had to face the fact that Troy was gone, like happened to so many in Rock Landing. In her life.
“He was a nice man, though,”
Gladys said.
“Troy?”
“Who? My daddy’s name wasn’t Troy.
It was Roger.”
“Sorry.
I’m sure he was lovely.”
“It pained me to let him go.”
She lowered her voice.
“I do believe he might have a drinking problem.”
Miming a tipple, Gladys let go a heavy sigh.
Regina switched on the tableside lamp.
It was getting late.
With Gale on his date, she’d had to keep Lucy to cover the kitchen while she delivered Gladys’s dinner.
Lucy had offered to do it for her, but Regina couldn’t let her see how Gladys lived. She’d feel obligated to report it to someone, somewhere, just like Regina did on most days. Having been neglected and abused within the welfare system all her young life, she couldn’t let it happen to the old woman. Gladys would be dead in a month.
“I’ll leave you to your dinner.”
Gladys waved imperiously, still gently slurping.
The television on, her belly full, hopefully, she’d fall asleep.
Out in the Durango, Regina leaned her head on the steering wheel.
She breathed in deeply, let it out slowly.
Marco would be at the kitchen by eight thirty.
The cioppino would be made with the last of her tomatoes, and seafood so fresh it had been swimming that morning. Simple. Elegant. He couldn’t accuse her of showing off, even if she most certainly would be.
Pulling around the back of the kitchen, Regina remembered the basil she needed from the garden mostly gone to seed.
Troy usually helped her put the beds up for the winter.
She’d get Gale to help.
Maybe that friend of his, Keith or Kyle. Pinching off handfuls that hadn’t gone to seed, Regina stuffed them in her jacket pockets and headed for the back entrance.
Voices.
She paused, hand on the doorknob.
A woman. Lucy.
And a man.
She checked the time on her phone.
Not even a quarter after eight.
Dammit.
She pushed open the door. “You’re early.”
Marco held up a cake box.
“I brought cookies from Libby’s.”
“That doesn’t make you any less early.”
Mental.
Deep.
Breath.
“I assume you two know each other.”
“Only through Gale,”
Lucy answered for them both.
“We’ve been to the restaurant a few times.
Can I see you a sec, Regina?”
Lucy Carmichael didn’t wait for an answer; she grasped Regina by the arm and hauled her to the pantry, closing the door behind them.
“Why didn’t you tell me you had a date?”
“It’s not a date.
And it’s none of your damn business.”
“Don’t get pissy with me.
He walked into the dining room while I was wiping down the tables.
He said you were expecting him.
What was I supposed to do? Kick him out? That’s my son’s boss. A chef, Regina. Is that wise? He might recognize you.”
Fierce mama-bird, Lucy Carmichael managed to pull a grin out of Regina’s ire.
“I’ve known Marco for a very long time,”
she said.
“He knows who I am.
Was.
But thanks.”
“Oh. Whew!”
Lucy dragged a dramatic hand across her brow.
“I’ll assume he knows you don’t want Gale to know who you are.”
“Lucy, go home.”
Regina guided her to the pantry door.
“And thanks for covering for me.”
“Fine.
Be that way.”
Lucy pulled her into a quick but tight hug.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.
You can tell me about your date.”
Regina stiffened.
“Not a date.”
But Lucy was already out the door, telling Marco it was good to see him, and to have a good night.
Regina gathered her thoughts, the emotions she usually kept as tight and brief as Lucy’s hug.
She joined Marco in the kitchen, kissed both his cheeks, Italian style, before she realized she was doing so.
Floodgates breached were floodgates opened. She took the box of cookies.
“You remembered my kryptonite.”
“I did.
Haven’t you been there, in all this time?”
“I haven’t stepped foot on Wooster Street since the night I got my bible from you.”
She gestured him upstairs before the words he’d taken a breath to utter could get out of his mouth.
“This way.
I’m making cioppino.”
“Any chance you’ll share the recipe?”
Marco slurped up the broth in that same old way Regina remembered.
This same old guy with even less affectation than he had when they were young and ambitious.
He’d never been overly so, just ambitious enough, successful enough.
“I could share the recipe, but Queenie B magic isn’t shareable.”
Marco’s spoon froze partway to his mouth.
“Did you just refer to yourself as Queenie B?”
She had.
Dammit, she had.
It was a couple of hours reminiscing, of skating shallow over the intervening years.
That was all. Resting her chin on the heel of her hand, Regina ignored Osvaldo’s voice scolding her about elbows on the table. He’d been infiltrating her thoughts a lot lately. Sometimes in a good way; most often not. “You were right, Marco. It’s all starting to crumble.”
“Something happen?”
“Besides you showing up here?”
She removed her elbows from the table.
“Lucy knows.”
“She recognized you?”
“She said I looked familiar when we met, but then she . . .”
Regina blew a breath through her lips.
“She started watching cooking shows when Gale signed up for Cut!”
Marco reached across the table and took her hand.
Regina let him keep it.
“I could move again.
Start someplace else.”
“But you don’t want to.”
“I don’t know.”
She groaned.
“You can’t spend your life running from who you are.”
“Were.”
“Are.”
He squeezed her hand.
“Maybe you’re not on billboards anymore, but you underestimate your influence still out there in the world.”
There was no underestimating it.
The money her name still pulled in said it all.
Notoriety lived on; invisible as she was, Regina—correction, Queenie B—was a mystery that had yet to be solved.
More than five years in one place had been an anomaly; in the earliest days, she’d rarely made it through a few months before a glance too long, a picture snapped moved her on.
“You going to tell Gale?”
She snatched her hand away. “No way.”
An eyebrow arched.
Marco wagged his spoon at her.
“What if Lucy slips?”
“She won’t.”
“And you know her well enough to be sure about that?”
“What are you getting at? Huh?”
She threw up her hands; threw up her hands! Like she used to, back when she was just Regina and Marco pissed her off.
She reined it in.
“Are you trying to freak me out? Or just being an asshole.”
“Neither.”
Marco shrugged, tilting his bowl to scoop out the remaining broth.
“Oh, the tangled webs we weave .
.
. just sayin’.”
“I’ve never lied.”
“You’re not being truthful, either.”
“I’m entitled to my anonymity.”
“True.”
Marco gave up trying to scoop and slurped broth straight from the bowl.
“Amazing.”
He smacked his lips.
“He’s going to find out, Reg.
A week, a month.
Tomorrow.”
“I’ll deal with it then.”
“He’s going to feel stupid because he should have recognized you because, well, you’re you, and didn’t, and then he’ll be embarrassed.
You know how he is.”
Marco’s calm unsettled her.
He’d been as big a hothead as she.
No more.
Maybe she wasn’t, either. Rising from the table, she took dishes with her, leaned heavily against the edge of the sink. “He called me his mentor, Marco. That means something to me. More than . . .”
Anything.
But the word wouldn’t come.
“And you think that’ll change if he knows?”
“Everything changes once Queenie B hits the scene,”
she said.
“You know that.”
“You’re not her.”
“You just said I was!”
She curled her hands into fists to keep them at her sides.
“Which is it, Marco?”
He smiled sadly from his chair, shoulders going up, and falling down.
“You make choices, Regina.
Make the right ones, and you’ll be fine.”
He was right.
And wrong.
It was so much more than he could grasp, because Marco hadn’t been there.
He knew her before the drugs took over, when she was just a bit wild and slightly nutty, prone to dramatics and night terrors that started in fire and ended in fists. He’d held her through some of those nights when they were both too young and too inexperienced to know the turns it could take. Would take.
Regina washed the dishes by hand, as much to avoid the conversation as to spare her hand-thrown, hand-painted pottery plates the dishwasher.
She could still conjure the street fair in that tiny Peruvian village, the bent-over woman who looked a hundred and ten but turned out to be only sixty-seven.
The scents of food over flame and spices rich and pungent, mountain air she’d experienced nowhere else in the world.
Osvaldo had haggled the artist down from her already ridiculously low price—the equivalent of twenty bucks—for four dinner and four dessert plates, all beautifully, disparately, and intricately painted. Regina paid her two hundred after he turned away, victorious. The woman had cried and given her four bowls that didn’t match but were equally as beautiful. It cost almost twice that to have it all properly packaged and shipped back to New York, but worth every dime, as far as Regina was concerned. She didn’t even ask Oz if he wanted them when they divorced. He wouldn’t have remembered them, let alone wanted them. And she wouldn’t have given them, anyway.
“Want me to dry?”
Marco stood at her elbow.
She hadn’t even noticed.
“No, thanks.
I’ll let them air-dry.”
“They’re really pretty.”
“They are.”
Regina smiled over her shoulder; it shined all over Marco’s face.
She averted her gaze from the infatuation she should have known would resurface.
The infatuation she did know would resurface but pretended she didn’t, even to herself.
She put the cookies on a plate, made them espresso, not even asking if he wanted cappuccino instead.
Italians knew cappuccino was for breakfast, espresso for after dinner.
So did chefs, even if their restaurants offered both after dinner.
“You want to watch a movie or something?”
“Sure.
Sexy comedy?”
Light.
Silly.
Unrealistic.
Exactly the kind of movies they’d watched, way back, because anything else was too exhausting. Marco remembered. Of course he did.
On the couch, the plate of cookies between them, they ate them and drank espresso while The Proposal flickered on her massive flat-screen.
She leaned her head onto his shoulder.
Marco put his arm around her, kissed the top of her head.
“Why’d you leave me behind, Reg?”
And there it was.
The real reason he’d lifted the rock she’d been hiding beneath.
Regina should have known this too.
Had, all along. “I asked you to come to New York. You didn’t want to.”
“Because I’d just bought my restaurant.
I thought you’d be coming back when you finished taping.”
Regina had known, even as she kissed him goodbye, she wouldn’t be.
Marco was the house and home guy.
The nice restaurant in a nice neighborhood guy.
She had already been half out the door when the PBS producers called about the cheesy cooking show she put out on the local community access station. Regina broke his heart knowingly, if not maliciously. Not the way she’d broken Osvaldo, whom she loved so much. “Are you looking for an apology?”
“An apology? Nah.”
He took another cookie.
“You weren’t meant for the life I was offering you.
I knew you, way back when, remember?”
He pointed at her with the bit end of his cookie.
“Straight out of foster care.
You didn’t talk about it much, but some things were obvious.”
“Such as?”
“Such as”—he swallowed the last of his espresso—“you were busting to get out of New Haven.
Out of Connecticut.
I pretended it wasn’t true.
I wanted it not to be true. But, yeah. You were meant for bigger things, Reg. Bigger than me. Bigger than a nice, normal life spent cooking in a hometown you hated as much as you thought it hated you. I guess I just didn’t realize how big big was going to be.”
Regina tilted her head back.
“I didn’t either.”
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
Words spoken and unspoken.
Unnecessary between them, in this moment. He was right then; Marco was still right. Regina wriggled into a more comfortable position. “Watch the movie. And don’t eat that last anginetti. It’s mine.”
She felt his laughter in the way his chest lifted and shifted.
Regina allowed herself another Queenie B smile; Marco couldn’t see it, the way they were sitting.
She wouldn’t have to ignore the effect it had on him.