29
Reduce: The process of simmering or boiling a liquid, usually stock or sauce, to intensify the flavor and thicken the consistency.
2016
“You sure about this?”
Regina struggled with the huge pot of boiled potatoes.
“Will you stop asking me that? You’re the one who was pushing for it months ago.”
“I just want to make sure .
.
.
here, let me help you with that.”
“I can do it.”
Marco knew better than to take the pot from her, instead adding his muscle to hers.
Together, they dumped water and potatoes into the industrial-size colander.
“It’s come out of hiding, or run again.
I can’t run.
I won’t.
Before someone outs me, I have to out myself.”
Regina wiped her hands on her apron.
“You said it yourself”—and a little internet searching proved him right—“I still have influence in the culinary world.
I can use that, get in touch with some of the old greats.
Emeril. Lydia. Ina. Eric. Tony would understand better than anyone. He always had a thing for me.”
“I know of those people,”
he reminded her.
“And you don’t know them anymore.”
Regina shook the colander of potatoes, steam rising up in her face.
“Someone has to remember me fondly, right?”
“A lot of people do,”
Marco said.
“But can you really know who’s safe? Who’s not going to turn it into a circus? You think it’s going to be, ‘Hey, how the hell are you? Where’ve you been the last decade or so?’ You burned a lot of bridges.”
“Nothing’s going to be safe.”
She checked the time.
Four thirty.
Lucy should have been back from the box store by now.
She’d been counting on her to go pick up Gladys. It had taken the old woman a while, but she tolerated Lucy when Regina couldn’t be there. At least she’d stopped waiting for Troy. “There has to be someone. Think, Marco.”
“How about an interview?”
Marco asked.
“There are lots of talk shows that would kill to have you on.”
“That would absolutely turn into a circus.”
She scooped potatoes into the massive ricer she had ordered from an online kitchen supply warehouse, squeezed with all her might.
“I need more control.”
“No, really? I’d never have guessed.
For fuck’s sake, Regina, let me.”
Marco took the ricer from her.
“Glare all you want.
My hands are bigger.”
The bastard.
But she laughed.
He riced.
She mixed.
Butter, salt, a little cream.
A handful of parsley. There would be no infusion of truffle or garlic, no horseradish kick, but they’d be the smoothest, silkiest potatoes to pass the lips of anyone in the dining room tonight. Layering the mashed potatoes into hotel pans, sliding them to Marco to set into the oven so they’d be golden brown and slightly crispy on top, Regina moved on to the veg. If Lucy didn’t get there soon, she’d have to go get Gladys herself.
“This is too high.
You’ll dry them out.”
Marco adjusted the temp on the oven.
She smacked his hands away.
“You’re the sous in this kitchen.
Don’t touch anything I don’t tell you to.”
He backed off, hands raised.
Regina put the temperature back up to where she wanted it.
Marco leaned on the edge of the prep table, hairy arms crossed, smiling.
“What?”
Regina chopped without pause.
“I think I got it.”
“Don’t just stand there grinning, out with it?”
“You do a magazine interview,”
he said.
“Like Oz did, after you vanished.
It’s not in your face, like a television spot.”
Regina’s scalp prickled.
“That’s not a bad idea.”
“I think it’s genius.”
“Let’s not get carried away.”
Her brain was already sifting through possibilities.
Any magazine would jump at the chance to stage her comeback.
But which one? Gastronomica? Food and Wine? Queenie B knew every editor, most of the journalists, and many of the interns on every food magazine staff—a decade ago.
Slept with a lot of them too. Regina did not. But if she could pull it off, it would be . . .
“Kind of like a soft open.”
Marco nodded.
“Exactly.”
“I like this idea. A lot.”
“You’re welcome.”
He winked.
She would make it an offer no one in their right minds would refuse—an exclusive she’d, of course, get final approval of, that would ensure no one leaked the news and risked someone else getting a jump on the story of a lifetime.
She could dictate when Queenie rose from the ashes.
Her way.
In her time. And once it was done . . .
Regina untied her apron and threw it at him, that scalp-prickling sensation coursing through her whole body.
“Baste the chicken in about ten minutes,”
she said.
“I have to go get Gladys.
If Lucy doesn’t get here by five, turn the ovens down to one seventy.
Don’t touch them a minute before that. Understood?”
“I didn’t leave Gale in charge at my place to come take orders from you, woman!”
he called after her, but Regina was already flying out the door.
A magazine exclusive.
It could work.
It wasn’t hubris to know all she had to do was make the call to get what she wanted; it was straight-up fact.
She’d stop at the newsagent on the corner of Gladys’s block, grab whatever foodie magazines she could find. Publishing was even more changeable than the culinary world, but maybe she’d get lucky and recognize a name or two. Someone she could trust; or at least trust their ambition enough to risk contact.
Pulling up in front of Gladys’s building, hand on the plastic bag of glossy magazines to keep them from sliding off the seat, Regina took in its dilapidated glory.
The building had been beautiful, once.
Prewar elegant.
Current-day graffiti everywhere. Garbage in huge piles, bagged, and picked apart by crows. It was as if the city of New Haven had forgotten it existed at all.
She hated that Gladys lived there.
Hated that she lived alone, vulnerable to the vagaries of the neighborhood, the city, and her failing mind.
The alternative was worse—a state-run nursing home, understaffed and overcrowded because the system had never been devised for so many to get so old.
Heartbreaking, backbreaking, soul-breaking work few had the stomach for.
Regina let herself in the main entrance—Troy had given her a key long ago—navigated the shopping carts and bicycles cluttering the narrow path to Gladys’s apartment.
Across the way, where Troy once lived, the notice to quit was gone from the door; the loud and messy sounds of a family came muffled from the other side.
She took a breath in, and let it whisper out.
Not now.
Too much.
Regina had to accept that she might never know what happened to him.
She knocked on Gladys’s door, and waited.
Regina had a key to this lock, too, but had sworn she’d use it only in an emergency.
Gladys’s mind might be a sieve that only caught thought or memory on occasion, but she deserved all the respect and dignity Regina could give her.
Just as she was about to knock again, the door creaked open.
“Oh.
It’s you.”
“It’s me.”
Regina smiled.
Gladys seemed momentarily taken aback.
“Let me get my purse.”
“Take your time.”
But don’t.
Regina had to get back to open the soup kitchen.
Hopefully, Lucy would be there even if Marco would be gone.
He’d left Gale in charge of Marco’s for prep; he wouldn’t for service. And Marco called her a control freak. He was, at least, starting to teach Gale the less glamorous side of the restaurant business, something Regina herself had never been good at. She’d had Osvaldo for that. And all the experts she could afford to hire.
Gladys stepped into the hall, closed her door, and locked it, jiggling it for good measure.
She lifted her chin in that mercurial way, going first down the hall, navigating the carts and bikes with tottering yet elegant steps.
Resisting the urge to put out a steadying hand, Regina was nonetheless ready should she falter.
She reached around the old woman to open the front door for her. A gust from outside whisked the paper crown away.
“I got it.”
For all her tottering slowness, the old woman had made it down the steps in the time it took Regina to chase down her paper crown.
Placing it back on the Burger Queen’s stiff and thinning hair, she resisted the urge to curtsy.
“Thank you, dear.”
“You’re welcome.”
Gladys needed help getting into the Durango.
Regina moved her magazines to the back seat, buckled the old woman in rather than argue with her to do it herself.
At least she didn’t complain.
“What’s for dinner tonight?”
“Chicken, mashed potatoes, and peas.”
“Canned or frozen?”
“Frozen.”
“Good.”
She sniffed.
“I never could abide canned peas.
Only Mother’s.
Well, she didn’t do the actual canning. Susie did. But Mother did take credit for it when she gave the jars out to neighbors.”
Gladys talked the whole way back to Regina’s Kitchen, barely pausing for breath.
Mother and Susie.
Her dog, Lassie, so named long before the television program, and wasn’t that utterly too-too? She talked about the peas Susie shucked with her long thumbs, and how mesmerized little she had been by it.
How she pretended they were tiny babies cocooned in the pods and cried when Mother made her eat every last one on her plate. She talked and talked, even once inside the kitchen where Lucy was waiting, apron at the ready. She escorted Her Majesty to the dining room, to her table for one, without the old woman missing a word, as if she had to set the memories free before they got locked inside her brain again.
“Is she still talking?”
Regina asked as Lucy came back through the swinging door.
“I told her to hold her thought, and I’d be right back with her tea.”
“She’ll forget by the time you get back.”
“I know.”
Lucy poured hot water into a mug from the urn always warming on the counter, set a tea bag into it.
“I put the ovens down to one seventy and basted the chicken.
What else do you need me to do?”
“Marco was supposed to baste the chicken.”
Lucy dunked her tea bag.
“He had to rush off as soon as I got back.
Gale was having some issue with the grill.”
It was always something, in a kitchen.
“Sit with her,”
Regina said.
“We’re good until people start coming, then I’ll need your help serving.”
“You got it.”
Lucy poured a second mug, dunked another bag.
Holding both mugs aloft, she said, “Wish me luck!,”
and pushed backward through the swinging door.
Regina stood alone in her kitchen, hands on her hips, surveying her queendom.
Pride swelling, she didn’t deny the prickling behind her eyes.
Before long, it wouldn’t be hers anymore.
Like Cucuzza. Like all the other jewels in her former crown, long gone. Lost. Given away. They didn’t matter anymore, but this kitchen always would. On everything she hoped to be, Regina swore it.
“It’s going to be different, this time.”
Spotting her bag of magazines there on the counter where she’d dropped them, Regina whisked them into the stairwell where Lucy wouldn’t see them.
She’d never guess.
Not in a million years.
She wasn’t even sure the woman knew she’d unintentionally outed her to Gale. Probably not. Lucy would have apologized, clearing the air before it could get foggy. Regina would tell her what was going on, once she knew, herself.
Gastronomica.
Food Regina hadn’t so much as flipped open any of their covers in years.
Lingering long over Food she devoured the pictures, gorged on the recipes and the spotlights on old greats—her heart did little flips; did she get as old as they did?—as well as those up-and-coming chefs she couldn’t know, but who most certainly knew her.
Breathless.
Unsatiated.
Insatiable. Midnight neared before she knuckled down to searching through editors and journalists in the credits and bylines.
It was after midnight when she, gritty-eyed and a little deflated, gave in to bed.
Of course, it wasn’t going to be that easy.
She knew no one.
Not a single editor or journalist from back in her day. Oh, it was entirely possible she did, in fact, know some of them but simply didn’t remember. Their names. Faces. What she’d done to them. Probably just as well. Uncurling from the club chair by the gas fireplace, she grabbed the last two magazines from the pile. One appeared to be more of the supermarket endcap category. The other seemed a little too Ladies’ Home Journal or Good Housekeeping for her purposes. Tomorrow, she’d go to another newsagent, or the big bookstore over by Yale. They’d have larger selections than a kiosk on a street corner in Rock Landing that only carried months-old magazines.
Under the covers, propped up on piles of downy pillows, Regina tossed the supermarket endcap magazine to the floor.
An exclusive in such a mag said too many things about who she’d been and where she’d landed than she could stomach.
Flipping through the last one—A Chef’s Life, fifth anniversary edition—she had to admit it wasn’t the house and home variety she’d judged it to be, only old and worn, even the inserts torn free.
The once-glossy cover now dulled, though the artwork showed merit, had luxurious heft.
From last autumn.
A carafe of wine, dewy grapes, a hunk of Roquefort putting Regina’s salivary glands into overdrive, and a crusty hunk of break.
Simple. Elegant. Maybe done to death, but classic for a reason.
She scanned bylines.
Went back to the table of contents.
Typical autumnal fare, from food to article to spotlight.
On the second page, she found the letter from the editor—“Five Years After the Dream Came True.”
Maybe a bit uninspired, but concise.
She scanned but didn’t read.
Phrases popped—gastronomic daring; trends already passé; classic reinvented—enough to get the gist.
At the bottom, beside a barely legible signature, the tiny photo in the bottom corner made Regina sit up higher.
“Holy shit.”
Bringing the magazine closer to her face, she couldn’t quite tell, but .
.
.
was it? She grabbed her phone, tapped editor a chef’s life into the search engine. And there she was. Older, of course. No longer the young woman Queenie B handpicked, the young woman Queenie B had nearly broken. The young woman who’d left her when she could no longer watch her employer destroy herself.
Saskia Specter.
Of all those she’d hurt and lost, Saskia was up there, just below Oz and Julian.
Until seeing her picture, searching for her name, Regina didn’t even realize it.
Now the splinters embedded all those years ago pricked fresh, bleeding her from the inside.
Wide awake now, Regina read the letter from the editor in its entirety.
Saskia wasn’t just executive editor, she founded the magazine itself.
It’s mission: to speak to the hearts of chefs and food critics while still being accessible to food lovers of all kinds.
When had she gone from personal assistant to journalist? Regina wished she could remember anything personal about the young woman Saskia had been.
Still, it couldn’t be more perfect.
Redemption, times two.
Regina didn’t even have it in her to feel devious about it. If Saskia would do it. Of course she’d do it. Saskia hadn’t gotten to where she was by being stupid.
She couldn’t call the magazine offices.
No way she was getting through without name-dropping.
But Saskia would—for ambition or love—take a call from an old friend of Queenie B’s.
Tapping into her phone, Regina scrolled through the few numbers stored there to the one that would pick up any time of day or night.
“This better be a booty call.”
“For fuck’s sake, Marco, shut up and listen.
I have a plan . . .”