22
Flake: Refers to the process of gently breaking off small pieces of food, often for combining with other foods.
For example, you would flake cooked fish to combine with mashed potatoes to make fish cakes.
2010
Regina’s Kitchen Hours
Breakfast: 7:30 a.m.–9:30 a.m.
Lunch: 12:00 p.m.–2:00 p.m.
Dinner: 5:00 p.m.–7:30 p.m.
Bold lettering, but otherwise understated.
The contractor hammers in the last nail, all smiles.
Inspections passed, permits acquired, it’s finally finished.
At last. It has taken fourteen months, just as Mr. Koda promised. Right on time, and right on the dime. Honest as the day is long, Koda has never once taken advantage of the fact that Queenie always comes up with the money for all her add-ons and his unexpecteds. He had no clue of her identity at the start, and still has no idea at the finish, proving not everyone in the world knows who Queenie B is. Or cares.
Dining room set up, pantry stocked, she’ll be able to open the soup kitchen in the morning, as planned.
She isn’t expecting a crowd or anything; she hasn’t advertised in any big way.
A few flyers distributed by a local priest to his mostly down-and-out congregation, and the flyer she’s tacked up near the dumpster of the only restaurant in walking distance will suffice.
Word of mouth will kick in after that. Low-key and local is what she’s after. Maybe, for once, she’ll be able to pull that off.
“Been a pleasure working with you.”
Mr.
Koda shakes her hand.
“I might even miss this place.”
“You’ve done an amazing job.
Everything I hoped for and then some.”
“Still don’t know why you’d open a place this nice down here.”
He scratches his head.
“But you’re a woman who knows what she wants and how to get it, that’s for sure.”
A slight chill slithers up her spine, but he doesn’t know.
If Mr.
Koda is suspicious of anything, it’s that she’s in with some kind of cartel or in witness protection.
She has paid everything in cash. No check. No proof.
Queenie reaches into her pocket for the wad of hundreds she’s had—for the last time—her accountant withdraw.
From here on, it will be credit cards paid by her newly-formed-for-the-purpose corporation.
She isn’t exactly sure how it works, but she’s been assured it will.
“This is for you.”
She palms Koda a banded ten thousand.
“And this”—she hands him another ten thousand—“is for the crew.
Divvy it up as you see fit.”
She doesn’t add any admonishment to see it goes to them; keeping it for himself won’t even occur to him.
“I . . .”
Koda stares at the money, then her. “I . . .”
“You’re welcome.”
She almost smiles; she’s learned not to do so overtly.
“I hope I can call on you again if I need to.”
“Of course, of course.”
He pockets the cash.
Thankfully, his truck is right there, at the curb.
It isn’t that the locals are criminals, only desperately poor.
Okay, there are criminals too—she hasn’t had a high-tech security system put in for nothing—but Queenie prefers not to think about that.
She waves to him as he pulls away, keys to her new home, her great project, in hand.
Letting herself in, locking the door behind her, she breathes in the aroma of fresh wood and paint.
The black-and-white linoleum tiles aren’t her style, but this part of the place isn’t about style.
It’s about function, economy, and invisibility. The exorbitant elegance of the place upstairs would cause speculation, but no one will ever see it. Her home is to be her sanctuary, as well as a reminder of who she’d been and how small her world has become.
Folding banquet tables and chairs for the soup kitchen dining room are easily stacked, and replaced if necessary.
Two swinging doors—one going into the kitchen, and one coming out—are the only break in an otherwise pristine coat of deep red paint.
White or beige, Koda had suggested, but Queenie knows it’ll only be a matter of weeks before it’s smudged beyond her ability to overlook it.
She spent—a lot—extra on the easily washable paint the salesperson swore by. Used in all the day-care centers in New Haven, he said. Guaranteed to hold up, he said. Even with a daily cleaning service, Queenie will be happy if she gets a couple of years out of it.
Pushing through the swinging door into the kitchen, she’s glad she hasn’t skimped.
Working with subpar appliances just won’t cut it, even if her fine dining days are over.
Cheaper, less ostentatious will never hold up anyway.
Queenie runs her hand over the industrial-size Wolf. It’s not the La Cornue still sitting, unused and unloved, in the Bova home—that she got in the divorce because Osvaldo wanted nothing to do with the place—but it’s a stunning piece of equipment. Everything from that stove to the dishwashers to the gadgets, pots, and pans is, and not a single person who walks through the door is ever going to question it. This, she knows without a doubt, because she’ll never let a chef into her kitchen. Only locals willing to volunteer, locals she’ll slip a twenty to after a shift. Just enough to make it worth their while, not enough to raise suspicion.
Queenie preps for the morning, simple enough.
Two huge Crock-Pots of oatmeal, jars of jam, honey, and brown sugar.
She cuts up fruit.
In the morning, she’ll scramble several dozen eggs and toast several loaves of bread. Baking it from scratch crosses her mind—she’s always loved the meditation of kneading dough—but only momentarily. She has no way of knowing how many will show. Simple is best until she gets the hang of things.
Lunch prep is even simpler.
Sandwiches, PB lasagna is always better for being allowed to sit overnight in the fridge. She hopes she’s made enough of everything; sending people home hungry doesn’t just go against her mission statement, it goes against every chef nerve in her body.
Not a chef.
In this kitchen, never.
She’s a cook now.
A soup kitchen cook making nutritious food for people in need. Her mission statement. Her balance.
Prep done, slow cooker timers set, Queenie goes upstairs for the first time since the final inspection.
The whole apartment has been finished and furnished for almost a week.
It’s been difficult, not peeking, but the good kind of difficult.
Like waiting-for-Christmas difficult.
She sets the alarm from the pad in her apartment and closes the world outside.
Inside, it is perfect.
Elegant.
Beautiful. Richly textured from window curtains to the flowers on her Carrara marble counters, from the buttery-yellow walls to the burnished Brazilian teak flooring to the russet leather couch and armchair. Her television hides behind a mirror that isn’t quite a mirror, but a very expensive trick of the eye. Her bedroom is a tranquility of sea-foam walls and comforting dark-walnut furniture. The bed is a luxurious pile of white. The bathroom is a spa complete with its own sound system. Koda is right about building so nice a place in an area that will never be prosperous again, but Queenie doesn’t care. This is where she will live and someday die. Julian will do with it what he pleases when the time comes. Or Osvaldo will do it for him.
Julian.
Osvaldo.
She has done her best not to think about them and has mostly succeeded.
The bible she retrieved from Marco sits there, on her bedside table.
Atop it, an envelope she received months ago and has still not opened; she knows what it is.
What’s inside. The end of everything.
Queenie sleeps like the dead.
Mornings have never been her thing, but she resolves to be up by six, every morning, to have a good breakfast before her long days.
In her own home, she can be a chef.
It is her joy, her art.
Denying herself that piece of her soul is never going to end well. So Queenie makes herself a spinach and herb omelet—she will get chickens and put in an herb bed come spring—brews freshly ground coffee for cappuccino, and cuts a thick wedge of the fresh bread she bought yesterday before meeting Koda for the official sign placement.
Fed, dressed.
Ready.
Queenie gathers herself as she used to before stepping out onstage at an awards show or in front of a camera.
It’s a different sort of fortitude she needs now, and she draws as much as she can from a past that nearly killed her. Several times. Downstairs, the oatmeal gives off its nutty scent. She plugs in the coffeepots, the pot for hot water, and soon the aroma of coffee joins the nutty oatmeal. The buffet-style table is already set up with biodegradable cups, plates, bowls, and eating utensils—no sense saving the homeless if it destroys the planet; unlike most, she can afford to be environmentally conscientious. Tables and chairs line up neatly. She’s as ready as she can be. This is going to be a great day.
Seven thirty, on the nose, Queenie unlocks the front door and barely gets out of the way before the onslaught knocks her over.
The buffet table is stormed like the beach on D-day.
Too much food ends up on the floor.
She can only stare, dumbstruck. Queenie—no, Regina—remembers being poor, being hungry. She remembers savoring every bite of food, because there was no guarantee there’d be more. The only time she ate regularly was during her stint in a group home, run by the state, when she was seventeen and had no more relatives to tap. Edible was all it was required to be, and it was barely that, but it was there, and that was the important thing.
Dumbstruck turns to horror when, buffet tables empty, someone heads for the kitchen.
Queenie bolts for the door, gets there just ahead of the man and his .
.
. girlfriend? The woman can be twelve, twenty, or fifty but the man is solidly somewhere in his forties. Queenie stands in the doorway, arms stretched from jamb to jamb.
“Sorry.
No one goes in the kitchen.
Health codes.”
“Is there anything more? My daughter and I got here too late to get anything.”
Queenie glances around him.
People are filing out.
Most are carrying food in those biodegradable vessels with them.
It’s only a quarter after eight.
“Sure,”
she tells him.
“Just go sit.
I’ll bring something out to you.”
Her hands shake, but Queenie manages two plates of scrambled eggs and toast.
She cores two apples, fills them with a nob of butter, raisins, and brown sugar, then nukes them a couple minutes.
When she brings the food out, there isn’t a scrap of food except what’s on the floor, and no one left but the man, his daughter, and the elderly woman Queenie recognizes because of the Burger King crown on her head.
“You too?”
“I couldn’t get through the ravening barbarians.”
The woman sniffs.
“No one has any manners anymore.”
Queenie sets the plates down for the man and his daughter who, now that she gets a better look, is probably in her twenties and very, very high.
The man pushes his plate to the Burger Queen.
“Go ahead, Gladys.
I can wait.”
She nods that imperial nod.
“Thank you, Troy.
You are a gentleman.”
The daughter is already shoveling eggs into her mouth, almost as ravenous as the barbarians.
“Slow down,”
her father says.
“You’ll choke.”
She does as she’s bid.
The man looks up at Queenie, his eyes sad but somehow smiling.
He doesn’t look much better than his kid, but he doesn’t seem to be under the influence, at least at the moment.
He has that look. Hunted. Haunted. Trying really hard and mostly failing.
“I’ll be right back.”
Queenie goes to the kitchen, scrambles, toasts, nukes.
It doesn’t take long, but the daughter is finished with her food and trying to get the last dribbles of coffee from the urn by the time Queenie returns to the dining room.
“I’ll put up another pot,”
she says, placing the food down for Troy.
“Sorry about all this.”
Troy waves his fork like a magic wand, maybe to vanish the sad evidence of her first step into philanthropy.
“Someone should have told you a free buffet is never a good idea with really hungry people.
Most of ’em’s good sorts.
But, still, you best have them line up and hand them what you offering.”
“Good to know.
I’ll make sure to do that at lunch.”
Which is going to be difficult, with only her own hands doing the doling.
“I’m Regina.”
He rises halfway from his chair, tipping a nonexistent hat.
“Troy.
That’s my daughter, Petunia.
And this is Miss Gladys.”
He gestures to the elderly woman.
“We live in the same building.”
“Hello, Miss Gladys,”
Queenie says, and in response gets that imperial nod.
“Petunia, get away from there.
She say she putting another pot on.”
Petunia shakes the coffee urn.
Troy shrugs, tucks into his food.
“This is nice.
Been a long time since I had fresh scramble. And a baked apple, just like my mama used to make.”
“There was a fruit salad.”
Queenie pulls out a chair.
Sits down.
“This was an abysmal failure.”
“Nah,”
Troy said around a mouthful of toast.
“People just not used to anything lasting around here.
They get it while they can.
But you here to stay, I can tell.”
“You can?”
“You wouldn’t’ve made it this nice if you was going to up and leave.
You just need some fine-tuning.”
“Like a soup line instead of a buffet.”
“Just like.
Petunia, leave off that thing!”
“I’ll get that coffee going.”
Queenie pushes to her feet, exhausted when she shouldn’t be.
It’s not even nine o’clock.
She makes a small pot of coffee in the automatic drip machine she keeps in the kitchen.
No sense brewing a whole pot now. When there’s enough coffee, she pours it into a disposable cup for Petunia and carries it out to her. At least there are still sugar packets and creamer near the empty urns.
“Thanks, miss.”
Petunia smiles, sips it black.
She’s not a pretty girl, looks too much like her father, who is not a handsome man.
Maybe she could have been, he could have been, but the ravages of substance abuse and poverty are too deeply engraved.
A perk of being a wealthy addict is the money to alleviate some of the damage she’s done to herself.
“You okay?”
Queenie asks.
“I fine.”
Petunia waves her off.
“My daddy think I wasted all the time but I just wasted when he not.
We look out for each other that way.”
How healthy.
Queenie tamps down the urge to lecture, to give the I’ve been there myself speech.
She knows, as any addict does, that no one can coax, cajole, or coerce someone into getting clean.
Staying clean. In the end, no matter the why behind it, the end is a decision made and kept despite the why that’ll never go away.
Queenie takes coffee to Gladys and Troy.
Petunia puts two sugars and half-and-half into her dad’s.
Her Highness dumps four packets into her coffee, but otherwise drinks it black.
Torn between getting to the cleaning up or sitting with these three, Queenie gets to the former even if she’d rather succumb to the latter. Moments later, Troy wheels out the trash barrel, goes up and down between tables, cleaning up. Petunia asks for paper towel and spray cleaner and gets to work wiping down tables. The Burger Queen watches. Imperiously.
“So, what’s with the paper crown?”
she asks Troy. Quietly.
Troy chuckles, just as quietly.
“Don’t know.
She been wearing it since I met her.
Not in her house though. Every once in a while, she replaces it with a new one. Don’t ask me how she gets to the Burger King. None in this area, that’s for sure. Closest one is over on Whalley.”
“And the attitude?”
Another soft chuckle.
“All I know is she used to teach at some girls’ finishing school.
Least, that’s what I got from stuff she’s said.
But who knows, really? Like the crown, she been like this all along.”
“Well, thanks for helping.
And for the advice.
I really appreciate it.”
“You need help handing out lunch?”
“Really?”
“Least I can do.
I’ll get Miss Gladys to keep Petunia till she come down.
What time you need me?”
“Just be here by noon, when I open up again.”
Queenie doesn’t add only if you’re not wasted.
Despite what Petunia said, maybe he’s a few days clean.
A few months.
She remembers how precarious that teeter is, how the wrong comment can topple someone off it. Any excuse to justify using, even if it’s cutting off their own nose to spite their face.
Queenie locks the door behind the three of them, even though it’s only nine forty-five.
No one else is coming, now.
The same people who trashed her breakfast will be back to get lunch.
Two meals in one day is a luxury. Three is nirvana itself. They’ll be back. Maybe they’ll bring others. Maybe they’ll keep this boon for themselves. Whatever the case, she has to be ready.