CHAPTER 23
I’m running out of time.
It was late, but she wanted to believe, had to believe, that in the past week she’d made some progress. She’d come up with four appetizers, three salads, and five desserts, and she had sketched out recipe ideas for the entrées. Now she was testing, as fast as she could. She had notebooks strewn around the central countertop, their pages smudged with chocolate and stained with beet juice and berries. She had rudimentary sketches of how the finished dishes should look. The kitchen looked like a demilitarized zone, but at least she was moving forward.
She was listening to music, as usual. Just not any Latin music. Since her scorching-hot and completely unexpected “dance session” with Hudson, they’d still been in the same general area. He was getting to the bottom of his punch list, and she was still working, or trying to work, diligently. But they had enough sexual tension between them to be seen from frickin’ space, and it was taking a toll ... even if it was fueling some of the ideas, which was a when-life-gives-you-lemons situation if she’d ever seen one. She still didn’t have any of the written body copy to connect the recipes, but she had notes detailing what could happen.
She’d also had some sweaty, formless, confusing, sexy dreams that left her waking up breathless. Flashes of that kiss with Hudson would ambush her at various points during the day and night: in the shower, when she was going to sleep, and always when she was trying to work. She’d almost cut herself again by not paying attention while dicing the boiled beets for her goat-cheese-and-beet salad, which was ridiculous, especially if it meant Hudson would patch her up again.
Just pull it together, she scolded herself as she worked on her salmon mousse. She was in her late forties, and this was her living . If she didn’t figure out a way to stay afloat and pay the mortgage, she was going to have to sell the house and move off island—which, let’s face it, would be a temporary save anyway. Even if she didn’t buy another house and just rented, unless she moved somewhere like Iowa that had drastically lower rents than anywhere on the West Coast, she was going to run out of any profit she made from selling. It wasn’t retirement money, as her parents continually pointed out.
Fear, it turned out, was a great motivator. Between the anxiety and Hudson going home, she was able to shift into a hyperfocused panic mode.
She took a picture of the completed mousse, piped into artistic rosettes on baguette rounds and garnished with dill and lemon zest, shaped into a heart. It was a little cheesy, but it ought to get the point across.
She tucked the phone back into her pocket. Three photos done, five to go, if she could manage it. Her eyes felt sandy, and her body felt drawn with exhaustion, but she kept moving forward.
At nearly three in the morning, she was ready to fall over, but the last of the recipes she’d wanted to show Sam was written up and tested. She’d managed to even make some chicken, although that wasn’t going to make the final cut. The kitchen was a tangled mess of confusing sounds, the whole place a disaster, despite her trying to clean as she went. It reminded her of times at Steven’s restaurant when they’d been shorthanded and she’d had to work the line. She smiled a little. She missed the companionship there, though—working with the chefs, joking with them. Yes, they’d had focus, but they’d also been family. More than that: people who’d been in the trenches of a war they were more passionate about than anyone she’d ever met. She still didn’t consider herself a chef necessarily, but she’d loved seeing these people who were so devoted, so bonkers about pursuing a career in something they loved that “wasn’t necessary” and “didn’t make sense.” She’d loved feeling like a part of that.
She loved their passion.
She missed their presence.
That said, she hadn’t missed the pressure, and this was like all the negatives of being on the line and none of the camaraderie. She took the last picture, then tucked the phone into her back pocket.
She’d made sticky toffee pudding ice cream, a recipe she’d altered from a special edition of H?agen-Dazs years ago that she’d fallen in love with. After packing it into the freezer, she went to start cleaning up, when she heard a noise outside her back door.
“You have got to be kidding me,” she said, with fondness, despite her exhaustion. “Tell me you didn’t smell me poaching chicken all the way from Marigold Farm!”
There was a tentative push against the doggy door. They’d trained Noodle—or tried—to use the door itself. It wasn’t a big door, so she wasn’t worried that a full-size person could get in. It was Noodle size. She thought about opening the door but instead decided to let him make it in himself. It would encourage him to come over when he wanted, and if she kept opening up the door for him, he’d never learn.
She cleaned up as she heard the plastic flap of the door rustle. She was just putting the last dish in the dishwasher and reaching for her cleaning cloth as she finally heard the tapping of claws on the wood floor. “Good job, Noo—”
The word lodged in her throat as she focused in on what had entered her house.
The only thing that made sense initially was that it was obviously not Noodle. It was bigger than a house cat but smaller than Noodle. It was also black and bushy, almost like a hedgehog. It had a longish tail that was also bushy, like a bottle brush, straight and spiny.
It also had a thick white stripe running from its head to said bottle brush tail.
She was so surprised, so tired and so baffled, that it took her way longer than it should have to realize that this was a skunk.
The scream started slowly, more like a startled “AaaaaaaaaIIIIIIGH!” And then she tossed her cleaning cloth at it.
This, it turned out, was the absolute worst course of action, as the bushy little creature was immediately (and understandably) pissed. It must’ve been drawn to the food, or maybe it had just gotten lost. She wasn’t a nature expert. But it was in now, and it didn’t know how to get out, and it had just had projectiles lobbed at it.
It started stomping its little feet, jumping up and down on its forepaws as if to say Oh really? You want to start something? Then it bared what looked like needle-sharp pointy teeth, making a chattering sound. By that point, she’d backed out toward the hallway, and it advanced on her.
Then it slowly started to raise its tail, turning it toward her.
Some memory of a documentary, or maybe just instinctive common sense, finally kicked in. She spun on her heel and sprinted for the front door, grateful that she hadn’t locked it after Hudson left that afternoon. She threw it open just as she heard it make a warning chitter ... and the foulest smell she could imagine suddenly trailed after her.
She turned back, accidentally taking a breath through her nose. Her eyes watered, and she gagged. It was like tear gas, if tear gas could go rancid somehow. She slammed the door behind her.
She didn’t smell like skunk, at least—or rather, she hadn’t been directly sprayed. But the kitchen. All her notes. The food in the fridge ...
She’d heard about what happened when skunks sprayed dogs. It took a month for the smell to wash out, she seemed to remember. She’d heard stories about people washing their dogs with tomato juice to try and cancel it out, only to have them then smell like skunk and V8. It was not encouraging.
Not to mention that her house was now going to smell like skunk. How was she supposed to work like that? Or, God forbid, how far out would this put selling the house? Surely no one was going to want to buy a house that smelled like skunk.
I do not need this.
It was as if everything caught up to her, all at once. She let out a yell that was a cross between a shriek and a cry.
“Why?” she shouted. “ Why ? What kind of a net do I need to buy to catch a fucking break ?”
She didn’t know if she was yelling to God or to the void. Or even to Steven, although she doubted it. But she finally broke down weeping, plopping down in the damp grass in front of her porch and hugging her knees, rocking herself as the tears poured out like a broken pipe.
She didn’t know what to do. All she knew was she was tired of being alone. She was tired of shouldering all of this herself. She knew she could call Nat, but she hadn’t talked to her in too long and had glossed over the realities of her finances and her work state. She sure as hell wasn’t waking her elderly parents at three o’clock at night and detailing her latest in a series of what she knew they’d see as failures.
She shouldn’t call, she knew. But she just felt so broken. So she pulled her phone out of her pocket, grateful it had some charge left, low though it was.
And after a moment’s debate, she hit Hudson’s number.