Chapter 1 #2
"They'll stop." Renata raised her voice. "EVERYONE, SHUT UP!"
The kitchen stopped.
Tanisha looked at her crew. Ten of them.
A team she had built from nothing. People she had paid out of her own savings for the first six months when Hot Honey was just her, a propane burner, a battered food truck, and a recipe she had pieced together from her grandmother's pound cake and her year in Seoul on a culinary scholarship before her grandmother got sick and she came home.
She had taught herself to fry chicken thighs crisp and golden, slick them with hot honey, and tuck them into soft potato buns with quick-brined kimchi pickles. Black Southern. Korean. Hers.
"Y'all," she said, and her voice cracked. "We did this…not me, we did this."
A whoop went up. Someone banged a wooden spoon against a hood vent.
" And the finalists go to Vegas this weekend. They're flying me out for the awards reception."
The whoop became a roar.
"Conditions, though," Tanisha said, and held up a finger until the room quieted again. "No cameras on my face. Not for the press, not for the network, not for anybody. I told them already. I accept the award, I shake hands, but my face stays out of the broadcast. Y'all know why."
The room sobered, but only for a second. They knew her story and had her back.
"You earned the rules, baby," her sous chef said. "Get your money and get out."
She laughed again, her eyes watering.
Then her phone buzzed on the prep table.
Tanisha glanced at it. Unknown number. Nashville area code. She thumbed it to silent and kept talking, but a small part of her, the part she had not been able to fully unclench in eighteen months, paid quiet attention to the back of her own neck.
Two minutes later, it buzzed again. Same number.
She thumbed it to silent again without looking.
It didn't quite ring a bell. It just made her skin prickle.
She turned her back on the phone.
"Okay," she said. "Family dinner. Mama Boone's. Right now. Renata, you're driving."
"I am not driving, you won, you're driving."
"You won't let me drink at dinner if I drive."
"That is a feature, not a bug."
Tanisha laughed, scooped up her phone without looking at it, and walked out of her own kitchen on a high so sweet she thought, just for a second, that this was what the rest of her life might feel like.
******
Mama Boone lived in the same red-brick bungalow off Jefferson Street where she had raised three children and one granddaughter on a Fisk University professor's salary.
The porch sagged in the middle. The wisteria climbing the trellis was almost as old as Tanisha.
The screen door slapped twice when Tanisha pushed it open.
"That you, baby?"
"It's me, Mama."
Her grandmother came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on a dish towel, all five feet of her, gray hair in two short braids, glasses pushed to the end of her nose, the smell of butter and yeast trailing behind her like a hymn.
Mama Boone took one look at her granddaughter's face and let out a soft sound that was halfway between a prayer and a laugh.
"You won, didn't you."
"Mama,"
"I knew it. I knew it when I woke up. I had your daddy in a dream."
Tanisha let herself be hugged. Her grandmother was a small woman, but the hug was a fortress.
"And Vegas?"
"Vegas."
"And no cameras."
"No cameras. That was the deal."
Her grandmother held her at arm's length. The old, sharp brown eyes studied her face.
"Baby," Mama Boone said quietly. "You sure you ready to be out in the world like this?"
Tanisha smoothed the front of her own shirt.
"Mama," she said, "it's been a year and a half. He's not looking for me anymore. He's moved on."
She believed it when she said it.
She was wrong.
*****
Dinner was loud, tasty and filling, the way it always was at Mama Boone's.
Her grandmother had cooked enough for ten, smothered chicken, collards, a pan of cornbread and, sitting in its place of honor on the counter, a pound cake cooling under a dish towel.
Renata had brought a box of her own pastries from the bakery, "for dessert dessert," and the three of them crowded around the small kitchen table like they had a hundred times before and for one evening Tanisha let herself simply be happy.
"So tell us about the bakery," Tanisha said, refilling Renata's glass. "Don't think I didn't see that line out your door this morning. You're blowing up, Ren."
Renata waved a hand, but she was glowing.
"The croissant lady from the food magazine came back.
Third time. She brought a friend who 'happens to write about regional bakeries.
'" She made air quotes, then dropped them, grinning.
"T, I think I might actually do the second oven.
I've been scared of it for a year. But the numbers are there.
The numbers have been there for months; I've just been too chicken to look. "
"Look at the numbers girl."
"I'm looking, I'm looking." Renata pointed a fork at her. "You're one to talk about being scared of growing. You just won a regional competition and made them cut your own face out of it."
"That's different."
"It is not even a little bit different," Renata said cheerfully. Mama Boone laughed into her coffee, and Tanisha threw a piece of cornbread at her best friend, and for a moment the whole kitchen was light and loud and exactly the home it had always been.
Mama Boone told a long story about a former student who'd just been made a department head somewhere up north and had written her a four-page letter of thanks.
Renata talked about a man she'd gone on two dates with and decided against because he didn't tip and "you can tell everything about a person by how they treat someone in the service industry.
" They talked about everything except the thing prickling at the back of Tanisha's neck, the unknown number she'd silenced twice and would silence again before the night was out.
Her grandmother walked her out to the car at the end of the night and held her face in both hands.
"You did good, baby," Mama Boone said. "Your daddy would be so proud.
Your mama too, wherever she got to. You did it all by yourself, with your own two hands.
" She kissed Tanisha's forehead. "Now go be careful in that Vegas.
Pretty girls, bright lights and too much money in one place, nothing good was ever invented in a casino. "
Tanisha laughed and promised to be careful.
It was the last promise she would keep for a while.
*****
Yegor's plane lifted out of Houston at eleven seventeen on the dot.
Tanisha's plane lifted out of Nashville at four o'clock that same afternoon, five hours and six hundred miles behind a man whose name she did not yet know. They were both flying to Las Vegas.
Same destination. Different cabins. Different reasons.
They never saw each other in the air. When his phone buzzed in his pocket on the runway, Yegor pulled it out and read the message from his sister.
Try to enjoy the next few days, brother. The cage doesn't lock until Saturday.
He almost laughed.
He looked out the small oval window as the Houston skyline tilted and dropped away beneath him. The cage doesn't lock until Saturday. The phrase sat strangely in his chest, as though some part of him had heard a warning he hadn't been listening for.
He told himself it was nothing.
It was not nothing.