Caroline: Just a Taste Ch.1

                                                                        

Author's Note: I think I've done a good job getting the inciting incident of Ellena being offered and then taking the shift at the food truck across along with the necessary back story for the character relationships, Ellena's dad's death, and the cooking aspect.  I worry that the last half feels heavy since I don't really have any dialogue breaking it up, just scene changes. I'm also concerned I haven't given enough details either - like description and setting - as I'm so bad at being too concise or too in my head to realize what's not on the page that needs to be.  

       The food truck is a breakfast/brunch food truck, which is why I named it Quichey Keen, but I'd love to hear feedback on the name! I just wonder if it's working/funny/cute/makes sense to y'all, because it was surprisingly hard to come up with a catchy food truck name. 

                                                                            Chapter 1 

  Mable sat on the worn oriental rug in my bedroom, cutting out pictures and lines of bold font from the magazine pages I had ripped out and tossed down to her from my perch on the bed.  We were determined to finish our “inspiration board” before Mable left to work her shift at Quichey Keen – something she insisted was of vital importance to ensure a successful start to our summer vacation.  

       “Hey, stop tearing out so many shoes and perfume ads. Try finding a hot Calvin Klein model, this board needs some testosterone.” Mable did a little shimmy with her shoulders. 

“Oh, stop, how is a picture of a guy’s abs inspiring?” I laughed and Mable rolled her eyes. 

“This is exactly why we’re making this board. Clearly, your mind needs to be opened to new and exciting ideas.” She fanned her hands out to emphasize the new and exciting, following up with another shimmy. I threw a torn apart magazine at her.

“Be thankful I didn’t throw the September Vogue.” 

“You forget I’m the one with the scissors.” She lifted the lifted the pair of scissors above her head with frantic clipping motions, as if about to pounce, before cracking a smile. “Just hand me the thumb tacks before I’m legit late for work.” 

I reached for the tacks on my bedside table and slipped off the bed to join Mable on the floor. As we started pinning the random photos of pretty things into the corkboard, I caught her glancing nervously at me from under her bangs. 

“I seriously want you to look at this every day, Ellena.  Looking at fun, pretty things will cheer you up, even if just a little.  I know mine did when Parker and I broke up last spring.” Mable quickly looked down at the board, knowing her breakup couldn’t really compare to what I had been through. But, everything about what she said was sincere. I knew she was just doing what best friends do – whatever she could to keep me from slipping back into the tough grey months of quiet lunches and blank expression.  I smiled with my lips closed and poked her knee with the sharp end of a tack. 

“Thanks, Mabe.  I promise to look at it. I mean, you’re totally right, staring at a hot male models is definitely the key to happiness.” I tried to mimic her earlier shimmy, but only managed to spastically shrug my shoulders.

Mable laughed, “God, please never do that again – that’s the key to my happiness.” She stood from her cross-legged position and went to the mirror hanging on the back of my door. “Ugh. I’m so over this job. Do you know how hot a food truck is in the summer? It’s hot,” she said as she re-braided her long blonde hair.  “Can’t you take my shift this weekend?” Mable begged with her eyes in the mirror, but I couldn’t imagine working outside during a Virginia summer, let alone in a kitchen again.  It was too soon. 

“So sorry, truly,” I gestured a dramatic apology, “but there’s no way that will ever happen. Love ya.” I blew her a kiss into the mirror, which she received with a scrunched up nose. 

“I just think you’d really like it! You know, cooking and all…” Mable trailed off knowing she was stepping into a tense subject. I held her eyes in the mirror for a second before answering.

“Nope.  You just want to go on your step-dad’s boat and lay out.  No ma’am, you are not leaving me stranded ashore.” Mable shook her head in unconvincing defiance before scooping her braid up into a faded navy Alexandria Yacht Club baseball cap.  She grabbed her purse and keys from the foot of the bed, flicking the top of my head as she started to leave. 

“Just give it a thought. You know he’d want you to.” I focused on the shoelaces of her tennis shoes, not looking up and admit she was right. “Well, hey, text me a picture when you get the board up on the wall.  I gotta go.” Mable flicked my head again before leaving the room.  Sometimes it was hard being friends with a person that knew you better than you knew yourself. 

Mable and I had been inseparable since the day she moved into the house next door.  While our mothers chatted at the end of the driveway about moving hassles and book clubs, I clung to mine and hid behind her legs, peering between the gap in her thighs at the girl wearing head-to-toe neon orange.  My mom laughed and asked about her bright ensemble, to which Mable’s mother relayed how Mable had been concerned the movers would overlook her and accidently crush her with a sofa if she wasn’t wearing the proper safety wear.  I stepped out from behind my mother and lifted the hem of my right jean leg, revealing a pair of neon orange socks. Mable beamed. We were 6 years old that summer, and 11 years later we were starting the last real high school summer before our senior year. We even sometimes still wore neon orange. 

I tacked the last magazine cut-out – a artsy bouquet of pastel ice cream cones – and leaned back against the side of my bed.  What Mable had said kept looping my thoughts. She was right, my dad would have wanted me to keep cooking.  More so, he would have thrown a full-on fit at the absurd idea that I could ever stop cooking.  But, even thinking about it now struck a chord of dull anxiety in my stomach that ached through me. 

I turned my head, still resting it against the side of my bed, to look at my open closet across the room.  I could just barely see the bottom 6 inches of the light blue dollhouse façade peeking out from behind my winter sweaters, a relic of my childhood shoved to the back. I scooted across the rug and hardwood floors to reach the closet, tugging the dollhouse out from the barrier of clothing.  I clicked open the plastic latch on the side and swung open the entire front of the house, revealing my stash.            Inside, wedged into the rectangular rooms of the Barbies of yore, were a couple of 2-year-old Food & Wine magazines and a thick spiraled journal with worn corners and tens of papers sticking out from almost every side.  My dad’s recipes. 

         My dad died in his restaurant.  He was prepping the wait-staff on the changes to the lunch menu when he was suddenly just gone.  Gone even before anyone reached for a phone to call an ambulance.  The doctor at the hospital said it was a blood clot in the leg that moved to his brain, that no one could have known and he didn’t feel a thing.  Which never felt right to me, because my dad embraced pain.  As a chef, he had more burn and knife scars on his hands than I could count, and I would try when I was little.  Each time he’d grab a hot pan without thinking or nick his finger on a shattered plate, he’d bellow, practically sing, “Love is pain, and so is cooking!”  So I wish he’d felt something in the end, even pain. 

         I flipped open the tattered recipe book and ran my right index finger over the scrawled handwriting I was so familiar with.  Each page was like a piece of him.  They were only recipes, some passed down in the family, some borrowed from friends or colleagues, many created by my father.  He was always working on The Best Thing You’ve Ever Tasted, always sure he could beat himself at his own mad scientist game.  And he always did, at least almost always.  I turned to the last several pages of recipes, the ones he was working on when he died.  Grits.  Grits were his kryptonite.  For some reason he had never been able to find or come up with a recipe that fit The Best Thing You’ve Ever Tasted criteria.  Three Cheese Pepper Grits. Shrimp and Garlic Grits.  Spinach and Egg Baked Grits.  Balsamic Honey Grits.  Beer-Soaked Bacon Grits.  Adouille Sausage and Asiago Grits. Each recipe was marked with aggressive symbols of varying extremes of failure.  Red exclamation points in the top corner meant a near miss.  A thick black ‘X’ across the page meant disaster.  The last recipe, Spiced Chai Grits, didn’t have any markings at all.  

I kept my dad’s recipe book in the dollhouse so my mother wouldn’t know.  After he died the restaurant – La Lena, named for me, the nickname he gave his only daughter – struggled.  It took my mother a month to reopen after the funeral, and by then it seemed the entire population of Alexandria had found new favorite restaurants.  La Lena was forgotten.  My mom tried to keep it alive, tried to replicate every aspect as if that would keep my dad alive, too, and for a while she did.  Last month, eight months after my dad died, we closed La Lena for good.  We sold and auctioned off each table, chair, set of silverware – even the spare microwave we’d kept in the supply closet – it was all priced, boxed, and gone.  

         I found the recipe book as we were packing up the random odds and ends that couldn’t be or didn’t get sold.  I was dumping a heap of stained napkins into a box with menus, a phone book, and several biographies of James Beard when I saw the fray of pages sticking out from under the drink menus.  As I pulled the book out of the box my mother walked past, “Just toss that,” she said fast and sharp in a way I knew meant it was my dad’s, and that she couldn’t bear to see something of his like that. I nodded that I had heard her, but instead of putting it back with the menus I tucked it up under my sweatshirt.  

          A month later, I still can’t seem to tell my mother I kept it.  I wasn’t sure if I was afraid she’d be angry for going against her, or afraid she’d break into a million pieces.  I figured I would tell her when I could actually bear to cook one of the recipes myself.  I’d been my dad’s right hand girl in the kitchen, mostly at home, but also at La Lena on some weekends, but now it wasn’t the same.  I didn’t know how I to make anything taste good without him standing next to me.  I wasn’t sure I could even lift a spoon. 

         Sitting in the doorframe of my closet reading the recipes closely like I’d done dozens of times before, the throng of anxiety in my stomach I got from thinking about cooking twisted into something new.  Something I couldn’t ignore.  I placed my father’s recipes back into the dollhouse, pushing it back to its dusty baseboard, and stood to get my phone. 

       “Hey, Mable.  I know you’re working, so call me back when you get this.  I–I want to take your shift this weekend.”