Chapter 4
ALICE
“I didn’t think you’d come back,” Ethan says without looking away from the computer screen in his office at Forked.
A paunchy technician in a uniform stands behind him, pointing at the screen as he explains to Ethan how to adjust the carbonation in the soft drink dispensers from a computer program. The screen is facing away from where I stand in the doorway, which makes me feel as if I’m intruding.
But I quickly push the thought away. I have to walk in with confidence and presence of mind if I want to pull this off.
“I wasn’t so sure I’d come back,” I reply honestly, straightening my shoulders as I take a step inside. “But you were right. I need this job. And I should be grateful you’ve offered me a chance to get back on my feet.”
Confidently submissive.
I repeat these words in my mind a few times to remind myself not to explode the way I did yesterday. Ethan obviously got a kick out of my feistiness. But I’m certain that, more than anything else, he wanted me to submit to his authority. His superiority.
I can play that game.
For now.
He looks away from the computer screen, and his expression seems skeptical. “So, you’re here to accept the job? Not here to tell me to shove it up my arse?”
I swallow a scathing reply and force a demure smile. “I know I’ve made mistakes,” I begin, ignoring the duh expression on his face. “But I’ve done my homework and I’m so impressed by what you’ve built. Not just with this restaurant, but your entire career.” I pause to let the sickly sweet compliment sink in. “I’m not here to punish you for what happened…what happened between your brother and me. I’m here to work.”
Ethan has to understand from the get-go that this is all business. I’m not here to get back at Edward. And I’m definitely not here to become another notch on his bedpost. I’m here for the promotion and the raise and nothing else.
His face is serious as he turns back to his computer screen. “Good. You can find Ollie. She’ll give you a uniform and intake forms and show you around. You’ll start next Friday.”
“Opening night?” I reply, trying to hide my disappointment that Ethan won’t be giving me the tour of the restaurant himself.
He glances at me with a tinge of annoyance. “No, we open the following Friday. You’ll have a weeklong orientation before opening night. I need to make sure you know how to do things my way.”
Confidently submissive. Don’t take the bait.
I force my smile even wider, to the point of maniacal. “Great!”
I stare at my phone screen, turning my head from side to side as I examine my skin using the front-facing camera. “Did I put on too much makeup today?” I ask my mom as she folds a pile of freshly laundered towels on the sofa.
She rolls her eyes as she tucks a lock of light-brown hair behind her ear. “You care too much what people think about your appearance, Alícia,” she says in her lilting South Carolina accent.
She still refuses to call me Alice despite my father and brother adopting my preferred name when I was in high school, which was when I first started idolizing world-renowned chef Alice Waters. While my friends had posters of the Jonas brothers on their walls, I had sticky notes scribbled with ingredient lists and cooking tips I’d found in Waters’ cookbooks. My obsession has hushed to a gentle admiration over the years, but I still think I might die if I ever actually met her in person.
“That’s easy for you to say. You don’t have to work for your ex-boyfriend’s twin brother,” I reply, exiting the camera app on my phone and opening my browser to look at the picture I found of Edward at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new restaurant in Midtown last month.
He didn’t tell me he was working on a new project. Apparently, this restaurant venture was in the works for nine months, which means he knew about it for months before we broke up. What else was he hiding from me?
“But your new boss is not your ex-boyfriend,” my mom reminds me tenderly, placing another folded towel on top of the neat stack. “Just remember he’s your boss and everything will be okay.”
I laugh at her oversimplification of my predicament, and the gentle reminder to keep my hands off Ethan’s utensil. “That’s nowhere in the vicinity of the truth. Edward used me, Mom. Doesn’t that piss you off?”
She shoots me an angry look. “Don’t say that word.”
We stare at each other for a moment as she waits for me to test her. “Piss. Piss. Piss,” I say as if I’m twelve years old.
She sighs. “Of course it makes me angry, dear,” she replies, placing the folded towels in the now-empty laundry basket, so she can carry them upstairs to the linen closet. “Your father and me wanted to choke him to death.”
My mother’s gentle manner and soft voice make her sometimes crude—but very rarely profane—language even more jarring.
“That’s a little too graphic, Mom. And it’s ‘dad and I.’”
“You know what I mean,” she says, waving off my attempt to correct her grammar. “You need this job. Your father spent so much on Paulo’s—”
“I know,” I say, cutting her off before she can remind me how my father lost his entire life savings on a bad business venture his best friend had roped him into. Well, ex-best friend.
Something my father and I have in common: we’ve both been royally screwed by our exes.
As a daddy’s girl, I don’t like remembering the dark time when my father had to close the family restaurant due to overwhelming debt. It was two years ago, but it feels like yesterday. He was forced to take a mid-level job at Greenwood Capital, the venture capital firm Ethan is using for his restaurant funding. My older brother Adrian, who had worked with my father since graduating high school, moved to Long Island to manage a Dunkin’ Donuts. I’d never seen my father so depressed.
And I never want to see him like that again, which is precisely why I have to take this job.
I don’t want my dad to see all my hard work and education go down the toilet the way the family restaurant did. I have to swallow my pride and use every bit of cunning in my plump little body to earn that promotion and raise. And once I’m back in that sous chef position, I’ll contact the journalist who wrote the profile on Edward in Food & Beverage magazine to tell my side of the story.
You know, the truth.
My mom gets up from the sofa and heads upstairs to put away the towels without another word. As much as I adore my father, I sometimes feel as if my mother squandered some of her potential when she decided to be a housewife.
I’ve never even asked her what her dream job was when she was a child. I’ve always been too afraid to ask; afraid to find out she didn’t want to spend all day cooking and cleaning in between shuttling Adrian to soccer games and trumpet classes, and me to piano lessons and cooking courses. But what if she didn’t want to be a housewife?
Would that mean my entire childhood is a lie, like my relationship with Edward was?
I open up my messages app to send Minka a text.