“Who died?” Chef asked.
What?Momma wasn’t dead, she couldn’tdie, she was just...And then I realized he was being sardonic. “Nobody.”
He maneuvered around me to the locker stuffed with white jackets and houndstooth pants. Years of working at top speed in tight kitchens had made him as agile as a boxer. But this proximity, off the line, felt different. Awkward. Intimate.
He shrugged. “Then...”
“It’s my mother,” I blurted before he could tell me no. “She went into the hospital today.”
“Ah. I’m sorry. She will get better?”
“Yes. I think so.”
Meg said so. My poor, capable sister, dealing with everything by herself.
“Good.”
He pulled on his white coat. Unlike my anonymous polyblend, his chef’s jacket was fresh-pressed, high-thread-count cotton, vented in the armpits, his name embroidered above the pocket.
“The thing is... After she gets out, she’ll need help. I need to go home. Just for a few days.”
He looked at me sideways. “How old are you, March?”
Why did he want to know?
“Twenty-eight.” I tried not to sound defensive. At least I hadn’t moved back home to live with my parents. Yet.
“College graduate?” he asked in the tone of somebody back home. Kind. Dismissive.
But I was in New York now, free to be whatever I made of myself.
“English major.” I added, deadpan, “My faculty advisor told me it would be good preparation for any career.” I didn’t mention my MFA in creative writing, a two-year investment that had produced a handful of sentimental stories and put me more deeply in debt.
His eyes crinkled at the corners. Not a smile, but a sign that he found me amusing, at least. “And you chose... this.”
I hesitated, wondering how much I should tell him. Nodded.
“You think when I was training that I went home to my mother every night?” he asked. “That I asked for weekends and holidays off?”
“No, Chef.”
“I was sixteen when I dropped out of high school to work in my first kitchen,” he said. “No Le Cordon Bleu for me, no culinary degree. I begged jobs from anyone who would teach me.”
I knew all this already. I’d researched him online. Eric Bhaer, the son of an American serviceman and a German mother, had risen through the culinary ranks in Italy and France, working eighteen-hour days in two- and three-star kitchens in exchange for food and a cot. A hint of Old Europe still rolled around his voice like butter melting in a pan.
“I can learn,” I said. “I want to learn.”
I had always been a good student, having figured out early on thateducation was my ticket out of Bunyan. Always knowing there would be no money for college—not the kind of school I dreamed of attending—beyond what I earned or borrowed myself.
“Technique, sure.” Chef slipped his feet into handmade clogs. “You have promise, March. You don’t wait for everything to be handed to you. You show up on time, you pay attention to detail, your knife skills are improving. But the good cooks, the great chefs, they have passion, you understand? Dedication.”
Another nod. Because I did understand. I watched the other members of the kitchen team stumble in day after day, shift after shift, underpaid, overworked, sleep-deprived, sick, or hungover. Cooks, driven to cook the way writers are driven to write.
“I like to cook,” I said. Not to mention that there were way more job opportunities for inexperienced prep cooks than downsized journalists in New York.
Chef gave me a look, skewer bright and sharp, over his shoulder. “Why are we here, March?”
Not like,here, in his office.Hereat Gusto. “To feed people?” I ventured.
