“Coming right up!” He starts mixing with wild abandon, tossing bottles and catching them with some seriousshowmanship. He’s either very talented or very lucky. “I don’t work every night. I’m lucky I caught you here.”
I give a little laugh at the thought. I’m pretty sure luck had nothing to do with it. More like Lani and Ruby did their homework. I look over at the two of them, and Lani offers up a little wave, and Ruby winks. I guess in a way I am lucky—to have them.
“So what brings you to my humble establishment?” he asks, shaking out his blond mop to get the hair out of his eyes. “Other than escaping whatever’s happening out there on the dance floor.”
“My buddies, Ruby and Lani, thought I needed some cheering up. Apparently, moping around the resort isn’t considered a healthy recreational activity.”
“Nothing heals the soul like country music and poor judgment,” he says, crushing mint with the ease of a bartender who could do it blindfolded.
“How’s this place doing?” I ask, trying to ease him into conversation.
“Business has been strong—turns out investors like places with actual character. We’re talking expansion, maybe another location down the coast.” He adds rum in one smooth motion. “But it’s fragile. One wrong review from the right person could demolish all of it in about five minutes.”
“Sounds stressful,” I say, watching him work. “Especially with all the competition for tourist dollars.” And don’t I know it firsthand.
“Exactly. That’s why it’s so important to control your image, your product quality, your supply chain.”He shakes the cocktail with perhaps more violence than strictly necessary.“Some people don’t understand that sometimes you have to make a few compromises to survive in this market. And when you can’tsource locally, you could still adjust your marketing to match customer expectations.”
The music shifts to something involving a lot of spinning, and through the crowd, I catch a glimpse of Lani executing a perfect line dance turn while Ruby appears to be inventing her own interpretive country dance fusion that defies several laws of gravity.
I hope no one breaks a hip over this country fried adventure.
“The thing is,” Breezy continues, straining the mai tai into a glass garnished with enough tropical fruit to constitute a small salad, “people like that food critic—they think they know everything about authentic island culture, but they’re outsiders judging things they don’t understand.”
He slides the mai tai across the bar, and it’s actually impressive—layers of rum and fruit juice that catch the bar lights like a liquid sunset. The music bumps and thumps, and the entire establishment howls with laughter at once as the bodies on the dance floor collectively try out what looks like an acrobatic move.
Breezy steps around the counter. “Come on, honey, let’s find somewhere quieter to talk. It’s impossible to have a real conversation over this chaos.”
He leads me to a corner booth that’s far enough from the dance floor to allow actual communication and dark enough to feel slightly dangerous. The booth has seen better decades, but it’s clean and provides an excellent view of Ruby attempting what appears to be the world’s most enthusiastic interpretation of “Achy Breaky Heart.”
Breezy slides in on the same side of the booth as me, but I suppose that’s for the better. I’d never hear him from clear across the table.
“I’m so sorry about your friend,” I say, settling into the booth with my tropical masterpiece.
“Thank you. We were friends on some level, but really she was more of an acquaintance,” Breezy corrects, though his expression shifts into something serious. “But I’m sorry about it, too. So brutal, seeing her like that. Nobody deserves to die that way.”
He stares into his own drink—something amber that probably has a story behind it. “You know, everyone thinks Coraline was just this mean, cruel person who got off on destroying people’s dreams. But that wasn’t the real her.”
“It wasn’t?”
He shakes his head. “She once told me she grew up with this horrible mother who favored her brother over her, and never cared about anything Coraline accomplished. She always told her she was dirt, that she’d never amount to anything, that she was too loud and too ugly and too difficult.” His voice carries genuine sadness. “I guess her brother got the love, the attention, and the college fund. Coraline got criticism and neglect.”
“That’s awful.”
“It shaped everything about who she became. The TV show, the food competition world—it was all her way of proving her mother wrong. But the defense mechanisms she built to survive that childhood made her seem cold and bitter to everyone else.”
I sip my mai tai, which is honestly incredible, and try to reconcile this sympathetic picture with the woman I saw slapping Giselle behind the makeshift bar huts that night.
“Speaking of which,” I say, “I saw what happened with Giselle that night. The slap looked pretty intense.”
“I don’t know what that was about.” Breezy’s expression darkens. “Giselle Fontaine. Now there’s a piece of work pretending to be something she’s not.”
“How so?”
“Her cookbook is doing well. Really well.” He crushes the mint in his drink, not looking at me. “Though there was sometension between her and Coraline at a food festival last year. Something about recipe origins. It got heated enough that security had to step in. Apparently, Coraline knew exactly where those recipes came from, and they had nothing to do with Giselle.”
My mai tai suddenly tastes more complicated. “How do you know all this?”
“Coraline did her homework on everyone. She was planning to expose Giselle during the competition—she had photos, documentation, the whole thing. It would have destroyed her completely.”
