Barbara ONeal - The Lost Recipe for Happiness

CONTENTS

For Christopher Robin (aka Neal Barlow), with love.
You know why.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Gigantic thanks to my wise and wonderful agent, Meg Ruley, and the whole gang at RotrosenAndrea, Annalise, Christina, and Kellyfor multiple readings and suggestions and meetings. I am eternally in your debt. Thanks to my editor, Shauna Summers, for knowing how to nudge me into my best work, and to Christie for endless, endless conversations about the book (and other things). Thanks to Camron Welch, executive chef at Sonterra Grill, who helped illuminate the battlefield of restaurant kitchens and the daily life of a chef; to all my compatriots in the restaurant life at Michelles and Papa Felipes; Cocos and the Blue Fish Cove, and all the others along the way.

The Lost Recipe for Happiness

I know he said. A prick of howling sorrow touched him. God, Elena, I wasnt criticizing. I read about the accident when I called up your name on Google.

An icy mask stiffened her pale face. Violet shadows showed beneath her eyes. I dont want to talk about that.

Im not asking you to. He skimmed a spray of bread crumbs from the bare wood of the table. My mother died violently. I think I know a little about prurient interest.

She gazed at him impassively, mask still glittering and cold. Im sorry, she said without emotion.

Around her there was a disturbance, a bending of the air like the fine bands of heat waves that rise from a fire. For a moment, Julian thought it seemed there was fire flickering out from her very skin, like in the pictures of saints, but there was no mistaking the cold on her face.

Abruptly she leaned forward, pushing her plate away so she could put her forearms over the table. Her eyes, fierce and sapphire, burned in her face. Do you know how many times men have wanted to sleep with me because I survived such a gruesome accident?

Elena

Do you know how often some reporter has come in to do a story on a restaurant and heard the rumors of my past and tried to get it out of me? Im like a priest who gave up the callingeveryone wants to know the story. Her eyes narrowed. I will not give you a story, Mr. Director.

PROLOGUE

A long Elenas smooth white back is an ancient scar that cuts downward in grotesque beauty like a long, graceful snake. It begins at the joint of her right shoulder and sails south across her shoulder blade, then her spine, swoops around the lower edge of her left ribs and across the unguarded softness where vital organs once lived, and finally ends deep in her left buttock. In places, it looks like a rope, dark pink and angry; in others, it submerges beneath the flesh, showing only a slight white scratch above the skin.

Men love it, thinking themselves so original, so generous in their tracings of it, so accepting. In fact, it is the lovers version of slowing to look at an accident on the freeway, equal parts horror, fascination, and, if there is any wisdom, gratitude. Some ask her what happened. Some do not. All of them wonder.

But only Elenas ghosts know her story. The ghosts who travel with her. The ghosts she protects. The ghosts who will never leave her.

Red onions are especially divine. I hold a slice up to the sunlight pouring in through the kitchen window, and it glows like a fine piece of antique glass. Cool watery-white with layers delicately edged with imperial purplestrong, humble, peacefulwith that fiery nub of spring green in the center

MARY HAYES GRIECO, from The Kitchen Mystic

ONE

E lena had been expecting Dmitri for more than an hour when he finally stormed through the back door of the Blue Turtle, the Vancouver restaurant where they both worked.

Shed come in early, as was her habit, to cook in the agreeable quiet of the Sunday morning kitchen, when the young apprentices and line cooks and dishwashers were all still abed after their Saturday night revelries. Her only companion was Luis, the forty-something El Salvadorian commis, who stirred his stockpots with a hand so brown and squat it looked like a hand balloon. He sang cheerfully under his breath, a bloody old Spanish folk song about a conquistador taking revenge on his enemy. It made Elena think of nights at the VFW when she was eleven or twelve, drinking Cokes while everyone danced the two-step. No doubt it made Luis think of bodegas back home.

Humming tunelessly along with him, Elena stood at the stove, stirring pale pink shallots and yellow onions with a long wooden spoon, thinking of the things she needed to check for service today. She thought of conquistadores and the plate armor theyd worn to protect themselves from arrows.

Mainly, she thought of Dmitri, who had betrayed her.

Her whole body ached this morning, back and hips from the old injuries, shoulders and neck from trying to erect the armor she had to assemble afresh each and every day, finely honed plates of sharp arrogance and bad language beneath which shethe secret and guarded Elenacould hide. She rolled her shoulder blades down her back, reminded herself to stand tall.

Shake it off.

When the onions were nearly done, she crushed garlic with the flat of her knife, and was about to scrape it into the mix when Dmitri burst through the back door. Hearing his fury in the slam of the door, she pulled the pan off the fire and turned to meet his anger.

Long and lean, with severe planes in his beautiful Russian face, he strode through the kitchen and flung a newspaper down on the counter. She turned off the burner and wiped her hands.

The paper was turned to the front page of the Lifestyle section, and featured a photo taken two weeks before. Of Elena, dressed in chefs whites at the end of a shift, long blonde hair pulled back from her face beneath the bright scarves she had adopted as her trademark. She lifted a glass of wine to the camera with a crooked smile and a saucy cock of a brow. It was a good photo, she thought again. It made her look younger than her thirty-eight years, sexier, charming. The headline read:

STANDING UP TO THE HEAT

BLUE TURTLE CHEF SAYS LIFE AS A FEMALE IN
THE KITCHEN IS NOT EASY, BUT WORTH IT

I saw it, she said mildly.

You are fired.

What? Her head jerked up. Come on, Dmitri. Its not my fault she liked me better than you. And youre right there in the first paragraph anyway!

It is my kitchen. Your focus should have been on the restaurant, on the menu. Not on yourself.

It is not your kitchen! she said, slamming her knife down on the counter. You have the title of chef, but you know as well as I do that we built this menu and this kitchen together. Its as much mine as it is yours.

Is it? He raised his index finger. One question, hmm? When he got angry or excited or passionate, his speech slipped into the Russian accent hed labored over many years to lose. Whose name is on that door?