When in Doubt, Add Butter Read online

  My guess was that he probably had a lot of stories I’d enjoy over a beer if we ever met.

  Other than that, though, the guy was a mystery. I had a pretty good handle on most of the people I worked for—if nothing else, you can tell a lot about people by the things they surround themselves with in their homes—but Mr. Tuesday had very few clues to his personality in the main part of his apartment, and I’d never been into his bedroom or anything. Essentially, it was like trying to figure out something about the last person who’d been in your hotel room.

  Wednesday was a different story. Wednesday was Lex Prather, who was usually there for at least part of the time I was. Personality-wise, he seemed to be the exact opposite of Mr. Tuesday, flamboyant where Tuesday was understated. Social, where Tuesday seemed to just be working all the time. But Lex was almost as much fun to cook for, though his tastes were far more highfalutin.

  Until a year and a half ago, he lived with his mother in this two-bedroom flat in the old Westchester, off Mass Avenue. She was like Perle Mesta, and he was Felix Unger—they must have been quite a pair. Anyway, when she passed away, he hired me to cook all his old favorites, which consisted of the kind of fussy white tablecloth dishes one might have found on the menu of the Titanic. Shrimp Louis, oysters Rockefeller, Waldorf salad; even the occasional molded Jell-O dish incongruously made it onto the menu. He apparently had no problem drawing the line at mint jelly, however.

  Lex is tall and thin, and always impeccably dressed, which is appropriate, since he owns the venerable old Simon’s Department Store downtown. It outlived both Woodward & Lothrop and Garfinckel’s department stores, though I believe its reputation might be wobbling a bit now in the shadow of Nordstrom and everything you can find in Tysons Corner and the Galleria.

  Anyway, the movie version of Lex could be perfectly played by Tony Randall. He is of completely indeterminate sexual orientation—though by “indeterminate” I mean that I don’t know if he’s gay or completely asexual; straight does not appear to be an option, although it’s possible I’m wrong about that, I suppose.

  A social butterfly, Lex often had me cooking for his mystery book group or his annual Christmas, New Year’s, May Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, and Halloween parties.

  The upshot is that Lex had champagne tastes and a champagne budget. This made him pretty fun to cook for in and of itself, but he was also just a really great guy and I enjoyed seeing him every time. That’s a luxury I don’t always have with my clients, and it’s particularly nice since work is basically the only social contact I have at all.

  Which takes us to Thursday.

  Thursday nights were with the Oleksei family, which was sheer chaos. Not really bad chaos, necessarily, just crazy chaos. The Oleksei family consisted of a grandfather, Vlad, who was clearly the patriarch of the family, often holding court in a mysterious back room I never saw but from which people would come and go at all hours, often leaving looking fearful or even in tears.

  I half suspected that they were part of the Russian Mafia.

  Seriously.

  They made me a little nervous sometimes.

  Vlad Oleksei’s wife had died years earlier, leaving him with three strapping sons—now in their thirties and forties—and a handwritten recipe book I could not read because it was in Russian. Fortunately, my sister’s boyfriend worked in the Russian department at American University and was translating the recipes as best he could, though the metric translation was still a bit of a challenge for me.

  The Oleksei sons—Borya, Serge, and Viktor—were all nice enough to me, and always politely appreciative of the food I prepared, but there was something … off about them, too. They owned a dry cleaning and tailoring store, which I knew from The Jeffersons could be profitable, but it was just hard to picture the three of them going into one little dry cleaner every day and whistling as they busily worked out a stain in the collar of a shirt.

  Nevertheless, assuming that wasn’t a cover for their actual work with the Russian mob, that was what they did.

  Viktor was the only one who was married. His wife was American and stood out in that family like a sore thumb—blond, big-lipped, brash, and boisterous. It was hard to imagine how she lived in such a traditional old-world atmosphere. I could picture her much more easily in a football jersey, tailgating with a bunch of burly blond lumberjack types, than with this dark, moody family.

  Fridays I had the Lemurras in Georgetown.

  What can I say about Marie Lemurra?

  For one thing, she was a social climber to the nth degree. In the three short months I’d worked for her, I’d watched her try to get in with politicians, a few former B-list movie stars who now lived in or outside D.C., and most recently, local famewhores on the D.C. True Wife Stories reality show.

  For another thing, she seemed to hate me, though that had to be impossible, given that she knew me only in a professional context and even that involved me doing her bidding and not arguing. Nevertheless, she was a woman who didn’t seem satisfied with acquiescence of any sort; she wanted it to include at least a small measure of pain. I think Marie Lemurra needed other people to be wrong so that she, herself, could feel right.

  It wasn’t an ideal work situation, believe me, but I don’t think very many people among us would say their work is always 100 percent awesome.

  Marie Lemurra, and those like her, was the price I had to pay for having a job I otherwise loved.

  So that was my week right now: the Van Houghtens, Mr. Tuesday, Lex, the Olekseis, and the Lemurras. They ran the gamut, in every way.

  With the banquet work added on the weekends, my life felt full and secure.

  Famous last words, huh?

  Chapter 2

  This time, it wasn’t my fault.

  I mean, seriously, who the hell owns a peacock in Georgetown?

  I had worked for the Lemurras for three months, every Friday night, and had never encountered anything living on their property, though their premium lot in the middle of the city certainly had room for undetected livestock. I was surprised once by what I still contend was some kind of werewolf there.

  But that was ages ago, and when I pulled up to cater their biggest party of autumn, no one warned me to keep an eye out for the fucking peacock.

  I mean if you had just acquired an exotic pet that no one in their right mind would expect to see someplace so incongruous, wouldn’t you think to give everyone a heads-up? I’m sure the place that sold the peacock must have had some sort of PEACOCK AT PLAY signs to put by the driveway, like those green turtle things that warn drivers to slow down because of children running in the streets.

  On top of that, if the exotic pet in question had a tendency to be sexually attracted to blue cars, and you knew your private chef was going to show up, as she had every week for three months, in her blue Toyota, wouldn’t that be another thing you’d take into immediate consideration? Hey, let’s tell Gemma to watch out for the peacock.

  I would have.

  But there was not a word of warning. Just like that time they had a guest who was deathly allergic to onion and they didn’t mention it until her husband was frantically searching for the EpiPen as she turned red and struggled to breathe.

  All I know is that one minute I was maneuvering my car toward the kitchen door so I could carry the thirty Cornish game hens—and accoutrements—into the house, and the next thing I knew, there was a little scraping sound on the bumper that I took to be a bit of the bramble that littered the wooded property.

  Because frankly, you don’t immediately think, Wait a minute … I know that sound. That’s the sound of a peacock trying to mount and sexually dominate my bumper. Or even that a peacock might be territorially jealous of said car, viewing it as a romantic rival, which is something, I kid you not, I have since learned in my extensive research on peacocks.

  Of course, I prefer to think Pepe died happy. I mean, at least he thought he was getting laid. That’s good, right?

  Especially sin
ce, as soon as the feathers began to fly, I knew I’d just lost my job.

  * * *

  After the thrashing and hysteria ended—Marie Lemurra’s, not Pepe’s; you will be relieved to know that he went quickly and quietly after his few scratchy advances toward my car—I had to go into the house and prepare the meal anyway.

  Fortunately, Marie was very aware of all eyes being on her, so she didn’t allow her anger toward me to continue bursting forth. The tension was unmistakable, however. I would be amazed if anyone there didn’t feel it.

  Then again, there was always an edge to Marie, so anyone around her would have been hard-pressed to determine exactly what her problem was at any given time.

  Mishaps like this were rare, thank goodness, but they did happen. People were usually very happy with my work. I can’t remember the last time I had a complaint. (I mean one that didn’t involve running over exotic pets, anaphylactic shock I had no way of preventing, or on one unfortunate occasion, a drunken spouse making a pass at me … and no, it wasn’t the husband.)

  If the night had not involved a dinner party, I have no doubt that I would have taken a bath on this one. The way I worked was to buy the ingredients myself, then get reimbursement for them, along with my pay, at the end of the night.

  In this case, it was a party for thirty, including Marie and two cast members from The Real Famewhores of D.C. or whatever the show was called. Marie had been fervently hoping the whole event would be filmed and included on the show in order to increase her screen time. Last year, she’d already made several appearances, backstabbing one person or another—at the time, she’d been tagged on-screen only as MARIE L—but then one of the cast members had grown popular enough to get her own show and there was room for one more in the regular cast, and Marie got the gig.

  The camera crew had been to her house several times, including tonight, but filming never guaranteed the scene would actually be aired. This, of course, made Marie the number one most attentive fan, intently watching for any sign of herself, even if it was just her overbleached hair dipping out of the corner of the shot at Columbia Country Club’s banquet hall.

  Once, when I’d arrived at her house for a small dinner party, I noticed she had the DVR strategically on hold for more than an hour until her first guest arrived so she could press PLAY and then pretend it just happened to be on when a close-up of her filled the screen.

  “That was dramatic,” Lynn Bowes, my pal who worked as a waitress at most of these events, whispered to me as I chopped a Vidalia onion.

  We’d become friends after we worked together a few times at the Chase Country Club, where my most lucrative work came in the form of special events several times a month, and we’d hung out a few times over the past couple of years on the rare occasion we both had a weekend night off.

  “I’ll say.” I kept my voice low, but I was frustrated. “I don’t know what her problem is.”

  “You don’t?”

  I looked at Lynn. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean a perfectly catered party for her friends going off without a hitch is about as interesting on-screen as paint drying.” She raised an eyebrow. “But histrionics, a catering catastrophe, and a dead peacock might just be enough to tip her over the edge into a leading role on that stupid show if the rumors of cast changes are true.”

  It made total sense. “Are there rumors of cast changes?”

  Lynn snorted. “Oh my God yes, this is the most boring bunch since the Bradys!”

  I had always liked The Brady Bunch, but I took her meaning and gave a laugh. “Then Marie must be salivating at the prospect of getting a full-time gig here.”

  “Ho yeah!”

  My cell phone rang and I glanced at it. It was Penny, my cousin. She was heavily pregnant, on bed rest, and bored out of her mind. She called about three times a day lately. Fortunately, she was always entertaining.

  “Excuse me a minute,” I said, and Lynn gave the Ok signal and walked away. “Hey.”

  “Are you alone?” Penny asked.

  “Ish.”

  She laughed. “I’m calling to remind you not to hide from the cameras. I know you hate having your picture taken and yada yada yada, but someday, trust me, you’ll be glad you did this. In fact, I was thinking if you got on camera, this might even be like the first step toward getting on Top Chef or maybe even getting your own cooking show on the Food Network or something. This could be like your audition tape—”

  “I’m not going to be on the show.”

  “Gemma! You have got to stop this bullshit of being so shy about publicity.”

  “I don’t want publicity.”

  “You need it! You make frozen dinners for five people a week—that’s not going to get you a retirement plan.”

  “No, but the country club will.”

  She sighed. “Okay, but still—if you could make buckets of money being on TV and becoming a celebrity chef while that’s hot, why wouldn’t you?”

  I sighed. We’d had this conversation so many times. Her confidence in me was touching but a little overly optimistic, I thought. “So many reasons.”

  She made a sound of irritation. “I can’t believe you are so bullheaded about this.”

  I laughed. “Why don’t you do it?”

  “I swear, if I could so much as boil water, I’d be all over it!”

  “I’ll teach you. I think I’ll have time on Fridays from now on, since I’m about to get fired.”

  “What?” Everything was always big to Penny. Two years older than me, but about a hundred times more energetic and bubbly, for her life was one huge party and she wanted to taste every single piece of cake and lick ice cream, good or bad. I could almost hear her adjusting herself into the most comfortable listening position.

  “Oh, the usual, you know”—I peeled another onion—“dead peacock.”

  “You tried to serve dead peacock to someone?”

  “No!” I laughed at the thought. “Although that might be what they’re left with. No, the Lemurras bought a peacock as a pet or decoration or something equally ridiculous, and I ran over it.”

  “How do you run over a peacock?”

  “I didn’t see it.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Aren’t they kind of … obvious?”

  I already knew I was going to get this question a lot. “Well, maybe, if you know to look for them! Otherwise, believe me, they’re fucking invisible. You can back right over one and not know it until you hear the screaming.”

  “It screamed?”

  “No, she did. Marie.” I frowned. Had there been cameras running at the time? I sincerely hoped not, though they couldn’t put me on the show without me signing a release, could they?

  “You are totally making this up!”

  “Really? This is the story you think I’d come up with on the spot? That I ran over a peacock?”

  “Well, why would they even have a peacock there?”

  “The eternal question. Look, I have to get back to work. Are you at home?”

  “Very funny.” She was so sick of being homebound, it was starting to make her crazy.

  “Sorry, I keep forgetting.”

  “Would that I could!” I heard the bed creak as she obviously moved with some effort. “I can’t stand being pregnant for one more second. I think it’s time to start taking cold showers, running, doing all the things they say you shouldn’t do, in case it sends you into premature labor.”

  “Don’t you dare! I can’t stay on the phone and babysit you right now, but if you take any chances that land you in the hospital for anything other than labor, you’ll be really sorry.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “I mean it.”

  She laughed. “Okay, okay, got it. But promise you’ll call me if you want to talk.”

  “I promise.”

  I took out the asparagus and started to chop off the woody ends. I was about halfway through five pounds of them when Lynn came back, wearing
a tight expression.

  “She’s on the warpath,” she warned. “I don’t know if she’s really pissed or if she’s just playing it up for the cameras, but I get the feeling this is the real thing.”

  I nodded. “That’s the impression I had.”

  “I mean, she’s at a boiling point right now. You might want to gather your knives.”

  “Oh, no, really?” My nerves jangled.

  “She’s probably afraid PETA is going to come after her publicly and ruin her image or something.”

  That would make the papers, albeit the small papers and probably just a corner thereof. “Good point. Jeez, do you think they will?” I paused in the midst of searing the game hens in a large pan. “Would they come after me?”

  “Nah. That was an accident. The crime here is having a peacock on a property like this at all! It’s like keeping a pony in Times Square. Well, almost. Anyway, she’s the one who’s wrong here, not you.”

  Dread knotted my stomach. “I hope you’re right.”

  “I’m always right.” She glanced around and took a slice of Vidalia and popped it in her mouth. “I love these things. I could eat them like apples.”

  “And never get another date because you perpetually smell like onions.”

  “Who are you kidding? I’m never gonna have another date anyway. And I hate to break it to you, but neither are you. Our jobs are to cater to other people’s dates!”

  “We need to get out now and then.”

  “Damn right! We’re not going to be spinsters forever!”

  I am not a beautiful girl. I am prettyish in the right light, I guess. Average height, average straight brown hair, murky green eyes that have been called everything from “exotic” to “expressive” to “creepy” (thanks, Mark Hutchinson in third grade) but are the one feature that keeps me from blending into the wallpaper.

  I used to have a great figure—this was what fooled guys into thinking I was something I was not in high school, I think—but thanks to life and my vocation, I had to give up on the idea of maintaining a supermodel physique a long time ago. Where once I was tight, I am now best described as voluptuous, and really, I’m okay with that.