The mistress, p.32
The Mistress, page 32
The kitchen was dated but sparkling clean, and there was a surprise awaiting them, too. A door marked Bakery opened, and in came an older Black woman with thick-rimmed glasses, her hair in a bun and braids. She carried a tray of baked goods and a pitcher of lemonade.
“I’m Ida,” she said, setting the tray on a spotless stainless-steel counter.
“You’re the bakery owner,” Yolanda said. “What a pleasure.”
“In name only,” the woman said. “I’m retired, now—supposed to be, anyway. My son, Jerome, runs the place, but I still have a stake in the business. I came in today because I like to know who we might be doing business with.”
Margot introduced herself, and Ida stepped back to take her measure. “Look at you,” she said. “You’re no bigger than a minute. And so young.”
“Reckon so,” Margot said, “but I’ve been at it a good while. Started out making sandwiches with my mama for a food truck.”
“Is that so? You came up in the business, then.”
“Uh-huh. It was just my mama and me, and she was my best friend,” Margot said. In fact, her mother had been her whole world. “Her sandwiches were beyond delicious. Pimento cheese, smoked meatloaf, egg salad, roast beef and remoulade, honey butter biscuits and fried chicken . . . Folks lived for her food.” Darla Salinas had never made much of a living, not because her food wasn’t good—it was—but because she didn’t have a head for business.
Ida indicated the tray. “Go on now, help yourself. Have a bite to eat and then in a little bit, I’ll show you around the place.”
The treats she served were the stuff of dreams—a buttery tart glistening with fresh fruit, a molasses cookie that made Margot almost swoon with pleasure when she sampled it, and tiny, decadent chocolate brownies and lemon bars.
As Anya quizzed Ida about the business, Margot wondered if things would have turned out differently if her mother had focused on getting ahead instead of just getting by. One year, Darla’s brisket and pepperoncini kaiser—with its not-so-secret ingredient of crushed barbecue potato chips—was named best sandwich in the state by Texas Monthly magazine, but she had never capitalized on it.
“I got my own start right here in this kitchen back when it was just a community center.” Ida showed them around, opening the door to the abandoned dining room. It had a dated, neglected air, the walls painted with scenes of old Mexico. The empty restaurant resembled a ghost town abandoned in haste, leaving behind upended tables and chairs, an apron on a hook, a battered soccer poster, tubs of plastic tumblers and flatware, discarded receipts and order slips.
Margot stood still for a few moments, picturing the space transformed into a warm, fresh, welcoming restaurant. In her dreams, driven by a yearning to find a place where she mattered, where she fit in, where she was in control, she had designed every nook and cranny, setting the stage for people to enjoy her food.
Ida finished the tour with a gracious smile. “I hope I see you again soon, Margot,” she said.
“Decision time,” Anya said when they stepped out into the service alley. The dumpsters were neatly aligned and labeled for trash and recyclables. There was an old basketball hoop above a wall with a fading antiwar mural that appeared to be from the Vietnam era. “We need to go over the pros and cons of each place.”
As Margot mulled over her options, she tried to be cold-bloodedly objective about each locale. The buzzy Fisherman’s Wharf place, the tony Nob Hill location, or historic Perdita Street.
“What do you think?” she asked Anya.
“Well, it could be challenging to share a kitchen with that bakery. It’s clean and roomy, but some of the equipment is dated.”
“True,” Margot conceded. “But remember, I’ve been working in a food truck, so I’m good with cramped spaces. This place feels comfortable. Down-to-earth, here in the middle of a city that still intimidates me sometimes. I like Ida. She seems so cool. And what did you say that bakery was called?”
Anya handed her a business card. “Sugar.”
Margot felt a smile unfurl. Suddenly she had a sense of clarity, one so powerful that she no longer second-guessed herself. “Perfect.”
“Well now, I hope you’re happy with the place,” Ida said. The lease had been signed, plans approved, licenses granted, and the transformation was nearly done.
“We looked at a lot of properties,” Margot said. “Once I found this place, I was done looking. It feels exactly right to me.”
“Sometimes it works like that,” Ida said. “When you know, you know.”
Margot hoped Ida was right. The past five months had been intense, but rewarding. A professional design and development team had turned her vision into a reality. She herself had scouted the vintage Victorian chandeliers, spray-painted them black, and hung them in the all-white dining room. The booths along the inner walls showed a subtle hint of color, accented by a single apple-green napkin tucked into a stemmed glass, glowing against the arctic white. The overall impression was clean but not stark or intimidating. The place still smelled of plaster and paint, but soon it would be filled with the smoky sweet aroma of barbecue.
The kitchen and prep areas had been refurbished and updated. Personnel hired and trained, technology in place, menus agonized over, tested, and curated. The playlist featured old and new music that was audible but unobtrusive. Her freshly trained bar staff would soon be serving craft cocktails like the Baja Oklahoma and the Wild West martini. She had attended to every detail she could imagine, all the while being fully aware that the trouble would come from a source no one had anticipated. This was the nature of the restaurant business. This was the reality she had to accept. And that just might be what made it so exciting to her.
She and Ida sat at the gleaming bar, which had been reclaimed from a 1908 hotel.
“I brought you some samples from the pit and smokehouse.” She offered Ida a carryout package with brisket and links and her favorite sides. She also included a few jars of sauce.
“sugar+salt,” Ida said, studying the label. “And now we’re neighbors. Isn’t that something?”
“I took it as a sign,” Margot said. “I came up with that name for the sauce when I was a kid.”
“Did you now? My, my.” Ida leaned in with genuine interest. She listened with a friendly tilt of her head. She always seemed like a person comfortable in her own skin. “Something your mama showed you?”
Margot found Ida easy to talk to—which was something, since Margot rarely felt at ease with people. “She let me experiment in the commercial kitchen. Once I was on my own, I started making sauce in small batches for a barbecue place I worked at years ago.
Cubby Watson’s Barbecue, it was called, run by him and his wife, Queen. In the Texas Hill Country, barbecue’s practically a religion, and the Watsons were always in need of kitchen help. I started on dishwashing detail and prepping ingredients for their classic sides, and when Cubby saw how serious I was, he showed me every aspect of the trade, from tending the firebox to tending the bar— which I was too young to do back then, but he was a fine teacher.”
“Sounds like a good place to start,” said Ida.
Margot nodded. “I loved it, even the hard parts. Cubby’s one of the best pitmasters in the world. His brisket is so falling-apart tender you’d swear it was cooked in butter. Folks would travel miles to sample Queen’s house-made sausage, her vegan portobello sandwiches with creamy remoulade, and her Texas sheet cake.”
“How wonderful. I can see what inspired your menu,” Ida said.
The phone rang and she stepped into the bakery office to take the call. Margot was seldom so chatty, but she felt as if she’d made a friend. In several ways, Ida reminded her of Queen Watson—a woman with a sturdy spirit who seemed like she could withstand any storm. Both were women of color, so Margot was sure they’d encountered their share of storms. Queen’s fortitude had inspired Margot to survive when she was at her most vulnerable, and she sensed a kindred soul in Ida.
Margot had been sixteen when she showed up in the Watsons’ kitchen in Banner Creek, Texas, looking for work, any kind of work.
Her story was one of uncertainty and desperation, but she’d held her head up and looked them in the eye—first Cubby, mildfaced and quiet-spoken, with busy, talented hands and burly arms that could manage the big cuts of meat in the outside pit—and then Queen, whose impassive regard measured Margie from the top of her blond head to the bottom of her skinny legs.
“You’re mighty young to be out on your own,” Queen had observed.
Margot—Margie, back then—wasn’t quite sure what the rule was for underage minors. She missed her mother so much in that moment. She missed the way they’d stay up late together on Saturday nights, talking and giggling about everything and nothing. Even when Mama had her sick spells, the two of them were best friends and life was simple, nothing remarkable about it—until Del came along.
Del. Delmar Gantry. At thirteen, Margie had been told that they were a family now. She asked her mother what they were before, and Mama broke out laughing. Margie had never understood the joke. Del talked slick and didn’t have a job. He looked like a movie star, and he and her mama together were like a Hollywood golden couple. They reminded her of the couples you saw in People magazine, looking glamorous even if they were just getting coffee or watching a Lakers game.
Except unlike the Hollywood couples, Mama and Del were always broke. Then one day, as Mama was teaching her to drive, she pulled off the road and said she had a headache. She passed out and wouldn’t wake up, and by the time the police came, she was already gone. An embolism. Mama had always been sickly, but the doctor at the hospital said it was totally random, with no underlying cause and no way to stop it.
Both Margie and Del were so destroyed by shock and grief that they couldn’t function. They were like pieces of a boat that had broken apart, drifting aimlessly away from each other, attached to nothing. Mama had been the glue that held the family together. When she was gone, so was the bond.
Then one day Margie noticed Del looking at her in a certain way.
“How old are you now?” he asked.
“Sixteen.” How could he not know that?
At night she heard his footsteps in the hallway outside her room. The footsteps paused next to the door. She didn’t breathe for a long time. Not one single breath. Not until, thank god, the footsteps shuffled into silence.
The looks Del slid her way didn’t go away, and sometimes after he had a few beers, she heard his tread outside again. He’d softly scratch on her door. The feeling in her gut warned her to leave and so she took off in her mother’s car. She took along a suitcase with a few changes of clothes, some key kitchen items, and the only thing of value her mother had left behind—a thick, food-spattered binder crammed with her handwritten and annotated recipes.
“My mama died,” Margie had explained to Queen, keeping her eyes low. “And her boyfriend, Del, he wasn’t a good guy.”
After that, Cubby and Queen hadn’t asked too many questions, which was a big relief, because she hadn’t wanted to talk about Del. Now she remembered the Watsons with deep gratitude, wondering if she would ever be able to repay their many kindnesses. When they discovered she was living in her car, they’d set her up in a garage apartment near the restaurant’s smoke shack at the edge of town.
Within a few years, she’d herself in every aspect of the service and was an eager student of the art of barbecue. Cubby jokingly called her the son he never had. In fact, he and Queen were childless, and when they’d started bringing Margie to service on church Sundays, they’d raised eyebrows for sure. A blond-haired white girl, she had never set foot in a Black house of praise. But Queen was a church mother and Cubby a deacon, and the congregation of the Church of Hope made her welcome in a way she’d never been welcomed anywhere else.
Thanks to steady wages and tips, and the proceeds from her small-batch sauces, she managed to pull together enough of a life to rent a little furnished cottage by the creek, with a cat she’d rescued from a box of kittens in the H.E.B. parking lot. She had settled into a life of quiet contentment, until the night everything fell apart.
Ida returned from the office and put the carryout box in a thermal carrier. “Smells like pure heaven,” she said. “I’ll take it home for dinner.”
“Let me know what you think,” Margot said.
“Right now, what I think is we’re going to get along just fine.” Ida grinned at Margot’s expression. “Don’t worry. I really am retired. I won’t be sticking my nose in your business. Have you met Jerome?”
“I’ve been really busy. We haven’t crossed paths yet.”
“You will, no doubt. Mind if I share this with him and his boys?” “Not at all. And there’s plenty more where that came from.”
“Jerome’s a single parent,” Ida said. “It’s a challenge, but he’s a fine daddy.”
“I hope to meet him soon,” Margot said.
“I like having them over,” Ida said. “They’re good company.” “Is there a Mr. Sugar?”
“There was. We divorced a long time back,” Ida said, “after Jerome finished high school. All Douglas left me was his name. He remarried and passed away five years ago.”
“You never married again?”
“I never did.” She paused, seeming to hover on the edge of a larger explanation. Then she shrugged. “Got to liking my own company. Too much, if you ask my son. Jerome, he worries about me.”
“Wait a minute—he’s single, and he worries because you’re single?”
Ida chuckled. “Projecting, I suppose. He knows I get lonely sometimes, and I suppose I do, but . . .” She looked off into the distance. “My heart’s stuck in the past, I guess.” Before Margot could ask her about that, Ida asked, “What about you? Single? Dating?”
“Yes—single. And dating? Not at the moment.” Not in a lot of moments, she reflected. Guys asked her out and sometimes she said yes. She’d had a couple of first dates that hadn’t gone anywhere. She did want to find someone. She wanted that feeling of letting someone in, but opening her heart proved to be more challenging than opening a restaurant. There was always a tiny part of her that stood firm against vulnerability. A part that could never move beyond the past that haunted her every day. Focusing on other things was a form of avoidance, but it was simpler to concentrate on meeting with the investment group and planning strategy, working with her new staff. “Getting this place up and running has been my whole life lately,” she told Ida. “Anya, my GM, warned me that the general rule of thumb is that things will take twice as long and double the money.” Margot sighed. “My original three-month window stretched out to six.”
“One day, it’ll seem like the blink of an eye. I was young like you when I started the bakery,” Ida said. “It was all I ever wanted to do. The neighborhood was a lot different back in the seventies. This space was a church-run soup kitchen. We bought the building for next to nothing. I set up a playpen for my little boy, Jerome, right over there by my desk.” She gestured toward the office. “We like to say we’ve been partners in crime ever since. His boys are eight and ten now, and they’re just about the prettiest things you ever did see.”
“Spoken like a proud grandma.” Margot had only vague, indistinct memories of her own grandparents. When her mother had died, Margot had contacted them and they sent a sympathy card. But they hadn’t shown up for the sad, hasty service to bid their daughter farewell.
When she thought about her mother’s parents, she could only come up with a vast nothingness. She pictured them like strangers on a commercial for a reverse mortgage, benign and generic. “I hope I get to meet your grandsons one day,” she said to Ida.
“I’m sure you will. Just watch out—they eat like a plague of locusts, those two.”
“My favorite kind of folks.” Margot had a good feeling about Ida and about this place. Apart from Miles, it was the hardest, best thing she’d ever done.
One week until opening day. The deadline loomed, as keenly anticipated as Christmas morning and as dreaded as judgment day. Late at night, Margot keyed in the door code to the kitchen delivery bay behind the restaurant and let herself in. She was too wound up to sleep, so she decided to take advantage of the nighttime quiet and get some work done.
It was a good thing that she loved the work, because there was no end to it.
Her kitchen was ready, her staff trained, her menu set and ready to go. Finally. Tomorrow night would be the first dinner service, a trial run. It was a complimentary dinner for her executive committee and their guests, so they could sample the food and toast the new enterprise. Just the thought of opening the doors gave Margot wave after wave of nervous chills.
Something about the kitchen workflow had been nagging at her. A long wait for an order could ruin a meal, even if the food was delicious. A smooth flow from station to station was essential.
Over and over, she simulated an imaginary order, timing each part of the sequence from prep to plating. While working the line, she scarcely noticed the time passing. This happened to her a lot. When she was into something, time seemed to stop and wait for her.
She found a possible bottleneck at the far end of the kitchen. There was a tiny desk area that had become a catchall for unsorted objects—mail, utensils, charging cords, odds and ends. She was still organizing the space, but so far, her only accomplishment had been to install a corkboard above the desk. She’d tacked up a photo of Kevin, looking totally luxe curled up in the window of her apartment, and another picture—one of the few she had of herself with her mother. It was an old photo booth strip they’d made the one time they’d visited the beach at Corpus Christi. She could still remember that day, the two of them riding bikes along the seawall and playing in the waves, then getting cones of soft serve and plugging quarters into an old pachinko machine. They’d crammed into the booth, making faces and giggling together. We looked so much alike, she thought. We looked like sisters.
