He didn’t tell me he was working on a new project. Apparently, this restaurant venture was in the works for nine months, which means he knew about it for months before we broke up. What else was he hiding from me?
“But your new boss is not your ex-boyfriend,” my mom reminds me tenderly, placing another folded towel on top of the neat stack. “Just remember he’s your boss and everything will be okay.”
I laugh at her oversimplification of my predicament, and the gentle reminder to keep my hands off Ethan’s utensil. “That’s nowhere in the vicinity of the truth. Edward used me, Mom. Doesn’t that piss you off?”
She shoots me an angry look. “Don’t say that word.”
We stare at each other for a moment as she waits for me to test her. “Piss. Piss. Piss,” I say as if I’m twelve years old.
She sighs. “Of course it makes me angry, dear,” she replies, placing the folded towels in the now-empty laundry basket, so she can carry them upstairs to the linen closet. “Your father and me wanted to choke him to death.”
My mother’s gentle manner and soft voice make her sometimes crude—but very rarely profane—language even more jarring.
“That’s a little too graphic, Mom. And it’s ‘dad and I.’”
“You know what I mean,” she says, waving off my attempt to correct her grammar. “You need this job. Your father spent so much on Paulo’s—”
“I know,” I say, cutting her off before she can remind me how my father lost his entire life savings on a bad business venture his best friend had roped him into. Well, ex-best friend.
Something my father and I have in common: we’ve both been royally screwed by our exes.
As a daddy’s girl, I don’t like remembering the dark time when my father had to close the family restaurant due to overwhelming debt. It was two years ago, but it feels like yesterday. He was forced to take a mid-level job at Greenwood Capital, the venture capital firm Ethan is using for his restaurant funding. My older brother Adrian, who had worked with my father since graduating high school, moved to Long Island to manage a Dunkin’ Donuts. I’d never seen my father so depressed.
And I never want to see him like that again, which is precisely why I have to take this job.
I don’t want my dad to see all my hard work and education go down the toilet the way the family restaurant did. I have to swallow my pride and use every bit of cunning in my plump little body to earn that promotion and raise. And once I’m back in that sous chef position, I’ll contact the journalist who wrote the profile on Edward in Food & Beverage magazine to tell my side of the story.
You know, the truth.
My mom gets up from the sofa and heads upstairs to put away the towels without another word. As much as I adore my father, I sometimes feel as if my mother squandered some of her potential when she decided to be a housewife.
I’ve never even asked her what her dream job was when she was a child. I’ve always been too afraid to ask; afraid to find out she didn’t want to spend all day cooking and cleaning in between shuttling Adrian to soccer games and trumpet classes, and me to piano lessons and cooking courses. But what if she didn’t want to be a housewife?
Would that mean my entire childhood is a lie, like my relationship with Edward was?
I open up my messages app to send Minka a text.
Me: I start working with Satan’s twin next Friday.
Minka: We should celebrate. You can come over and make me some mangonadas. We can hit delete on your OF profile together.
I smile despite the uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.
In a fit of desperation, I created an OnlyFans page a few weeks ago. I was seriously considering stripping for strangers on webcam if I didn’t get a job. Not that there’s anything wrong with stripping or sex work, but I’ve never been particularly comfortable with the shape my body.
The fit-spiration and thin-spiration movements never appealed to me. I love butter and sugar too much. In fact, butter and sugar are how I met Minka.
Minka’s day job is human resources manager at the first restaurant group I worked for after graduating from Le Cordon Bleu. Blue Ribbon Foods owns a bunch of local fast-food restaurants and low-brow dine-in establishments. I worked as a line cook for one of their dine-in Tex-Mex restaurants. My half-Mexican father cringed at the food they served, but it wasn’t bad for my first job out of college.
One day, I brought in homemade polvorones—Mexican style sugar cookies—for the staff. I was immediately sent to Minka’s office to be reprimanded for bringing outside food into the restaurant. But Minka’s assurance that she wasn’t actually going to write me up endeared her to me. And my insistence that she take the forbidden cookies home to her family won me an invitation to happy hour with her and some coworkers. We’d been best friends ever since.
And we still referred to all sugar cookies as forbidden.
Me: 8pm Saturday?
Minka: I’ll pick you up. Pack your jammies.
In the six days since I accepted the hostess position at Forked, construction of the dining room and bar has been completed. Blue masking tape Xs dot the taupe walls, where paint touchups are needed. Potted plants are strewn about the room, waiting to be placed in the boxy, modern planters near the windows and behind the reception desk. Stacks of liquor cases behind the bar sit ready to be unpacked, the bottles to be arranged on floating wooden shelves.
Ollie waves at me from behind the bar, then resumes chatting with a bearded, tattooed fellow who appears to be unpacking a box of shot glasses. They’re both wearing the same black T-shirt and
