The Lost Recipe for Happiness - By Barbara O'Neal Page 0,35
day. Good. He liked weathery days. Liked being in the steamy kitchen with music playing and food shaping up in pans and pots and trays, the smell of frying meat and bleach from the dishboys mopping the floors and the waft of rain blowing in through a door. The best, man.
Every now and then, Ivan liked to have a joint before work, especially if it was the kind of day when he was going to be making things up, trying new flavors and colors. Weed exaggerated things, brought out new notes he might not think of otherwise. There was plenty of time to play with ideas for the new menu, and he’d discovered something energizing in Chef’s ingredients list. New brightness, new angles, possibilities that had his brain popping in ways it hadn’t for a long time.
From his shirt pocket, he took a pack of Newports and lit one. The sharp menthol cooled his throat and he exhaled with a sense of deep well-being. This whole business with the new chef was taking him by surprise. It was hard to needle her. Hard to want to get rid of her, though that had been his original plan when he heard he was being replaced.
That first image he had of her, of a snow queen from some old fairy tale, had not gone away. There was some air of the tragic around her, some long-ago secret she didn’t tell, like a queen who had lost her kingdom. He saw it in the way she moved so stiffly sometimes when she thought no one was looking, the way she almost dragged her left foot when she was tired, how she had to brace herself to lift a heavy bowl of masa.
Meditatively, he smoked. For now, he’d let her alone, because it was thanks to her that Patrick had come to Aspen, to this restaurant. Every day, he was happy to go to work; every day, he thought of little tidbits to offer the sommelier, who liked sweets and savories and being right. Patrick was fastidious and highborn and out of Ivan’s league by six classes, but it didn’t seem to matter. He couldn’t stop thinking of him, and in his company, he was captured every day by some new detail. His water-green eyes. A pursed mouth, like a Kewpie doll. Those elegantly clean hands with the precisely cut nails.
Ivan took a drag off his cigarette and looked at his own nails. His hands were scrupulously clean, of course. A chef was careful with things like that, but his nails were buttugly. He should take better care of them.
Vaguely, he was aware of a creeping sense of quiet in himself, a thing that hadn’t been there in a long time. Cooking gave it to him. Love gave it to him, not that he’d been real lucky in that sense. If he was honest with himself, he also knew not drinking gave it to him. No nightmares when he left the booze alone. But also a little too much reality.
Smoking peacefully on a still mountain morning, just slightly high, Ivan Santino, who had been kicked down every time he tried to climb out of the shithole he’d been born to, wondered if this might be one more chance to make good.
A beat-up old Chevy pulled into the gravel drive. Ivan stood up, recognizing a buddy from the White Horse, a dive the next town over. He felt vaguely embarrassed to be caught high and dreaming of Patrick, as if the movie played on his forehead. “Hey, brother,” Ivan said as he opened the door. “What’s up?”
Damon came forward, his hair grimy beneath a blue stocking cap he never removed. “I killed an elk this morning,” he said, gesturing to a dent in his grille. “Dressed it right there, and wondered if you might be able to use some elk meat for your restaurant.”
Ivan turned down the corners of his mouth. “I don’t know, brother. Maybe. Why don’t you bring some on over in about an hour? I’ll be there then.”
“Will do.”
“How much you looking to get?”
Damon named a figure that would keep him in JB for a few weeks. Ivan nodded. “Come talk to me at the restaurant. Bring some bones. There’s a chow mix hanging around who’ll go apeshit over them.”
On a Thursday afternoon in late September, Elena peered at the green card presented to her by a dark-eyed young man from Mexico. A man she hoped would be her last hire—a dishwasher.