mid-sip when she realized what she’d said. It was one of her half-truths. Delilah went back to her basil.
“Not that I’m complaining,” Delilah was quick to say. “Whatever you want to call what you know is totally saving our bacon. It’s just … I’ve always found that “no cooking” story a little hard to believe.”
Shea couldn’t be mad at Delilah for her directness. The big, pink elephant was in the room. It had been more and more present every day in the two weeks that she’d been working at The Spoon.
“I never said I can’t cook—I only said I don’t. Once upon a time, cooking was something I was forced to do.”
“Your parents’ restaurant?” Delilah recalled.
“My dad’s restaurant, really,” Shea finally revealed. “A southern food place outside of Chicago.”
Delilah stopped again, this time to throw Shea a little smile. “Which explains why you know how to fry chicken.”
Shea coaxed the sticker on the pastry box to open.
“He grew up in South Carolina working in the kitchen his mother ran out of her house. Officially, it didn’t exist.”
“And unofficially?” Delilah asked in the patient voice of somebody who was curious to hear the story.
“Unofficially, she made more money under the table running a restaurant out of her back door than my grandfather made at his day job of twenty years.”
Shea picked up a bun, suddenly less hungry than she had been a minute before. She hadn’t talked about her father’s restaurants—all the Lola’s Kitchens—in ten years. Between Tasha and Delilah these past weeks, she’d mentioned it twice. Her promise to Tasha about approaching her father for testimony had borne no fruit. Every time she’d come close to calling, she’d chickened out.
“She fried catfish and chicken, served shrimp and grits, baked corn bread and rolls…she even had a barbecue pit. And her pound cake … it was legendary. The way she ran it wasn’t legal, but people looked the other way.”
There was no way for Shea to tell the story without remembering the scores of times her own father had told it—with some mixture of anguish and pride.
“Why didn’t she ever open a sit-down place? You know—make it official?” Delilah asked.
This was the part of the story that had always made her father’s face turn dark. “It was the fifties in the deep south. No bank was gonna give a business loan to a black woman.”
“So your father grows up and opens the restaurant your grandmother never could.”
“Actually…” Shea hated this part. “He helped her start over in a new place after she got run out of town.”
By then, Delilah had stopped cooking altogether, and she listened with rapt attention to the tale. Her jaw slacked a little at that last bit.
“Suspicious fire,” Shea explained. “There were other things—smaller things and even a few direct threats. They came through when her kitchen started doing too well.”
“Shit…” Delilah breathed.
Shea took a bite of her morning bun a second after responding, “Yeah.”
Shea chewed thoughtfully for a long minute. Delilah joined her in eating a bun.
“So your dad shoved the family business down your throat.”
Shea nodded. “Other kids hung out with their friends after school. I went straight from school to work and I stayed there until we closed. My homework didn’t get done until all the guests were gone—until the floors were being mopped and the kitchens were being cleaned. The weekends were even worse. There were times I had to wait tables and serve kids I went to school with, including boys I liked. It was awesome.”
“So you got the hell out of there as fast as you could and swore off cooking forever!” Delilah raised the uneaten portion of her bun with a flourish. It lightened the mood with a dramatic flair that made Shea glad.
“Yup. Moved to New York the day I turned eighteen. Got as far away as I could from that life and that town. Twelve years later, here I am.”
Delilah went back to cooking but gave a sad little smirk. “Your reasons for leaving are better than mine. I left Sapling for a guy who promised me the sun, the moon and the stars.”
“Uh-oh,” Shea grimaced. “He sounds like trouble.”
“Him cheating on me in high school when I had mono for six weeks might have been a clue. But I was in love with the guy. He was a singer in a rock band and I was young and na?ve.”
“When did you figure out it wasn’t gonna work?”
“Honestly? Pretty soon. I saw how flimsy his plan was the