Fire Up My Heart by Morgan Zach

Author:Morgan, Zach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-12-14T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

If Chef had wanted to give me an impossible command, he could have hardly done better than telling me to go to sleep after all of that.

First of all, of course, he'd gotten me agitated. Those feelings I'd barely been able to articulate, which Jamal had so insightfully brought out, were enough to keep you up at night.

Combine that with the wondering mystery of just what, exactly, was making this so important to him - professional pride? did he know someone there? What did this have to do with the woman who Jamal said he'd spurned? - and you're definitely not getting any sleep.

I managed to turn five or six hours of laying restlessly on clean sheets into a freshly reorganized bookshelf plus about two hours of light dozing before going in early. They were going to need me.

I came in through the front door at the brasserie this time, just for a change of pace. I'd stopped to get a catering pack of coffee and a half-dozen donuts from somewhere nearby, for the sake of either easing Chef or keeping him from collapsing in a mixture of starvation and agitation.

It was quite different out there. For one thing, all the tables had been rearranged into broad avenues and covered in white tablecloths. For another, the area near the bar (rather centrally located in our establishment) was set up with spaces helpfully labelled "flowers," "gifts," and several extremely large photographs of the happily married couple.

I didn't know their names, and I didn't care to grab a program - I might not see them at all, except at the end. I wasn't going to be doing tableside carving, nor was Chef. We'd be slaving away in the back.

Roxanne was organizing place settings as I approached the kitchen door.

"I love your tuxedo!" I said.

She looked up, groggy, and smiled back: "Thanks! It's not too much, right?"

"Nope," I said as my hip pushed open the lightweight doors into the kitchen: "Fits great."

Moving past the dark alcove where stacks of rolled silverware (you've seen it - a napkin wrapped around fork, knife, perhaps spoon) and the dark mysteries of the soda dispenser lurked, I was confronted by the melodious voice of Chef mingling with that of Jamal, both of them disguised by something sizzling and sizzling loud.

Both of them were standing near the grill, which was currently covered with a half-dozen of the game hens that Jamal had prepared. Jamal was pointing at them with one hand, another on his hip; Chef had tongs, which he raised up threateningly.

"HI!" I shouted out. Both of them looked at me, startled.

Chef turned back to the grill and Jamal came round, eager.

"Paul I am so glad to see your ass right now," he said, pulling one of our mugs off the stacked trays that held hundreds and filling it from the catering box.

"What about the rest of me?"

"That isn't too bad either," Jamal said.

As he opened the box and selected one of the hand-crafted artisanal pastries

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.