1
1999
BALTIMORE
“No walls.”
When Mickey Campbell led the first contractor through the old bank building two years ago—even before he plucked the flat pencil from his back pocket and drew with it in the dust-speckled air to show her where he planned to start framing up first—she told him firmly that she didn’t want walls in her restaurant.
“But people like walls,” he told her. “People need walls. Especially when they’re eating.” Then he shot her a smile that was nearly all gums. “Trust me. You’re going to want walls.”
But Mickey didn’t trust him—and she didn’t hire him. Instead, she found a ponytailed preservation contractor who loved her vision of turning an old bank into an upscale restaurant, and who was as excited as she was to keep the historic fabric in place. A contractor who, with the exception of the bathrooms, didn’t erect a single new wall.
But tonight, trying to stay out of sight in the restaurant’s office on the second-floor mezzanine, Mickey would give her right arm for just one wall.
The review from the Sun sits in the middle of her desk. She’s picked it up a dozen times in the last two hours, scanned every glowing word to memory, and she still can’t believe it’s real. A restaurant owner could go her whole career and never earn a review half this good. Before opening Piquant, Mickey was a head chef for four years. She knows this is true.
She also knows that she should be downstairs celebrating her success with the rest of her hardworking staff, winding her way through the collection of two- and four-tops, stopping to make sure her guests are enjoying their meals, checking the pass and the bar for what’s selling, all the things she does every night at Piquant.
Instead, she’s up here alone and about to jump out of her skin, nursing a flat Diet Coke in her bare feet, her red leather pumps cast off into the corner while below her the restaurant roars with life. It’s a soundtrack she knows well: The cheerful hustle of her beloved servers, expertly zigzagging through the sea of tables like synchronized swimmers. The clatter of plates picked up and set down. The clink of ice and the thump of popped corks as Lucas and his barbacks cruise the gleaming counter where bank customers used to fill out their deposit slips.
And, of course, just beyond the old vault door, the restaurant’s beating heart: Wes’s kitchen, her boyfriend’s commanding voice rising above the din of the hiss and sizzle of garlic in a hot pan, the even chop of a blade mincing herbs, the chime of finished plates landing in the pass. Coming up the ranks, from runner to prep to sous, Mickey had worked for chefs who treated their kitchens like libraries, hushing anyone who dared to raise their voice. She endured the tombs of their cooking temples and vowed that when she finally had her own restaurant, she would insist on noise. Lots of it.
Her naivete infuriates her now. That she really believed ensuring a lively kitchen would be all it took to keep a restaurant in the black.
She gathers the clutter of past-due notices into a pile and shoves them inside her desk. Not so unlike the way she used to cram dirty clothes and magazines from her bedroom floor into her closet when her friends came over after school. If only she could clean up this mess so easily.
She’s always known the chance of financial failure for new restaurants is high, that almost sixty percent of them close their first year, and of those that do survive, only twenty percent will still be around in five years. It was Wes who reminded her of the odds within fifteen minutes of their first meeting years earlier, when Mickey had asked him to join her for a cup of coffee at the café down the street from Dish, where he was head chef and creating quite a stir in the industry, quickly becoming known as one of the most innovative—not to mention attractive—young chefs in Baltimore.
When she began thinking seriously about opening her own restaurant, Mickey made a wish list of chefs she wanted running her kitchen, and Wes Isaac was at the top. When he seemed uneasy about signing on with someone who had never owned a restaurant before, Mickey told him what she lacked in experience she made up for in passion and nerve, which piqued his interest enough to grant her a second meeting, then a third. Back and forth they went, phone calls and more after-hours coffee conversations, until, four weeks later, Wes showed up at her doorstep with a bottle of single malt and a shake to seal their agreement. When his hand closed around hers, Mickey felt the electricity of attraction sizzle up her arm, but both agreed they couldn’t muddy their partnership with romance—a vow they maintained, miraculously, for almost two months. Until one night in the restaurant’s half-finished kitchen, tucked in with takeout and going over possible menus, they stopped to compare kitchen scars. Within minutes, they were like grizzled swordfishermen, hands thrust out over the gleaming stainless countertop, palms up like they were having their life lines read. Wes tried to impress with a brick-oven burn on his wrist, and Mickey matched it with a half-moon on her middle finger from a paring knife that earned her four stitches. He displayed a healed gash on the side of his hand from a Santoku blade, and she raised him the ghost of a blister from a kitchen torch, their bodies leaning closer with each reveal. When she bared a scar on the meat of her thumb, he traced the faint pink thread so slowly that she puddled like an undercooked pot de crème. After they christened the mezzanine (and the floor behind the not-yet-stocked bar) they swore over the rest of their Chinese food that they wouldn’t—couldn’t—act on their feelings again. But not twenty-four hours later, they were tumbling into her unmade futon. From that night on, they were inseparable—partners in the kitchen as well as the bedroom. A team.
Mickey swigs her soda, regret sizzling as she swallows. If they’re such a team, then why has she waited so long to tell him her poor management skills have sent their restaurant into debt?
She picks up the review and scans it again, determined not to let the distraction of tonight’s celebration allow her any more excuses. Enough is enough. She has vowed to tell Wes how dangerously behind they are, and she will, dammit.
“So this is where the great Mickey Campbell is hiding from her fans.”
Nina, Piquant’s front of house manager, appears at the top of the stairs. Her frizzy blond head is peeking around the giant bouquet of pink and peach roses she’s holding, the flowers bursting from a flared frosted vase.
Mickey manages a tired smile. “Very funny,” she says. “And I’m not hiding.”
“Good. Because someone who gets a big, sloppy kiss from the career-make-or-break queen Janine Cowell shouldn’t be hiding.” Nina sets the arrangement down on Mickey’s desk and wipes her palms on her black leather miniskirt. “They’re from Duncan. Card’s inside.”
Mickey’s old boss at the Top Shelf, where she got her first job in a kitchen after culinary school. She leans over and buries her nose in the cloud of blooms for a sugary whiff.
“Jeffrey and Lee are waiting at the bar. They want to buy you a celebratory bottle of Dom.”
Mickey appreciates the offer from her and Wes’s dear friends, but the last thing her frayed nerves need right now is a glass—let alone a bottle—of champagne.
“And Wes wanted me to tell you he’ll be up in ten,” Nina says, then squares Mickey with a hard stare. “You’re going to come clean with him, right?” After Nina accidentally picked up a voice mail from a disgruntled vendor two weeks ago, Mickey had no choice but to confess their financial woes.
Mickey bobs her head calmly, even as her heart races. “Tonight,” she says. “I promise.”
“Good—because he’s still asking me why we stopped hiring new servers and I can’t keep lying to him.”
“That makes two of us,” Mickey mutters, tossing the review back onto her desk with an exasperated sigh.
Nina turns to go. “Oh, and your mother’s holding on line two.”
Mickey looks over at the blinking console, torn. She doesn’t want to be on the phone when Wes comes up, but it’s not like her mother to try her at work. If Hedy is calling, there’s a good reason.
Mickey picks up. “Hi, Mom.”
“I hear congratulations are in order. That lovely manager of yours told me the big news. Four stars! Didn’t I feel like a terrible mother not knowing?”
Glancing down, Mickey spots a past-due notice she missed in her earlier sweep and stuffs it into her desk with the others, bumping the drawer closed with her hip. “You couldn’t have known, Mom. The review only just came out.”
The line goes quiet. “Sweetheart, are you okay? You sound rattled.”
“I’m just tired, that’s all.”
“I know the difference between tired and rattled, Michelle.”
Of course, she did. Mickey might have been able to fool her mother when it came to the difference between a bisque and a soup, but on the subject of distinguishing emotions, Hedy Campbell was an expert. An unexpected skill of almost thirty years selling real estate, she claimed.
“I have some news…” Her mother pulls in a breath and blows it out dramatically, the sort of exhale that could signal excitement or dread. “Cora’s engaged.”
Mickey blinks at the bouquet. “Engaged?” She repeats the word as if there’s a chance her mother has misused it. Or maybe Mickey has heard wrong. Yes, surely she’s heard wrong. Because if her widowed, seventy-two-year-old grandmother—the woman whose passion for food and cooking made Mickey want to be a chef in the first place—if that woman had fallen in love, Mickey would know.
“I don’t understand…” Mickey reaches behind, wanting to be sure her chair is close enough to catch her. “Grams is getting married?”
“Remarried, if you want to be technical about it.”
Mickey drops into her seat. “To who?”
“To Max Dempsey.”
The name is vaguely familiar. “You don’t mean the guy who fixes things around the house for her?”
“That’s exactly who I mean.”
“They’re in love?”
“That’s usually why people get married, Michelle.”
Mickey scans the top of her desk, trying to take this in. “But—but when?”
“When, what?”
“When did they fall in love?”
“I don’t have an exact date. You’ll have to ask your grandmother.”
A pencil sits on the edge of the desk. Mickey grabs it and turns it nervously in her fingers. “But it hasn’t been that long since…”
“Three years. I can’t believe it, either.”
Mickey’s face flushes with shock but her mother’s math is right. The last time she was on Martha’s Vineyard was for her grandfather’s funeral, just two months before Mickey put down the deposit on the old bank, and the realization startles her almost as much as the news of her grandmother getting married again. How was it possible? Three years away from Beech House is the longest she’s ever been gone.
“I wouldn’t have bothered you at work, honey, but the thing is…” Another deep breath in and out. “They want to have the wedding at Beech House as soon as possible.”
“How soon is soon?”
Mickey recognizes the familiar whistling sound that follows: her mother nervously pulling air between her teeth. “This Saturday.”
Six days from now? Mickey looks down at the pencil in her hand, wishing suddenly it were a cigarette. She wants to ask why the rush, then lets the question wither in her throat, feeling badly for it: At their ages, who would want to wait?
“I know it’s last-minute,” her mother says, “but it would mean so much if you could come.”
“Of course I want to come, but—”
Movement flashes and Mickey looks up, her breath catching at the sight of Wes standing there.
He swings his side towel over his shoulder and leans easily against the file cabinet, his dark eyes holding hers, and a familiar pulse of longing circles her stomach.
“Michelle? Honey, are you still there?”
Mickey breaks from his gaze and taps the end of her pencil purposefully on a stack of kitchen-supply catalogs. “I’m not sure I can get away just now, Mom.”
“I know things are busy…” This time her mother’s sigh is pure exasperation. Or maybe surrender. Mickey can’t decide. “Just say you’ll think about it, okay? Oh, and your grandmother wants you to know you can bring a date.”
Mickey glances reflexively over at Wes, his wavy, dark hair—the only untidy thing in his kitchen—looking especially thick tonight. He folds his arms patiently over his whites and smiles at her. She’s been so anxious to introduce him to her family, and the thought of him in a coat and tie is making her heart race …
She clears her throat pointedly. “I’ll call you later, okay, Mom?”
“Okay, honey. Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
Hanging up, Mickey leaves her hand on the phone, needing an extra second, an extra breath, before she rises.
Wes nods to the review on her desk. “I think the Sun likes us.”
“They like us,” Mickey says. “But they love you.”
He stretches his mouth into a crooked grin. “Is that why you’re hiding up here? Because you’re jealous?”
“Why does everyone think I’m hiding?” Mickey tosses the pencil back onto her desk and pushes her hair behind her ears. “And I’m not jealous,” she says. “I just came up to … you know…” She gestures lamely at the cluttered surface. “Organize.”
“Organize later, Beautiful,” Wes says. “There are about a hundred people downstairs waiting to buy you a drink.”
“So I heard.” Perspiration prickles the back of her neck. She spins her long strawberry-blond hair into a twist and holds it up, wanting to get air on her damp skin. Why can she never remember to keep a clip in her drawer?
Copyright © 2023 by Erika Montgomery Marks
