Photo by Radu Florin on Unsplash
Ava put another eight bucks in the glass jar she kept feeding when she wanted to smoke. Being smoke-free meant Vegas, or fuck it, a few more months and maybe Monaco.
Barton was gonna be a dick when she didn’t return his texts, she knew it.
It wasn’t just the pistachios, Barton, she wanted to tell him, Also, where the fuck did those pectoral muscles come from? He said he didn’t work out, that it bored him.
She shook off the chest visual, yanked out her mise-en-place.
Looked at the mise-en-place.
She couldn’t shake off the coffee table, the pistachios.
Barton’s pistachio ritual flashed her back to her dad, to his birthday. She physically shook from the memory, and mad at herself for shaking, she shook again.
Maybe she should have put her therapy money in a Vegas-maybe-Monaco jar too.
I was eleven, for fuck’s sake. It could have waited, dad.
For weeks I wanted to make you the best corned beef ever for your birthday.
Mom wanted to help, but my independent streak was already leaving streak marks all over my life, and I wasn’t stopping and haven’t stopped since.
I was gonna clean the kitchen, too, of course I was, but only after you were at the head of the table cutting your corned beef with a goddamn dull spoon.
But here you came, dad, into the kitchen, before I could even serve it to you, grumbling about the mess and the dishes, and “what’s that stain on the countertop?” as though it was a gangbanger’s spray paint and not salad dressing your daughter made at eleven years old without looking at a recipe, you asshole, dad, you overbearing, ridiculous, anal asshole. You started washing out the stockpot as if the queen mother was gonna knock on the door at any moment with gendarmes to behead the owners of dirty stockpots, and I was already almost in tears because I wanted you sitting at the table so I could place a beautifully presented dish in front of you, kinda like you don’t see a bride the morning of a wedding day, and before I could make the first slice in the godforsaken hunk of meat, you went to move the stockpot, raise it up so you could make sure it was scoured of any mark, to make sure it was perfectly clean because anything less than perfect was horrible, and that’s when you splashed greasy, sudsy, detergent laden water on top of the corned beef your little daughter had been cooking for nine hours and dreaming of serving you for weeks.
And it shouldn’t matter now, but I’ll never forget the seething pit of despair when that dirty water hit that corned beef, but it still hurts, obviously, even after therapy, because the corned beef incident wasn’t the only thing, but it’s the only one I care to remember because I’m a chef now, and practically fucking famous, and so, no Barton, fuck you and your weird pistachio ritual, it’s too anal, too regimented, just like a guy I once knew named my dad.
Powerful