Jessica Conant-Park - Cook the Books

The phone rang, and my stomach dropped. I glared at the caller ID as I waited for the number to appear. It could be Josh, I told myself. Did I want it to be Josh or not? I wasn’t sure.

Instead of my ex, the caller was Kyle. I wanted to sound completely nonchalant and to behave as though I had never assaulted him, but instead of staying cool, I found myself rattling off ideas at an auctioneer’s pace. “Kyle! Oh, good! Listen, I got ahold of Digger’s recipes, and there are tons here that would be perfect for the book, and I really think that we need to use some of them, which reminds me that we absolutely have to start testing the recipes we do have, because you can never trust a chef, and just because a recipe came from a chef doesn’t mean that the amounts and proportions of ingredients are right and-”

“Breath!” Kyle demanded with a laugh. “Stop and take a breath! But you’re right. We should test the recipes. Why don’t you pick out a few, and we can get together and do some cooking.”

Obediently, I took a slow breath. Kyle was behaving normally, and I should follow suit. “Great. I have some ideas already.”

“Would you mind if we cooked at your place? The apartment I’m renting has a really small galley kitchen, and we’d have a tough time here. I know your place isn’t gargantuan, but it’s the better of the two options.”

“Absolutely. How about Tuesday night? I should be home from my internship by five thirty.”

“Why don’t you do the food shopping, and then I’ll reimburse you in your next check. Oh, and have your friend Adrianna come over if she wants. I’m sure we could use the help, and she seems like she’d give us some honest feedback about the dishes.”

“I bet she’d be thrilled. I’ll give her a call.”

I hung up, started a shopping list, and immediately realized that I was going to blow my entire last paycheck on ingredients. I would get my money back, of course, and I’d charge for every second I spent at the store, but I’d have to go shopping tomorrow night so that we’d have everything we needed for Tuesday. I called Adrianna and Owen, and left a message inviting them over to cook and taste the food with Kyle and me. I was sure they’d take me up on the offer, especially because money was super tight for them these days. In fact, I was seriously worried that they weren’t eating well. In particular, since she was still nursing, Ade needed all the sustenance she could get.

Going through recipes and planning Tuesday’s cooking projects helped to distract me from dwelling on Josh. Helped. Somewhat. A little. In addition to being broke, I was still a jumpy, frazzled mess, and I gave in to the compulsion to keep checking my e-mail every ten minutes or so until I went to bed. Tomorrow, I assured myself, I’d be at my internship all day and nowhere near my computer. Maybe my supervisor would let me use hers, and I’d be able to check my e-mail from work? No, no! Josh does not exist. Josh does not exist, I repeated uselessly.

Ishifted my weight in the uncomfortable armchair and forced myself to look sympathetically at my client Alison. She was exceedingly beautiful, there was no doubt about that, but nutty as a loon. I was midway through my day at my internship-pardon me, my field placement-at the community mental health center and was listening to one of my regular clients drone on about her love life. Alison was a twenty-one-year-old college student who could have had practically any man she chose, yet she had a pattern of falling for unavailable older men. The woes of the young and beautiful, huh? Most of our counseling sessions centered on my trying to get to the root of her relationship issues so that we could figure out why she kept setting herself up to fail in her romantic life. So far we hadn’t made much progress, and I increasingly believed that Alison really wanted me to tell her that, yes, it was a brilliant idea for her to devote herself to the married workaholic who thought she had a great ass.

Alison twirled a long spiral curl around her manicured finger and crossed her mile- long legs. She had changed her eye color this week and now flashed violet eyes in my direction. “Ms. Carter?”

“Yes, Alison?”

“I really think that I found the right guy, this time.” She smiled, clearly pleased with herself.

I nodded, waiting for her to go on. One of the lessons drilled into us social-work students was that it was sometimes best to say nothing, to wait and see what a client did with silence. Alison usually used these moments as opportunities to announce new affairs.

“Don’t you want to hear about him?” she asked eagerly.

“Do you want to tell me about him?” Another social-work strategy: answer a question with a question. If I’d been allowed to be honest, I’d have screamed that hell no, I didn’t want to hear about Alison’s latest unavailable interest and that I wished she’d just enjoy the normal, loving, college-age boyfriend she had. Then I’d have run screaming from the room. In other words, I desperately needed to work on my patience and to focus on the goal of helping this young woman straighten out her life. Not that I felt like a particularly good role model, having spent the past two days jumping every time the phone rang and daydreaming about fooling around with Josh in the condemned apartment…

“Okay!” Alison sat up straight and clapped her hands. “His name is Keith, and he’s totally gorgeous. Older than me, obviously, because you know I have a thing for mature men. But he’s not, like, ancient or anything. I think he’s about forty-five. Totally suave and sexy. He was a guest lecturer in my friend’s college class, and he’s written books and makes awesome money.” She rubbed her fingers together and lifted an eyebrow. “I met him through my friend after he took a group of students out to dinner, and he invited me along because I was outside talking to her when he asked. I think she might be a little into him, but he obviously is much more attracted to me. I can tell we like each other, even though we haven’t said anything.”

I cleared my throat. This story was not screaming appropriate . A middle- aged man taking young college students out to dinner? Please. “You do already have a boyfriend, though. Tom. How is that relationship going for you? And do you think this new man, Keith, is the kind of man you could have a relationship with?”

She shrugged happily. “Keith is well traveled, smart, sexy… Did I already say sexy? Well, he is. A real gentleman, too. He holds doors open for women, and he’s really nice to all of my friends. Tom is such a bore compared to him. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with him, but he’s not what I really want. I wish Keith would just whisk me away to some tropical paradise where we could lounge around and sip cocktails and get massages.”

I was hoping to guide Alison toward the realization that her choices in boyfriends usually led to disastrous results. Who knew if this older man was even interested in her? There was a strong possibility that she’d conjured up the romance. It was even possible that the man existed entirely in her head.

I spent another forty minutes questioning Alison about her attraction to this man and making notes as we talked. A has expressed interest in older, suave gentleman K and is considering abandoning current relationship, claiming relationship is a “bore.” Impressed with K’s world experience and has fantasy that he reciprocates her attraction.

When my session with Alison was over, I grabbed a quick lunch and checked my voice mail on both my cell phone and my home phone. No calls from Josh, but one from Kyle confirming our night of recipe testing.