French Pressed Read Online Free PDF

not like Chef Rouille singled me out for special persecution. Last Saturday she screamed at Henry Tso, the sauté chef, and Henry never makes a mistake. On Tuesday she came down on Don Maris, the seafood chef, for overbroiling a lobster. Then yesterday, she gave Vinny so much work he had to hide in the walk-in refrigerator until everybody went home last night, just so he could finish. She threatened to have him fired if he didn’t have it all done by the morning. You remember Vinny Buccelli, don’t you? You met him at that press party last month. It was the same night you met Tommy.”
    I did remember Vinny. He was a nice-looking Italian boy—a young friend of Joy’s from her culinary school class. I had assumed (wrongly) that the quiet, slight young man was Joy’s boyfriend, something I still hoped could come true once she realized how wrong she was to get involved with Tommy Keitel.
    Joy frowned. “Brigitte’s got Vinny so rattled he called in sick today. And nobody calls in sick at Solange unless they want to lose their job.”
    “What kind of a kitchen is Tommy running?” I demanded.
    “This isn’t Tommy’s fault,” Joy replied— too quickly, I thought.
    “Mr. Dornier told me that Tommy hasn’t been around much lately,” I said. “Dornier doesn’t sound happy about it, and I can see why. Tommy’s the executive chef. If he’s not around, then he’s not doing his job.”
    Joy’s face got tight. I recognized the look . I’d obviously struck a nerve.
    “Is that man still sleeping with you?” I asked bluntly.
    “Mom!”
    “I know. I’m not supposed to bring it up, but—”
    “Please don’t start that again, or we’ll have to stop talking altogether.”
    I threw up my hands. “Truce!”
    Joy flipped her ponytail over her shoulder, looked away.
    “Truce,” I repeated, reaching over to squeeze her arm. “Okay?”
    Eyes downcast, Joy nodded. “Okay,” she said softly. “And the answer is yes. Tommy and I are still involved…romantically.”
    I tried not to cringe at the word. I found nothing whatsoever romantic about their relationship. It was seedy. It was wrong. And it was a testament to my daughter’s immaturity that she’d use a word like that to describe what was going on between her and a workplace supervisor thirty years her senior, who was married with kids.
    On the face of it, I would have guessed that Joy had been singled out for criticism, if not sabotage, because she was getting preferential treatment from the big boss. But if the restaurant’s French-Canadian sous-chef had been torturing poor Vinny Buccelli so badly that he’d called in sick, it sounded like she was routinely targeting different staff members for her wrath. So why wasn’t Keitel doing something about it?
    “Joy, tell me what’s going on with Tommy.”
    “Well…Mr. Dornier is right,” she began, leaning closer. “Tommy has been absent— a lot . When I first started my internship three months ago, he was practically married to this place. Everyone says he was like that from the very first day. He’d come in early, oversee everything in the kitchen, right through dinner service. He’d stay late, too. After the last customer left, he and Dornier would sit in the dining room with a bottle of wine and go over every detail of the evening—‘tragedies and triumphs’ is how Tommy put it. He wanted to be in on every little thing that went wrong or right at Solange.”
    Joy shook her head. “I really loved that about him, Mom…but now he’s hardly here. Sometimes he checks in around noon, but then he takes off a few hours later, way before dinner service even starts. And he doesn’t come back.”
    “Where does he go?”
    Joy shrugged. “Nobody knows. He won’t tell me, and everyone’s talking. Everyone has a theory about where Tommy’s going, what he’s doing…even who he’s doing…”
    My daughter’s voice trailed off, and she looked away, her expression hurt and confused. Congratulations,