The Cutting Season Read Free Page B

her childhood in this very kitchen, thumbing through her schoolwork or watching television. She’d learned to write her cursive letters in a single afternoon, sitting at one of the small tables by the stove, waiting for her mother to get off work.
    The kitchen’s door was propped open. Inside, Lorraine, the current cook, had her feet up on a card table covered with vegetable scraps and newspapers and discarded oyster shells.
    “Morning, baby,” she said, seeing Caren at the back door. Lorraine called everyone baby , and Caren had long learned not to take it personally.
    In the hot, steamy kitchen, she unzipped her down jacket.
    “You have a menu for me, Lorraine?”
    “Now, what you think, baby?”
    Lorraine had a bottle of hot sauce sticking out of the pocket of her stained apron and was sucking down raw oysters for breakfast and watching Fox & Friends on a small black-and-white television set. Caren could have stood there all day before she moved an inch. “Lorraine,” she sighed, because they went through this every time.
    “Yes, baby?” she said, in a way that suggested she had already carried this conversation farther than she intended to. Lorraine was openly suspicious of Caren and her sudden return to Belle Vie four years ago. It was possible that she even held an irrational belief that Caren had come for her job, to claim her rightful place in line. That Raymond Clancy had made her general manager, Lorraine’s boss essentially, certainly didn’t help things. Lorraine delighted in small acts of insubordination, putting through purchase orders without Caren’s permission, serving pickled chow-chow out of crusty jars from her home kitchen, and often changing menus at the last minute. She considered herself an artist, and not one to be tied down by fixed pricing. To Lorraine, Caren was a nuisance, with her little clipboard and her endless list of questions. Worse, she saw Caren as a woman who was rootless and unsure of where she belonged—and therefore not someone who, by Lorraine’s standards, ought to be consulted about the intricacies of local cuisine. Lorraine was tall and black and unabashedly fat, carrying most of her excess weight around her middle, wearing it as a walking billboard for her talents, and she likewise regarded Caren’s relatively lean frame as further evidence that she shouldn’t be trusted in a kitchen. She was nothing like her mother, Lorraine was fond of saying.
    “Lorraine, we have eighty-five guests due here at five o’clock.”
    “Plenty of time.”
    “The host is expecting a five-course meal,” Caren said, repeating a fact of which she knew Lorraine was well aware. “I’d like to be able to tell them just what all that might entail.”
    Lorraine pondered the request before deciding, impulsively, to grant it.
    “What’d we say, Pearl?”
    She glanced over her shoulder at her line cook, a child-sized black woman in her sixties who had to stand on an orange crate to man the stove, which she was hovering over now. She didn’t bother to look up from the pot that was fogging her glasses.
    “ ’Gator,” Pearl said.
    Lorraine turned, reporting this news to Caren. “ ’Gator.”
    “And?”
    Lorraine sighed then, making a grand show of being ordered onto her feet. She crossed the kitchen to a large, stainless-steel fridge. There, she planted one hand on the curve of her right hip and stood in front of the open refrigerator door, searching the stored contents with her eyes. After a few moments of silence, she ticked off the night’s menu: “Grits, rolled with smoked Gouda, spinach, and bacon; chard out of the garden, with garlic and lemon; and potatoes creamed with butter and drippings.” She bent down a little, checking a lower shelf. “And I guess I could do a mushroom soup to start.” Then, nodding to her assistant, she added, “Pearl did a cobbler last night.”
    “Peach,” Pearl said.
    Lorraine turned to Caren. “Peach.”
    Caren nodded. “Sounds