When in Doubt, Add Butter Read Free

that, though, the guy was a mystery. I had a pretty good handle on most of the people I worked for—if nothing else, you can tell a lot about people by the things they surround themselves with in their homes—but Mr. Tuesday had very few clues to his personality in the main part of his apartment, and I’d never been into his bedroom or anything. Essentially, it was like trying to figure out something about the last person who’d been in your hotel room.
    Wednesday was a different story. Wednesday was Lex Prather, who was usually there for at least part of the time I was. Personality-wise, he seemed to be the exact opposite of Mr. Tuesday, flamboyant where Tuesday was understated. Social, where Tuesday seemed to just be working all the time. But Lex was almost as much fun to cook for, though his tastes were far more highfalutin.
    Until a year and a half ago, he lived with his mother in this two-bedroom flat in the old Westchester, off Mass Avenue. She was like Perle Mesta, and he was Felix Unger—they must have been quite a pair. Anyway, when she passed away, he hired me to cook all his old favorites, which consisted of the kind of fussy white tablecloth dishes one might have found on the menu of the Titanic. Shrimp Louis, oysters Rockefeller, Waldorf salad; even the occasional molded Jell-O dish incongruously made it onto the menu. He apparently had no problem drawing the line at mint jelly, however.
    Lex is tall and thin, and always impeccably dressed, which is appropriate, since he owns the venerable old Simon’s Department Store downtown. It outlived both Woodward & Lothrop and Garfinckel’s department stores, though I believe its reputation might be wobbling a bit now in the shadow of Nordstrom and everything you can find in Tysons Corner and the Galleria.
    Anyway, the movie version of Lex could be perfectly played by Tony Randall. He is of completely indeterminate sexual orientation—though by “indeterminate” I mean that I don’t know if he’s gay or completely asexual; straight does not appear to be an option, although it’s possible I’m wrong about that, I suppose.
    A social butterfly, Lex often had me cooking for his mystery book group or his annual Christmas, New Year’s, May Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, and Halloween parties.
    The upshot is that Lex had champagne tastes and a champagne budget. This made him pretty fun to cook for in and of itself, but he was also just a really great guy and I enjoyed seeing him every time. That’s a luxury I don’t always have with my clients, and it’s particularly nice since work is basically the only social contact I have at all.
    Which takes us to Thursday.
    Thursday nights were with the Oleksei family, which was sheer chaos. Not really bad chaos, necessarily, just crazy chaos. The Oleksei family consisted of a grandfather, Vlad, who was clearly the patriarch of the family, often holding court in a mysterious back room I never saw but from which people would come and go at all hours, often leaving looking fearful or even in tears.
    I half suspected that they were part of the Russian Mafia.
    Seriously.
    They made me a little nervous sometimes.
    Vlad Oleksei’s wife had died years earlier, leaving him with three strapping sons—now in their thirties and forties—and a handwritten recipe book I could not read because it was in Russian. Fortunately, my sister’s boyfriend worked in the Russian department at American University and was translating the recipes as best he could, though the metric translation was still a bit of a challenge for me.
    The Oleksei sons—Borya, Serge, and Viktor—were all nice enough to me, and always politely appreciative of the food I prepared, but there was something … off about them, too. They owned a dry cleaning and tailoring store, which I knew from The Jeffersons could be profitable, but it was just hard to picture the three of them going into one little dry cleaner every day and whistling as they busily worked out a