Penny

Most of the guests who stayed last night come down for brunch with sunglasses on and order Bloody Mary’s and Eggs Benedict and sit on the back verandah looking as if the sun is physically hurting them.

Sign of a good party, I think, refilling my coffee at the bar.

“He’s not down here,” Megan says, coming to stand beside me at the coffee station.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, stop,” Megan admonishes me. “I’m just letting you know so you can stop coming out here for more coffee. I’ve never seen you drink this much —”

“It was a late night.”

Megan puts her hand on my wrist. “How much later did it go?”

As much as I want to marshal a good snarky comment about her being too nosey, I can’t brush off her question. She knows me too well and went into business with me anyway. She has every right to be worried about my self-destructive streak.

“He left about ten minutes after you. Nothing happened.”

That’s not the lie that makes me feel bad. The lie is in my tone, like she’s crazy for being worried.

I threw myself at him and he was the one with the good sense to say no.

Not something I can say to Megan.

“Don’t get defensive,” Megan says. “Don’t. Think of how it looks if the chef is sneaking into a patron’s room —”

“Stop. I get it. I do. Nothing happened. I didn’t go into his room and he didn’t come out to the trailer.” Not that I would ever invite him out there. “But, you’re right. I got carried away last night and it’s over.”

“It’s not over. He’s checked in until Friday.”

My jaw drops open and something giddy rises up in me.

He’s staying?

“No, see that look right there, that’s what makes me nervous.” She points a finger in my face and if she was my boss and not my partner, I might smack that finger away. “Dinner service starts on Monday and we have the supplier dinner on Thursday —”

“You don’t have to tell me,” I snap. “I get it. Nothing will happen.”

And I mean it. I do. It’s not professional to be sneaking into some guest’s bedroom after dinner service. It’s something the old Penny might do. Not this new incarnation.

But…he’s staying?

Stop being cheap.

That’s my mother’s sage advice, from when I was a girl.

Desperation is for dogs. Stop looking for someone to pet you.

I pour out my third cup of coffee and go back to the kitchen where I belong.

* * *

A few hours later most of the guests are gone. A few cars remain in the parking lot and the phone is ringing off the hook on the front desk. Three months of weekends are booked and two women have called to talk about private functions. Dinner service for the month is booked.

The Paintbrush is a total success.

When the kitchen is clean after brunch, I head out to the gardens and pull a bunch of sage for tonight’s dinner.

There are six reservations for tonight. We don’t have a menu — I serve what I want to cook. And tonight, I want to cook something new. Egg yoke ravioli in brown butter with sautéed sage.

The garden smells like my childhood. Like the farm. The sun is hot on the top of my head and the grasshoppers buzz and hop into my legs.

I crouch down to check the potato beds.

Soon, I think.

The peppers need water. The carrots need weeding and so I do it.

Something is off with the irrigation by the beans and I check all the hoses and find the hole that needs patching. Squirrels have chewed through the rubber. Again.

I try to remember what Papa did about the squirrels and wish once again that he was alive so I could ask him these questions.

Papa would be proud. I’m startled by the thought and how true it is. He would be so proud of me. Of this garden. And the inn.

Only the dead members of my family and the family I’ve made up would be proud of me. How freaking awful is that?

I circle around the avocado trees and nearly run into Simon, sweaty in running clothes, coming out from behind the corn.

He’s here, I think, like a teenager.

“This looks like I’m stalking you —” he glances at the corn he’s standing next to.

“Pun intended?”

“I wish I was that clever.”

“Then what are you doing in my garden?”

“Stealing your tomatoes, but they’re all gone.”

“Not gone, just not ripe yet.”

“Ah, that’s why you’re the gardener. Not me.” He glances around my garden. “Though, this isn’t like any garden I’ve seen. It’s a miniature farm.”

“If we’re going to be 75% self-sustaining in five years we need to think big.”

“Good thing you’re a farmer,” he says.

“Well, my grandfather was the —” I stop, swallow. Did I just say that?

“I thought your parents were farmers,” he says, his eyes oddly sharp.

“Family farm,” I say through thick lips. “My mom inherited it. Why…why are you so sweaty?” I ask, desperate to change the subject.

“I took a run on the trail up the mountain and am just cooling off.”

“That’s a big run,” I say. I know because when things are really stressful, I run up that mountain.

“I had some things to think about.”

Our conversation dries up and I feel compelled to fill the silence. I thought about this all last night, what I would say when I saw him again. How I would try to fix what, last night, I’d been trying to ruin.

“Simon, I am so sorry —”

“Sorry?”

“Last night.” I am wincing.

“Are you under the impression that I regret anything that happened last night?” He steps towards me and I step back, nearly trampling my arugula.

“I just…I shouldn’t have put you in that position.”

“What position?”

“The position of having to turn me down,” I say through thick lips. Fuck. This is embarrassing.

He sucks in a breath and I watch a hawk up in the brilliant blue sky.

“Penny,” he says.

“Please.” I want to close my eyes but I don’t. “Just…accept the apology.”

“I won’t. I don’t want it.” I can smell the sweat of him mixed with the dill from the bush beside us and I’m light-headed. “I would have taken you to my room last night. I would take you to my room right now.”

Yes, I think. Great idea.

“But my room is tiny,” he says, and I can hear the smile in his voice. “Like there isn’t space —”

“Are you under the stairs?” I ask, the room I insisted on when Megan wanted to make it storage.

“I am.”

I wince. “Sorry. That… that is a tiny room.”

But still, I think, there is a queen-size bed. And then I think of how desperate that sounds and I stop thinking it.

“Did you miss breakfast?” I shove the conversation into more familiar territory.

“I did,” Simon says with a wince. “I slept right through it. But I can grab an apple from the basket at the front desk.” He lifts his shirt and wipes at his forehead and I force myself not to look down. But still I manage to see a furry stomach. A muscled furry stomach and I want him to just pull that shirt right off.

“I’ll feed you,” I say.

He drops his shirt. “You don’t have to —”

“I’m a chef, Simon. It’s against my code to let someone go hungry. Particularly if that someone just ran up a mountain.”

His smile makes me smile. Dumb. This is dumb. So ridiculously dumb. There is no goal. No endpoint. There is just feeling good for the sake of feeling good.

That doesn’t even make sense.

“Give me five minutes. I’ll shower —”

“No,” I say. “You’re good like that.”

The heat that blooms in me as I say it is almost shocking. As the words slip out of my mouth and fill the air around me, his smile fades and the tension is back. Like a ripple of electricity down my body.

This would all be so much simpler if he just let me go back to his room with him last night. This bubble of tension would be broken. He’d probably even be gone.

“Follow me.” I lead the way into the kitchen. I know he’s following me because I can feel him.

At the prep table just inside the door, Denise and Sean are making pasta.

“Hello, Chef,” they both say as I come in.

“Thinner guys,” I tell them, catching sight of the pasta they’ve rolled.

“Yes, Chef,” they say and begin the process of rerolling the pasta.

In the main part of the kitchen, I walk to the stove and the mise-en-place fridge in the corner.

“That’s…hot,” Simon says on my heels.

“The chef thing?” I ask, because I think it’s hot, too.

“The respect thing.”

“It’s part of the job.”

“Are you being humble again?”

“No,” I laugh. Pulling out the ingredients I’ll need for an omelette. “It’s the tradition of kitchens. One boss and everyone knows it, otherwise it’s chaos.”

“Will your family be coming out to see the place?”

“Eventually,” I lie. “March maybe, before planting.”

The problem with lies is belief. That’s how things fall apart in the end. When I stop believing the lies, it’s just a story. When I believe the lies, it’s as much truth as the actual truth.

And this old lie, this childhood dream I made real when I was nineteen, when I met Megan. I’ve long since stopped believing it. And as far as stories go, it’s a bad one. The sappy, rose-colored dream of a kid with a broken heart.

“And your brothers —” he asks.

“Do you have any allergies?”

“Mushrooms.”

“You’re allergic to mushrooms?”

“No, I just loathe them.”

I crack open three eggs from the henhouse behind the garden.

“I feel bad taking up your time when you must be so busy,” he says.

“We’re not. Not now. We have a few dinner reservations for the week. A dinner we’re hosting for local suppliers Thursday night. But most guests don’t show up until Friday afternoon. Except…you, I guess.” I watch him out of the corner of my eye.

“It’s so peaceful here,” he says. “I can’t imagine going back to the city just yet. Is it a problem that I’m staying?”

“We’re an inn, Simon. Staying is the whole point.”

I put a knob of butter in the pan and tilt it, spreading the butter around. “Do you live in Los Angeles?”

“When I’m in the country. Yes.”

“You travel a lot?”

“Travel makes it sound like a vacation.” He rubs at his forehead. “Like I’m on a beach. Or visiting museums.”

“What are you doing then?”

He’s silent for a second and glances over. “War zones. Natural disasters. Refugee camps.”

“Most of the people who run foundations don’t go into the field like that, do they?”

“I don’t know what other people do,” he says, sounding weary. Sad.

“You can stay as long as you like,” I tell him.

“I’m sure I’ll get the nerve to head back home soon.”

Those words and his wry smile squeeze my heart.

“Where did you grow up?” I ask.

“San Francisco.”

Me, too, I almost say. Stopped, just in time, by my lie.

“You mentioned your mother, is she still there?” I ask.

“No, she died several years ago.”

“And your father?”

“He died four days after she did.”

I turn to him, shocked. “I’m sorry. That must have been awful.”

“It was. He…he killed himself.”

“Simon!”

“After mom died things were intense.”

“I’m so sorry.”

He smiles a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “It’s all right. It was a long time ago.”

“Nothing is a long time ago. Not when it comes to our parents.”

He’s silent for so long I look up at him, only to find him staring at me.

“I think,” he says, “that you’re exactly right.”

“Are you alone?” I ask and then realize how bald that question is and quickly add, “I mean…do you have siblings?”

“I grew up with a kid. Tommy. He’s like a brother.”

Like a brother, how keenly I understand that. For a moment I wish I could say that to him. That I could tell him how well I understand gathering family. Choosing your people to love.

But the McConnell family farm is the lie I picked eight years ago. It’s the lie I’m caught in. Like a snow globe of a corn field.

“Toast?” I ask, already slicing some from the sourdough loaf wrapped in a towel at the bread station. If he doesn’t want it, I’ll eat it. I’m suddenly starving.

“Who says no to toast?”

“Lots of very skinny people,” I joke.

“Your parents must be proud of you,” he says.

No. She’s not very proud. My mother doesn’t like me much.

I normally don’t think these things that are so close to the truth. They don’t even occur to me. Eight years of being Penny McConnell has burned most of Tina Andreas out of my brain.

But there’s something about Simon that makes me…forget who I am. Or remember who I am.

Or something.

“Mostly she just wanted me to be different.” I give him a safer answer.

“Than her?”

“Than the way I am.”

That slips out without thought. Words far closer to the truth than I’d ever said out loud before.

“You’re too wild for an Iowa farm mom?”

I was too needy for Marianne Andreas. Too plain. Too contrary. I wasn’t the doll she thought I was going to be. She couldn’t dress me up and put me away when she was done.

I slide the omelette with home-smoked trout and crème fraiche onto a plate.

“My God,” he says, looking at the plate like I’d made magic happen.

“Eat,” I say, blushing a little at his wonder.

“Have you eaten?” he asks. “I mean, I remember that about my mom when she’d host holidays for our neighbors and family. She’d forget to eat.”

“I didn’t forget to eat,” I say. It was just several hours ago and as if on cue my stomach growls. “Nature of the business,” I say with a shrug. “Make beautiful food and your body craves beautiful food.”

“Well, I understand craving beautiful things,” he says without leaning hard into the innuendo, like it is just a fact of nature that he would want me. And that I am beautiful. “Share this with me. It’s so much and too good to waste.”

“I will,” I say. But I don’t sit down.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“You were lying about why you didn’t take me back to your room.”