Chapter One
~Tommy Owens~
Arrow, Colorado
The minute the landline in my office starts ringing, immediately, I know who’s calling Tommy’s Cuisine. That’s what it says on my business license and building, but it’s Tommy’s Cuisine and Cookout if you’re looking for some serious barbeque. I’ll happily sell it to you, and I wish the other person on the other end of my phone was looking for food of any kind. That would be Mahogany Jefferson, who isn’t looking for anything but time off.
She’s supposed to be here in an hour to sort through my business’ invoices, then log them into the computer before taking over for my protégé, unpaid intern and sous chef, Foreign Torres, who is currently manning a twelve-aisle burner, nearing the end of her shift. I don’t need a crystal ball to know that Mahogany’s not going to show up for work today, when I need her the most.
The pile of statements stacked in front of me on my black lacquer desk have just been growing bigger and bigger because she’s barely been here all week. The slips of paper are mocking me, along with the program that I have open on my laptop. Opening both is all I’m pretty much capable of doing as far as computers are concerned. I was born to cook, not get acquainted with the latest technology. For some damn reason, my eyes cross up every time I go beyond playing Candy Crush or surfing the internet.
It made perfect sense to hire someone else to tend to the less thrilling side of business: crunching the numbers. That would be Mahogany’s job, part-time accountant, part-time cook, and sometimes waitress. She’d make a brilliant manager… if part of her responsibilities was to not be here most of the damn time.
I snatch the receiver off the base and punch the line-one button, then pinch the bridge of my nose, eyes shut so tight they hurt. “I’m telling you, Mahogany, if you don’t get your ass to work this afternoon, you’re going to be counting and searing steaks in the unemployment line.”
She sighs into the line, more annoyed with the weight of the world on her shoulders than I am with her right now. “Mr. Tommy, how is that even damn possible?”
She has every reason to be irritated with everything that is life, considering her current predicament: single motherhood with a tragic twist. Things will probably only get better for her and her two-year-old baby girl, Majestic, if God himself intervenes. Or maybe when Mahogany confesses to Majestic’s father that he’s, well, a father. I understand why she won’t though, so I let her rudeness slide. Besides, she knows my bark is much worse than my bite, something all my employees take advantage of often.
I’m too damn lenient with them. They know to look over me when I’m selling wolf tickets about firing them. I pay the price for that every single time someone calls out at the last minute, but my employees are all good people who desperately need their jobs. They only miss work when it’s a must. It’s the only kind of people I’ll work with, or in this case not work with, since she’s calling out.
Had Mahogany been a regular slacker for no reason, her ass would’ve bit the dust the very week I hired her three years ago. However, I know my team’s histories and present dilemmas… no, I should say fucked up situations. We’re all human, so we all have them. That’s what makes it impossible for me to be impartial and coldblooded when it comes to my underlings not showing up for work. Poor Mahogany Jefferson has one hell of a history and a dilemma.
She’s a twenty-three-year old orphan, who was abandoned at birth in front of a fire department in the inner city, crime-infested Spindle that’s two cities over. My divorced sister, Chrysalis, owns a well-paying bounty hunter business in that city and employs my unmarried twin sisters, Jen and Barbie. I wouldn’t abandon a child molester in Spindle, let alone a baby. Then again, maybe I would leave a pedophile stranded there, just so my sisters can hoist his ass up for being a stain on society and carry him off to jail unwillingly. The best part is they’ll put him down hard first.
As if Mahogany didn’t have it bad enough right after being born, she was adopted out to shitty foster parents that weren’t bad enough to lose custody of her until she aged out of the system. No sooner than she left Colorado for college in Utah on a free ride paid for by the state, she met what she thought was the man of her dreams. He turned out to be just a baby daddy, albeit a rich, white, and some say a good-looking one. Well, I say he’s an asshat for wanting to sleep with anybody, even worse a twenty-year-old who’s more prone to think with their crotch, when he didn’t want what resulted from the act of sex: kids.
Majestic found her way around the condoms and birth control pills meant to prevent her birth. Mahogany didn’t give Chance Middleton the chance to holler abortion. She quit school, came back to Colorado, and settled down in Arrow to get out of sight, out of mind of her baby daddy. Or maybe she wanted him out of her sight and out of her mind. Not the way she tells it though, but I wonder sometimes.
When she applied for any job position I had unfilled, she was in desperate straits and had no problem telling me why. The rest of her background, I had Chrysalis dig up. I’m a bleeding heart for sure, but I ain’t stupid enough to let just anybody up in here.
While Chrysalis checked Mahogany out, I, too, was in desperate straits for a waitress, cook, and trustworthy accountant who could actually count and be savvy with a computer. Mahogany was that, plus freshly pregnant and a college dropout with restaurant experience. She had high marks in all her classes but was running from a bad situation. I wasn’t immune to her plight, so I hired her to sit at my desk and keep inventory and my bills on point until she gave birth. Now, she’s Majestic’s mother, a former college dropout, and single parent whose toddler has leukemia.
The cancer has been eating away at Majestic’s little body for the last three months, so she’s admitted in the hospital more than she’s at home and doesn’t have anyone but her mother. I blame Majestic’s father for that.
If I had a position for Mahogany to work from home, I’d give it to her. But I don’t. I run a damn restaurant that requires all hands on deck, which means everybody needs to be here where the customers place orders by mouth or phone and expect to get their money’s worth in a reasonable time frame. Or, I run the risk of losing my livelihood, and everybody that depends on Tommy’s Cuisine and Cookout gets to stand in the unemployment line… together! Including Majestic, who chews on everything in sight and her elderly babysitter seems to be woke only during the hours of Mahogany’s scheduled shift.
Still, I would never hold Mahogany’s dilemma against her or her child. She’s doing her damndest to get her life together, slowly, by taking one online course at a time, once a week, to finish her computer programmer degree, while praying for a bone marrow donor for Majestic. The woman is going through enough shit to break a toilet. That doesn’t stop me from giving her hell though because that’s just who I am. If I have to suffer because she has to be at Majestic’s bedside more than at work, then by God, Mahogany will suffer my wrath. I tell my people off more so for venting purposes than to put fear in them—I get to not bottle up my frustration and die of a stroke or heart attack at thirty-nine, and these people are fucking unscareable. That makes me a shit excuse for a boss, I know.
I can raise professional hell at them though, and they take it on the chin like adults, so that’s what I do. “Mahogany, obviously you’re not old enough to know yet that if you’re hungry enough, you’ll find a way to cook food on top of a cop’s car in the summertime to eat… and get away with it. Now, please for Majestic’s sake and mine, come to work as soon as you can like in the next twenty minutes.”
“I would, Mr. Tommy, but Majestic is running a fever again,” she says pitifully.
And I know how dangerous that is for the adorable little girl who’s like another niece to me. Majestic reminds me of my great niece, Salon, Malisa’s daughter. Both children are biracial with tight-spiral curls and chubby limbs, although Majestic is slowly losing her hair and weight, and as close as I’ll get to having kids. My love life went in the same toilet that Mahogany’s was flushed down. Personally, I think life should’ve backed off and refused to submerge people in the bullshit ten years ago, when the woman of my dreams let a lying summa bitch, Edison Craft, convince her that I was cheating on her. Just so he could make a play for her. She fell for his okey-doke, furiously declining to believe that I hadn’t hurt her, with the emphasis of a potted plant thrown at my head. Then, she flung herself off the face of the earth. Or just out of Arrow, Colorado. No one in my family asks why I never searched for her or brings her name up… well, anymore that is, and that’s all I’m going to say about Katara Johnson now. Too sensitive of a topic for me. So sensitive, it even hurts to think about her.
So, back to my people, who are thoroughly trained but still human, and call in to beg off too damn much. At least, it’s always an emergency that they know they may be subject to providing proof of if I ask for it, at any time. No one who’s worked under me for the last four years even bothers with trying to pull one over on me anymore. Arrow isn’t a small town, but it’s not so big that I won’t eventually run into whoever’s missing from their duties. People are stupid enough to think that if they get away with it once, they’ll continue to be so lucky and won’t get caught. Yeah, well, they do.
I don’t cater to bullshitters and quickly weed them out from the genuine victims of ‘shit happens.’ That’s often if you’re breathing, and that’s how I end up in the kitchen or working the floor in others’ place instead of utilizing my time more efficiently. Like making sure my workers are working and customers are happily consuming my wares from behind the one-way glass in my second-floor office. Hell, I could be mingling like head chefs and business owners are supposed to do, even be learning this stupid program on my laptop. If I wanted to work all the positions myself, I wouldn’t have wasted my time with hiring anybody goddamnit!
The very same people that I’m not going to fire.
I groan at my own gullibleness into the phone. “Haven’t you found a long, lost relative who can help you take care of Majestic when Mrs. Kindleton isn’t sleeping like the dead? Or a low-life boyfriend who wouldn’t work in a pie factory tasting pies but adores babies?”
Mahogany, who’s currently snickering quietly at me, isn’t a bad looking woman. She’s probably sitting right beside a sleeping, or busily chewing on something, Majestic as we speak.
“If I had, Mr. Tommy, you know you would’ve been the first to know.”
“I know, and if I knew a nurse, I’d pay her or him to sit with Majestic myself, but I don’t. I only know a doctor who doesn’t work with pediatric cancer, just general pediatrics. You don’t have any other way to pay your bills, so you need to figure out something, Mahogany.”
“Mr. Tommy, you know you’re not going to fire me, especially since Majestic is sick, so quit tripping and let me make up my time by coming in after hours with Majestic like I’ve been doing all summer.”
See what I mean?
I bang my fist on the desk. “That isn’t any better, Mahogany! I just end up babysitting and feeding Majestic leftovers to keep her from chewing on me… for damn free at that! You two are not going to get over on me today, dammit!”
Mahogany huffs. “You won’t even let me hold Majestic when I’m there on my off day just to get something to eat, so are you through raising hell yet? I’m already at the hospital with Majestic to make sure it’s just an ear infection or something simple that’s causing the fever and not because her immune system is too weak to fight off a virus.”
“Which will probably kill her, if you didn’t get her seen in time, I know. And you should know I hate that Majestic has me wrapped around her finger. She reminds me so much of Salon. The poor thing had to come here with two boys just to be born. Or she wouldn’t have been.”
One pregnancy was enough for Malisa to seriously consider a hysterectomy. Lord knows I had much fun wisecracking on her while she was pregnant with triplets that were supposed to be just twins. I couldn’t help myself—she was as big as whole trailer park. Picking on Malisa might be why I’m catching so much hell from Mahogany. Too bad she didn’t find a good man like Malisa’s husband, Apollo Nordic-Ford, who would stick beside her and Majestic. You can hardly pry Apollo from his boys, Sebastion and Savion, nor Malisa from Salon.
I’m seriously considering sitting with Majestic at the hospital myself, so her mother can deal with the damnable computer system that I paid Mahogany an exorbitant fee to create, since I can’t make heads or tails of it. I think she made it complicated on purpose so I couldn’t fire her. Yeah, that just pisses me off, again.
“And hell no, Mahogany, I’m not through raising hell! What’s the point of having you on the payroll if I have to flip the paperwork and file the burgers myself? Please tell me so we both know.”
“Flip the what and file the who?” she asks, completely confused.
“You know what I meant. Mahogany, I’m telling you, I can’t keep you on, if you only work at night. I don’t have a graveyard shift, woman!”
Just because my team is unscareable doesn’t mean that I don’t try to put the fear of Tommy into them on a regular basis.
“I hear you, Mr. Tommy. I’ll be in tonight at least by eight to do the bookkeeping and I’ll clean the floor so Nevaeh can get off early. The hospital is quick about getting Majestic in now with her condition, thank God. Shouldn’t take me but a couple of hours to straighten out the invoices.”
A couple of hours. It would take me a couple of years just to enter the numbers. That doesn’t mean they would be in the correct place when I’m done. I’m completely at Mahogany’s mercy. Oh, let’s not forget Majestic’s mercy, too.
“Fine!” I slam the phone down in its cradle.
If one more thing goes wrong today, I swear to God I’m killing someone. Or deep frying them. Maybe even filleting their ass, then feeding them to somebody. Might as well go all out and do all of it since I’ll never see this side of the jailhouse’s bars again after committing murder. I am a black man, after all. By the time the cops, judge, and then prisoners get through with me, I’ll be fried, filleted, and fed to somebody else, too. Should get mine in first. Definitely.
I get up to go relieve Foreign and open my office door to her as she is just about to knock… on my forehead. She is as beautiful as Katara in two totally different ways. Katara is completely African American. Whereas, Foreign is mixed with a Filipino mother and African American father—both ousted her from the family when she wouldn’t agree to an arranged marriage.
Who does that shit anymore?
Apparently, Foreign’s family does, even though they live in the states.
“Put your hand down before you hit me, Foreign. I know you’ll do it on purpose and call it an accident, but I’ll have you locked up for it. You’ve been warned.”
She closes her eyes and shakes her head, not giving me her easy smile strangely. “Mr. Tommy.”
I snap, “What is it, Foreign?”
Nevaeh Lomax rounds the corner, coming from the staircase into the cream-painted hallway where Foreign stands. One corner of Foreign’s delectable mouth rises, finding my indignation comical. She’s the only one that makes me consider settling down after Katara. Usually, I date sparingly. As in, I spare myself the drama of finding a woman that wants a long-term relationship. Katara broke something in me: my trust in the opposite sex. Her not trusting me completely, or at least enough to listen to my side of the story before she became judge, jury, and damn near executioner, slayed me. It took a couple years before I would do anything besides work myself to death. She left with my heart. I do not want it back under any circumstances.
Dammit, I don’t want to think about her.
“It’s almost time for me to get off and Mahogany isn’t here, which is why you’re snapping at me like an animal when I haven’t done anything to you,” she informs, while I stuff painful memories of Kat into the locked box in the back of my brain.
I don’t know why they’re emerging fully today, of all days. Normally, I can force them back before the lid springs all the way open on the box that’s supposed to safely guard them from me.
I could snap at Foreign all day. She always just gives me the same half-cocked grin she’s giving me now. She has already learned that I’m harmless. “Foreign, I know when you get off. I make the schedule, remember? And I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”
Nevaeh stops short on her trek towards us, then executes a sharp and probably illegal U-turn in the hallway, knowing what’s coming. “Nuh uh, he won’t get a two-for-one butt for his jokes today. I’ll come back later to ask for a vacation day next week.”
“Denied, Heaven spelled backwards,” I hurl down the hall after Nevaeh. “With all the calling-in going on lately, there is enough days being taken off already.”
“Man!” she retorts just before vanishing in the stairwell in khakis, a white polo shirt with Tommy’s written in green across her left breast, and a ponytail that reaches below her shoulder blades. A twenty-five-year-old about to graduate community college right here in Arrow, she has the rest of her life in front of her to do what she wants with no obstacles (like single-parenthood, domineering parents, and an abusive boyfriend). The girl nearly severed her ex’s neck from between his head and shoulders when she decided he’d hit her for the last time. She’ll step in as bouncer before I even know I need one after the drinks have started flowing from my bar, or rather her bar when she’s behind it.
When she moves on to bigger and better things than Tommy’s, I’ll missed the dark-skinned, dark-eyed, Amazonian mixologist who works her ass off for her independence.
Foreign is more of the kind who stands her ground once her mind is made up, like she’s doing now, willing to fight if something’s about to pop off. A blank mask on her face, ready for anything. She would be unreadable if her eyes weren’t always lively, as if they’re dancing to some unknown music or entertaining a thought in her head. Suppressed get-up-and-go wafts off her like her subtle perfume. If she isn’t a younger version of Katara Johnson, I don’t know what she is.
“What are you going to roast me about today, Mr. Tommy?” She knows what’s coming too.
“Walk with me.” I slip past her into the hallway, careful not to even let my arm touch hers. “Looks like I’ll be filling in your position for second shift… again! And I want to make sure my station is stocked before you go, but I’m sure you have taken care of that already. Anyway, who in the hell names their kid Foreign? Why not Domestic? One doesn’t sound much better than the other if you ask me.”
If someone really did ask, I’d have to own up to the lie I just told. ‘Foreign’ sounds just as exotic as the woman looks. Philippine born but California bred with silky-black hair under her chef’s hat. Slanted, milk-chocolate eyes behind thick eyelashes that even I’m jealous of, and I have no need for more eyelashes. Especially when it’s not hard on my eyes to look at her full, shiny lips surrounded by smooth, blemish-free, pale skin. She has no drawbacks whatsoever, well, not in the looks department.
Even standing next to her, five-two on a slim but curvaceous frame, I feel tall at five seven. Not an easy feat when most of the men in my family, blood-related and otherwise, are six feet tall at least.
“Nobody asked you, Mr. Tommy, and you’ll have to question my mother about my name.”
I smile, enjoy the comebacks from my crew that’s more like family, and shove my hands in the pockets of my charcoal-gray slacks. “That’s the good part about this being my restaurant; nobody has to ask me to speak my mind here. I just can.”
“Lord, not tonight. I’m dog-tired and not in need of your jokes.”
“I believe that, because you look dog-tired too.”
But we both know that’s a lie, and that’s why I put up a wall between us to restrict my attraction to her from growing. She’s too young, only twenty-eight. Mostly sheltered by her family for the first twenty-six years of her life, Foreign is a ball of energy on any given any day, and she’s getting an enthusiastic late start in life with her culinary schooling. I’ve got to stop hiring twenty-something-year-olds and find older people with nothing better to do than work. They’ve already been through most of the things that life loves to throw at young people for the hell of it.
Seniors can be called in at a moment’s notice to fill in for the youngsters, too. I’ll have Mahogany get right on putting an ad in the local newspaper… if she ever gets here.
Foreign smirks as we round the same corner that Nevaeh just took at lightning speed. “You are too attractive to be this damn mean to everybody all the time, Mr. Tommy.”
We descend the wide, real oak stairs side by side.
“You shouldn’t take me seriously, Foreign. Oh, my bad, you don’t take me seriously. None of you ingrates do. That’s why I’ll have to flip the paperwork and file the burgers… again!”
Her tiny nose scrunches up like she smells something bad. “Flip the… you’re getting old at thirty-nine. That’s just sad.”
“I know exactly what I said.” This time. “And I know I’m not getting any younger. I don’t need your confirmation of that. This is my restaurant where you’re not allowed to speak your mind. Get your own damn business and you can. So, why are you up here, Domestic? I know what time you get off.”
She stops halfway down the stairs before laughing out loud. “I need a day off next week too.”
What the hell? It’s an epidemic!
I halt, with one foot hovering over the next stair down, eyeballing the swinging door at the bottom. “Denied, Foreign.”
“My father’s dead, Mr. Tommy,” she says softly behind me.
I look back. Can see the shit storm gathering in her life that’s rippling in the air over her somber face, about to hit the fan. Her family won’t be glad to see her, but Foreign wants to pay her respects so she’ll have no regrets, even though none of the Torres will want her there. Nevertheless, I’m betting she has more than a few regrets already, since she won’t be able to make amends with her father.
“His funeral is Friday. I’ll fly in and fly out the same day, so I can be on time for work the next day. His service will be in—”
“California,” I finish for her because, like I said, I know my employees’ damn business. “Approved day off. I’m sorry to hear that about your father.” I lift a finger in the air. “But he better really be dead, or you’re fired. Faking a death in the family is too low of a level to stoop just to dodge work, so you can skinny dip at a beach in Cali.”
Her usual smile makes a break for her lips. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“Woman, I know that, but seriously, give my condolences to the family. Send me the address of the funeral home after you touch down. I’ll send a flower arrangement there from Tommy’s Cuisine on your behalf.”
“I will, and thank you.” She tilts her head to the side, and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t make her more gorgeous. And approachable.
Time to go.
“You’re welcome, Domestic.”
I finish walking down the stairs, never staying in the same vicinity with her for too long when we’re not working to fill backed-up orders in the kitchen. I hate to leave her on the steps alone in not-so-obvious pain. She needs comforting after taking a hit of this magnitude. I’ve lost my father too, and I would hug her through the loss, but who knows how far that’ll go? I don’t, and don’t want to find out the hard way. Foreign is a risk I’m not willing to take. I’ve been around her long enough to know she doesn’t view me as a father-figure, and that she’s only attracted to and dates older men. That would be her father-issues manifesting.
I’m not a sounding board to work out her hang-ups on, nor am I a psychologist.
Besides, we have an unspoken understanding that we’re just intern and boss and nothing more. Even if she doesn’t understand it, I sure as hell do and will understand enough for the both of us. Before Katara, I could’ve envisioned a life with soft-spoken but fiercely loyal Foreign. She’s just not the one I want that with, and she probably doesn’t want it either. I said she dates older men; I didn’t say she stays with them for long. Until she comes to terms with her father being who he was when he was alive, she’ll always be unconsciously looking for what she won’t ever find in other men: the acceptance her father denied her every time she refused to go along with what he wanted.
I’ve already met the woman of my dreams and taught her what I like in bed while learning what made her body sing. Forget starting over in that arena again, which is unfortunately a must if I’m going to settle down with someone else besides Katara. Starting over isn’t something I want to do ever, and though I haven’t left a string of unsatisfied lovers in my wake, I can only imagine growing old with one very satisfied and satisfying woman.
As I push the door open to the busy main floor of the restaurant, I wonder where my old flame and should’ve-been-wife is now. I still have the ring that I planned to propose to her with in my home only a few miles from Tommy’s. I cannot bring myself to get rid of it or grab ahold to a life that doesn’t have Katara Johnson in it.
Goddamnit, Kat, what did you do to me?