Cook the Books

know, ‘I’m Hank Boucher, famous chef, everyone loves me, blah, blah, blah.’ I’ll give him what I have so far. That should be enough to get him going.”
    While I understood that the effort I was putting into the cookbook was simply considered “work for hire,” it was increasingly clear to me that I was the only one actually writing anything! Yes, work for hire meant that I was paid for my time and owned no legal rights to the book. Still, if the Boucher boys wanted to be fair, they might consider giving me coauthor status. Kyle, however, probably had no power to make decisions about the book; I’d have to go straight to the top.
    “Kyle, I have a thought,” I said casually. “Why don’t you bring your father by for dinner tomorrow evening? I can make some of the dishes from the book. I’d love to spend some time with him. Maybe it would help to give me a better feel for the book as a whole.”
    “Chloe, I really don’t want to subject you to an entire evening with my father. Besides, you don’t want to cook for the man. Trust me.”
    The more I thought about the possibility of being a coauthor, the more determined I was to lure Chef Boucher to my condo. “We’ll compromise. How about just appetizers and drinks? I’ll have everything ready when you get here. It’ll just be a quick pop-in visit.”
    Kyle paused. “Okay. If you insist.”
    “Besides, he should taste what’s going to be in the book, don’t you think?”
    “You’re probably right. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. He’s picky. He’ll tear apart anything he doesn’t love, so I hope you’re thick-skinned.”
    “I’ll wear a suit of armor,” I said. “Don’t worry about anything.”
    I hung up and began making a shopping list. I was happy to keep busy, and busy I’d be: preparing appetizers for Hank Boucher would be a challenge, but if I wanted a shot at coauthorship, I’d better not screw up.
    When the list was done, I called Adrianna in the hope of finding yet another way to occupy myself, but she didn’t pick up, and I figured she might be squeezing in a nap. I hopped online and tried to waste some time. Perez Hilton’s gossip blog featured shots of Daniel Craig emerging from the ocean, Miley Cyrus giving her usual stupid peace sign, and Brad Pitt surrounded by his eight million children. I clicked on my bookmarks and went to the Desperate Chefs’ Wives blog. I loved the site, which I’d visited regularly until Josh had ditched me for the Hawaii sun. The young woman who ran the blog was married to a chef and posted all sorts of funny stories about life with him. She wrote about watching Top Chef with her husband, she complained about how crummy his schedule was, she posted restaurant reviews, and she dropped lots of general tidbits about life with a chef. I especially enjoyed the blogs that she titled Chef Mumbles, which were about her husband’s habit of talking in his sleep. Even when he was zonked out, his mind stayed on his work: “It’s for the tasting menu. For Neil Patrick Harris,” he’d say in his sleep, and “I need dill and salsify.” He liked to engage his sleeping wife in conversation, too. “Is your station ready?” he once asked, to which his awakened wife begrudgingly replied that, yes, it was. “No. It’s not,” the chef responded before retreating back into silent sleep. In addition to mumbling, her husband sometimes hopped out of bed in the middle of the night, put on his chef pants, got back under the covers, and slept for another three hours.
    I missed all of it. Josh, too, used to talk in his sleep, rattling off lists of ingredients or details about scheduling. I knew that I should stop reading the blog, but I couldn’t help myself. The familiarity somehow made me feel close to Josh.
    I checked another blog that I was nuts about, Chef’s Widow, where the CW (as she refers to herself and to other women involved with rarely seen chefs) chronicles life with her chef and their two children. She’d posted great videos of her kids and pictures of her few-and-far-between dates with her husband, and she wrote honest, raw, sometimes painful accounts of her life. Her whole world felt so recognizable, so much like mine—minus the cute kids—that I momentarily cheered up. Then I checked my cell phone, saw three missed calls from Josh, refused to listen to the messages, and deleted all three. Crap.
    I slept miserably that night and must have done some mumbling of my own. I had