Fed up

the best seafood place in Boston.”
    “True enough,” Ade agreed. “Can you imagine what an awesome job that would be? Eating in restaurants with no one knowing who you are? And eating everywhere and having the paper pay the bills? I’d do that job in a heartbeat.”
    “Join the club. You sure you don’t want to talk to Robin yourself?”
    “No. I’m sorry, Chloe. I can’t eat at that place after what I’ve heard. Besides, I’m too huge to leave the house. I’ll probably end up having the baby in my apartment because they won’t be able to push me out the doorway.”
    “Very funny,” I said. In spite of Adrianna’s joking and protestations, I remained half convinced that her real reason for refusing to come with me to Alloy was money. Or money and pride. I was sure that she already felt indebted to my parents and wanted to avoid feeling like an object of my charity. She was not, in fact, totally housebound. And Alloy was surviving in the South End, where competition among restaurants had to be ferocious. How bad could it really be? “Do you have any requests for how the wedding is filmed?” I asked. “Anything you want me to pass on to Robin or Nelson?”
    “Tell them not to film my goddamned mother. I just know she’s going to be difficult, and I don’t need a visual reminder of her stinky attitude when I watch that video twenty years from now. If they accidentally get her on tape, have them put one of those blurry circles over her face and remove her voice from the audio. What’s today? Wednesday? She’s coming in on Friday, so the countdown to doom has officially started.”
    “Don’t worry about her. There’ll be enough people around to keep her under control,” I assured Ade while reminding myself to designate someone to head the official Kitty Patrol.
    I hung up and searched the Web for reviews of Alloy. The ones I read were far from fantastic. A local arts and entertainment magazine called Alloy’s food “undeveloped and mundane” but admitted that the dishes were helped by the bountiful use of fresh herbs. The reviewer was not ready to dismiss Alloy and hoped that time and experience would improve this little restaurant’s fare. Online customer reviews were mixed, with some people raving about simple ingredients and dramatic presentations, and other people complaining about small portions and an overemphasis on elaborate style at the expense of flavor.
    I looked up Alloy on Boston’s Mayor’s Food Court, a Web site that was, I thought, a bane to restaurants and a great boon to consumers. Posted on the site were the results of every Boston restaurant’s health inspections, and not just general results, either, but details about every violation, no matter how minor. According to the home page, “The Mayor’s Food Court provides consumers with current information about Boston’s restaurants so that they can make informed decisions about where they will eat.” In other words, I could make an informed decision not to eat at Restaurant X, which was infested with rodents and cockroaches, and routinely stored food at temperatures meant for growing a plethora of bacteria.
    I have to admit that out of curiosity, I’d looked up Simmer a couple of times. Because Josh was an absolute fanatic about keeping his kitchen sterile and up to code, I’d never found any violations. As I soon discovered, Alloy, on the other hand, had been repeatedly cited for improper cooling of cooked or prepared foods, unsound equipment maintenance, toxic items not properly labeled, and evidence of— ewww!—rodents.
    All I could think of was the Monty Python sketch about rat tart. Still, I absolutely couldn’t cancel the dinner. One point of it was to get a free professional wedding video for Adrianna and Owen. Another was to ask about gardening and thus to find out who might be growing foxglove. The third point was frivolous: being in a “human interest story,” to use Robin’s phrase, would be a hoot. Being in? Well, as the official solemnizer, I wouldn’t just be in the story, I’d be one of the stars. So rat tart or no rat tart, and Nelson or no Nelson, I had to go. I wondered whether Nelson would have his camera at the restaurant. From what I knew of him, I had to assume that yes, he would, so I’d better dress accordingly. Never having been the subject of a human interest piece before, I wasn’t sure exactly what was involved, but if I was going to discuss my role as a one-day solemnizer