My mother-in-law brought thirty-eight friends into my restaurant, ordered the most expensive menu on it, and told them she was paying. Then she started boasting about my husband’s new girlfriend — and I looked across the room at the young woman refilling their water.
“The full tasting menu for everybody,” she said. “And open the reserve bottles from the cellar. Nothing cheap today.”
Her friends clapped.
The bill was going to be over twenty thousand dollars and every person in that room knew it except the one who had ordered it.
Declan tried once more. “We can still stop this.”
“No. Serve it.”
Constance took over the private room like a hostess. Scallops, tartare, flatbreads, the dry-aged sirloin, the sauces. The first reserve bottles came up.
I brought the best one out myself.
I was pouring it round the table when Constance reached up and took the bottle out of my hand.
She held it against her own chest, looked round at thirty-eight women, and said:
“Give me that. She’s good at working — that’s what you keep her for. Pour for yourselves, ladies.”
They laughed. All of them. One of them said, “She cooks beautifully, but she’s very ordinary, isn’t she?”
