Second Helping

Chapter 6: The Booth Across the Aisle

The festival took up thirty thousand square feet of the convention center floor, four hundred booths in four long aisles, and by noon on the first day the air in the hall had gone thick with fat and smoke and the sweet chemical smell of propane.

Grace's booth was C-12. Independent creators' row, the cheapest tier, wedged between a pickle company and a man selling a hot sauce he'd named after his ex-wife. She had a two-burner camp stove, a folding table, a hand-lettered menu board she'd made the night before, and a pot of stock she'd brought from home in a cooler packed with ice.

Across the aisle, B section, was the account's booth.

It was four times the size of hers. Two camera positions, a ring light on a stand, a branded backdrop with the logo printed across eight feet of vinyl, and a table of finished dishes under a glass sneeze guard, plated and garnished and photographed before anybody had ordered anything. A crowd stood in front of it three deep, phones up.

Ethan stood in the middle of it with an apron on. He was talking to the camera. He had the tone he used when the numbers were good — bright, fast, the voice of somebody who understood, in an abstract way, that kitchens were places where things got made.

Wren was beside him, cutting garlic.

From forty feet away Grace could see her hands.

Goldbrook was the lead sponsor. Their banner hung over the main stage, and their logo was on every printed program, and Perlman was somewhere in the building, though Grace hadn't looked for her and didn't intend to. The arrangement was simple: Grace had a booth, and the brand had a name on a banner, and between those two facts there was a signed page that said so and nothing else.

She turned back to her own table and started the onions.

---

The cook-off was on the main stage at two, which meant the aisle in front of B section emptied out and the crowd migrated, and Grace could hear it from her booth the way she heard weather.

She could also see it. The stage was angled toward the floor and the big screen behind it was doing what big screens do.

Ethan was cooking the chicken noodle. On camera, with the handheld following him, with the crowd's sound bouncing off the ceiling.

He got the bones in the pot. He got the water in. He stood there with his hand on the ladle and his mouth slightly open, and then he looked at the camera and said something about letting it come up slow, and he said it with confidence, and Grace, forty feet away, with a knife in her hand, thought: he doesn't know how long.

He didn't. She watched him pull the bones at twenty minutes. She watched him salt it twice without tasting, and then taste it and salt it again. On the screen his face was doing the thing it did when it was working — pleasant, unhurried, the face of a man who had done this a thousand times — while his hands did the thing they did when he was lost, which was nothing. Holding. Waiting. Reaching for a spoon and putting it down.

The crowd couldn't see it. The crowd was watching the face.

Then Wren cut the garlic.

The camera stayed on her too long — five seconds, maybe six — long enough for the whole hall to see it. The cloves came apart under the knife in pieces of five different sizes, some of them whole, some of them paste. She scraped them into the pan with her thumb and the knife slipped and nicked her.

Ethan turned and looked at her. He didn't know the mic was still open.

"You said you could cook."

He said it low. It carried anyway. On the big screen you could watch her face go through something — a flinch, then nothing, then the bright thing she did with her mouth.

"I can," she said.

"Then cut it even."

The crowd made a noise. Not a laugh. That particular sound a room makes when it has just watched someone get embarrassed in front of it and hasn't decided yet whether it's part of the show.

Grace put her knife down.

She wasn't looking at the stage anymore. She was looking at a woman in the third row, maybe thirty, holding a tablet up above the heads in front of her, and the tablet was playing the account's first hundred episodes back to back, and the woman's thumb was tapping between two of them.

---

It started with handwriting.

The account had always finished its shots the same way — a small square hand on the menu card, tucked into the bottom corner of the frame. Grace had done it because it made the shot feel finished. She had done it on two hundred dishes, and then she had stopped, and the account had kept doing it anyway, in a hand that was not hers.

The woman in the third row had been watching the old episodes on her tablet. She held it up next to the stage monitor, and the woman next to her did the same, and then the man in front of them, and then it was a row of screens, and then it was a whole section of the audience holding up phones with the old episodes on them, comparing the corner of a menu card from four years ago to the corner of a menu card on a live feed.

The notes in Grace's booth were in her hand. She had a page pinned to the table's edge with the onion timing on it, because she wrote everything down, because she had written everything down for three years.

The woman came over. She had the tablet and the old episode and Grace's pinned page.

"Excuse me." She held the tablet up so the bottom corner of the frame sat right next to the page on the table. Same slant, same square little stack, the same final stroke on the *g* that came off the page like a hook. "This is yours. The note, I mean."

Across the aisle, the second camera position stood with its monitor showing the live feed. In the corner of the plated dish on that monitor was the same square hand, written by Wren's fingers with a steady grip and a pen that was not hers.

The woman looked from the monitor to the tablet and back, and then she looked at Grace, and her mouth opened and closed without anything coming out of it.

"Yes," Grace said.

The woman held the tablet out toward the person beside her. The person beside her turned to the person beside him. By the time the cook-off ended, nobody in the front of B section was looking at the stage anymore. They were looking at the woman at the second camera position, and then at her hands, and then at each other.

---

Wren got on the stage.

Nobody invited her. The host had just said something about the brand and the account and the tenth anniversary of the festival, and she walked up the side steps with her apron still on and stood at the mic and waited, and the hall stopped.

She had been crying. You could see it under the lights — the mascara ringed, the cover-up gone patchy under her eyes. She stood with her arms folded across her chest, holding her own elbows, and her voice when she spoke was quiet and carried anyway.

"The formulas are hers," she said. "The recipes. All of them. I knew that from the first day."

Grace, at the edge of the crowd, forty feet back, watched her.

"He told me he developed them. Then he sent me to her apartment to ask for the formulas, and that's when I found out —" she stopped, and started again. "That's when I found out he couldn't make any of it. He couldn't make anything."

Ethan was standing at the front of his booth with his hands at his sides.

"I did the videos because he promised me a brand of my own. He said, she's gone, everything's going to be yours." She turned her head and looked at him. "You told me if I copied her style close enough, nobody would know it was somebody else."

"Wren—"

"You had me study her. Her color grading, her framing, the way she sets a shot. You said once I had her method you wouldn't need her." Her voice cracked and stayed cracked and she kept going anyway. "You had me say the spice rack was mine. You had me wear her apron. You told me the handwriting was just something we did as a house style and I should learn to make the letters the same, so the menu cards would match."

The hall was completely silent.

"I practiced her knife work for three months," Wren said. "I still can't cut garlic even."

She said the last part almost into her own shoulder, and then she stepped back from the mic, and the host said her name, and she didn't answer, and she walked off the side of the stage and down the steps and out through the crowd, which parted for her because it didn't know what else to do.

Ethan hadn't moved.

He was still standing at the front of his booth when Grace walked up the steps.

She hadn't planned it. There was a laptop on the podium — the festival's, connected to the screen — and she had the drive in her pocket because she had brought it the way she brought everything, because three years of keeping every piece of it meant that when the day came there was something to show.

She plugged it in. The screen changed. The file list came up: three years of it, one folder per dish, the raw footage and the shot lists and the edit projects and the scans of the formula pages, each file stamped with the date and the hour it was created, going back to a phone she had broken two years ago.

"Anyone here can look at it," she said. "After this. The timestamps are on the files. I'm not asking anybody to take my word for anything."

She looked out past the lights.

Ethan was in the fifth row. Somewhere between the cook-off and the drive going in, he had come down off the stage apron and away from his own booth, past the industry people in the front, and sat down alone with his hands on his knees. Under the lights his face had gone the color of the paper plates.

The host said, into the mic, the question he had clearly had ready: *Why now?*

"Because he told me half the credit was mine," Grace said. "I thought half was enough."

A few seconds of nothing.

"One thing," she said. She was still looking at the fifth row. "The chicken noodle recipe. You told me it was an account asset."

Ethan's shoulders came up.

"Everybody here just watched the original files come off this drive. Do you still think it's an account asset?"

He sat there for three seconds. Then he stood up, and picked up his jacket off the empty seat next to him, and walked down the row and out the side door.

---

Perlman was standing at the front of the room before the door had closed.

She had come up the aisle from wherever she'd been standing and she walked straight to the podium, and she took the host's mic like it had been set down for her, and she said, in the voice she used in conference rooms:

"Goldbrook is confirming, effective today, a year-long brand content partnership with Grace Marsh, personally. Not with the account."

The room made a noise again. Grace stood there with her hand still on the laptop.

Her palms were dry. She noticed that.

She pulled the drive, put it back in her pocket, and went to find the stairs.

---

The back hallway smelled like floor wax and fryer oil, and Wren was sitting on a folding chair by the loading dock with her apron in her lap.

She stood up when she saw Grace.

She'd folded the apron. She had folded it properly, the way you fold something you're giving back, and she held it out with both hands.

"Here."

Grace took it. The cloth was soft the way it got after a hundred washings, and the strap at the neck had a small repair where it had torn two years ago and been sewn with thread that didn't match.

Grace had made that repair herself, on a Sunday, at the old studio counter, and had thought nothing of it at the time.

"He said the apron was from him," Wren said. "A trip somewhere. He made a whole thing of it. Which was stupid, because I was there when you bought it. I was in the room." She rubbed the side of her nose with the back of her hand. "I don't know why I let him tell me things."

Grace looked at her for a second. "What are you going to do now."

"Learn to cut garlic," Wren said. "That's the start of the plan."

She picked up her bag off the floor and went out through the loading dock door, and it swung shut behind her with a hollow metal bang, and Grace stood there holding the apron, the rest of the day still going on beyond the doors.

---

The apartment was on the third floor of a building on Harris, south end, and the buzzer had been broken since before she moved in, which meant that at seven that evening when the knock came, she knew exactly who it was, because nobody else in the world would climb three flights rather than stand on the stoop and text.

She opened the door.

Ethan stood there with his jacket over his arm, and the way he was standing — shoulders rolled forward, hands at his sides, not quite meeting her eyes — was the exact posture he'd had on that last night on the old couch, when he'd gotten up and walked to the door without saying where he was going.

The door was hers now.

"Hi," he said.

She didn't answer, and she didn't move out of the doorway.

"Can I come in for a minute."

She stepped back half a step, not to invite him, just to get out of the sight line, and he came in anyway.

The place was small. The living room and the kitchen were the same room, separated by the counter. No photograph on the wall. No second mug on the shelf. Nothing of his anywhere in it.

The burner was on under a pot. Red oil, moving.

"Just you?" he said.

"Yeah."

He stood in the middle of the room like a chair that had been carried into the wrong house. His eyes went to the cutting board on the counter — noodles, tofu skin, greens, a few meatballs on a plate. His eyes stopped on it.

There was no tripe.

He looked at that plate for a long time. Long enough that the oil in the pot popped twice and he didn't react.

"You used to get it with tripe," he said.

"I used to add it because you ate it."

He leaned on the doorframe with one shoulder and was quiet.

"Grace," he said. "I came to tell you something. I'm stopping the account."

She picked up the chopsticks and didn't stop moving them.

"I've started the paperwork to transfer the mark. It was your name for it. I don't have the face to keep using it." His voice had a dry scrape in it. "And the studio — the blender, the light stands, the good bowls, all of it — tell me what you want and I'll have it dropped off."

"I don't need it. I have everything here."

"What about the spice jars? You brought those back from —"

"Keep them. You don't cook. They're not doing anything at your place."

His mouth opened and closed.

In the pot, the broth rolled, and she turned the flame down.

He came forward a step and stopped at the line between the kitchen tile and the living room carpet.

"That word you said to me. On the phone." He wasn't looking at her. "I can't sleep. I keep hearing it."

"Then stop thinking about it."

"I know you're not going to forgive me."

"It's not that I won't forgive you." She lifted the noodles out with a skimmer and put them in the bowl. "There's nothing to forgive. If you think there is, you already know what those three years were."

He tried again and didn't get anywhere.

She carried the bowl to the small table in front of the couch and sat down. One bowl. Red oil. No tripe.

He watched her take two bites.

"When did you first think about leaving," he said.

"About the time you started saying anybody could do it."

He breathed in hard. "I didn't — that's not what I meant."

"What you meant doesn't matter now." She bit through a noodle. "What I heard does."

He stood there a while longer. He was waiting for something — a step down, a door opened, a word. She kept eating.

"There's one key left." He took it out of his pocket and set it on the coffee table. "For the studio."

"What about Wren."

"I told her to go. The brand thing is off." He looked at the key. "She's — she's simpler than you think. She's a kid who wanted to be famous. I used her."

"And when you used my recipes to sell Goldbrook and the audience. Was that using them too?"

"Yeah."

No excuses. She drank some of the broth.

"Ethan. You want to know your problem."

He looked up.

"You actually believe the person in front of the camera is the one who matters. Who made the food, who wrote the script, who sat up cutting the video — to you that's the back of the house. Anybody can do it. Anybody can be traded in."

She set the chopsticks down.

"It's not that you don't care about me. It's that you've never thought the person behind the camera was worth caring about."

His shoulders came down and kept going, the way a building goes when the foundation is pulled out from under it.

"I can't make that soup," he said. Quiet.

"Mm."

"I can't make the chicken either."

"Mm."

"I can't make any of it."

"Mm."

He picked up his jacket and went to the door. He put his hand on the knob and turned his head and looked back through the kitchen at the pot, still steaming.

"That hot pot," he said. "You're really not adding the tripe."

She looked at the bowl in front of her. Every time, for years — the note in the delivery app, extra tripe, mild. And after, alone, she had still typed it. And then one night she had understood that she had never once wanted it. She had been putting it in because it was the one thing he asked for, and it had cost her nothing, so she had never counted it.

She counted it now.

"Not adding it," she said.

The door closed. His footsteps went down the stairs, one flight, two, three, and then the spring in the entrance door banged, and then it was quiet.

She finished the last noodle. Washed the bowl, wiped the counter, turned the burner off.

Her phone lit up on the counter — a push notification, one of the apps, telling her something she usually bought was on sale. She opened it, and the first thing on the list was tripe, and she turned the recommendations off.

The delivery address list had one entry on it now. Harris Street, third floor.

At nine, Perlman's message came in, right on time.

*First brand spot drops tomorrow. Goldbrook loves the cut. One small thing — what name do you want on the end card?*

She thought about it for a second.

She typed back: *Mine.*