Family Recipe

Chapter 2-2

Del had met Clyde when he was twenty-five and working at a restaurant in Sacramento. Clyde had been everything Del wasn’t; self-assured, from old money, and college educated. He’d also been ten years older than Del, and a friend of the restaurant’s owner, Tony.

Del had been flattered with the attention Clyde gave him. The special thanks sent to the kitchen, the times he tried to chat Del up when their paths crossed in Tony’s office. Then eventually, he’d been waiting for Del out the back when he got off shift, and…well, the rest was history.

Del’s parents had been delighted that he’d met someone so sophisticated as Clyde, and when they got engaged couple of years later and married the next summer, well, they’d been so happy.

When Clyde gifted him a half of a really nice restaurant in San Francisco and told him to go wild with it, Del ran with the idea. Clyde was happy in the office or wining and dining potential suppliers of rare, top quality goods.

Clyde had been the front of the operation, and Del had been happy in the kitchen, running a tight ship. Sadly, after more than six years of marriage, Del realized Clyde was cheating. The fact that he’d chosen Trim’s business manager, Diana, to do it with was a whole other can of worms.

Del got up and left his cell behind. He sipped at his water as he meandered over to the kitchen. It was the only part of the old house he’d actually properly renovated when he moved about a year ago. There were all sorts of kitchen gadgets around, from a pressure cooker to a sous vide immersion circulator to a tabletop BBQ smoker in the corner of the counter.

There was a whole pantry full of other things, anything he could want while trying to write his f*****g impossible cookbook.

That reminded him. “s**t, s**t, s**t, s**t!” He went to the plate of sashimi and saw the cucumber in the salad had started to weep and now the tuna sat in a puddle. “For f**k’s sake!”

He grabbed the plate and scraped everything into the trash. Then he cleaned the counters, and took the most delicate items he needed to handwash to the sink.

There were lights on at the O’Dwyer house past his backyard and the gully. He wondered idly what was going on there. A few days ago, he’d seen flashing lights headed to the O’Dwyers’. It wasn’t the first or the last time, not with how the sketchy people in town seemed to congregate there sometimes.

The last six months had been more active in that regard. It was hard not to notice when the only way to the O’Dwyers’ was the same road Del’s house was on.

There were kids there, which worried Del sometimes. They weren’t that old, although his mother had said something about an older boy that had left years ago.

Sighing, Del rinsed the dishes and dried them. It wasn’t his problem, those children. That was what their mother and the CPS were for.

He should’ve fixed himself something to eat for dinner, but he didn’t feel like it. Part of him wanted to start a big pot of the Stew out of spite, but he didn’t have any Guinness in the fridge. It wasn’t Stew without Guinness.

Instead of cooking, he wandered over to his living room and plopped down on the couch. There wouldn’t be anything on TV, but suddenly the silence of the big old house felt too much, so he turned it on anyways.