Hungry Hearts Page 17

“My mom? Why?”

  “Girl, they weren’t going to tell me. But I’ve got eavesdropping skills. Seems your mom was doing the laundry and found, and I quote, a ‘bud of marijuana’ in your shirt pocket.”

  “Oh, shit.” The roach I put in my pocket when Seth caught me in the alleyway. I’d totally forgotten.

  “How you going to be so thoughtless, Kelsie? Getting caught smoking weed? From what I heard, your mom’s going to be there waiting for you after school, and you are going to be grounded for life.”

  I groan.

  “Oh yes,” Morgan says. “And I heard your mom say something about night shifts during the week at the restaurant so she can keep an eye on you?”

  “You don’t understand. Last night my mom and I got in a fight. I said—” I flush, embarrassed just thinking about it. “I told her I wished she had died instead of Dad.”

  Morgan blinks. “Oh no, Kels. You didn’t.”

  “It gets worse.”

  “Worse than wishing your mother dead?”

  “I went to see Seth.”

  “The creepy magic dude? You guys aren’t . . . ?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “Oh good. Wait, you didn’t tell him to hurt your mom, did you?”

  “No!” I take a deep breath before I say, “I told him to destroy the restaurant.”

  Morgan stares at me, chewing on her lip. “Well, that’s a little better,” she finally says. “But not much. Did he say how he was going to do that?”

  “I didn’t ask,” I admit. “I’m not sure I want to know the details. For all I know, he’s already put it in motion.”

  “Kelsie, think. This is not smart. What is he going to do?”

  “I imagine he’ll burn it to the ground. That’s what I would do. Make it look like a gas leak in the kitchen or something.”

  “But your mom will be in there! You don’t really want to hurt your mom. Do you?” She has a look of horror on her face.

  “Of course not! I’m doing this because I want my mom back. Once there’s no more restaurant, everything between us will be fine.”

  “But she’s going to be there.”

  “No, Thursdays are her farmers market days. She never gets there earlier than five p.m. on market days. No one does.”

  “I just told you. She’s sending Heather to the market so that she can be there when you get home at three to talk to you about your drug problem.”

  My stomach drops to my feet. “Oh God, Morgan. I didn’t know. What do I do?”

  “You go back there right now and you stop Seth before you ruin your whole entire life!”

  She’s right. I’m so stupid. How could I have been so stupid?

  “Go!” Morgan says, pushing at my shoulder. “I’ll cover for you. Just, go!”

  I shove my heavy backpack at her and take off running.

  * * *

  “Mom!” I scream as I come through the heavy glass doors. The restaurant is empty, silent as a graveyard at this time of the day. Nobody here. I checked Seth’s room first, to see if I could catch him before he started whatever he has planned, but he wasn’t there. And then I went upstairs to our apartment, but it was empty too. So I came to the restaurant last.

  The doors of the restaurant are unlocked, so someone has to be here.

  “Mom!” I yell again, striding across the dining area floor toward the kitchen. Part of me is relieved to find the restaurant intact, nothing wrong. But the other part of me feels uneasy, the air too still, like it’s holding its breath, waiting. Watching.

  I’m almost to the kitchen when Mom pushes the swinging door open.

  I sob with relief. “Mom!” I cry, rushing forward to hug her. I wrap my arms around her. She’s shaking, and she holds on to me so tightly I have to peel her away. Her face crumples, tears streaming down her cheeks as she looks at me.

  “I-I’m sorry,” I say, feeling awful about how upset she is. “I won’t smoke again. I didn’t know you would care.”

  But she shakes her head back and forth, no.

  “Then what?” I ask, confused. “If you’re not upset about me smoking weed, then what?”

  “Hey, bad girl,” Seth says, stepping out from behind my mom. I hadn’t even noticed him there. My stomach plummets. He must have told her about our plan.

  “I can explain,” I say in a rush.

  “You cooked for him, Kelsie,” Mom says, her voice cracking. “Why did you do that? I told you not to. I told you no. I would have made it work with just Seth. But now he knows. Now I know. And I can’t . . . I can’t walk away from that.”

  Fear skittles down my back. “It was just frybread.”

  “We both know that ain’t true,” Seth says.

  I want to protest that it is true, that it was just flour and baking powder and a little bit of salt. But he’s right. It was more, and we both know it.

  “You were right last night,” Mom says, still crying. “Seth came to the house to help me with my recipes. He figured out what’s missing.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The missing ingredient? Remember what the review in the Rowbury Times said? What they all say?”

  “They just don’t appreciate you.”

  “No, no. They’re right. I know it. We all know it. A white woman trying to cook indigenous foods. No matter my years at school, my prestigious internships, my hours in the kitchen. I just couldn’t get it right. But Seth explained it to me.”

  I eye Seth warily. He lifts his arm up, showing me the wound on his forearm. “It’s either in you, or it’s not.” I take a step back. My eyes dart between the two of them, trying to understand.

  “All I had to do,” Mom says, “was want it bad enough. Be willing to make a sacrifice.”

  “But you’ve already sacrificed so much for the restaurant,” I say. “Everything!”

  Mom’s blue eyes soften. “Oh, Kelsie. Not everything.”

  And that’s when I notice Seth’s holding a knife in his other hand. The big butcher’s knife that’s used for quartering beef. Slicing through muscle and tendon. It flashes bright in the light from the oversize windows. And I remember how he said he’s good with knives. But there’s nothing here to butcher.

  “Mom?” I whisper. “What’s going on?”

  “I need this,” she says, her voice a whisper. “Please understand. What you’re doing for me, it means everything. My dreams. Your dad’s dreams. You’re going to make them all come true.” Tears spill down her cheeks, but her eyes are hungry, and she licks her lips, excited. “I’ll name my new dish after you, I promise. I won’t forget your sacrifice.”

  “The new dish?”

  “The one’s that’s going to get me five stars.”

  “I told you this was the best job I ever had,” Seth drawls, twirling the knife between his fingers. “All I had to do was figure out what your mama’s recipes were missing. If I did that, she’d move me on up to the kitchen. No more trash, no more busboy. Ain’t that right, Jeanette?”

  Mom nods through her tears.

  “Blood is good and all,” he says, taking a step closer to me. “But why stop there when you can do better? Your mama’s recipes need more than I can give her.” His smile spreads. “They need heart.”

  Hearts à la Carte

  BY KARUNA RIAZI

  It was a slow night, up until this guy fell from the sky.

  No, not merely fell. He plummeted, as harshly uprooted and roughly swept away as a shooting star, sun streaming and teary eyed. He fell, and he brought with him several dislodged pigeons, a handful of tinsel, and one or two errant balloons with their stomachs glutted on dirty city exhalations and gutter backwash.

  I mean, I could have stopped his fall.

  Maybe. Well, honestly, I value my life.

  And maybe I’d have had more sympathy and thoughtless altruism if it hadn’t been the hundredth time this month that some rich partygoer had toppled off a balcony in his attempt to imitate a YouTube parkour video.
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br />   Also, and more reasonably, it was Christmas Eve, and the police probably had better things to do than field their hundredth call of the year from King of Kuisine (“the food you hate to love from the people you love to hate,” according to my youngest aunt, which was met by no end of snickers and scolding depending on which generation she said it in front of).

  In any case, it also wasn’t as though a man falling from the sky was unprecedented. Our cart had the misfortune of being parked next to a historically protected and ridiculously ostentatious water fountain, which drew teen boys for ill-advised stunts any time of the year. I’m not sure what I could have done, honestly, besides hustling out of the cart and holding my arms up like I was a Ghibli character.

  And the last time I checked, I was not.

  So floating guy got a face of concrete. This was unfortunate and made a very unpleasant sound reminiscent of the spiced-mutton patty currently working its way toward a good burn on the grill.

  I winced and gripped the hem of my apron a little tighter. Yes, I’d seen falling men before, but that sounded like a particularly rough landing.

  “Um . . . excuse me . . . ,” I started.

  The gray lump on the sidewalk shifted a bit, and then let out a pathetic cough.

  “Um . . .”

  I reached back without looking away, fingers fumbling and triumphantly clamping down once they met with cool metal.

  I held up my weapon to the light, and deflated.

  My greasy spatula. It figured.

  Still, there was no time for hesitation or doubt. I inched my way out of the cart and down the stairs toward the lump on the ground.

  “Um, sir . . .”

  I prodded at him with the spatula. He shifted and groaned again, rolling over with a grimace.

  Okay. Here’s the thing. When you’re the daughter of a dad who still remembers his Casanova of a college roommate and the five girlfriends he managed to have at a relatively conservative campus, and said dad pretty much flatlines at the mere suggestion of the word “date” out of the context of Ramadan and the innocuous dried fruit, you don’t see many guys in your social circle—or admit to having many guys in your social circle—who are, well, second-glance material.

  I know some of my friends are not as choosy, but for me, cousins do not count.

  But this guy was more than second-glance material. I’d hazard to put him at a 10.5 out of ten, along with a tossed-in giggle with a close female companion and a bumbled attempt at a sly candid to post on Snapchat: I DIDN’T KNOW ALLAH MADE THEM THAT FINE IN THIS AREA.

  Looking down at his wild shock of dark hair, the blue-black eyebrows perfectly arched as though drawn with the steadiest hand, and the mouth that already had the gentlest laugh lines forming at the crease, I won’t lie: I finally knew what it meant to be thirsty.

  Seeing the glass in front of you and needing to reach out for it just to reassure yourself it was sitting there.

  It is a moment I am not 100 percent proud of, but I readily own it.

  You wouldn’t have raised your eyebrows at me if you’d seen him. That’s all I’m saying.

  I blinked, and the boy had managed to peel himself off the stain-studded pavement with more grace than I expected from someone who had hit solid concrete. He leaned his weight on the cart, reaching down to inch a sneaker up his foot. I opened my mouth to ask if he wanted me to call 911, and my jaw hung there.

  His sneaker was smoking.

  And his hand was glowing.

  There was no other way to describe it. Later, it would be easier to pass it off as my own shock, but for a moment, his fingers glistened as though they dripped stardust and deferred dreams. And then I blinked, and there was a handful of wadded bills and brown, callused fingers.

  Had I really seen that?

  “Did you just . . . ,” I started, and then blinked rapidly as he shook the bills directly in my face.

  “As-salaamu alaikum. Sorry, should have led with that once I saw the hijab. Emergency services aren’t needed. Just give me whatever carbs you got on hand.”

  Two minutes later, I was leaning on the counter, watching as he dug into a layered bowl of Egyptian-style kushuri—pasta, fresh tomato sauce, lentils and rice—digging deep for the flecks of onion I’d snuck in and humming to himself. I wasn’t the biggest fan of kushuri on our menu myself, mainly because my memories of it had the bitter aftertaste of disappointment and deception.

  Time for a quick flashback. So, we were in Egypt, circa . . . well, whatever year it was when I was thirteen and moody and wanted to have time to myself and skulk through the pyramids, where surely the atmosphere would be dark and dank enough to reflect the tortured depths of my soul.

  But Ma didn’t want that to happen, because “that’s a huge tomb and you don’t know WHAT might be waiting in there,” and Baba had somehow sweet-talked his way into a dinner invitation with our cab driver at some hole in the wall, and the way his eyes were glinting as he pored over menu items, I knew my ideal sightseeing day was going to be given up for the greater good of King of Kuisine, as always.

  And I hated it. I hated Egypt. I hated its food. And then Baba leaned over the table, went, “You have to try this!” and shoved a good spoonful right into my sulking mouth.

  It was amazing. But I wouldn’t admit that, even now.

  Apparently, though, I was really easy to win over. The sight of this guy totally devouring kushuri—my kushuri, the type that always seemed a little sloppier in execution compared to my father’s efficiently tiered bowls—almost had me understanding my dad’s obsession with watching the customers eat, which was scary.

  “Good food should temper the shock of the fall, but you really should get medical assistance.”

  “This is good enough. Wait, scratch that. This is amazing enough,” he said, and gave me a devastating smile. I didn’t even know those were real, but he had one. There was even a hint of dimples.

  I flushed. “Freshly made every day,” I managed. “But hey, your sneakers . . .”

  He waved it off. “It happens from time to time. I’ll live.”

  Obviously, I wasn’t going to get much more out of him. So I settled. And watched him eat. He polished off the kushuri and a few fish patties that weren’t on the official menu but more like Ma’s personal gift to our regulars. Those were more of our usual home fare, the type of thing that felt warm in my mouth and grounding and that I often selfishly “vanished” rather than share with the customers. I separated categories in my head: cart food and our food. I knew other friends whose parents had restaurants, but I still balked from asking them if they had similar feelings, ways in which they drew the line between the business and them, what territories they could have to themselves.

  Watching him gulp down several of the browned and spiced patties, though, oddly didn’t sting. I didn’t even argue when he claimed the rest of the baklava I had triumphantly shaped and filled under the guidance of Aunty Busra up the block (all the while bitterly realizing that my father’s pride meant it would end up on the counter at work and not in the house). He eyed the empty pots longingly, and, with a sigh, I passed a white paper bag over the countertop. He raised his eyebrow at me inquisitively.

  “One of my friend Lila’s special pastries,” I explained. “Consider it a complimentary gift for spending more than any customer I’ve had in a night and effectively clearing out the rest of our inventory.”

  “I can’t tell if this is heartfelt or sarcastic, but thanks anyway.” He pressed it into his shirt pocket and patted it. Something about the gesture made my heart melt.

  For a moment, as he smiled at me and finally passed back the plate I found behind the counter, he seemed entirely normal.

  And then he slid off into the night when I paused in the middle of clearing away his containers to take a call from my mom.

  (That wasn’t embarrassing at all: trying to fumble through the usual “yes, I’m fine,” “no, there’s nothing going on,” “yes, the big butcher knife is und
er my stool” and awkwardly turning my back on another flash of dimples.)

  All that was left was a large wad of money—I’m talking a good stack of twenties, from the peek I took—and a note.

  For the next meal!

  There was a smiley face, too. I smiled back at it, if you want to know how low I fell over a guy with cute eyebrows and a healthy appetite and some foolish ideas of how to spend his night.

  And then I got on my phone and tried to figure out if we were really free of liability since he had fallen in front of the cart.

  Not to sound all jaded or anything, but I really expected that would be the end of it.

  It was one of those nights, in that type of city.

  And at least for that moment, I had felt bemused and bedazzled and almost magical. Something bizarre and curious had happened to me, in a city full of other people’s dreams. He had been that change, that taste of something else that I needed for just that moment. And now it was over. I would never see him again.

  * * *

  As it turned out, Falling Boy—or, well, Hasan Mahmood—came back for that meal he had alluded to in the note. And another one after that. And another one. You would think that all that time spent together would have lifted some of the fog of mystery around his shoulders. But it only deepened.

  When I asked where he went to school?

  “Rowbury High.”

  “That’s where I go!”

  “Well, then, there you go.”

  I mean, he’s the type of guy you would remember seeing in the halls, though, at some point.

  Then again, I’m not always the most observant person at school. I spend a great deal of time shopping around the previous night’s leftovers and using my friends’ enthusiasm for my ventures into spiced kofte and pistachio-laced rice pudding cups as a reason to eat something different for once, even if it was bland hamburgers off the hot lunch line and not face the whole “what do you want to do with your life” question that everyone in high school seems to want you to grapple with.

  Anyway, Hasan and his appetite were always a good distraction.

  And even when he was eating, or waiting hungrily for something to come off the grill, those eyes were always fixed on me—smiling, gleaming brightly in preparation to tease me, but just . . . there.