“Tracy,” Rachel said. “Shut the fuck up and let us work!”
“Sorry, I talk when I’m nervous.”
“I talk when I’m nervous,” Rachel said, in a high-pitched voice filled with sarcasm.
“It’s okay, Trace,” I said, and caught a warning look from Rachel.
It was the last Monday in June and we’d had an unexpected run on the kitchen. We’d just finished serving our first standing-room-only when a charter bus pulled up in front of the inn and dumped twenty-four female senior citizens in our doorway. Beth had taken one look at the crowd and raced out the door to make a grocery run. I was frying some maple sausage links with sliced apples to take the edge off their appetite until she returned. Rachel was squeezing oranges as fast as she could, and Tracy was washing a rack of glasses, waiting for Rachel to fill the first pitcher with orange juice.
Oh, and Rachel was getting a bit testy.
“You don’t have to take up for Little Miss Tits,” she informed me. “Though I don’t blame you. She’s done everything she can to get your attention, short of giving you a blow job.”
“Oh my!” Tracy said.
“Rachel,” I said. “Relax. And Tracy?”
“Yes sir?”
“No blow jobs.”
She looked at me without expression.
“I mean it, okay?”
She giggled. “I wouldn’t even know how.”
“I wouldn’t even know how!” Rachel mocked. She grabbed an orange and hurled it at Tracy’s head. It missed by an inch and continued picking up speed until it slammed into the side wall of the dining room.
Tracy’s lip began trembling. Her eyes filled with tears.
An elderly woman screamed in the dining room.
Which caused Tracy to scream and run out the back door. Or maybe it was the knife Rachel held, or the curl of her lip, or the gleam in her eye. I poked my head through the serving area, smiled, and said, “Where you folks from?”
One of the ladies was halfway out of her chair, but she paused when she saw me. The others appeared nervous, but hadn’t bolted yet. She sat back down, tentatively. A lady sitting at her table said, “We’re from Valdosta.”
I glanced back at Rachel and gave her a look of disapproval. In return, she flipped her middle finger at me. I turned back to the ladies, showed them my best smile and, doing my best to imitate the friendly banter used by the locals, said, “Well, we’re mighty glad to have you folks with us today, and that’s a fact!”
“You sure about that?” the lady said, pointing at the dripping orange stain on the wall.
“I’m sorry, I should have warned you,” I said. “It’s an old St. Alban’s custom. Like the ceremonial pitch in a baseball game, it’s our way of welcoming you to The Seaside.”
The group looked skeptical, but rewarded my bullshit with light, scattered applause. The lady doing all the talking said, “I’ve been to St. Alban’s before, but no one ever threw an orange at me, or screamed in the kitchen.”
One of the other women said, “You’d think they’d throw something softer.”
Another said, “Or at least something less messy.”
Another responded, “Well, it’s Florida, after all.”
The Valdosta lady said, “You’re missing the point. They shouldn’t be throwing anything at all.”
I said, “Your appetizers will be out shortly.”
The lady who thought we should be hurling something softer said, “Come here, Sonny Boy, I want to show you something.”
I walked over to her. She pulled out her wallet and opened it to a picture of a baby.
“This is my new granddaughter,” she said proudly. “Isn’t she gorgeous?”
I hoped my wince wasn’t obvious. Was she kidding me? Personally, I thought the little freak looked like Moms Mabley. But I smiled and said, “Wow!”
She kissed the picture and put it away. I turned and started heading back to the kitchen, thankful she didn’t feel obliged to show me the rest of her brood. But after I’d gotten a few steps I saw another photo, one I recognized from the posters around town.
“Is that Libby Vail?” I said, pointing to a small photo another lady was studying.
She smiled a kindly smile and said, “I pray for her every night.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“They sell them at the tourist shops on Main, near the old train depot. Such a sad story.”
I nodded and continued my journey to the kitchen.
Though I didn’t get a chance to tell Tracy, I was, in fact well prepared for the Fourth of July pig roast. A full house for the B&B meant six couples, and they’d been booked months before Rachel and I showed up. We were counting on a double capacity breakfast Saturday and Sunday, and since the Fourth fell on Sunday this year, Beth had talked me into doing a giant pig roast on the beach Sunday night. We’d put a sign in the window and sold a hundred tickets at forty bucks each. After food cost and labor, Beth should net a cool three grand.
Other than losing Tracy and having to clean the orange mess from the wall, we managed to get the charter bus ladies fed without incident. Having one less set of tits in the kitchen seemed to have a calming influence on Rachel, but I knew she wasn’t up to handling the entire food service alone during the busiest week of the year. She’d turn on me for sure, and probably with knives instead of oranges. Knowing the rest of the week would be difficult for Rachel, I persuaded Beth to hire two of her lady friends to start that afternoon and work through the holiday weekend. I even managed to get Tracy back, though it required an apology from Rachel.
“I’m sorry I threw an orange at you,” Rachel said.
“That’s okay,” Tracy said.
“And?” I said.
“And I’m sorry your big fat titties flop out whenever Kevin’s around,” Rachel said.
“That’s okay,” Tracy said.
It wasn’t much of an apology, but Tracy needed the job.
Chapter 17
LIKE SKINNING A cat, there are many ways to roast a pig. The most common is on a rotisserie over a fire pit. But since the right type of rotisserie costs hundreds of dollars and would have taken too long to ship, I defaulted to the ancient Mumu method of burying the pig and cooking it with hot rocks.
The art of cooking an entire animal underground was perfected by thieves in the mountains of Crete, who used to dig pits, build fires in them, and bake large stones until they became white-hot. Then they’d steal some lambs or goats, throw them in the pit, and cover them with leaves and dirt. These pits were so well insulated that the thieves could stand on top of them comfortably in bare feet during the cooking phase, even as the animal’s owners came looking for them. This manner of cooking produced no smoke or odor, so the stolen animals seemed to have disappeared into thin air. Ten or twelve hours later, after the owners had given up looking for their stock, the thieves would dig up the perfectly cooked meat and enjoy the feast. Then they’d bury the remains in the pit, a perfect crime.
I roped off an area behind The Seaside and spent a couple of hours on Saturday digging the pit. Then I filled it with Georgia fat wood and local kindling. Around two o’clock, Hardware Store Earl and two of his sons picked me up in the family truck to steal some cooking rocks off the shore of Fernandina Beach, near Fort Clinch State Park. To be precise, these were ballast stones from 1800’s shipping fleets that had been tossed overboard by crew members in order to make their ships light enough to anchor close to shore. After a few hours of wading, lifting and carrying, we’d gathered enough stones to fill the pit. As we started loading the stones into the truck, the strangest thing happened. The wind that had been blowing from the south shifted slightly to the east, and a chill hit the air for a split second. I looked out to sea and saw a storm gathering on the horizon.