The herb garden is calling me before prep starts.
I stand at the kitchen window debating it for a full minute, because outside is where they are, and bumping into any one of them before my first coffee is not something I'm equipped to handle.
Then I remember the geography.
I've mapped this island the way you do when you're actively trying to avoid three people while living under the same roof as them. The herb garden is the far corner, tucked behind the kitchen wing, as far from the main house as the property allows.
Safe. Mine.
I go.
The garden is amazing, there’s rosemary in a long row, woody and established. Thyme in three varieties which I identify by crushing a leaf between my fingers and holding it to my nose, a habit my mother had that I absorbed without noticing until I was doing it alone in foreign gardens at six in the morning. Flat-leaf parsley, chives, two kinds of mint, tarragon, which I haven't cooked with enough and intend to fix. At the far end, half in shadow, a bay tree that has been here longer than everything else, its lower branches nearly at my shoulder, the leaves dark and waxy and smelling exactly the way bay is supposed to smell when it's real rather than the dried version that's been sitting in a jar for two years doing nothing for anyone.
I stand next to the bay tree for a moment.
The island is beautiful at this time of day. The light starts to come gold through the trees, the water beyond the garden wall going from flat gray, and it's warm already, and the whole place smells of salt and green things and the particular sweetness of something flowering further up the hill that I haven't identified yet.
I breathe it in and feel my shoulders drop approximately two inches.
See,my omega says.Nobody's here.
I know,I tell her.Don't make a thing of it.
The lunch service is fine.
The guests eat what's put in front of them and don't leave anything on the plates, which is the only feedback that counts in a service kitchen; the rest is just people with opinions about food, which describes everyone and is therefore not specific information.
I get a notepad from the drawer next to the refrigerator, the same one I used for last night’s prep notes, and start writing. Menu planning. Practical things. Tether myself to something concrete.
Three courses for dinner. The Italian couple want good olive oil and will notice if it isn't, which is fine because the olive oil in this pantry is genuinely excellent and I've been using it with the reverent care it deserves. The British guests are fine. The two new guests arriving tomorrow for the Nakamura meetings — Carmen said formal, Japanese, so the dinner the night they arrive wants to be confident without being showy, the kind of food that says someone was paying attention.
The handwriting on the previous pages is mine, careful and small, Anna's rice recipe in the margins with her annotations copied faithfully.Don't skip the resting time.
The dinner goes well. The lamb goes out medium and rested, the herbs from the garden in the crust, the tarragon in the sauce making exactly the argument I hoped it would. The vegetables are honest, roasted with the good olive oil, nothing clever happening to them, just heat andtime and something that belonged in the ground recently. The dessert is a tart I have made approximately forty times in various kitchens under various conditions and it comes out right every single time, not because it's simple but because I've earned the repetitions.
I stand at the counter after the last plate goes out and breathe.
"We did that," I tell the kitchen, and feel briefly ridiculous, and then decide that talking to a kitchen at eight thirty after a good service is a completely defensible habit and I'm keeping it.
The baby shifts, approvingly.
"You helped," I allow.
Carmen appears in the doorway while I'm wiping down the marble, clipboard in hand, bergamot and clove and the particular energy of a woman who has seventeen things to do and is choosing to pause on purpose.
"The guests are happy," she says.
I look up. “Really?”
"The Italian couple asked who made the lamb." She checks her clipboard. "Mrs. Bellini said, and I'm quoting directly, that the tarragon sauce was the best thing she'd eaten since her grandmother died."
I put the cloth down. "That's either a compliment or a tragedy."
"In Italian cooking," Carmen says, "it's the highest possible praise." She makes a note on her clipboard. "You're doing a good job, Jennifer."
"Thanks," I say, because sometimes the simple answer is the right one and also because something about Carmen saying it so plainly, no fuss, no performance, just the plain fact of it, lands somewhere I wasn't prepared for.
She nods once and disappears back down the corridor, already onto the next thing, because Carmen is always already onto the next thing.