at her first movement. He found himself above the chanterelles again, found the one in his hand and began to move as normal, raising it towards the bag. And then—remembering what he had just seen but forgetting both himself and her actual presence five or six feet away—he raised the dusty orange, pine-needle-covered mushroom past the rim of the bag and to his nose.
Jules was looking surreptitiously around herself, having been unable to find the stare immediately. She was glancing back to her celery root when she spotted him. The guy in the suede leather coat, high cheekbones, dark eyes and thick, unkempt dark hair. He was staring back down at a basket of chanterelles, looking with faint recognition at the one in his hand. And standing, staring, his face had become dreamy. The mushroom drifted up to a spot under his nose, where he inhaled its fragrance deeply, taking a long, shuddering draw.
He opened his eyes again and dropped the chanterelle into the paper bag, apparently satisfied. At which point he noticed that she was looking back at him, laughing silently. He saw thechosen celery root hoisted and sitting on the palm of her hand, next to her shoulder, as if ready for shot put.
“Is that what I look like?” she asked him. “Like I’m trying to get high?”
He reddened. He ran a hand nervously through his hair.
“You cook,” Jules said. It wasn’t really a question. He looked tired. He was checking out chanterelles with a practised eye. He had a snip of Elastoplast around his left index finger, right where you might take off a slice of knuckle if you were behind on prep and not getting enough sleep. But he didn’t ask how she knew, just accepted that she had spotted him as a professional.
“My night off.”
She nodded, eyebrows arched high. “From …?”
He told her about his work, sauté man at a popular tourist restaurant with a steady-on salmon-and-prawns-type seafood reputation. She was doing pastries and desserts at The Tea Grill, a well-known and overtly experimental kitchen, the kind loved by a certain glossy variety of critic and the financially enabled patrons that follow in their wake. A serious Crip credential, but Jeremy was impressed.
They had coffee several weeks later. She called. They met at Save On Meats, in a rough block of East Hastings Street. Jeremy knew about the legendary Vancouver butcher—part slaughterhouse, the band saws and heavy cleavers were in use right behind the glass counters—but he hadn’t known about the little diner at the rear. It had a narrow yellow Arborite counter that curved in and out to form conversational peninsulas. They sold drinkable diner coffee and enormous hamburgers for $3.50.
Jeremy loved it. He looked around the counter area with a broad smile. Jules found herself pleased to have predicted approval.
Save On Meats became a weekly thing, talking shop mostly. He confided in her quickly, told her of the irritations andrewards of his present work. He told of his ideas, his taste for the simplest, most direct and local cooking possible. “Highend urban rubber-boot food,” he said at one point. He told her about the restaurant where he had worked in France, Chef Quartey, Claude, the cast of other characters and the surrounding countryside, which had all joined to inspire one single idea: The Monkey’s Paw Bistro. He could almost draw the details of the room in words, so long had he lived with the vision. He told her about the slow-dawning possibility that he may have enough seed-investment money. He spoke of his so-far unsuccessful search for that one other chef he would need.
Jules nodded and listened over a number of similar conversations, watching his angular face work with enthusiasm around dark, shining eyes. She thought he was starting to like her, maybe he even had a little crush at this point. And she would have acknowledged a mutual attraction if someone had asked her. She would have admitted that once—the second or third time they
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