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Cap studied his only daughter. She was all grown up now - adult, headstrong, opinionated. Just like him.
“Can I go or not?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll see you at home.” Then Cap went back into the kitchen where he found Nikki giving him the stink eye.
“What?”
“How come she gets to go home?”
“She said she’s tired.”
“Tired? I’m tired. I got here an hour before she did. I should get to go home.”
“You can go home next time,” he said, not really caring.
“It’s not fair.”
“Whoever said life was fair? You should know that better than anyone.” Then he pointed to the couple of people standing on line, waiting to order. “You got customers.”
“And you…” he said, raising his voice and directing it at Tyler.
“What?”
Cap had nothing more to say. Tyler was his son, but they never seemed to be on the same page anymore. Not for the last few years. In fact, Tyler was fast becoming quite the disappointment. Cap just shook his head, headed in the back to the office, and closed the door.
It wasn’t that far to their house. Only a dozen or so short blocks, but Ant really was tired and her feet hurt so she called an Uber.
She got home, grabbed a long hot shower, put on her pajamas and then set herself on top of her bed with her laptop. She had been working on something the last few weeks and it was finally starting to come together. It was a business plan for the restaurant she wanted to open.
She was serious about quitting law school. She hated it. She found it mind numbingly boring. She found it soulless. She regretted ever letting her dad push her into it.
Get out of here. Get out of this two bit town. Get a real job. Be somebody… That’s what he said to her, over and over again. And she listened, regretfully. With each passing semester she disliked it more and more.
When she thought about what it was she really wanted to do, the only thing she thought about was food. Food, food, glorious food…
Growing it, raising it, prepping it, cooking it, serving it, eating it. If it had anything to do with artisanal or seasonal she wanted in on it. That was going to be her
place. That or something like it. Though she still had no idea what she was going to call it.
She hadn’t always been a foodie. She’d never been exposed to real gourmet cooking when she was a kid. Her dad’s idea of a fancy night out was the all you can eat Sunday rib special at the Pig and Porker two towns over.
It wasn’t that she wasn’t around food. She basically grew up in the kitchen at Cap’s. It was her summer job since she was eleven. Its just that she was never really introduced to the good stuff. Cheesesteaks, french fries and mozzarella sticks can only take you so far. It wasn’t until she wandered into the city’s biggest greenmarket on a warm September Saturday that she felt the call.
School had just started and Ant was having an unusually tough time getting back into the groove. She’d been procrastinating writing a paper all week and so, on that particular morning, her plan was to buckle down and get it done.
Up bright and early, which wasn’t much of a feat after yet another fitful night’s sleep, she grabbed a coffee and headed to the library to knock it out. Forty-five minutes later she was wandering around outside. Her books and notes left behind in the cubicle where she’d sat.
It was an absolutely stunning day and the push and pull of getting out was just too strong for her to resist. Which was odd, for her. She was never really one to blow off school, or work.
But, the thought of spending five more minutes inside… In that musty, depressing, beige building, putting pen to paper and trying to flesh out the Validity of Contracts in Regards to Restrictive Covenants Where There is No Underlying Patent or Trade Secret was just too much to bear.
So she got out and she just wandered. Did she know where she’d end up? Maybe. The subconscious is a tricky thing. Either way, soon she was in the midst of the city’s biggest farmer’s market. Stall after stall of fresh produce, pulled from the ground and trucked in, most by the grower’s themselves, just hours before it was sold.
On that day Ant walked past a vendor selling buckets of honey yellow habaneros. Past a pile of sweet as sugar, mottle skinned pluots two feet high. Their juicy insides fading inwardly from the darkest magenta to the palest of pink. Past a plethora of pies bursting with stone fruits and tangy berries. Finally stopping at a table brimming with ripe, late summer tomatoes. Fresh off the vine. Heirlooms the guy called them.
He was cutting up samples and handing them out. One bite of a Cherokee Purple sprinkled with a few grains of sea salt and her mind was blown. It was nothing like the tomatoes she’d been eating her whole life.
Pasty, mealy, supermarket staples that she usually ended up pulling off of every sub she’d ever had. These were different. These were amazing. She bought a bag of heirlooms and a fresh baked country boule from another vendor. Found a plastic knife and some packets of salt at a bodega across the street. And proceeded to eat all of it on the stoop outside a local church just a block from the market. To say it was a religious experience for her would be to vastly undersell it.
