Bobby's Diner Read Online Free

After he’d prodded me enough times, I decided to
leave the gas station and help him out in the kitchen. Slowly, I started to add
recipes of my own to the menu, ones that would cost little but present well.
The first new dish I added was fettuccine alfredo. It included a side salad of
organic greens and tomatoes and a chunk of garlic toast. We first served it as
a special to see if people would go for it. When we’d sell out night after
night, Bobby decided to add it to the menu. It went on like this for years and
now that little diner has been named Best of Sunnydale for the past five years.
People travel north all the way from the big city just to have dinner with us.
    I’d worked the diner for going on
fifteen years.
    Vanessa and Bobby ran it for
thirty years before that.
    Never once, since I’d been
around, has she come in and, now, that was all about to change.

 

 
 
    CHAPTER 2

 
    Two large women working together
in a tight kitchen looks a lot like a herd of hips and breasts throwing food
around. Mix in one woman who has an attitude and stir in another who cries   uncontrollably as the wind blows, well, it’s
not a pretty sight at all. We found our newly formed partnership trying.
    The first day proved disastrous.
Vanessa wanted to do things the way she used to, the way she’d done them over
fifteen years ago. I tried as diplomatically as possible    to    explain    we’d    changed    the    menu considerably—no more
mashed potatoes and gravy or
    creamed hash on toast. We’d
updated the fare to suit a finer palette. She didn’t appreciate the implication
that her food wasn’t up to standard and took to pouting but continued to work
nonetheless. I had to force-feed the new menu down her throat. She spit it back
at me like a baby in a high-chair.
    “What   the   hell   is   radic-chee-o ?”   She   said   it phonetically—the way it
looks. My mistake was correcting her.
    “Radichio. It’s pronounced
radeekyo.” I went on. “It’s a purplish-red leafy kind of vegetable. Sort of
looks like cabbage. It can taste mildly bitter. And, it’s great for Italian
dishes.” I was explaining all about the proper pronunciation and everything a
person might want to know   about or do
with raddichio, on and on. I was chopping up   something at the time and didn’t pay attention to the offense she’d
taken from me telling her all the radicchio facts that filled my pin-sized
head. I was just chattering along like a chipmunk after a nut.
    “I don’t need you telling me how
to pronounce words, young lady.” Vanessa barked out her objection, untied her
apron, threw it onto the counter, and walked off. “Vanessa, I didn’t mean…”
    She didn’t break her stride and
left the kitchen before I could finish my sentence.   She went straight for the bathroom,
disappeared inside and slammed the door. Hard.
    We were prepping for lunch and
dinner. We were both trying to work the kitchen, the way we had when we each
worked with Bobby. He had always done the rest—host, cashier,   supervise the wait-staff and bus- people, do
the books, marketing and promotion… all that was Bobby. The name, “Bobby’s,”
for heaven’s sake, represented the brains behind the   organization. The diner was all about Bobby.
I was just a glorified worker in the back and as the day plodded along, I
realized that’s all Vanessa ever was during their marriage. A fear gripped me
while Vanessa threw her temper tantrum in the john.
    “Vanessa! Come here please.” My
voice must have sounded a bit panicked because she popped out almost instantly.
    She was wiping her nose with her
hankie and sniveling.
    “What?”
    “Have you ever worked the front?”
    “That was Bobby’s job. Why?”
    “We don’t have a front person.” I
looked at her in terror. “Do you think you can handle the front, Vanessa?”
    “Are you trying to get me out of
the kitchen?”
    “Vanessa, I’ve never worked the
front. You’ve