On the Right Side of a Dream Read Online Free Page A

while it’s still breathing. That tiny little slice of roast beef was so rare that its blood pressure was higher than mine. I could barely look at it.
    “Um, Yancey, could I get . . . I like to have my prime rib . . . medium, if that’s OK.” I knew those were killer words to a chef, and I wasn’t even a paying customer, but what could I say?
    Yancey chuckled and whisked the plate away.
    “Don’t worry about it,” he said, a huge grin splitting his face. “You’re in good company. My momma only comes here once a year. Says she can’t stand the food I serve and the crowd of fakes that I serve it to. ‘Puttin’ on airs’ she says.
And
she makes me serve her roast beef medium, too.”
    I finished my dinner and gave my compliments to the chef. And then Yancey brought out the dessert tray.
    You never know when lightning will strike, when a flash of inspiration will appear and push you in a new direction. Destiny crossed my path in the form of the dessert tray.
    There was a pudding that looked as if it had been whipped up with clouds. A three-layer lemon cake with soft ivory-colored icing that had sparkles in it. The apple tart was big enough for four people to eat or six if you counted the gigantic scoop of homemade vanilla ice cream on the side, and then a chocolate dessert with a white chocolate pyramid on top. It was called “Chocolate Death on the Nile.” They were so beautiful. Each one was like something that you could see in an art museum. They had been sculpted, designed, and measured. They had been crafted. I looked at that little pyramid every which way. Peaches was through.
    “Juanita, the man has other tables to wait on. Are you going to order that cake or pray over it?”
    I couldn’t answer her. I had turned myself into a pretzel so that I could look at the underside of the pyramid. I ordered two desserts. Not even to eat them. I just wanted them on my plate so that I could study them up close and touch them. It was hard to believe that they were food.
    OK, I did have a few bites.
    As I shoveled in a forkful of the lemon cake, I asked Yancey to tell his pastry chef that she was a genius.
    “Yeah, she is. But you’re welcome to tell her yourself.”
    Wendy Stern had a wide, toothy grin and tired brown eyes set in a friendly face. Her short dark-brown hair was cut like a pixie’s. She blushed when I told her how much I enjoyed her desserts—looking at them
and
eating them.
    “I almost feel bad getting paid to do something that I enjoy so much,” she said in a quiet voice that was hard to hear over the banging of pots and pans and the yelling in the kitchen.
    “Almost,” she chuckled. I could hear the flat ranch lands of Texas in her voice.
    “How did you make this?” I asked as she put the finishing touches on another sculpted dessert that looked as if it had come from an architect’s drawing board.
    She shrugged her shoulders as she gently placed a plump raspberry on top of a swirled dome of whipped cream that looked as if it was really made of white marble.
    “It isn’t that hard, really,” she said as she drizzled thin lines of chocolate syrup around the plate in a design that looked like a tasty spider’s web. “You could do it. You draw it out, get it down on paper. Then you calculate. You have to measure everything, make a formula. That’s the most serious part of what I do, the measuring. Especially since I can’t eat what I make.”
    “Why not?” I asked, remembering the taste and richness of the last should-be-illegal dessert. I tried to lick my fingers without looking too much like a pig.
    “I’m diabetic,” she said simply. “Sugar and I get along fine but only from a distance. I have to be careful.” She gestured toward one of the other chefs who was working at the opposite end of the kitchen. “Larry helps me with the tasting when I’m not sure or when I’m experimenting.”
    I stayed by Wendy’s side for another hour. Peaches left me to run the truck through