The Caterer's Revenge

Five years ago I got fired from the best job I ever had. Well, "fired" makes it sound dramatic. It was budget cuts, Philip Gibson told me, nothing personal. He said it with a little frown, like he was sorry about it, and then he shook my hand and sent me out the door of the university catering service he ran, with two weeks notice and a box of my knives.

I was forty years old. I'd been running his kitchens for six years. And the budget cuts thing was partly true, but here's what Philip never said out loud: he was cutting my position so he could hire his nephew's friend at a lower rate. I found that out later from the bookkeeper, who told me over a beer at The Gilded Owl and then bought the second round because she felt bad.

So what did I do? I did what any forty year old man with a truck full of chafing dishes would do. I panicked for about three months. Then I got mad. Then I got busy.

I rented a kitchen space over on Marsh Street, the one with the bad floor and the good ovens, and I started Cal Sandford Catering with nothing but that truck, my knives, and a grudge. And you know what? The grudge turned out to be the best business partner I ever had. Every quote I wrote, I wrote like Philip Gibson might read it. Every event I ran, I ran like he might be in the room. Five years later I've got six employees, a waitlist for graduation season, and a rep in Oakmere for the kind of food people actually talk about at the party instead of just eating.

Am I over it? Ha! I tell people I'm over it. My sister Marla, who is forty-one and knows me better than anyone, says I'll be over it when Philip Gibson eats his words at one of my events and I get to watch. Fine. Maybe. I'm forty-five now, I'm allowed one pettiness.

Here is the thing about Oakmere, though. It's a small town with a college stuck in the middle of it, like a pearl in an oyster. Everybody knows everybody. Which means when my phone rang on a Tuesday night in February, while I was prepping chicken for a funeral lunch of all things, and the caller ID said Selena Adler, I already had a bad feeling.

Selena Adler is an event planner. She's forty-two, married her college sweetheart at twenty-three, never cheated on him, never even looked sideways at him as far as I know, and is the most relentlessly cheerful person in a fifty mile radius. She also books caterers. Which means when she calls me directly, on a Tuesday, about a job she would normally hand to her assistant, it's not a normal job.

"Cal! Hello! It's Selena!"

"I know, it says so on the phone."

"Ha. Right, sorry. Listen, are you busy Thursday? I need to talk to you about a thing."

"A thing," I said, wiping my hands. "Selena, you're an event planner. You people don't have things. You have events. With spreadsheets."

"This has a spreadsheet," she said, and she actually sounded proud of it. "It's the art department gala. The big spring one. University contract, three hundred guests, real money. And before you say anything, yes, it's the university contract."

I put down the knife. The university contract. Every caterer in three counties wants the university contract. It's steady, it's prestigious, and it pays on time, which in my business is practically a love letter.

"Philip Gibson is on that committee," I said. "He chairs it. I'm not going to stand in a room and hand him little canapes while he makes that face."

"First of all, he doesn't chair it this year, he's just on it. Second of all..." and here her voice did a thing, a little sideways thing, like she was tiptoeing into somebody else's mess. "Second of all, he doesn't get a vote on the caterer. Cecelia does."

"Cecelia?"

"Cecelia Whitmore. Art history. She's thirty-eight, she's brilliant, and she is running the gala this year as her own personal weapon against Philip. Cal, I'm going to be honest with you, because you're my favorite caterer and also because Marla is my yoga partner and I hear things."

"She hears things too," I said to the ceiling. "Great."

"Cecelia wants to stick it to Philip. She won't say it that way to the committee, she'll say quality and local sourcing and whatever, but between you and me? She wants to hire the caterer Philip fired. She wants to walk into that tasting with your food and watch him chew it. That is the whole play. That's the gala."

I stood there in my kitchen with chicken on my hands and my heart doing something undignified. The universe does not usually hand you a gift wrapped in spite with a bow on top.

"Wait," I said. "Wait wait wait. She wants to hire me to annoy her boss? That's it? That's the pitch?"

"That's the pitch," Selena said cheerfully. "Also the food has to be amazing because the committee votes too, but mostly the spite. Are you in?"

"Does she know about the firing?"

"Everybody knows about the firing, Cal. You tell the story at every bar in town."

"I do not tell it at every bar."

"You told it to my husband at his birthday party. Twice."

Okay. Fair. Once. Maybe twice. It was a good story, I had the timing down.

"All right," I said. "Thursday. Where?"

"The Gilded Owl, seven, she doesn't want to do it on campus, too many ears. Cal? One thing."

"Here it comes."

"Be normal. She's my best friend, she's been through some stuff, a whole thing a couple years ago, I'm not telling you what, and she's doing this gala partly for fun and partly because Philip has been undermining her for three years and she's had it. Just be normal and funny and make good food. Can you do that?"

"I'm extremely normal," I said. "I'm the most normal man in Oakmere."

"God help me," Selena said, and hung up.

I need to be honest about the next two days, or as honest as a man can be while marinating pork shoulder. I did not think about the gala the way a professional thinks about a gala. I thought about it the way a man thinks about a rematch. I wrote three tasting menus. I threw out two. I made Selena's favorite little shrimp things in case I needed to bribe her, which is a joke, but I did make them.

Thursday came around gray and cold, the kind of Oakmere February where the oaks on the square look like they're holding up the sky. The Gilded Owl at seven o'clock is grad students in the front and faculty in the back, and I walked to the back and there was Selena, waving like I might miss a woman in a red coat at a table of six people, and next to her was Cecelia Whitmore.

Let me describe her, because I got it wrong in my head before I walked in. I'd pictured somebody severe, somebody in a blazer with a list of complaints ready. What I got instead was a woman with dark hair going gray at the temples and not pretending otherwise, glasses pushed up on her head, reading a menu like it was a contract she intended to find loopholes in. She was, I will admit it right here, gorgeous in a way that had nothing to do with trying.

"Cal Sandford," I said, sticking my hand out. "You must be the spite."

She looked up and laughed. Actually laughed, quick and surprised, like it got out before she could stop it.

"And you must be the revenge," she said, shaking my hand. Hers was warm and she had ink on two fingers. "Sit down, please. Selena's told me exactly four useful things about you and forty things about the shrimp."

"The shrimp are a bribe," Selena said. "I already ate six. Cal, she ordered for you, I hope that's okay, it's the chili, it's the only good thing here."

"Cecelia," I said, sitting down. "Before we start, I need to say one thing. I know why you called me. Philip fired me five years ago and you want to hand him my food and watch his face. I am not going to pretend I hate that plan. I have rehearsed his face."

"See." Selena threw her hands up. "This is what I was afraid of."

"No, no," Cecelia said, and she was grinning now, glasses coming down off her head, and I thought, oh no, oh this is a problem. "That's exactly what I hoped for. A man with a grudge and a saute pan. Tell me everything. Start with the day he fired you. Leave nothing out. I want details, I want dialogue, I want to know what his face did."

"Cecelia," Selena said. "You're supposed to vet him, not recruit him for your war."

"Selena, sweetheart, I've been at war for three years. I'm just badly armed." She turned to me, and her eyes were doing something bright and mischievous that made my stomach flip like I was twenty-two, which I have not been for twenty-three years. "So? The firing. Go."

And I told her. I told her about the box of knives and the phony frown and the budget cuts that somehow had money for a new conference table the same month. Selena drank her beer and rolled her eyes at all the right moments. And Cecelia Whitmore leaned in with her chin on her hand and laughed at all my best lines and a few of my bad ones, and somewhere in the middle of the story about Philip's face at the staff Christmas party, I stopped telling the story for the grudge and started telling it for her laugh.

Bad sign. Great sign. I couldn't tell which.

Selena put her beer down and pointed at both of us. "Okay. I can see this is going to be a problem. You two are going to be insufferable."

"We're going to be professional," Cecelia said.

"You're grinning like you just won a raffle."

"I did win a raffle. I won the spite raffle."

I ate my chili and listened to them bicker and thought, this is the best contract I've ever taken. And it wasn't even about Philip anymore, which I should have noticed right then. I noticed later. I always notice things later, ask my sister Marla.

We got down to business around nine. Three hundred guests, faculty and donors, the big hall in the art building, a budget that Selena had negotiated up twice. Cecelia wanted stations instead of a sit-down dinner. She wanted food that looked like it belonged in the building, whatever that meant.

"It means," she said, "the theme is still being fought over. Philip wants carved roasts and a chocolate fountain. Philip's theme is 1987 country club."

"And yours?"

"Yours to figure out. That's why I'm paying you."

"Fair," I said. "I'll do tastings. You pick."

"See, this is why we're going to destroy him," she said, and Selena groaned into her beer.

We traded numbers. Cecelia walked me out, and we stood on the sidewalk in the cold and she said, "For what it's worth, I'm sorry about the knives. That's a lousy way to end six years."

"It was five years ago."

"Yes, but grudges don't expire. That is the whole point of them." She smiled. "Tuesday, my office, three o'clock. Bring menus."

Then she went back inside and I walked home through the cold with my hands in my pockets, grinning like an idiot, at forty-five years old.

Tuesday I found her office in the art building and it looked like a paper store had exploded in it. Books everywhere. Stacks of slides, actual slides, from some older century. A poster for an exhibit that closed in, I checked, 2019. Her desk had one clear square on it the size of a coffee mug and that's where the mug was.

"Welcome to my office," she said, kicking a stack of catalogues off a second chair. "Watch the one on the floor, it's the good one."

"This is a fire hazard."

"This is a system. Sit. Tell me about menus." She pushed her glasses up. She had ink on two fingers again, same two. "Also tell me why your sister Marla is texting Selena about yoga immediately after Selena told her I hired you."

"Marla knows everything within the hour. It's her gift."

"I like her already."

I laid out three menus. She read them the way she'd read that menu at the Owl, like a contract, looking for loopholes. She crossed one out entirely. She circled things on the other two. She asked sharp questions about the duck, sharper ones about the vegetarian count, and at one point she looked up and said, "You actually care about this, don't you? The food. Not just the revenge."

"I care about the revenge a lot," I said. "But the food's mine. Philip never cared about the food. He cared about the invoice."

"Huh." She put her pen down. "That's exactly what Philip does to my department, you know. He cares about the budget line. I care about the actual work. And somehow he's the associate dean who signs my budget and I'm the one filling out forms justifying my field trips."

"How does a man like that keep a job?"

"Decades of surviving. He's fifty, he's been surfing committees since before I was hired. Every year I get a little more ground taken. My graduate seminar cut. My office moved to the basement, then back up. A grant I brought in, credited to his 'leadership.'" She was spinning the pen now. "So yes, Cal. This gala is petty. I own that. I want to serve four hundred dollars a head of pure spite while he watches."

"It's three hundred guests."

"Then three hundred dollars of spite per guest. I did the math on the drive over here."

I laughed. I hadn't planned to, it just came out. She looked pleased with herself.

"So we're really doing this," I said. "The gala. Your grudge, my grudge, one event."

"One beautiful, catered grudge." She stood and pushed books off the windowsill so we could look at her floor plan sketch. It was actually good. She'd drawn the stations where the sight lines to the podium would be worst for Philip. "He gives a speech. He always gives a speech. He'll be standing right about there, behind the desserts, so every time he says the word vision, people are looking at a tower of something delicious instead."

"You've thought about this."

"Every day for three years."

There was a knock and a grad student put her head in, said the seminar reading was posted wrong, and vanished. Cecelia handled it in four sentences and turned back to me like the interruption hadn't happened. I liked that. I liked a lot of things about this woman and I was keeping a list and lying to myself about the list.

"Thursday," she said. "The Owl again. Bring the revised menus. Selena will come and pretend she's not delighted."