The Sommelier's Secret

I turned forty-four in March and I still live alone in the same condo I bought when I was thirty-six, and some nights I stand in my kitchen with a glass of something expensive and think, well, this is it, this is the whole shape of my life. I'm a sommelier at a hotel restaurant downtown, which sounds glamorous until you know it means standing around in heels waiting for some banker to ask if we have anything "smooth." I'm good at my job. I've been good at my job for twenty years. I'm polite to the difficult regulars, I never overpour, I pay my taxes, I floss. And lately every part of that sentence has felt like a stone sitting on my chest.

I was never married, never even close, and people at the restaurant have stopped asking about it, which is its own kind of insult. My sister calls me sensible. My mother used to call me her steady one before she passed. Sensible, steady, reliable. I could put those words on my headstone and be done with it.

So when my phone buzzed on a Thursday night with a text from Roland Smythe, I was already halfway looking for trouble, I just didn't know it yet.

Roland runs the culinary arts program at Crestwood Community College. We met five years ago at a wine-tasting class, back when we were both single adults with nothing better to do on a Saturday, and we stayed in loose touch ever since, the kind of friends who send each other articles and meet for lunch twice a year. He's forty-two, tall, going gray at the temples in a way that works for him, and he's always struck me as one of the few men in food service who actually listens more than he talks.

The text said, this is an odd ask, but the college got a shipment from a new distributor and I don't trust my own palate tonight. Any chance you'd come taste through it after hours? I'll feed you. I'll pay you in leftover catering.

I read it three times. I was in my bathrobe with a glass of a mediocre Pinot I'd brought home from work, and the alternative to saying yes was another evening of television and judging myself quietly, so I typed back, what time, and felt something in my stomach that I hadn't felt in years, something like nerves, something that felt like a new possibility.

He said nine, after the last evening class clears out, park in the loading dock. Which should have been my second clue. Normal wine favors don't need loading docks.

I changed clothes twice, which was ridiculous, and settled on a dark green blouse and decent boots, and I told myself the whole drive over that this was a professional favor between colleagues, and that if my pulse was up it was only because I was excited about the wine, which, fine, I do get excited about wine, that part was even true.

The campus was empty at nine on a Thursday. He met me at the side door of the culinary building wearing his chef's coat with the sleeves pushed up, and he smiled when he saw me and said I owed you one, really, and led me down into the building's basement, which is where they keep the teaching kitchen and the wine cellar for the beverage program classes.

The cellar smelled like oak and old cork and a little like industrial cleaner, and there was a single pendant lamp lit over the demonstration counter and nothing else except the blue glow of the walk-in cooler's LED strips. It should have felt like a morgue. It didn't. It felt like the kind of room where things get decided.

We tasted through six bottles, and I gave him my honest notes, and two of them were genuinely good and one was thin and overpriced and I told him so. He listened the way he always does, elbows on the counter, actually writing things down. And then somewhere around the fourth glass he set his pen down and went quiet in a way that I recognized, because I've spent twenty years reading people across restaurant tables.

"Out with it," I said.

He laughed a little and turned his glass by the stem. "I've been trying to ask you something for about three weeks and I keep chickening out."

"So ask."

"It's not a wine question."

"Roland, it's nine-thirty at night in a basement, I don't think it's about the distributor."

He looked at me, and I want to note that he looked nervous, which was strange, because I'd only ever seen him calm, and he said, "You know the long equipment drawer in the teaching kitchen, the pastry one?"

"I've seen it."

"I've noticed how you look at it when you're down here."

I had no idea what he meant by that, and then I did, sort of, and I could feel my face go warm. "I look at equipment. That's my whole relationship with equipment."

"Sure," he said. "Well. I've been reading up on it. What it can do, what people use them for besides cooking. And I keep thinking about you and this room and the fact that nobody comes down here after nine." He took a breath. "I'm asking if you'd be interested in testing it with something other than food. With me. Just us, no strings, nobody ever knows."

I stood there with my glass in my hand and my heart doing something I could feel in my ears. The honest answer, the sensible answer, the answer the woman on my headstone would give, was no thank you, lovely dinner, I'll see you at lunch in the spring. And instead I heard myself say, "Show me the machine."

He did. He walked me into the kitchen proper and pulled it open, whisks and spatulas and piping tips in neat steel rows, and he explained, in a voice that was trying very hard to be calm, what he'd read and