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By Root 466 0

been kind, allowing me to call Hope, our downstairs neighbor and Chloe’s sometime babysitter, and wait for her to trudge the three blocks in her bathrobe to pick up Chloe. She had even graciously removed the cuffs so I could hold her for an instant, allowing me to brush a trembling kiss across her forehead before transferring her into Hope’s waiting arms. But the act for which I remain most grateful was her unexpected humanity—she had waited for Hope and Chloe to disappear around the corner before re-cuffing me, apologizing as she snapped the locks into place with a dispiriting click. Perhaps because I’ve spent my life working with my hands, I find it terrifying to have them immobilized. But, sitting in the back of the cruiser, my neck craned uncomfortably to watch the diminishing specters of Jake and Nicola out the cruiser’s rear window—Jake’s arm wrapped protectively around Nicola, a white tablecloth draped over her heaving shoulders—all I can remember feeling was a strange detachment, as if I were watching a Lifetime Channel movie of the week, waiting patiently for the next commercial break. It wasn’t until Jake and Nicola had completely disappeared from view, and I struggled to turn around, the steel of the handcuffs uncomfortably chafing my wrists, that I found a piece of Nicola’s long, dark hair had wedged itself firmly in between my two front teeth and was tickling my bottom lip. All I can remember thinking is, “How the hell did that get there?” No remorse, God forbid. No guilt. Just pure incredulity.

Now what does that say about me?

The thing is, you really can’t know who you are, what you will do to get what you want, until you’ve been in trouble. Getting away with something makes it easy to hide behind the stories we tell ourselves, the lies we live with, often small and incremental, in order to secure our hearts’ desires. But find yourself fingerprinted and photographed, forced to call a friend—of whom you have depressingly few, apart, of course, from your husband, whose lover you have just attacked and who is probably not, at the moment, inclined to post your bail—and you’ll find you have some real explaining to do.

I’ve never been a person with big plans. Most of what I do, I do spontaneously, or as Mary Ann might say, impulsively. The only fruits of any serious planning in my life, in fact, are Chloe and Grappa. The trouble with planning things in advance, I’ve learned, is they seldom turn out the way you plan them. When Jake and I opened the restaurant five years ago, we thought we knew what we wanted. We were both tired of working under the direction of restaurant owners, bottom-liners, all too often loud of voice and lacking in vision or culinary understanding. We wanted to shake up the restaurant world, which we felt had grown complacent and mired in certain continental dining traditions. At one point, shortly after our return from Europe, we dreamed of owning a loft in the city. We imagined an expansive, multi-level space where we could live and work. Enough space to accommodate an open kitchen, where we would offer cooking classes and wine tastings during the day and where we could serve a few prix fixe dinners each week. However, when a cozy (real estate code for miniscule) basement space in the West Village became available, we took advantage of the opportunity, adjusted our expectations, and Grappa was born.

In its former incarnation it had been a small, dank pizzeria, or at least what passes for a pizzeria in the States, serving oil-drenched, over-sauced pizza Americans tend to love, which actually bears little relation to real Italian pizza. The kitchen was small by restaurant standards, and needed a total overhaul, stretching our budget and our borrowing capacity to their limits.

We picked up cheap stock tables and chairs at warehouse and fire sales, where we tried not to remind ourselves we were buying the remains of someone else’s failed enterprise. White cloths and kitschy wax-dripped Chianti bottles dressed the tables in the fall and winter. In the summertime I loaded fresh flowers, which