Listen to Your Heart - Fern Michaels [17]
She had a date tonight but she’d had lots of dates. Nothing special there. It must be Rosie. What else could it be?
The moment Josie sat down at the small secretary, the appointment book open in front of her, the phone rang at the same instant a fax started to come through. She wasn’t able to take a deep breath to relax until well past the noon hour, at which point she slammed the appointment book shut and turned on the answering machine. She pressed the intercom button next to the secretary.
“What’s up?” Kitty asked in a harried voice.
“I’ll tell you what’s up. I had to turn on the answering machine. We are booked solid until the end of May. That means we can’t take a brunch or even a tea unless we hire more people and even then what good is it going to do us? You can’t cook more than you do and there are just so many hours in a day. I hate turning away customers. Do you have any suggestions?”
“We could hire the girl I was telling you about—the one I met when I went back to culinary school for the reunion. She’s really good, and she said she hates her job because all they allow her to do is make salads. She’ll want big bucks and you said we were in no position to pay out that kind of money. She won’t want to give up her job without some kind of guarantee. You know how hard it is to get a job in this town.”
“Let me run some numbers. I won’t rule it out at this point, but if it looks like we’ll be paying her most of the new business, what’s the point? We might have to raise our prices. We’ll still have to pay her during the summer when business is so slow we can barely keep our heads above water. What about a trainee, an apprentice?”
“You get what you pay for, Josie. I don’t think either one of us wants to gamble that they won’t screw up someone’s dinner party. We have an excellent reputation. Why take a chance?”
“How did Mom and Dad do it? They earned a real nice living doing this, put us through college and had money in the bank and we always took a month’s vacation.”
“They both cooked. You don’t cook, Josie.”
The silence on the intercom was something both dreaded. Josie’s shoulders slumped. “Talk to you later.”
It wasn’t like she hadn’t tried her hand at cooking. She had. With disastrous results. Kitty had thrown up her hands in disgust on three separate occasions when she’d tried to teach Josie the basic elements. She’d even gone so far as to enroll in a night cooking course in secret. The school had refunded her money after the third class. Everyone wasn’t meant to cook. Everyone didn’t have the same traits, the same skills. Kitty couldn’t add two numbers together, much less make sense of the computer.
Josie’s shoulders slumped even farther. She had to do something to take the load off Kitty. What? What would her mother have done if she’d been in a similar position? Her gaze traveled to the tiny ledge that ran around the entire room. When they were children the ledge held small toys and decorations. Today it held family photographs. She leaned closer to look into the smiling eyes of her mother. She wished, the way she’d wished a thousand times before, that there was a way to communicate with the woman with the laughing eyes. “I wish you were here, Mom. I really do. We didn’t get to say good-bye. There are so many things I need to tell you. God, I used to write you letters by the bushel, but I never gave them to you. Kitty didn’t either. Those letters were full of our childish problems, our teenage problems, and then our college problems. At least we perceived them to be problems. Maybe we were smarter than we thought and knew they weren’t important, so that’s why we never gave them to you. I don’t know what