Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(13)
The fact that DJ had this job was nothing short of a miracle. A miracle called Ashna Raje. Ashna was one of the few friends DJ had in this world, and she’d proven that when it came to friends, quality mattered vastly more than quantity. Man, had she come through for him. First by getting his little sister in to see her cousin, who was some sort of genius surgeon at Stanford. That would have been above and beyond on its own, but then she had gotten him this gig with her aunt, Mina Raje.
He pulled out his phone and quickly checked to make sure he didn’t have any new messages from Emma. She had seen her surgeon today, but she was refusing to tell him what had happened over the phone. He felt horrible about not being at the hospital when she got the scan results, but without this job, there would be no money to pay for the scans or the surgery that was his little sister’s only hope.
Hope was something that hadn’t exactly been abundant these past few months. Not until this surgeon he’d never met had come along. It had been three months since Emma had collapsed while teaching at the nursing home where she worked as the resident art therapist. The monster headaches had turned out to be a tumor in her brain that was so unfortunately located that the doctors had labelled it inoperable and given her six months to live.
Emma being Emma, she had only told him after the doctors had declared that she was terminal. Up until then she’d faced everything alone. The day she had called him, DJ had quit his job at Andre’s. Two days later he had subleased his Paris flat and flown to San Francisco to find his little sister shrunken to half her size, one of her eyes a strange new light brown, unable to walk in a straight line.
She had learned how to walk holding his hand. He had taught her how to ride a bike, bought her her first sketchbook and box of paints. He had painted her little hand with a rainbow of colors and shown her how to stamp it on the paper, to transform it into peacocks and Christmas trees and daisies.
And she was alone right now in a hospital with information that would decide the course of their lives.
He looked at the time. It would be a few hours before he could get to the hospital. Until then he couldn’t let himself think about anything but dessert, which was all he had left to do. He quickly squeezed his fingers into his eyes and scrubbed them on his smock. He could not lose Emma. She was all he had.
“I mean it, Rajesh. Clients and their guests are strictly off-limits.”
The tosser winked at him. “Our client is that ancient Bollywood star. I’m most certainly not bonking that. Although have you seen the baps on the ol—”
“All right! I think these look about ready to go into the cooler for a bit. Do the honors, won’t you? I need to get my caramel started.” He turned away briskly, and luckily the man got to work. A world-class wanker he may be, but he understood how crucial it was for them to make a success out of this dinner. Without DJ’s help Rajesh would have to return to London, where, by all accounts, a number of boots were waiting to connect with his dangly bits.
As for DJ, he didn’t have the option to fail. Not with Emma’s treatment hanging in the balance. He had saved every penny he could while working with Andre. Paris was not a cheap place to live, but he didn’t have to live on avenue Montaigne like the other chefs in Andre’s crew. Growing up the way they had in London, in an attic flat in Rajesh’s grandmother’s Southall house, meant a Porte de La Villette studio had felt almost luxurious. As for being ridiculed by his peers, so long as they couldn’t ridicule his work, nothing else mattered.
Turned out it was a good thing he hadn’t picked up expensive habits, because after paying Emma’s astronomical medical bills and the deposit on his Palo Alto flat, all his savings were gone. He was as dead broke as he had been the day their mother died leaving them orphaned.
The good news was that he wasn’t sixteen anymore and he had this, his art. His food. And if this dinner continued to go the way it was going, if Mrs. Raje stood by her word and gave DJ the contract for her son’s fund-raising dinner next month based on tonight’s success . . . well, then they’d be fine.
Mrs. Raje had been more than impressed thus far. Everything from the steamed momos to the dum biryani had turned out just so. The mayor of San Francisco had even asked to speak to DJ after tasting the California blue crab with bitter coconut cream and tucked DJ’s card into his wallet.
Only dessert remained, and dessert was DJ’s crowning glory, his true love. With sugar he could make love to taste buds, make adult humans sob.
The reason Mina Raje had given him, a foreigner and a newbie, a shot at tonight was his Arabica bean gelato with dark caramel. DJ had created the dessert for her after spending a week researching her. Not just her favorite restaurants, but where she shopped, how she wore her clothes, what made her laugh, even the perfume she wore and how much. The taste buds drew from who you were. How you reacted to taste as a sense was a culmination of how you processed the world, the most primal form of how you interacted with your environment.
It was DJ’s greatest strength and weakness, needing to know what exact note of flavor unfurled a person. His need to find that chord and strum it was bone deep. It was why he had dreamed of being a private chef from the day he had walked into culinary school. After ten years of working at Andre’s, unable to cut the cord of financial security a paycheck provided, here he was, pushed—no, tossed out on his bum—into his dream by the threat of losing the only person in the world who meant anything.