Margot was known as a shrewd reader of résumés. In his first interview, she had said, “You mention here that you were homecoming king at Maryland?”
“Yeah,” Griff said. “I was.”
“That’s so cool,” Bev Callahan said. “Was that, like, voted on?”
“Voted on, yes,” Griff said. “Secret ballot. Juniors and seniors eligible, so chances were about one in eight thousand.”
“Wow!” Bev had said. Bev, Margot knew, had been on the kick line in high school, and although she was a very serious professional, she was prone to this kind of gushing.
Margot put a check mark next to “Homecoming King.” And after that first interview, she called Griff and told him to strike it from his résumé.
“It makes you sound shallow,” she said.
“I wasn’t sure,” Griff said. “I figured it would either be something fun to talk about in the interview, or it would make me look like a tool.”
“The latter,” Margot said. “Get rid of it.”
The other front-runner for the job was a man named Seth LeBreux, who came from New Orleans—Tulane, LSU Business School. Seth had a Cajun accent that everyone loved, and he’d been with BellSouth for a decade and had pulled New Orleans through post-Katrina hell. He left BellSouth in 2007, however, and invested in a trio of restaurants in the French Quarter that had failed. And so, he said, he decided it was time to give up the gumbo and go back to IT.
Seth LeBreux was Edge’s nephew.
Margot didn’t know this, however, until Edge took her to dinner at Picholine. At that dinner, she and Edge had been seated in an intimate, cozy corner of the restaurant. Immediately when they sat down, champagne appeared. He then ordered house-made burrata cheese with heirloom tomatoes, and a wild mushroom risotto. He knew his way around the menu; Terrance Brennan was a friend, he said.
When Edge had invited Margot to dinner a few days earlier, he’d told her that he wanted her to spend the night with him. She couldn’t believe it. She had checked back with him twice. You’re sure?
Of course, he said.
Margot had gotten Kitty, her afternoon babysitter, to spend the night with the kids.
During the first course of dinner, Edge held her hand. At one point, he leaned over and gave her a long, lingering kiss. In public! Every sexual and romantic cliché happened at once—Margot swooned, her stomach dropped, her knees turned to water.
It was more than an hour later—after several glasses of Malbec and entrées of day boat lobster for her and suckling pig for him—that Edge cleared his throat and brought up the subject of Seth LeBreux, his nephew, his sister’s only child, a good kid, a kid Edge had looked out for since his sister’s husband died in Vietnam in 1974. A kid who was like a son to Edge. And Seth had had such a hard time with his restaurant ventures, why he’d ever left BellSouth no one could say except that Seth had a dream of running a restaurant empire, maybe he’d watched too much Emeril, who knew, but it hadn’t worked out for him. He’d lost his shirt.
Edge had been the one to encourage Seth to come north. Start over in New York.
Seth LeBreux, Edge said again, in conclusion, as if Margot might have missed his name the first time.
Margot had held a bite of butter-poached lobster suspended over her plate.
She said, her voice barely a whisper, “Edge, you know I can’t…”
And he said, “Oh, I know, I know, I’m not asking you for anything. I would never do that. He just mentioned Miller-Sawtooth, and I wondered if he’d encountered you, and he said—”
“Yes,” Margot said. “Yes, that’s my placement. Tricom.”
“So,” Edge said.
Margot had set her food down, unable to eat anything else. Edge poured her another glass of Malbec. He said, “I shouldn’t have brought it up. I feel like an ass. Can we forget I mentioned it?”
Yes, Margot agreed this was for the best. She excused herself for the ladies’ room, where she spent a good, long time staring at herself in the mirror, trying to convince herself to walk right out of the restaurant. Fuck Edge Desvesnes. Margot wasn’t a moron; she saw what he was doing. Seth LeBreux had that Cajun accent—quite frankly, that was the best thing going for him, that and his tear-jerking stories about post-Katrina, which to Margot had sounded a bit too crafted. He was one of the top three candidates, but he was also, in Margot’s mind, the maverick. He’d been out of the industry for six years, and a string of failed restaurants didn’t say much about his management skills or his imaginative problem solving.