Topped Chef(11)

The host seated me and assured me the waiter would be around shortly to take my order. I pulled out my phone. I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t consider this dinner as review material for my food-critic job—it would be too easy to overlook important social cues if I was busy whittling clever sentences in my head about the food. On the other hand, eating out was a busman’s holiday. How could I ignore it?

I snapped pictures of the fountain and the bar, which was buzzing with customers eating small plates of food and dipping vegetables and bread cubes into vats of fondue, and then jotted some notes on the décor. The rustic wooden floors, the living bamboo wall separating the restaurant from the property next door, the white wooden ceilings with fans, the strings of tiny lights following the line of the eaves, the clusters of tropical greenery with uplighting, all made it feel cozy and romantic. My phone buzzed with an incoming text message from Nate’s phone number.

Fifteen minutes. Sorry. Order drink and appetizer. Be there asap.

Oh geez. Now I had the pressure of ordering for him piled on to the pressure of waiting for the date to begin. When the waiter stopped by, I selected “our salad” thick with shrimp, eggs, provolone, pepperoncinis, and salami for Nate because it sounded manly and substantial, and grilled asparagus with ham, roasted peppers, and Boursin cheese for me. And finally, I added a Bloody Mary for my jangling nerves.

I’d finished the asparagus (just a hair too much ham for my taste) and the drink, including licking the circle of celery salt off the rim, and begun nibbling on his salad—delicious, when he texted me again.

Twenty minutes. Order me a steak, medium-rare, and baked potato?

Which seemed odd. How long would it take to cook a steak? Why didn’t he order when he got here? Maybe he was having regrets about the entire evening. I clicked back over to the messages I’d been studying all day. He hadn’t sounded regretful—more like he was really looking forward to the date. Maybe he imagined we’d gobble the dinner and then go back to my place and…forget it. With no privacy to mention, there would be no romance on Miss Gloria’s houseboat. Besides, I was nowhere near ready to take that step. I waved the waiter over, explained that my date was running even later than predicted, and ordered the strip steak for Nate, and the snapper meunière for me.

“We have a very popular chocolate lava cake for dessert,” the waiter said. “It comes with vanilla ice cream. We like to warn folks ahead because we prepare them individually and they take about twenty minutes to bake. Shall I add that to your order?”

“Definitely,” I said, mouth watering at the prospect. Pointing my internal compass toward that dense, warm chocolate would make me feel better, no matter what else happened—or didn’t happen—tonight. “And could you bring along a glass of the house red wine and one of the white?” Nate hadn’t said anything about alcohol and maybe he couldn’t drink while on the job, but the longer I waited, the more nervous I felt. And I hated to drink alone.

After the waiter had cleared my appetizer plate and delivered the wine, I tapped the web address of the Key West Citizen into my phone to see if there might be breaking news in the crime report—something that would require the services of the top detective on the KW police force. But the latest entry—several hours earlier—was a story about a homeless man who’d been evicted from an Old Town bar for falling asleep and refusing to leave. I hoped it wasn’t Turtle. In any case, that was a bread-and-butter no-brainer for Key West cops: Nate would never have been siphoned away from dinner to handle that.

Twenty minutes came and went and so did the waiter with our main courses. “Shall I keep the gentleman’s dinner in the kitchen so it doesn’t get cold?”

I glanced around to see if the other diners were watching, probably speculating that I’d been dumped. Not only dumped, but left with a big fat check. “He said he’d be here any minute,” I told the waiter, who nodded with raised eyebrows, but then backed away.

Minutes passed, three then four. I hated to let my fish congeal in its rich artichoke sauce. So even though I felt awkward and foolish about eating solo in the flickering candlelight, only the untouched steak sitting at the place across from me, I dug in. The fish was buttery and delicious. And the wine slid down my throat like a sudden rain through a dry riverbed, dampening my embarrassment at dining alone at a table clearly set for two.

Finally, my phone rang. Private caller. “Hello?”

“It’s Detective Bransford. Nathan. Nate. I’m not going to make it,” he said brusquely. “I’m really sorry.”