The Girls' Guide to Love and Supper Clubs (44 page)

Rachel dashes into Blake’s hallway and opens his coat closet. “Found it!”

She comes back, pulls the pin, and begins spraying everything—me, the fire, Blake’s drapes and floor and ceiling. How the hell am I going to explain this to Blake? By telling him his kitchen just spontaneously caught fire, and we tried to put it out? Oh god, this is horrible. Horrible!

“What are you doing?” I shout at Rachel. “Don’t spray me!”

“I’m putting out the fire!”

“Move faster!”

“I’M TRYING!”

The guests pile out the door while Rachel showers the kitchen with fire retardant foam, and all I can hear is the blaring fire alarm, which blasts at an unholy decibel level. Even as the flames die down, the alarm continues shrieking its alert to the entire neighborhood.

“AAAAH, SHUT UUUUUP!” Rachel screams as she sprays the fire extinguisher across the kitchen.

Suddenly, mixed in with the cry of the fire alarm, I hear the fire trucks howling down the street in the direction of the house.

Rachel and I lock eyes.
Shit
.

The howl of the fire trucks intensifies as they barrel in our direction, and then the sirens stop. The front door bursts open, and three men in thick boots and black-and-yellow firefighter uniforms storm down the hallway into the kitchen.

“Everyone out!” shouts the firefighter in charge, yelling above the din of the smoke detector as his colleague disables it. “Everyone out now!”

The alarm shuts off, and the house goes silent, and any lingering guests scurry out the front door. The firefighter in charge grabs me by the shoulder. “This your place, ma’am?”

I fidget with the box of baking soda, my ears still ringing. “Um … actually … it’s complicated.”

“Yes or no, ma’am?”

I clear my throat. “No.”

“Then I’m going to have to ask you to step outside.” He turns to Rachel. “You the owner?”

She shakes her head. “No.”

The firefighter lets out an irritated sigh. “Could someone tell me who the damn owner of this house is?”

“I am.”

Rachel and I whip our heads around and see Blake standing in the kitchen doorway, dressed in a tuxedo and holding his cell phone in his right hand, his eyes darting anxiously around the kitchen. And that’s when I know for certain that the hell of this evening isn’t even close to being over. No, in a classic twist of Hannah Sugarman luck, the hell has only begun.

Blake’s forehead twists into knots. “Can someone please tell me what’s going on?”

The firefighter nods in the direction of the stove top. “It appears there’s been a grease fire in the kitchen, sir.”

“But … that’s impossible. I’ve been at a gala all night.” He waves his cell phone. “The only reason I’m here is because I got a call from my security company about a fire alert. Luckily I was only a three-minute cab ride away.”

The firefighter shifts his eyes from Blake to me to Rachel. “I’m going to have to ask the three of you to step outside while we inspect the property. Sir? Ma’am?” He gestures toward the doorway.

The three of us walk down the front hallway and out the front door, my hair and apron covered in soot and chunks of food. A crowd has congregated outside the house, some of them neighbors, some of them guests of The Dupont Circle Supper Club.

When we reach the bottom of the wrought iron stairway, Blake turns to me, his brow still rumpled into thick creases. “Who are all these people? Why were you in my kitchen?” He glances down at my apron, and the blood rushes to his face. “Were you … throwing a party in my house?”

I grab the iron banister to keep from passing out. I might throw up. “No,” I say. “Not exactly.”

“
Not exactly
?” His face has turned the color of a red grape. “What the fuck does that mean?”

I have never heard Blake use the word
fuck
. I have also never seen him this angry. A thick vein pulses across his forehead, and he clenches his jaw and flares his nostrils and, oh my god, I think he might kill me.

“I … I … it’s not what it looks like.”

“Oh, really? So you
weren’t
throwing a party in my house?”

I suppose the phrase
it’s not what it looks like
is only effective when whatever “it looks like” is far worse than whatever “it (actually) is.” In my case, however, the opposite is true, and so I have no response that will not result in my immediate eviction.

As I stare at Blake, my chin quivering and my eyes filling with tears, a stranger strolls past the crowd and asks what the hell is going on.

“Dude, The Dupont Circle Supper Club went down in flames tonight,” someone bellows. “Literally.”

Blake shifts his eyes from the crowd to his house and back to me again. His gray eyes fill with incredulity, then realization. The ice cream in his freezer, the missing port and scotch, my familiarity with his kitchen—all of the pieces come together at last. He shakes his head, his face painted with the pain of treachery and betrayal.

“You’re fucking kidding me,” he says, his voice gradually rising. “You’re fucking
kidding
me!”

“I … we didn’t … I mean …”

“How long has this been going on?”

I bite my lip and wipe the tears away from my eyes. I cannot bring myself to speak. Neither can Rachel, who has stood silently beside us, watching the horror unfold before her eyes.

“Answer me,” Blake says. “How long has this been going on?”

Before I can answer, a young woman with cropped strawberry blond hair taps Blake on the shoulder. I recognize her as one of the guests from the dinner tonight. “Excuse me,” she says. “Are you Blake Fischer?”

He frowns. “Yeah.”

“The Blake Fischer who ran for Dupont Circle ANC?”

“Yeah, why?”

“I’m a blogger for DCist. Is it true you were running The Dupont Circle Supper Club out of your house?”

Blake glares at the blogger and then at me. “I don’t know. Was I?”

My lip quivers. “No,” I say. “I was.”

The blogger stares at Blake. “But that is your house, right? You live here?”

Blake sighs. “Could you leave us alone, please?”

Her eyes dart back and forth between us. “Sure. Whatever.”

She grabs her iPhone from her purse and begins tapping into it as she walks away, and Blake buries his head in his hands. “What a nightmare.”

The firefighter approaches the top of the stairway and waves Blake inside, telling him they’ve extinguished the fire in its entirety. I motion for Rachel to stay outside and proceed to follow Blake up the stairs, even though I’m pretty sure he wants to vaporize me at the moment. I almost wish he would.

Blake runs his hands over the top of his head as he takes in the damage to the kitchen. “Jesus,” he says.

A thick miasma of smoke hangs in the air, and the smell of scorched matter permeates the room. The formerly white cupboards are all a grimy gray, bespattered with streaks of black ash and soot. The ceiling, too, is dark and dingy, and the knobs to the stove top have all melted into the counter.

“The damage actually isn’t that bad,” the firefighter says. “Your stove top being in the middle of the room and all, none of the walls caught fire. The blaze was mainly confined to the breakfast bar area.”

Blake snorts. “Oh. Hooray. Fantastic.”

The firefighter shrugs. “Hey, buddy. I’ve seen worse. You lucked out. Nothing your homeowner’s insurance shouldn’t cover.” He turns to me. “But you, ma’am, need to be more careful in the kitchen. Deep frying is no joke.”

“Oh, don’t worry, sir,” Blake says. “She won’t be cooking here ever again.”

Blake escorts the firefighters outside, leaving me alone in the kitchen to stew in my own anxious juices. What can I say or do to possibly make this okay? I need Blake to understand how deeply sorry I am—how awful I feel for lying to him, how terrible I feel for setting his kitchen on fire, and, above all, how much his companionship has meant to me over the past few months and how much I don’t want to lose that.

Blake returns a few minutes later, his black bow tie undone and hanging around his neck and his tuxedo jacket folded over his arm. His sleeves are rolled up around his elbows.

“Blake, I’m so sorry. You have no idea how sorry I am.”

“Don’t I?”

“I—I didn’t mean for it to turn out this way,” I say, wiping the splotches of soot off my face.

He sneers. “What, you didn’t mean to set my kitchen on fire?”

“No—I didn’t mean to use your house at all. I just … everything spun out of control.”

“How, exactly?”

I clear my throat. “Well … my friend Rachel and I planned to hold a supper club out of my apartment, just to see if I could do it, but then the apartment flooded, and since you gave me a spare key to your house …”

“Hang on,” Blake says, interrupting me. “Let me get this straight. You and your friend decided to run an unlicensed restaurant out of my basement—
my
basement, which I own and happen to let you rent. And when you ran into a problem, you decided it was okay to move the whole thing upstairs into a part of the house you don’t pay for, using a bunch of furniture and kitchenware that isn’t yours.”

My throat tightens. Recited out loud, the scenario sounds even more absurd than it did in my own head. I stare at Blake, biting my lip to keep it from quivering. I can’t believe I let this happen. All along, I knew I was doing something wrong—something profoundly dishonest—and yet I kept doing it anyway. What was I thinking?

“I …” My voice cracks and shakes. I am on the verge of losing it. I take two breaths and try again. “I …”

“You what?” Blake says.

“I’m sorry.”

Blake goes silent and stares at the ground. Then he looks back up at me and fixes his gray eyes on mine. “You lied to me, Hannah. To my face, for months.”

“I know, and I am so, so sorry. I feel awful.”

“Why, because you got caught?”

“No,” I say, my voice shaking. “Because I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Maybe you should have thought of that before you decided to turn my house into a speakeasy. Didn’t you realize what this could do to my career? Did none of those conversations we had mean anything to you?” He shakes his head and looks up at the ceiling. “All those weekends I was away, I’d get excited about coming home because I’d think, ‘Maybe I’ll run into Hannah. Maybe I’ll have an excuse to talk to her again.’ And the whole time, you were running a borderline illegal operation out of my house.”

“Blake, I didn’t mean to—”

“I stuck out my neck for you, Hannah. I got my friend’s aunt to look at your application for L’Academie. I wrote you an unsolicited letter of recommendation. I took you to fucking Bistro du Coin so that you didn’t have to spend last weekend alone. And what did you do for me? You sabotaged my political aspirations and lied to my face.” He tosses his jacket over his shoulder. “I can’t believe I let myself care about you. What a fucking joke.”

Blake turns his back to me and starts to walk out of the kitchen. “Blake—wait!”

He turns around and locks his eyes on me. The whites of his eyes are pink and glassy. “What?”

“I’m … I’m so sorry. What can I do to make it up to you?” Blake stares at me and says nothing. “I care about you, too, Blake. Please, what can I do? Tell me what I can do.”

Blake lets out an exasperated sigh and heads back down the hallway. “I don’t give a crap what you do,” he shouts back at me. “Just leave my keys on the counter and get the hell out of my house.”

It’s official: I’ve ruined everything.

I now have no job, no boyfriend, no supper club, no income stream, and an ex-friend landlord who hates me. And, on top of all that, my parents keep leaving me increasingly agitated voice mails, messages to which I cannot reply due to all of the factors listed above. As one might expect, I am completely freaking out. What am I going to do? This is a problem no amount of carrot cake or brisket can solve.

And now Blake is gone.
Gone
.

The morning after the fire, I banged on his door, holding a container of honeycomb ice cream in one hand and my checkbook in the other, but he didn’t answer and hasn’t answered in the seven days since. Not that I should be surprised. The story of Blake Fischer and The Dupont Circle Supper Club has made the rounds, first appearing on the DCist blog and eventually making its way into the Metro section of the
Washington Post
. I try to comfort myself by pointing out that the story appeared on page three, below the fold, but I know Blake won’t take any comfort from that at all, not in the digital era. According to the article, he is stepping down as neighborhood commissioner.

The article also said he has left town while on “temporary leave” from his job on the Hill, which explains why he hasn’t answered my repeated knocks on his door or any of my phone calls. If he loses his job because of what I’ve done, I may never get over it.

Strangely, the articles make precious little mention of me, even though I am the buxom hostess in question, which makes the situation doubly unfair. Blake doesn’t deserve this humiliation. This fiasco is entirely my fault. But if there is a way to make amends for what I’ve done and set things right, I don’t know what it is.