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cameraman’s clumsiness.
    “Yeah, man,” Digger added. “Watch where you’re going.”
    Nelson looked truly apologetic. “I'm sorry. It’s crowded
    here.”
    “It’s okay. I’m fine,” I assured Nelson, who was right about the crowding. Although the kitchen was spacious in the sense of being a large room, the work areas were infuriatingly cramped.
    “No, you’re not fine,” Robin informed me. “Nelson, get yourself and your goddamn camera over here. Here, where the chef is cooking the food!” She pointed sharply at the innocent gnocchi. “Zoom in and give me something to work with. Stay on the food until I say otherwise.”
    Despite Robin’s demanding attitude and Nelson’s repeated need to reshoot cooking steps and instructions, Josh was able to teach Francie and Leo how to prepare the rest of the meal and how to coordinate the timing so that the separate components of the dinner were ready at the same time. When the gnocchi floated to the top of the pot of boiling water, the lamb chops were perfectly cooked in a nest of herbed vegetables, and the fish was seared to perfection. At that moment, Josh popped the peach and berry cobbler into the oven to cook while dinner was being served and eaten. The cheeses were on a platter, and the tomato salad had been tossed in an aromatic dressing. The cheese and salad course would follow the main course, and the cobbler would be served last.
    I was not used to watching Josh cook without being free to sample his delectable creations. Although he’d put me and everyone else to work, I felt stuck at the periphery of the scene. My stomach obviously did, too: it began to growl. When Josh tossed the hot gnocchi into the pesto, I couldn’t resist any longer. Catching his eye and glaring at him, I transmitted the message that unless I got some of this food, he was going to have one cranky, miserable girlfriend. I was absolutely ravenous, since it was nearing eight o’clock. As Josh must have sensed, everyone else clearly felt the same way I did. In the chaos of getting plates and serving platters to the table, he let everyone get in a few spoonfuls of food and practically had to swat Robin away from the gnocchi. He also remembered to set aside gnocchi with butter only for Leo. I grimaced when I saw Marlee double-dip her spoon back into the bowl. How uncheflike! Between her dirty fingernails and germ-sharing tasting method, I wondered how this woman’s restaurant ever passed a health inspection.
    At last it was time to film the dinner scene. The large dining room was painted a deep green that I hoped wouldn’t be too dark for the camera. Francie and Leo took their seats on delicate Windsor chairs at a round wooden table beneath what I thought was a fake crystal chandelier. The table was too small for the generously proportioned room and too chunky for the chairs. The piece of furniture that dominated the dining room was a gigantic sideboard with little mirrors and elaborate carving. It seemed to me that the dining room, like the kitchen, had been assembled bit by bit, without any sort of overall plan or theme to guide the selection of elements, none of which had anything in common with any of the others. While I’d been busy in the kitchen, someone had tried to impose eye appeal on the unfortunate dining room by creating an attractive table setting. The matching runner, place mats, and napkins were made of a Victorian-looking fabric with stylized flowers and vines on a black background. The stainless flatware was heavy and oversized— at a guess, the pattern had the word Hotel in its name—and each of the two places had two stemmed wineglasses, one large and one small. Someone, maybe Marlee, had opened two bottles of wine, one red and one white, and had placed them on the table. Although I knew very little about wine, I knew that red wine, or at least some red wine, was supposed to be opened ahead of time so that it could breathe. But white wine? And wasn’t white wine