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apples were already sliced and the aroma of sugar syrup caramelizing gently on the stove filtered pleasingly through the kitchen.
    It was eight-thirty in the morning and she had already been to the wholesale produce market at six to collect the day’s vegetables. The chef, Chan, would take care of buying the meats and later he would telephone her and they would discuss the day’s specials. Depending on what he’d bought, she would write up the menus, then rush down to Kinko’s to get copies made, dash back again and open up in time for the lunch trade at eleven, for which she did the cooking and Jake acted as server.
    Jake was dark, handsome, and an actor. In L.A. everybody was really somebody else, Ellie thought. Even herself.She was a baker, and also a waiter and a manager and a girl Friday. Anything but the proper chef she had been trained as, because lunches were mostly omelets and soups and salads. Meanwhile, as usual, she would open up at nine-thirty and serve coffee and muffins, eggs and toast, a simple breakfast that brought in a nice bit of trade and added to the weekly takings. Except the darned coffee machine wasn’t working again.
    The phone rang. Dusting her hair back with a floury hand, she picked it up. “Ellie’s Place.” Her deep sweet voice had a rising intonation that always made her sound as though she were happy to hear from whoever it was. Even Chan.
    “Morning, Chan.” She steeled herself, waiting for the daily barrage of complaints from the chef.
    “They had no veal this morning. D’you believe that?
No veal.
What kind of butcher is this, anyway? We get another supplier today, or I quit.”
    “Chan, they are the only ones whose quality you say is perfect. So they don’t have veal today. Why not try pork instead?”
    “Pork? Mmm, maybe I do some ravioli, like Chinese dumplings, with a special hoisin sauce….”
    “You got it, Chan. Just tell me what it’s called, then I can go to Kinko’s.”
    “It is ravioli Chan.”
    Ellie rolled her eyes, what else would he call it? She wrote down the list of dishes he proposed for the evening’s menu. “See you later.” She rang off, thankful to have stalled him from quitting for another day, then walked through the cafe, switched on the lights and turned the
Closed
sign to
Open.
It was, she thought, sighing happily, just another day.
    Back at the workstation, she poured the caramelized sugar into the cast-iron
tatin
skillets, arranged the appleslices in concentric circles over it, then topped them with the pastry, ready to be cooked and served warm later that evening.
    She was thinking about Chan. He was half Asian, short, black-haired and dark-eyed, talented and temperamental, but he gave the French cooking an exotic edge that lifted it above the usual. His assistant, the twenty-year-old sous-chef, Terry, with the short-cropped blond hair, bland blue eyes and solid methodical ways of his German ancestors, came from Minnesota, and Ellie thought he probably would have worked anywhere, just as long as he could stay in sunny California. “I can’t believe there’s no snow,” he’d say, amazed, when everyone else was grumbling about the few days of rain.
    There was also a dish stacker, busboy, washer-upper, cleaner-upper, who changed so often they’d given up trying to remember a name and whoever was employed this week, was known, generically, as “the kid.” Then there was Jake, who came in to help at lunchtimes, and whenever they were shorthanded. And, of course, there was Maya. She had been her friend since college and for a while they’d shared an apartment together in Venice, while they “found” themselves.
    Maya was a blond goddess, a knockout, with a helmet of golden hair, whiskey-brown eyes fringed with long, dark lashes, and a voluptuous tightly toned body, which turned heads no matter how she disguised it in trailing skirts and long sweaters. Ellie said Maya attracted more customers to the cafe than the food, the four days a