Several Dipping Areas

Overall, Debra thought, as she scraped hummus from the silk curtains, it was not the worst wedding she had catered.

“Hey, are you almost done with this room?”

And she was also glad to be working with someone with such a wonderful sense of humour.

“Laura, grab a bucket and a sponge and get to work.”

“But the others need…”

“They need to explain things to the police when they come back to interrogate someone besides family. Now, clean.”

In the dirty smock that had once been white, Laura seemed to deflate as she walked into the main hall and saw how last night’s disturbance looked in the sunlight. She found a bucket and worked on the still food-stained windows.

“Wow.”

“Laura…”

“I’m just saying…that was incredible.”

Debra managed to pull the last fork she found out of the wall as Laura finished her thought.

“Have you ever seen anything like that before? Seriously?”

Debra had done over ten years of catering, covering birthdays, company retreats, bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, and many, many less-dramatic weddings. She had plenty of stories to share, but she was not sure if Laura was the right one to hear them. She had only with her team for three years and was still impressed by events like last night’s explosion of emotion.

“I have seen other events that were close to what happened last night.”

“Close?” Laura had cleared the bottom pane of window that was thick with sweet and sour sauce. “Close to that?”

“Close but no…cigar? Is that the phrase?”

“Yeah.” Laura laughed, emptying her bucket down for moment.

Debra relaxed, letting herself flop onto a now backless chair.

“Yeah, I have seen some things. Really bad things before and after. But usually, you don’t see that kind of behaviour at a reception. All that poison gets out when the others are not in the room. They can breathe and think about what come next.”

“What?”

“I mean, they just take some time before they get angry, at least in public. And this is wedding. You’d think that they’d…think.”

Laura finished up the rest of the window, staring at the space where the main table faced the open floor.

“I see what you mean. I mean, I can really see what you mean. It was like Tom decided to marry Jerry and the rest of the cartoons could not take it.”

“I like that. Tom and Jerry. Ren and Stimpy.”

“Spy vs. Spy.”

“Hatfields vs. McCoys!”

“Okay, I’m lost now…”

Debra got up with her bucket and stepped over to the DJ’s booth. For some reason, most of the wedding cake ended up there.

“Never mind. A bit dated…”

“Cool. Understood. But you said that you have seen bad things like this before.”

“Yeah, but not that close. Not that obvious.”

Laura turned and almost knocked over a broken pair of wine glasses on a nearby table. “Obvious?”

“Obviously obvious. I could see where this one was heading as soon as they got here. If I had been allowed at the wedding, I’m pretty sure that I could have predicted all of this.”

Laura did not want to let this one drop. “But how…?”

“I saw them when they came in. When people get married, usually, they seem pretty happy about it. They don’t walk in with gritted teeth and smiles that don’t touch the eyes.”

“Touch the eyes…”

“You see it in horror movies; guy smiles, but it is totally fake and he’s doing it to put on a show…a lie…”

Laura looked out the now clean window. “Never thought about that.”

“It’s not something everyone notices. I have to for work…and life.”

“Right.”

They both continued to move through the stains and wreckage.

“You don’t think it was something that happened here?”

Debra froze over several shattered plates of steak and fennel.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that best man’s speech…”

Debra would never forget it. “Bad taste all over.”

“Right, but then it got worse and worse. He did not even stop when the father tried to grab the mike and…”

“Yeah, that might be true. But why did they have that face when they stepped in? What happened before…?”

At that very moment, the main table, elevated on a platform, collapsed and spilled the last of the glasses and dishes all over the main floor. A few of the other tables received their share of the crash with several labels and flowers floating in the air.

“Of course.”

“Jeez! Ms. King, I will call the rest…”

“I think they heard it.”

And they did. Some of the remaining staff and crew came into the room and began to organize themselves into teams. Debra wondered about the ones who did not come in, but she was also aware that this would be for the rest of the weekend. Let them work in shifts, she thought, and then we can forget all about this.

“They got it.”

“Incredible. How much damage you can do when you are really that pissed off is incredible.”

“Yeah, it is.” Debra found her bucket and brush. “And I think that you might be right about something.”

Laura looked back at her. “What was that?”

“Your theory. About something happening here.”

“Oh, yes. I think that something happened.”

“Laura, it was the food.”

Debra gave herself credit for being able to read people, especially people who worked for her; the ones she hired had to be easy to read if they were going to be relied on. But Laura did something that she had not believed possible.

She cried.

It did not last, but it was clear and she could hear the sobs and see the shakes and tension in her employee’s body.

“It was just a stupid comment from a stupid idiot!”

“Laura…he made a point of focusing on how he hated one specific dish. ‘Guess we don’t have enough money in the family for any decent food.’ Remember that? I thought that we would get killed after that one.”

“Killed?”

“Maybe not that drastic. But as you can see,” Debra looked around the room, “we now have the aftermath.”

They both continued cleaning up for a while, but Laura felt she had to say it.

“I thought that if we put a little sauce on each plate, it would be…”

“Don’t do this.”

“But you said to try several of them for the dipping; it was a tradition…”

“I know. And we see how that went down.”

Debra wondered if she had to tell Laura how these things worked out in the long run. Bills would be paid, menus rewritten, staff let go… And she almost began to explain this while dabbing at the next set of curtains.

Fortunately, the chandelier crashed with the weight of the wedding cake and physical damage it had sustained, so they did not have to speak for the rest of the afternoon.