Page 4 of Best Served Hot

Curiosity got the best of me. “What are they?”

She perked up so fast it was almost as if she’d been electrocuted. Circles of pink rose on her otherwise very tan cheeks. “My first advertisement for my business!”

“I didn’t know you had a business,” I said. As if in reply, Emerson Leigh shoved a flyer in my face. I took it. “Wow, Emerson Leigh.” I blinked as I read it. “This is quite . . . something.”

The flyer was advertising Emerson Leigh’s new pet yoga business. Is your dog, cat, rabbit, or fish stressed-out or anxious? Call me, a soon-to-be-certified yoga instructor, and I’ll help them stretch that stress away! (No snakes.) An email address was listed below, but instead of a contact name, it just had a big photo of Emerson Leigh’s beaming face. Her face was bigger than any of the text, actually.

“I decided I didn’t want it to have a real brand name,” said Emerson Leigh. “I thought it was better if the brand was just my face. It’s, like, a metaphor for the human condition. And how my business is a part of me.”

Last year, on December 8, Emerson Leigh had come into the office and wished me a happy birthday with an actual gift. I was surprised because I had never told her my birthday: she’d gone into my employee file and found it herself, telling me that everybody should feel special on their birthday. When I unwrapped the gift, touched almost to the point of tears, I found a framed picture she’d painted of herself. In the nude, sprawled out on a tiger fur rug (fake, she assured me, as if that changed anything).

That story tells you pretty much all you need to know about Emerson Leigh.

“So, Emerson Leigh,” I said. “What made you decide to start a pet yoga business? Are there really that many stressed-out pets in New York?”

She drew herself up. “Well, I did a cat yoga class with my cat, except it was really just a bunch of moves I did with my cat there next to me, so it might have de-stressed me, but it didn’t do anything for her. And I just thought, why not? She might not be able to talk, but her life really isn’t that different from mine. So if I’m stressed and lost and worried about . . .” She trailed off and cleared her throat as she shuffled her flyers. “Anyway, I researched online how to become a pet yoga instructor and discovered there was a real hole in the market!”

“I see,” I replied dubiously. “So how does a fish do yoga?”

“Oh, it’s not that complicated. You just—” She looked down at my desk. Her eyes widened, sunny circles of green on white. “Oh! Wow! Look at that!”

I looked down, too. Now we were both looking at that large photo of duck confit, Bennett Relish Marmalade Wright’s name stamped in official black and white beneath it.

Most of my followers didn’t even know my real name. When anyone recognized me in public, they always called out my handle. Hey, it’s JulieZeeEatsNYC!

“It’s duck confit,” I said, but she didn’t seem to hear me.

“It’s Bennett’s first review in the Scroll!” she cried instead. “How exciting! I’ll have to save this! Maybe even frame it for him!” She snatched the paper from my desk and held it up in the air before her. It made a noise like thunder. “Wow, that duck confit looks luscious, doesn’t it? So good. I have to go there and try it out sometime. Don’t you think it looks good, Julie?”

“It’s a really nice picture,” I said. “Do you . . . know . . .” It took me a minute to remember his actual names. “Bennett Richard Macalester Wright?”

Her airy laugh pealed in the air. “He sounds so stuffy when you say his full name like that! Yes, I’ve known Ben for years. He went to Dartmouth with Maisie.” Her older sister. “They actually dated for a little bit. He used to come to our cottage in Martha’s Vineyard for half the summer. They broke up, but we’re all still friends.”

I’d been right. Totally right. Maybe not about Bennett’s oldness—the picture in my head de-aged from a fiftysomething to a thirtysomething—but of course Bennett Wright ran in the same circles as the Deckers. His parents were probably childhood friends with the paper’s CEO. Both the Scroll’s and the Times’s.

It was really competitive, getting a first job as a food reporter at a place like the Times, and I realized now that Bennett would’ve been young when he got it. The opening had probably come up and his dad had leaned on the CEO, said conspiratorially into his ear how nice it would be for his kid to get a byline in before he grew up and moved on to the business world like all the proper kids in that circle, and the CEO had said go ahead. And then the same for this restaurant critic job. If there was anything I’d learned from working for Mr. Decker, that was how the world worked.

Emerson Leigh was still talking. “. . . but Maisie was cheating on everybody then, so it wasn’t personal.” She set her stack of flyers down on the ledge above my desk. “I was probably angrier at her than Bennett was, since that meant he wouldn’t be coming around to Martha’s Vineyard anymore, and he always knew the hot places to eat before they had lines.” She laughed again. “But we kept in touch, and I was so excited when he moved back to the city! Look, this is us last week.”

She thrust her phone in my face. I hated to admit it, but if Bennett and I weren’t already mortal enemies (whether he knew it or not), I probably would have found him attractive. From the way he had to stoop to pose with Emerson Leigh, who was five-eight, I assumed he had to be pretty tall. Wire frame glasses shone against the flash, nearly hiding the blue-gray eyes beneath. Pale skin on a narrow, angular face, a high forehead beneath a swoosh of brown-blond hair. Nerd cute, very different from Emerson Leigh’s usual type. “Looks fun, Emerson Leigh,” I said. “Is he going to take you restaurant-reviewing with him?”

Her shoulders sagged as she pulled her phone back. “It’s hard because I’m doing this cleanse right now where I can’t eat anything that has color, and he said you really have to be able to eat everything.”

“Except octopus,” I said.

“Yeah, Bennett really doesn’t like octopus,” Emerson Leigh said. “Octopi are really smart, though, aren’t they? I feel like I shouldn’t be eating anything that smart. Why do we eat them?”

“I don’t know,” I said. My computer pinged with notifications. More emails I had to answer before getting back to my research. “So, do you want to leave the flyers here for your dad? I can make sure he sees them first thing when he comes in.”

Emerson Leigh dumped the Scroll back on my desk and picked her papers back up. “It’s okay. I want to start hanging them up in the lobby downstairs and give some out to my friends to put them up in their buildings,” she said cheerily. “But you can keep the one I handed you in case Dad meets with anyone who mentions their anxious pet!”

I eyed it skeptically. “Great. Thanks.”

“Yeah, and if you ever want to mention my business online on your page, that’s cool, too!” she said. “I’m of course putting it on mine, but I’m really trying to get it out to as many people as possible.”

Eek. The last thing I needed was my boss’s daughter pressuring me to advertise her ridiculous business on my professional page. Change the subject, quick. “You know what I bet would be really fun and that would get the word out?” I chirped. “A business launch party. Rent a space, invite all your friends and your friends’ friends. I bet there are a lot of people in your circle who need yoga for their pets.”

She gasped so loudly that for a moment, I thought she was choking. “Yes! You’re brilliant, Julie!” She flashed me a dimpled smile. “I’m always down for a party, but even better if it’s celebrating me, right?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “You’ll come, right? You have to. It was your idea.”