Free Pish Posh by Ellen Potter Page A

home immediately and take an aspirin and rest. She’ll be in to check on me when she gets home.” It was a bit of an exaggeration, but it delighted Clara to say it nevertheless, and she quickly glanced around the kitchen to see if the others had heard. It was then that she saw Audrey, standing in her usual place, ladling soup into a bowl. For a moment Clara was too shocked to say anything.
    â€œWell, then,” Pierre was saying, “go home, if you must, but don’t talk about fevers in the kitchen, or every single one of these lazy pinheads will suddenly come down with one and—”
    â€œWhy are you still here?” Clara interrupted furiously, pointing a finger at Audrey. Audrey did not turn around.
    â€œShe don’t hear too good,” the dishwasher said to Clara.
    â€œBut I fired her this morning!” she said angrily to her father.
    â€œOh, yes, she told me,” Pierre said. For once, his voice was quite calm, almost cheerful, as though he were relieved that someone else was doing the yelling in his kitchen.
    â€œThen why is she still here?” Clara demanded, smacking her hand on the metal pick-up counter, making the dishes that were lined up on the shelf clatter loudly.
    â€œBecause the woman makes a damn fine soup,” he replied. It was the first kind word he had ever said about an employee, and the entire kitchen staff now stopped what they were doing to stare at him in disbelief. In the uncharacteristic silence, Pierre’s face suddenly collapsed into a livid scowl.
    â€œWho said you could stop working, you putrid heap of bat droppings...”
    His booming voice drowned out Clara’s protests. Furious and mortified, she looked at Audrey, who had finally glanced up from her pot. Behind her thick glasses, her eyes met with Clara’s. They were proud eyes, the sort of eyes a soup cook had no business having.
    She thinks she’s won, thought Clara. She hasn’t. She’s hiding something, and I won’t have things hidden from me. I’ll find out her secret. She has no idea how far I’m willing to take this.
    Clara, in truth, didn’t exactly know herself how far that might be. But as she walked home, the night air skimming across her feverish skin and cooling it, she considered that it might be pretty far indeed.

CHAPTER TEN
    D r. Piff had an office in a very sleek high-rise building across the street from Central Park. Outside the building was a massive red metal sculpture of the office building’s numbers—464—each number twice as tall as Clara.
    Clara did not relish the idea of seeing Dr. Piff again. Once she declared someone a Nobody, it was generally unpleasant to see them again. But it seemed to her that she had no choice now. She took the elevator to the sixteenth floor and walked into Dr. Piff’s big, fancy waiting room. It was completely empty, except for a receptionist who smiled at Clara with a confused look on her face.
    â€œCan I help you?” she asked pleasantly.
    â€œI’m here to see Dr. Piff.”
    The receptionist’s face fell, and she blinked rapidly three or four times.
    â€œAnd... how do you know him?” she asked, in an overly polite voice.
    Clara paused, then said, “He’s a friend.”
    â€œOh. ” She looked at Clara for a moment, nodding. She picked up the phone, dialed an extension, and said, “Would you please come to the reception desk for a moment?”
    Clara sat down on the couch and waited, flipping through some old magazines. Inside one was a large photo of the melancholy actress June Loblolly, and above her picture was the heading “Doom and Gloom June.” This was the very article, in fact, that had turned June Loblolly into a Nobody. Sometimes it happened that way. An article would appear in a magazine or a newspaper, and all of a sudden everyone was talking about it. And everyone had talked about this article. In a matter of days, the