Free Don't Look Twice by Andrew Gross

imaginary pin.
    He looked at Tobey. The dog jumped up. Hauck threw the eight iron back in the golf bag.
    â€œC’mon”—he winked— “we’re puttin’, dude!”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
    I t was the end of a long, crazy Saturday night, and Annie Fletcher was beat.
    They had served over forty tables, a hundred and twenty plates. For the first time in the restaurant’s life, they’d gotten a three-time turn.
    Since Annie’s Backstreet had opened, just over a year ago, they’d been trying to get the place off the ground. She’d been at it since seven that morning, starting with the fish market and the farmer’s market in Weston, picking out squash and heirlooms, and the local bakery she used for fresh-baked sourdough and olive bread. They had stuffed twenty veal chops, hand-rolled two hundred agnolotti stuffed with chicken and feta, made twenty off-the-charts chocolate crespelles. Her hair smelled of spattered grease. Her nails were caked with allspice and Madras curry.
    They call it sweat equity, right?
    Annie looked over the rows of empty tables, finally sitting down to pick at an iceberg wedge salad and sip a glass of wine. This exhausted never felt so good.
    It had been a slow, building process. They didn’t have the “glamour” opening. They weren’t in the hot location. Theywere situated in Stamford on the other side of I-95, amid the antique warehouses and next to a tiling factory. OTMO, they called it, tongue in cheek. Other Side of the Metro-North. Not exactly Tribeca. They didn’t get throngs of young people lining up on the sidewalk drinking beers or families pouring out of the movie theaters. But it was her place. In her style. Cross-beams on the high ceiling. Linen-colored, stuccoed walls. An open kitchen with copper pots hanging from the racks. “Comfort food with a point of view.”
    After the debacle at her last place in the California wine country, with her partner (and husband) siphoning off the register (and the checking account!), it closed literally overnight. She had put everything she had into that place. Her dreams, every penny in the world, her trust.
    It had almost cost Annie her son.
    She’d gone from someone who had everything going for her to a person who had no place to go the next day. To someone who had liens. Nothing. Jared, who was eight and needed a special school. She’d tapped into money from her parents, and she hadn’t done that since she had left home.
    Then Sam, whom she had gone to the Culinary Institute with, called out of the blue and offered her this chance to do a new place. Start a new life.
    So she left. Healdsburg. San Francisco. Where she had a history and a name. To come east, start over.
    Everything rode on this.
    It was eleven. The staff was finishing wiping the place down. Annie was leafing through the receipts over a glass of wine. Some of them were heading to Café Mirage, where a lot of restaurant people got together after-hours to let off steam.
    She knew she should go. She could meet up with everyone there. Hell, she was thirty-five and had been working in kitchens for ten years. Pretty, funny, now divorced. She’d made a clean break. Now it all just seemed about two people who ended up headed in different ways.
    Jose, the dishwasher, was tying up the garbage, hanging the last of the pots and pans.
    â€œGo on home,” she told him. Jose had a wife and kids and went to church early in the morning.
    â€œI finish, ma’am,” he said, picking up the broom.
    â€œNah,” Annie said, getting up. “I’ll close. Here…” She handed him the tray of the last of the crespelles. “ Para los niños. Go on.”
    Jose took the tray and smiled. “ Gracias, Miss Annie.”
    He left through the back door. Annie heard the rattling sound of Jose’s Nissan as it clunked away. Still in her whites, she got up and hung a few last pots, made a note about