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“How long have you been playing, Mr. Delaney?”
“I’ve been playing for almost fifteen years,” he said, “And please, call me Luke.”
I nodded.
“All right then, Luke,” I said.
It felt odd to call him by his first name. No other bosses I’d had in my time as a chef would allow me to call them by their first names, even in private. It hadn’t been considered professional in Chicago.
Then again, I wasn’t in Chicago. I supposed there was a different level of professionalism expected at a lodge in Idaho than at a restaurant in Chicago.
He began to show me the basics of how to hold a guitar and the chords that I was going to be strumming for the first “easy song.” The song – I believe it was ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ – proved to actually be quite difficult, and I got lost. Immediately.
I attempted to copy where his fingers had been on the neck of the guitar for the first chord. Then, I strummed the strings at the other end. The chord that came out did not sound entirely right.
Luke winced.
“Not quite like that,” he said softly. “Move your index finger down a string, and then try strumming.” He reached towards my hand to show me the correct string.
“I can fix it on my own, thank you,” I snapped involuntarily.
Luke’s face froze briefly. He moved his hand away from the neck of the guitar.
I let out a soft sigh.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
I took a deep breath before moving my index finger down one chord and trying again. This time, the chord strummed properly.
“There we go. I want you to hold that position with your left hand for a few seconds. Just until you feel your hand start to cramp,” he said. “Doing that will help you build the muscles, but I don’t want you to actually cramp your hand so early. Another way to build the muscles for this would be to get one of those grip trainers and practice that way.”
I let my fingers relax away from the strings of the guitar as he spoke. I might have had quite a bit of strength in my palm and fingers, but the way some of my fingers were curled to get the chord properly strummed hurt. I could see now why guitar players had calloused fingertips.
There was a bit of tension in the air as he tried to work out what to tell me to do next. I felt bad for snapping at him, but the moment he’d reached towards me, I’d felt Mark’s hands shoving me out the door. It was better if I did this on my own. When things sounded wrong, I could experiment to fix the chords. Part of learning was learning why something didn’t work. If I was told everything I was doing wrong, I wouldn’t learn as easily as experimenting on my own.
Right?
I felt part of my brain trying to point out that the whole point of a teacher was to teach you how to avoid mistakes.
I felt the memory of Mark’s fingers digging into my arms and ignored the voice.
My phone buzzed, and so did his. Luke didn’t hesitate to pick up his phone. I glanced at mine to find a text from my mother, asking for the chicken a la penne recipe I used. She often asked for recipes, but this was the first time she had asked for that recipe.
“Excuse me a moment, Luke,” I said. “My mother wants a recipe, and it’ll be much faster to get it to her now than let her continually text me for it.”
“Of course. What recipe?”
He was clearly trying to make casual conversation, but I wondered if he’d be mad if he knew it was the recipe that had caused so many arguments.
I hesitated a moment but decided that telling him what my mother wanted to cook would ultimately not harm anything.
“She wants the chicken a la penne recipe.”
With that, I left to go to the kitchen to find it. Thankfully, I had had the foresight to gather my most used recipes into a small binder that I used as a cookbook. The pages were all protected so that if I did spill something in the kitchen on the pages, all I had to do was wipe the page protectors clean. It was a lot easier than almost losing a recipe because I spilled my wine while cooking or someone knocked a bottle of olive oil over.
After I took the picture and sent it to my mother, telling her to make sure the chicken was all the way cooked before adding it to the pasta, I turned to go back out to the lobby. However, I found Luke waiting for me in the doorway of the kitchen, his hand sheepishly on the back of his neck.
Then, his stomach growled.
