chapter 1 part 2
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“All things in due time, Ms. Offen. You may have had a little too much sugar and caffeine from the chocolates already, this being your first day and all. Please go ahead and take a quarter hour break, wherever you want. Do consider having some water or herbal tea or savory food to help settle you back down.”
* *
Not knowing anyone else and feeling vaguely uncomfortable elsewhere on the premises, Eden returned to her and Shira’s work room with a full mug of Calm Clouds tea well before it reached its minimum steeping time, resuming her comfortable seat.
“Nice in here, huh?” Shira commented between her latest chocolate chomps.
“Not at all the dank, windowless basement with single super-buzzy tubular fluorescent light that I’d feared when they roped me into this.”
Indeed it wasn’t. Airy and bright with windows, skylights, fresh paint, fresh air, nice comfortable overstuffed furniture… it was a very nice space in many ways.
“So tell me again what happened once you threw the molotov cocktail?”
“The man I now know as Mr. Easter happened to be exiting his car on his way back towards the building, standing right behind me when I jumped out of my car, poured and lit the cocktail, and threw it. A maintenance guy appeared out of nowhere in the doorway near the window I hit with a fire extinguisher, and had my improvised incendiary device extinguished almost as fast as I’d lit it, immediately crashing me into depression at having so epically failed.
“Soon as I turned my head, an L.A.P.D. patrol car rolled up, lights no siren, and Mr. Easter appeared just behind me. The officers took a report from Mr. Easter and a confession from me, then asked Mr. Easter if he wanted to press charges. He asked for a moment to have a private word with me, which the officers granted him. Between the option of misdemeanor vandalism at a minimum on my record plus likely probation or fines or jail time versus taking this job to eat factory reject chocolates for 6 months with no charges pressed, the choice seemed obvious.”
Shira chowed down on a just-arrived Milk Rum Nougat, not anticipating the numminess of the rumminess. “Would you make a different choice now?”
“Hell no! I’m jus gonna… make my way through this, grateful for my high metabolism, so I won’t get fat.”
“*Pffft!*” Shira snorted in high amusement, pretending to turn it into a sneeze to mask her mirth.
She ignored Shira’s response, sipping her tea, then asking, “So how’d you wind up chowing down on defective chocolates, like me?”
“Unauthorized sex at work. Around food, being served to the public.”
“*Ewww!* Why?!”
“Horniness and boredom! Why else? There’s a reason our catering company gets snarky spelled B-O-N-E Bone Appetit.” She bit into one then the other of her latest 2 chocolates: a Milk Bordeaux® then a Milk Butterscotch Square, starting to speak with her mouth partly full, “I’rm nurt the only one who works there—*worked* there—who runs sexually hot.”
“Do I even want to know where?”
“The Huntington Library, Museum, and Botanical Gardens, which I’m sure a local like you knows is abbreviated to The Huntington the way we can get away with Rose Parade without inciting your literally fiery wrath.”
Eden rubbed her forehead, then took another sip of tea. “Yeahhh, the improvised incendiary device plan was pretty much the nadir of my personal judgement over my life so far. Guess I’m glad that I got off so easily.”
“Yeah, that was my problem at that job: getting off far too easily and often. I didn’t *think* either of us were spraying nor otherwise spreading anything near enough to the cooktop, but the crispy well-done pubes wedged in Sad Trombone’s teeth indicated otherwise.”
“Woah woah what? Who? Where?”
“Me and Jared, who’s a great lay and one of my work regulars, were working the kitchen I think in the 1919 Café, but really we did it so much so many places, it might have been one of the other kitchens. Grill was full, wasn’t time to flip yet. No one else was back there. He was hard for me, I was wet for him, our usual sloppy kisses happened, then our usual fucking happened—usual in that we routinely boned at work, not that we were stuck in any kind of rut in terms of specifics. It had never been a problem before—we did it behind a stack of boxes. I can’t tell you how the pubes got into Sad Trombone’s burger patty, just that they did.” She got that contemplative look again, “Kinda makes me wonder what they’d taste like with a little extra virgin olive oil. Huh—virgin olive oil and non-virgin pubes… there’s a mash-up for ya!”
{This is so gross! And it’s just the first day! *Gaaaah!*} “Who or what is Sad Trombone? And if it’s *anything remotely* like rusty trombone, *please* don’t tell me!”
“No no no. It’s the name of the President of The Huntington at the time. Not her real name, which was Trombley something, I guess… something close to that. We just all called her Sad Trombone, because her presence and activities made the folks who worked there before she arrived sad, and that’s what they all started calling her.”
“Why were they sad?”
Shira needed to down a few Dark Molasses Chips and a Dark Maple Walnut before she could reply. “Ever known some hotshot who breezes in to head up some company or other organization, then totally fucks it up and over doing things for their own self-aggrandizement? Then when others cotton on and try to right the ship, they skip town, erase any record of their wrongdoing, and repeat the process some other place?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“Well, if you listen to The Huntington folks who worked there before her time, that’s what I got of their consensus opinion. Rumors that she trashed Pitzer College before breezing into The Huntington, but I couldn’t find any provable evidence of that when I looked, just speculation and innuendo. She brought our company in to do catering, so I have no personal knowledge of things prior to her. Nor, once my or Jared’s or both our short curlies were wedged between her teeth, after.”
“So what does any of that have to do with you scarfing down reject fine chocolates with me? Did this Unhappy Trombone person–”
“–Sad Trombone, please. She’s not worth more syllables than that.”
“Alright. Did or does Sad Trombone have any connection with See’s?”
“Munger.”
“Oh?”< br>
“You don’t know this, Ms. Pasadena? From what I’ve read, Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway which owns See’s amongst all kinds of other companies lives in your fair city.”
“**That’s all the more reason for the web dipshits here to *fix the fucking [url=https://www.sees.com/timeline/]history time line page[/url]!*** *That 1949 entry is* **one of the greatest abominations in the *history of the written WORD!***”
{She’s unhinged. Tote unhinged} Shira struggled not to cower.
“**TOURNAMENT! OF! *ROSEEEEESSSS!***”
“**DROP IT!**” Shira yelled back. “You’ve got delicious candies to eat.”
Sullenly, Eden complied. The perfectly balanced scintillating flavors of the Key Lime Truffle she was currently enjoying made her tastebuds dance. {If they keep feeding me ones which are this good, I’m going to stop caring about much of anything else besides having more of these} she thought. Despite the roughly pound and a quarter of chocolates she’d already consumed so far this work day, the inevitability of her situation plus gustatory joy of that last truffle made her look forward to the latest new additions dropped into her bowl.
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