"Zero talent, just like your father. Apron off, you're fired!" My mother screamed that at me across the counter of our family barbecue joint on Saturday, just before opening.
Then she picked up the plate of ribs I'd just finished and smashed it on the floor. Ribs and broken plate covered the empty strip of floor behind the counter.
I'm thirty-one. I've worked the pit at Clarence's Smokehouse in Kansas City since I was fourteen, the year my dad died and left Mama alone with the restaurant and me. I come in at four in the morning to light the smokers. My son Desmond does his homework in the back booth after school. This place is our whole life.
But Mama never let me change one thing. Not the rub. Not the sides. And especially not the sauce. "Your daddy's sauce," she calls it, even though she's the one who's made it for seventeen years. On Saturday she caught me serving my own sauce to our early customer, and she lost it.
She said she was ashamed of me in front of our one early customer.
My face was on fire. But I held out a spoon of my sauce across the counter and said, "Fine, Mama. Just taste the sauce before you fire me."
She turned her back on me. And then, from the corner booth, an old man in a straw hat who'd been eating quietly the whole time stood up, holding his rib bone.
"Ma'am, who made this sauce? I've tasted it before."
Mama turned around. She didn't recognize him. I did, but only barely. I had seen him once before, from the back of a crowded tent at the fairgrounds, wearing a white judge's apron.
His name is Walter Briggs. He has judged barbecue for thirty years. People in our world call him "the tongue," because he can tell you what wood a brisket was smoked over with his eyes closed.
Last October, I did something I never told Mama about. Every fall there is a big barbecue invitational, with pitmasters from six states. I entered the sauce category under my own name, with a sauce I had spent three years perfecting in my apartment kitchen at night. Dad's recipe was the base. I added smoked peaches, a little black coffee and sorghum in place of brown sugar. I drove there with Desmond on a Sunday, while Mama thought I was at church.
I won. Grand champion sauce, out of a hundred and twelve entries. I came home with a ribbon and two thousand dollars in prize money. I hid both in my closet, because I knew what Mama would say. That I had betrayed Daddy. That I thought I was better than him.
Walter Briggs had been on that judging panel. Months later, he was driving through Kansas City and stopped for lunch at a little place with good reviews. The first bite of a rib stopped him cold.
He walked up to the counter. He told my mother, politely, exactly where he had tasted that sauce and who had made it. Then he told her it was the best sauce he had judged in ten years.
The extractor rattled behind us. Mama looked at me like she had never seen me before.
Then she did something I didn't expect. She took a clean spoon from the bin, dipped it into the pot on the stove and tasted. She closed her eyes for a long time. When she opened them, they were wet.
"Peaches," she said. "Your daddy always wanted to put peaches in it. I told him it was foolish."
She had never told me that. Not once in seventeen years.
We closed for an hour that afternoon, and she finally told me the truth about what she had thrown at me. My father had wanted to change the menu, too, the year before he died. They fought about it. He said she never let him try anything. The last thing she ever said to him about the restaurant was that he had no talent. Two weeks later, his heart gave out at the pit. Every time I tried something new, I heard that fight all over again.
Walter Briggs wrote about us in a barbecue magazine that summer. The line out the door started the next week, and it hasn't stopped.
Mama didn't fire me. She didn't hand me the restaurant, either. She's stubborn. But we have two sauces on the table now. One says Clarence's Original. The other, in the brown bottle, says Jasmine's Peach. Mama refills that one herself every morning. She thinks I don't notice.
Last week, Desmond asked if he could learn the pit. Mama said yes before I could.
Should Jasmine's mother have apologized out loud in front of everyone, or is the second bottle on the table enough?
