Just a Few More Days…

A Splash of Substance releases on Tuesday!

I’m very excited about this book making its way into the world and I hope you’ll all enjoy it! I’ll put up a post on Monday with links to guest posts (not as many giveaways this go-round, but still a few) for those of you who like to find out bits and pieces about me and the characters and inspiration and so forth that goes into those blog visits.

And, since I didn’t put up all of Chapter One last week, here’s the rest to tide you over until Tuesday.

Paige banged her fists on the steering wheel. What a waste of time. She’d spent practically every evening for nearly a month on her proposal for the Senator, and that didn’t take into consideration the week she’d spent praying about submitting an offer in the first place. Or the three hours her favorite instructor from culinary school had spent with her on a video call. It was a vicious cycle. She needed a high-profile event like this to get more clients. And she needed more clients if she was going to stay in business. Catering companies filled more pages in the phone book than she cared to count, and that didn’t include smaller businesses like her own that hadn’t bothered with the book and had just setup shop online.

The handful of personal chef clients she kept happy provided only a little more than she needed to pay her half of the rent and utilities. Some days, filling the car with gas to get to her appointments was an iffy proposition. She needed this event. And it was very possible—probable even—that it had just tumbled out of her grasp.

Her phone chimed with an incoming text.

Call as soon as you’re done and tell me how it went.

Paige sighed and hit the call button. Slipping her Bluetooth headset over her ear, she started the car and backed out of the twenty-dollar parking spot she’d managed to snag in a lot near the Senate office buildings. She could’ve parked at Union Station for less, but that would have meant walking in shoes that were better suited for sitting. Even if they were professional and went with her suit she wasn’t hiking around D.C. in the things if she could help it. At the end of the day, the extra six dollars for this parking space wasn’t going to matter one way or another if she had to close.

“You’re done already?” Clara, Paige’s former instructor turned mentor and friend, sucked a breath through her teeth. “It either went incredibly well or… not so much.”

“Ding ding. We have a winner with option number two.” Paige frowned at a slow-moving truck and slammed her foot on the accelerator, dashing in front of it and squeaking through a light that she’d term orangey-red. Provided a cop hadn’t seen her. Or those blasted cameras they had all over the place in DC.

“Why would they have you come in with menus if they weren’t going with you? That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Tell me what happened.”

Paige recounted the conversation with Jackson. “It’s not that I didn’t get the event, necessarily. He just has to go back and actually read my proposal. Seems to me, despite any protestations to the contrary, the senator doesn’t actually want to stray too far from the typical fundraising meal where everyone gets their own slab of cow and no one thinks about the waste that goes into preparing the meal.”

“Hmmm. Did you consider… let’s say ‘setting aside’… the strength of your convictions just this once? In the name of getting business? You can’t save the world with your catering company if you go belly up.”

Paige slapped the steering wheel. She wasn’t going to be the crazy person laying on her horn, but good grief, would it kill the other drivers to pay attention to the lights and go when they turned green? It was hard enough to dodge the tourists that crowded the streets like clueless cattle, totally oblivious to the little things like cars needing to drive there. “I’m already selling out plenty, thank you, by even bidding on this event. I mean really, politics? What was I thinking?”

“You were thinking that you need a chance to network with people who have parties and routinely use caterers. Those people, at least in Washington DC, are most likely going to have something to do with politics. Unless you’re ready to take your father up on his offer, this is good business, not selling out. It’s one event… ”

“That I may not even get now.” Paige cranked the wheel hard to the left, cutting off a commuter van, and sped onto the Interstate.

“Perhaps. But if you do get the event, it’s only one. One event done in a more traditional manner isn’t going to condemn you to the ranks of people who don’t care about the planet. And if you’re able to make contacts, well, then you actually have a business to build your platform on.”

Maybe Clara was right, but it still didn’t sit well. A typical cow could provide maybe twenty New York strips. A fundraising event like this, even if it was “only” a hundred people, meant five, possibly six, cows And what happened to the rest of the beef? Did it get used? There was no way to know when you bought that way. Presumably it got sold, but when she dealt with the Higgenbotham Farm, Paige knew they were only slaughtering what would be used. In its entirety. She had no way to store five cows worth of other beef cuts just to get a hundred steaks. Besides, if she started out serving in a non-sustainable way, wouldn’t new clients expect that same type of thing?

“I don’t know, Clara. Having spent so much time reading up on sustainability, I can’t go back now. I mean, sure, I’m not exactly living the dream like the girls at Green Acres Farm in Idaho, but I’m doing the best I can with where I am. How much back-pedaling am I supposed to do just to get my business going?”

“That’s something only you can answer. Just make sure you’re not letting pride run the show.”

Pride? “What do you mean? I’m not… ”

“Paige. I love you. You know that. You were one of my best and favorite students. It’s why I took you under my wing after you graduated. But this sustainability thing—it’s not that I don’t believe it has merits—you’ve just taken it to an extreme. It’s good to have principles. It’s good to want to change the world. But you need to be less rigid, more willing to bend when it’s warranted. Just think about it.”

Paige swung the car across two lanes and squeezed onto the exit ramp with a heavy sigh. “All right. I’ll think about it. Thanks, Clara.”

“Let me know as soon as you hear something.”

“Will do.” Paige ended the call and skidded into the parking lot of her apartment complex. ‘Rigid’ and ‘proud’. Two new words to add to the ever-growing list of adjectives that explained why she was twenty-six, unmarried, and had no prospects on the horizon.