Joy had to wait in a line fifteen people deep and spend upward of seventy dollars to do what she did while Maggie was off getting the paper and walking Pickles. It was insane, really, how many people were lined up at the Roving Patisserie. Well, summer wasn’t over yet—it had just been briefly interrupted. She noted with some satisfaction that the boy who was taking orders—this would be Hugo, of course—was flustered, overworked. Maybe he was hungover.
Finally it was her turn. “Hello!” she said brightly. “I’ll have . . . let me see. A salade Niçoise.” Hugo had an iPad for order-taking; he tapped on it and then looked up at her, half expectant, half annoyed. Good. She wanted both. “Oh, and also a macaron,” she said, giving the word a bit of a French twist, just for fun. (She’d taken two years back at B.M.C. Durfee High School in Fall River, but rarely trotted out her accent, which Madame Girard had called “impeccable.”)
Hugo didn’t seem impressed. “What flavor?” He yawned.
Behind Joy the line thrummed with impatience. “What flavors do you have?” she inquired.
“They are all listed right there.” Hugo pointed to a sign bearing a list of the twenty-four flavors.
“Hmm,” said Joy thoughtfully. “Raspberry. Oooh, that sounds good. Mocha, yum.” She kept going. (She heard someone behind her say, “What’s the holdup up there?”) “Orange cream,” she read. “Boysenberry. Wow.” Across Hugo’s face passed a look of irritation, quick as a lightning strike. Finally she said, “You know what? I’ll have one in every flavor.” This had been her intention all along, of course. “Also, may I please speak to the owner?”
Hugo glanced behind him. “He is . . . occupied. Busy.”
Joy flashed Holly’s Chamber of Commerce ID. “I’m so sorry, but I’ll need to speak to him anyway. I work for the town. It’s an important administrative matter.” She felt gleefully, ridiculously important saying this.
“One minute,” said Hugo. He went to the small window on the side of the truck and called a string of French words too fast for Joy to understand. “Wait over there,” he said, pointing.
When Joy had her order—it had cost her seventy-two fifty—she stood off to the side and waited until a short balding man wearing a white apron appeared. He was such a stereotype of a French chef that Joy wanted to pop him right into a cartoon. She wanted to put him on Instagram. But what would she say for her caption? @Joybombs. Ran this guy out of town today. #Majorwin.
His name was Luca. She had to put the bag with all her food on the ground to shake his hand. Again she showed Holly’s ID. At first Luca thought she was there to assess storm damage, of which, he assured her, the truck had sustained none: they were within their rights to be open for business.
Joy chortled gracefully, professionally. “That’s not why I’m here,” she said. She explained her mission. She’d been charged with overseeing the proper use of all summer business permits. Then she shook her head regretfully and told Luca that the Roving Patisserie had been found to be in violation.
“But why?” asked Luca. He looked so genuinely perplexed that Joy almost felt sorry for him. But then she thought about her little shop. She thought about the fingers-to-the-bone effort she’d been putting in for a decade now. She thought about the time the compressor on the walk-in freezer had failed and the repair had cost so much that she’d had to beg Harlan for an extension on the rent payment for three months until she could get herself back on track. She thought about Harlan’s mother moving into her long-term care facility.
“Yes,” she said firmly. “You have a permit. But according to our records, you do not have a roving permit.”
“Eh?” He began to glower. He looked like he might start to chase a villain around while waving a rolling pin, with his chef’s hat lifting off of his head and following several inches behind.
Joy glanced down at the place where a clipboard would have been if she’d thought to bring one. “My records show that your permit is a single-use, single-space permit.” She’d made that up.
“Pardon me?”
“That’s right.” She decided to repeat it, because it sounded so legitimate. “You were issued a permit for a single location, and each time you move your truck you are in violation of the permit.”
Luca blinked at her and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “What is the . . .” He paused, maybe searching for the right word. He looked worried. She almost felt bad for him, again, but then she thought about Bridezilla, and Harlan, and Dustin’s uselessness, and she kept going.
“The penalty?”
“Yes, this is it. The penalty. What is it that you want?”
“Well,” said Joy. It had not occurred to her to think too much past this point. And she knew Luca was asking the question literally, but she found that in her mind she was answering it in the abstract. I want my island back, she wanted to say. I want you to take your golden-skinned son and your twenty-four flavors and your high-end truck and the backing of your New York financiers and I want you to go back where you came from, because if you aren’t going to stick around and put your kid in the school and your tax dollars in the coffers and your butt in the bleachers at basketball games that our kids take hour-long ferry rides to get to, then you don’t deserve to be here right now.
“We are almost done here anyway,” Luca said. “It has been—how do you say it?—a shit summer for the business. And this is the . . . what is it, the ultimate straw.”
Now she was perplexed. “But how can you say that? I drive past your truck all the time. There’s always a line.”
“Lines, yes. But the overhead is high, and the profits are low. So many expenses! You can’t imagine what it costs, to get the ingredients here.”
Oh, she thought, oh, but I can.
“All of the ferry times and the missed shipments and the timing and the spoiling.” He waved his hand toward the line, which was now only five deep. “And people wait and wait and they buy only one or two macarons, and that is not enough to sustain us. My boss has lost money on us this summer. I have lost money for him.” Luca looked disappointed in himself and Joy felt her sympathies begin to shift.
He shook his head sadly. “We are only, what do you call it, men for hire, my son and I. It is a man in New York who has the money, who owns the truck, who made the plan. If it is not a success this year”—he made a poof motion and the accompanying sound—“then we will not be back next year. We knew that from the start. And it is not a success this year.”
“So what will you do?” Joy asked.
“We will go back home.”
“New York?”
“No, no. No. Home. Paris. France. So the penalty for this—this permit situation. Can you tell me more about that? I will have to let my boss know. I was not aware . . .”
Joy felt something change then, a shifting of the tides. “You know what?” she said. “I’m just the messenger here. But let me put in a word with my boss and I’ll see what I can do about making this just a warning. Since you’re leaving soon and everything, it really doesn’t seem right to shake you down for a fee.”
His relief was almost palpable. “Really?” he said. “I would be so grateful. You would do that for me?”
She nodded magnanimously. It was such fun to wield power! Perhaps she should run for public office. “I would, Luca. I would do that for you.”
After Luca had returned to the bowels of the truck, Joy opened the container and took a peek inside.
Instead of a composed salad, the way a Niçoise was often served, the Patisserie had cut up the beans into bite-sized pieces, pan-fried the boiled potatoes to leave little crispy bits in the salad, and done the eggs in a medium boil, so that the yolks hadn’t gone all chalky. Besides the usual suspects—the olives, the cherry tomatoes chopped in half—she thought she spied some chopped fresh herbs, and a deep sniff told her she was right. Tarragon? Chervil? She didn’t see any anchovies in the salad, but when she dabbed her index finger into a piece of the (she had to admit, beautifully torn) butter lettuce and put it to her lips, she thought she tasted anchovy. The bastards must have minced it and put it right into the dressing.
Even though Joy was about as loath as could be to say it, it sort of had to be said: that food truck had turned out a genius of a salad.