Tomorrow she had a festival to prepare for, and a kitchen twenty years and 800 miles away that was about to come walking back into her life through the side door of a marble restaurant.
Saturday's festival was twelve hours away. Brianna did not write a strategy. She drove out to Hollis Bennett's farm at golden hour, eighteen miles south, past the suburbs and into pasture. The chickens roamed loose between the maple trees.
Hollis was already waiting at the back gate when she pulled up, three live birds in a wire crate beside him.
"Heard about the bet on the radio."
"Yes, sir."
"You want me to dress them or you doing it yourself?"
"Myself."
He nodded. "B."
"Yes, sir."
"You take whatever you need. I'll bill you next month."
"Hollis—"
"I said next month." He spit tobacco into the dirt. "I've been watching you cook for six weeks. I trust you with my birds."
She walked to the rows with a basket: bell peppers picked twenty minutes ago; yellow corn still hot from the afternoon sun; white peaches so ripe the skin split when she lifted them; buttermilk from the dairy cooler in Hollis's mudroom, three days old the way the brine wanted it; hot sauce from the jar his wife had canned in August. She paid in cash and drove the truck back into town with the produce cooler in the passenger seat and the birds in a second cooler in the bed.