Stirring the Pot

“Drumroll, please,” Elijah announced, shaking the cap with mock solemnity. He held it out to Emma in the kitchen. She reached in and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “Number two. I guess that’s okay. I’m going to grab some water before my turn. Anybody want some?” Oliver held up his hand.

Elijah stretched across to Noah with the hat. He pulled out a number and announced, “Five,” with a disappointed look on his face.

Next up, Olivia. “Number three! I’ll hold this whole thing together.”

Oliver stood up and leaned over the coffee table, his reluctance radiating off him like heat from a stove. “I really don’t want to do this.” Elijah shook the hat. “Number one,” Oliver sighed, slumping back onto the loveseat. Olivia patted his knee.

“Oh, God damnit,” Noah immediately said.

“OH, GOD BLESS IT, BABY,” Jasper stood up, his arms raised in victory. He was already bouncing on his toes, the folding chair rocking dangerously behind him.

“Anybody want to trade?” Noah asked the room at large. After a few seconds of silence, he accepted his fate and slouched in his folding chair.

Elijah slowly looked around the room, tapping his fingers together, and said in a deep, theatrical voice, “The order has been set. May the odds be ever in your favor.”

Oliver stood up from the loveseat and composed himself. He looked like a man about to give a eulogy he hadn’t written.

Elijah interrupted, “Stand in the kitchen,” and pointed. He stood up and turned off the living room lights to set the stage. The kitchen’s overhead fluorescent cast Oliver in a pale, unflattering glow that made him look like a reluctant witness on a low-budget true crime show.

Oliver went to the kitchen, shoulders slumped. “You got this,” yelled Olivia.

“I don’t want to do this,” started Oliver.

“But you have to,” prodded Elijah, the red wine evidently starting to take effect. He leaned back on the milk crate with a confidence that suggested he’d forgotten what he was sitting on.

“Statistically,” Oliver began, adjusting his glasses, “when a small business owner suddenly closes shop, the cause is almost always mundane. Financial trouble, a family issue.” He paused, looking at the ceiling as though the data might be stored there. “The historical precedent for dramatic kidnappings by business partners is, to be frank, negligible.”

“Boo!” Noah yelled.

Oliver blinked. He was clearly wrestling with himself—the part of him that found speculation undignified versus, apparently, some part of him that had been chewing on the question all evening. “But, if we must speculate,” he sighed, “I suppose it’s possible his online popularity led him to relocate to a state with a more favorable tax code.”

“Except I already texted that shop owner and got the name of his hot sauce, and it’s not for sale anywhere online,” Olivia said, clearly tired of Oliver not cooperating.

“Fine,” Oliver conceded, a faint color rising in his cheeks. “He was moving, he took the website down, and his business partner, who was unaware of the move, caught wind of it and… kidnapped him. For money.” He delivered the last two words like they personally offended him. “Is that good enough?”

“Very intriguing, Oliver,” Elijah said, relieving him of any more unwanted attention. “Who’s next?”

Emma was already on her way to the kitchen, passing Oliver at the threshold. She hugged him and whispered, “That was great,” before lightly pushing him back to the living room. Oliver retreated to the loveseat with visible relief, and Olivia immediately reached for his hand.

Emma positioned herself under the fluorescent light and placed both hands on the counter behind her, leaning against it the way she’d seen chefs do on cooking shows—casual authority, or at least the appearance of it. She’d been thinking about this since the market. Not a theory, exactly, but a feeling—the kind of gut-level conviction she used to trust in the kitchen before Bistro Lavande taught her not to.

“While Oliver has dreamt up a very believable fiction, it is still that!” Emma opened, adding “Fiction!” after a pause that was just too long, ruining the dramatic effect. Jasper gave her an encouraging thumbs up anyway. “Unlike Oliver, I know what really happened to Hottie McHot Sauce.”

“Wait, did you only care about this guy ‘cause he’s hot?” Noah interrupted.

“What? No. He’s not hot. I mean, he’s not not hot. He’s… look, it’s like Boaty McBoatface,” Emma rebutted, losing the room’s focus. She could feel the theory slipping away from her, so she raised her voice. “Hey! I know what happened.” She paused, planting her feet on the kitchen tile. “It was Big Hot Sauce.”

“Oh, shit! Big Hot Sauce in the house!” Jasper yelled in support, making finger guns. “Pew, pew, pew!”

“They saw Hank’s artisanal, small-batch hot sauce as a rising threat,” Emma declared, her voice rising with each word. “They knew his secret family recipe was too good, too authentic, too real. So they did what they always do—they crushed him. Bought him out, silenced him, maybe even… disappeared him.” She paused dramatically, eyes wide. “Think about it. Have you seen Hank since last week? Exactly.”

“Well, to be honest, literally none of us have ever met Hank, so no,” Oliver uncharacteristically interjected from the loveseat. He smirked; across the room, Olivia was beaming at him. It was possibly the best-timed joke Emma had ever heard him land in this group, and he looked both pleased and slightly alarmed by it.

“You know what I mean, Ollie!” Emma said, resting her case. “Elijah knows I’m right. He’ll see the truth.” She took a small bow and leaned back against the counter, feeling lighter than she had all day. There was something satisfying about giving a name to the shapeless unease she’d been carrying around since the market. Big Hot Sauce. It sounded ridiculous. But it also sounded, in a way she couldn’t explain, exactly right.

Olivia stood up and smoothed her skirt. “It looks like I’m next, and I’ll tell you, it’s quite simple.” She was the picture of composure as her eyes slowly went across the room, making eye contact with each person—a move so practiced it might have been rehearsed, though with Olivia, the performance was always spontaneous. “Oh, darling Emma, you’re being so dramatic!” she said, channeling a bygone movie star, one hand placed delicately on her chest. “It’s far more likely Hank’s been swept off his feet by some wealthy socialite. You know, the type who summers in the Hamptons and has a personal shopper at Bergdorf’s. She probably whisked him away on her private jet to a secluded villa where they’re sipping champagne and feeding each other caviar.” She clasped her hands together, a dreamy smile on her face. “Honestly, I’d do the same if I had the chance!”

Oliver was shaking his head, but he was smiling. Everyone was smiling. Olivia had a gift for making the absurd sound not only plausible but aspirational.

Jasper sprung from his chair, knocking over his wine glass. “Aliens!” he exclaimed. Emma rushed to get paper towels as Elijah picked up the glass, but the chaos did nothing to slow Jasper down.

“Hank’s hot sauce was too hot! It was like a beacon!” He paced the narrow strip of floor between the couch and the coffee table, gesticulating wildly, his arms narrowly missing the overhead lamp with each revolution. “Drawing in extraterrestrial beings from across the galaxy! They landed their spaceship right in McGolrick Park—you know, by the monument, between the old guys playing chess and the woman who does tai chi with her cat? Coincidence? I think not!—and they snatched Hank right from his stall, and now they’re probing him for his spicy secrets, probably because it’s the perfect fuel for their warp drives!” He threw his hands up. “Or maybe it was the CIA. Or the Russians. Or maybe… maybe it was all of them working together!”

Noah leaned back, arms crossed, waiting for the debris field of Jasper’s performance to settle. “You’re all thinking too small,” he said, his voice dripping with confidence. “This is obviously a state-actor play to leverage asymmetric market destabilization via a targeted supply chain disruption.” He was met with blank stares—four pairs of eyes and one pair of glasses all reflecting the same polite confusion. He sighed, the sigh of a man perpetually surrounded by people who didn’t speak his language. “Look. It’s the CIA. They’re trying to destabilize the global pepper market. Step one: eliminate Hank. Step two: create a hot sauce shortage. Step three: profit.” He smirked. “It’s their master plan for world domination.”

“They’re all too good! Too good!” Elijah said through laughs as Jasper and Noah started arguing about lizard people—an argument that was somehow both completely new and exactly the same as every other argument they’d ever had. “I gotta be honest, I don’t think I can pick! Let me get this straight. My options are: kidnapping, Big Hot Sauce conspiracy, socialite abduction by private jet, alien abduction, and CIA destabilization of the pepper market.” He looked around the room, his expression hovering between amusement and genuine affection. “I’m starting to think the real mystery is how you all function in society.”

A chorus of protests erupted. “Alright, alright,” Elijah said, raising his hands in mock surrender. “You’ve all made compelling arguments. But I’m still not convinced. Maybe we need to do some actual investigating next week before I can make a final decision.”

The room went quiet for a beat—the kind of pause where a joke stops being a joke and starts becoming an idea.