by Ruthie Knox
After that, he maintained a running monologue as he gathered the day’s bounty, and May trailed along behind him, pleasantly surprised by how much she liked being up here. She remembered snatches of a song about city rooftops—how peaceful they were—but this wasn’t that sort of rooftop. They were only one story high. She heard every car go by and caught bits of conversations from the sidewalk.
But even so, she liked looking down on the Village. She liked the way her boots squished into the humus when she took a step into the bed to pull a weed at Ben’s direction. The coolness of her forearm after the carrot tops deposited their morning’s collection of dew on her skin.
She liked Ben’s dimple-crevasses and the easy way he moved up here.
After he’d finished, she followed him down to the empty kitchen.
“Do they serve breakfast?” she asked.
Ben smiled. “If they did breakfast, it would be a madhouse in here right now, and Cecily would kick us out so fast it’d make your head spin.”
“Just dinner?”
“Yeah.” He glanced at the clock. “The prep crew will get here soon, and the pastry chef. But this early in the morning is about the only time it’s quiet in here.”
Ben turned on the taps and dumped his harvest on the metal countertop next to the sink. While he sorted through the pile, snapping the tops off carrots then throwing what remained—as well as some tiny potatoes—under the water, May tried to imagine the kitchen with fifteen people bustling around it. Every galvanized surface covered with food, the burners all lit, the pasta cooker bubbling, the dishwasher letting off clouds of steam. She’d worked as a waitress once, so she had a sense of what it would feel like in here during the service.
Crazy.
“So can you cook?” Ben scrubbed a small blue potato with a brush and then added it to the collection of clean produce on the countertop beside the sink.
“A little.”
“You like potatoes and omelets?”
“Sure.”
“Good. You do the omelets, I’ll do the potatoes.”
“I thought you were making breakfast.”
“You need to earn your keep.”
“Since when?”
His eyebrows lifted. “You don’t know how to make an omelet?”
“Sure I do.” But despite her love of cooking shows, she didn’t know if her technique would pass muster with a real chef.
Ben diced the potatoes and began sautéing them, adding seasonings and what seemed like an obscene amount of butter while he cooked some vegetables for omelet filling on another burner.
On her first try, May got shells in the eggs, forgot the salt, and failed to get the pan hot enough. When she tried a bite from the edge, the eggs tasted rubbery and bland.
“How’s that coming?” Ben asked.
She carried the empty bowl, the whisk, and the container of eggs over to the countertop on his side of the stove. “You’re making them.”
“You sure?”
“I can’t take the heat, Master Chef.”
“Crack the eggs for me, at least.”
She picked four out and cracked the first one on the lip of the bowl.
“I like mine best without the crunchy shell bits in there,” he said.
“Shut up.”
He stirred the potatoes. She glanced over at him. “And quit smirking.”
“All right, princess.”
Two men came in and began setting up their workstations on a long galvanized steel table nearby. One brought a big tray of what looked like miniature chickens out of the refrigerator, and the other retrieved a vast quantity of onions and began chopping them at a speed that astonished her. Ben greeted them by name—Luis, Pedro—but they kept their heads down, their eyes on the flashing knives in their hands as they said hello. Deferential? Or else they just didn’t want to cut off their own fingers.
May kept her back to them and focused on Ben’s graceful economy as he moved from one pan to the other, stirring and seasoning and flipping eggs in a symphony of hotness.
How had she ever thought he was nothing more than a dishwasher who liked to cook, especially after watching him make French toast yesterday morning? He moved with fluid grace, as though cooking was a language he’d learned to speak at birth.
He loved it. Obvious as a neon sign.
At their station nearby, one prep cook chopped carrots into precise cubes while the other separated chickens into pieces. A freckle-faced redhead pushed backward through the kitchen doors on crutches—an awkward job that left her little room to maneuver in the kitchen, which wasn’t a large space. Ben finished sliding the second omelet onto a plate and said, “That’s Sam. Keep an eye on the potatoes, okay? I’ll be back in a minute.”
He crossed to her, and they fell into a conversation that seemed to consist mostly of shorthand. May caught the gist of it—something to do with produce quality from a supplier, the prices of various cuts of meat, a shortage of hotel pans. Ben made a disdainful remark about someone he referred to as “your sauce guy.” Sam asked questions about people May hadn’t met, and Ben answered them, his tone of voice growing gradually darker and growlier.
Five minutes turned into ten. She stirred the potatoes until they started to look rubbery, then took them off the heat. The omelets cooled and took on a glazed appearance.
She caught enough of what Ben was saying to understand that he had been covering for Sam for a few days while her injury kept her from the kitchen and someone named Perry was out of town for a funeral.
She also caught enough to understand that the conversation was putting him in a foul mood.
Or maybe it was the people. As Ben and Sam talked, nine o’clock came and went, and the kitchen filled with a steady stream of strangers in white coats. They pushed through the door, greeting the two chefs by name.
Ben began leaning toward Sam when he spoke, the angle of his body too aggressive, the V between his eyebrows as deep as she’d seen it. So different from the way he’d been on the roof—the way he’d been all morning so far, open and teasing. Fun.
This had happened on Friday, too, when Cecily asked him into the kitchen to fix the dishwasher. But then May hadn’t known what to make of the mood he returned in.
She didn’t know now, either, except that there didn’t seem to be any bad blood between Ben and Sam, who wasn’t the least bit fazed by his mood. She nodded brusquely now and then, asked questions in an undertone that May couldn’t overhear, and eventually squeezed his shoulder, said something that looked appreciative, and angled her head toward May. A moment later, Ben rejoined her.
“You didn’t eat?” He glowered at the plated food.
“I was waiting for you.”
He poked at an omelet with one finger, then tipped both plates into a nearby trash can. “It’s no good now. We’ll just stop at a bakery.”
May peered over the lip of the can. All that warm, delicious potential—gone. The eggs and potatoes had become a jumbled pile of fat-glazed refuse.
Ben turned away from her to retrieve his hoodie, and she fantasized about placing both palms flat across his shoulder blades and giving him a shove, because he’d ruined everything. Again.
But when life gave her lemons, she knew what she was supposed to do. She picked up her purse.
Maybe whatever had come over him would fade as they got farther away from this place.
The morning could still be salvaged, even if breakfast couldn’t.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“The Brooklyn Bridge?”
“Yep,” Ben affirmed.
She couldn’t believe how long it had taken her to figure it out. It wasn’t as though the bridge had been hiding.
But in her defense, they’d had to wend their way through a construction zone, and it wasn’t until they started heading up—and then up, then more up—that it became obvious their trajectory would send them out over the water.
“Don’t you have anything more obscure to show me?” she asked
. “Everybody says to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge.”
“It’s a great bridge. Plus, it goes to Brooklyn, which is where we’re headed.”
“What are we doing in Brooklyn?”
“Bees. And we can look for apartments, too.”
She perked up, pleased by the idea of helping Ben find somewhere new to live. She’d loved that part of college—finding an off-campus house or apartment for the school year, moving in, fixing it up on a budget. “Do you have listings we’re going to look at?”
Maybe he would let her see them. She could be in charge of the notepad when they walked through. She would make pro/con lists with him, and—
“No, I thought I’d walk around a few neighborhoods.”
Dang it, there went another fantasy.
“When is Alec coming back, again?”
“Friday or Saturday. I have to check.”
“Cutting it close, aren’t you?”
He shrugged. Clearly, he didn’t want to talk about his move. But if he had to be out in less than a week and he was still “looking at neighborhoods,” something smelled fishy.
Ah, well. None of her business.
As she’d hoped, his miasma of grouchiness had dissipated on the way here. They’d stopped at an amazing patisserie for coffee and pastries. She’d eaten one more chocolate croissant than she reasonably should have. But she loved them, and it wasn’t as though she could get chocolate croissants this good in Manitowoc.
It felt perfect now to stretch her legs, to breathe deeply and move at a brisk pace. As they made their way up the inclined walkway, he seemed lighter. Cheerful, for him.
The bridge was all cables and air, the pedestrian walkway in a separate area from the car traffic but crowded with tourists and punctuated by the occasional surprise of a cyclist bombing downhill from the Brooklyn side.
The morning was crisp, the sky bluer than blue, the river shining with reflected light.
“What is that, the Hudson?”
“East River. The Hudson’s on the other side.”
“Oh.”
“Separating Manhattan from New Jersey?”
May rolled her eyes and tried to project Sure, I knew that.
“Kids today,” Ben said. “Did you learn no geography in school?”
“My teachers back home sadly neglected the unit on mapping Manhattan. And I bet yours did, too.”
He smiled. “Yeah, I can’t really remember, honestly.”
“Did you go to cooking school?”
A slightly risky question, as it might fall into the none-of-your-business category or, worse, plunge Ben back into gloom. But her curiosity demanded to be fed more scraps of Ben’s life story.
“No, I went to UW–Madison. You know Connor, the guy who was slagging off my darts game at Pulvermacher’s?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“That’s where we met. He was my roommate.”
“So how did you get into the restaurant business?”
He shoved his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. Gray today. The blue T-shirt he wore underneath did interesting things to his eyes.
“It was an accident,” he said. “I was supposed to be a farmer. I grew up on a berry farm. Raspberries, blueberries. And hives, too. Lakeshore Nectar.”
“Did you sell honey all over Wisconsin?” She might have eaten it and not even known.
“Not as far away as Manitowoc. I think they changed the name anyway.”
“They?”
“My dad and his new family. My parents got divorced.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“It’s all right. Happens to everybody.”
“Well, not everybody.”
He had nothing to say to that.
“How old were you?”
“Fifteen.”
She imagined him back then—his unfinished face and skinny, defenseless adolescent body. Ben with his hands buried deep in his hoodie pockets, hurting.
He glanced at her. “Naw, don’t look like that. It was a good thing. They were fighting all the time.”
A woman passed them with a rolling suitcase. Her intense focus on the ground reminded May to get out of her own head and look around. There was so much water and sky and air up here, she didn’t want to miss it. It was hardly like Manhattan at all.
Ben caught her eye, and one corner of his mouth hitched, maybe at the expression on her face. She felt like a deep inhale, caught and buoyed up.
“Are you an only child?”
“Yeah.”
“And the farm—that’s what you wanted to do?”
Ben stepped around her and pushed her to the outside of the bridge, away from an oncoming bike. “Walking in public isn’t one of your best areas, is it?”
“I’ve managed to survive this long without your help.”
He grinned that loopy grin, and she looked down at her boots, afraid she’d float away.
He’d shaved this morning. In the bright light, against the blue sky, she was having trouble not staring at him. With a few days’ beard growth, Ben was good-looking, but clean-shaven … holy cow. He had a nice square chin, a strong jawline, and since when did she notice a man’s jawline?
When he spends two days hiding it from you.
Maybe. Or maybe just when the man was Ben.
“I guess that was what I wanted to do,” he continued, ignorant of her jawline fixation. “It wasn’t something we talked about. It was how things were, with my dad. But then after the divorce, I went with my mom, and all the plans changed.”
“That must have been disorienting.”
“It was … a surprise.”
“Were things better after the divorce?”
“In some ways. But the farm—not really. I couldn’t get along with my dad. When he remarried, he was kind of done with me and my mom. And then after a while he had another whole set of kids. Three boys. I figure one of them will take over.”
“Is that what he says?”
Ben shrugged. “We don’t talk.”
His expression had darkened. May saw the skinny boy again and suppressed the urge to hug him. “Are you close to your mom?”
“Nah. She’s Latvian. Got stuck marrying my dad when she found out she was pregnant. As soon as I went to college, she moved back home.” He glanced toward her, frowning. “How did we get on all this? It’s fucking depressing.”
“I wondered how you got to be a chef.”
“Right.”
They walked in silence for a few beats before he spoke again. “Well, so I went to college on scholarship, where I worked three part-time jobs and figured out fuck-all, and then after graduation I had this buddy who was going to Europe. My mom paid for a plane ticket so I’d come visit her. I thought it would be for a month or so.” He glanced at her. “I didn’t come back for four years.”
The bright daylight picked up colors in his short, dark hair—those scattered strands of gray at the temples, a sprinkling of auburn and gold on top where the sun had brought it out.
Those eyes like rings in burnished wood.
Striking. Handsome in a way that was almost threatening.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“You’re staring.”
She tripped over a particularly thick pocket of air. Ben caught her by the upper arm and shook his head, amused at her.
“Come on, May. ’Fess up. Did I say something weird? Do I have egg on my chin?”
“You shaved,” she said. And then, when he cocked an eyebrow, “I like it.”
That made the dimple-creases cut deep into his cheeks. Even more devastating without the beard. “I thought you might.”
“You did it for me?”
A shrug. “It was time.”
But as he looked away, his eyes were wrinkling at the corners, and his mouth stayed amused for a long moment of walking.
He’d done it for her, and now she couldn’t stop thinking about how his face would feel under her fingers. His raspy-smooth cheek against her
s, or on her breasts. Between her thighs.
“You’re blushing,” he said when he looked back.
“It’s windy.”
May turned around to walk backward so she could look down on Manhattan from up high.
“You’re gonna trip.”
“No, I’m not.” But she turned and walked normally.
They reached the middle of the bridge, where the pedestrian path widened out into a platform. Tourists pulled one another into knots, smiling for the cameras.
Ben cut through the crowd. She hung on to his arm, amused at herself for feeling so smug. She loved her boots and her jeans and the cranberry-red pullover sweater she wore with a black camisole. She loved being on Ben’s arm, feeling like she could pass as local when she was the furthest thing from it.
False pride, but it still felt good.
After they’d moved through the bulk of the crowd, the traffic thinned, and they began heading downhill. The change in elevation registered as a tightening in her hamstrings and glutes. “So is Europe where you became a chef?”
“Sort of. After my buddy and I knocked around for a while, he had to come back, and I moved in with this girl in Sardinia. She lived with her grandmother, and the grandmother made everything by hand. Cooked like the old days, you know?”
“I thought those people were only in movies.”
“Nope. My girlfriend would be working, and I would sit in the kitchen with the grandma—her name was Bibiana—and she would cook and insult me in Sardo.” A huff of laughter. “She wasn’t so thrilled about having her granddaughter’s deadbeat boyfriend hanging around her kitchen.”
“And she taught you to cook?”
“Eventually. At first I just watched her. I could barely speak Italian, and she mostly spoke Sardo, so there was a pretty big language gap. But I figured out the food words. I got a dictionary and would sit there looking stuff up while she cooked, trying sentences. I liked how she never seemed to be in a hurry. She never looked at a recipe, never doubted herself. Everything seemed really clear to Bibiana—there was Sardinian food, prepared correctly, and then there was crap.”