Bread and Butter

by Michelle Wildgen

  “Is there that much we need to work on?” Jenelle said.

  “I don’t know!” he said. He smacked the flat top with his palm. “That’s the fucking point!”

  From behind them they heard, “Harry.” Britt was at the host’s stand, a pile of menus in one hand and an expression on his face like the one he’d have if he’d found his brother watching porn in the dining room. A menu slipped out of his grip and drifted toward the floor without his noticing.

  Harry looked over at Jenelle, who looked stricken. He shook out his stinging hand and said, “I’m sorry,” to Jenelle. “I’m just saying I’ll feel better when I get the feedback.”

  “Can we talk?” Britt said.

  “Absolutely,” Harry replied. He went back to scrubbing. “As soon as I’m done here, okay?”

  “I’d prefer now,” Britt said, but Harry knew his brother would tell him to calm down and not to swear at the staff, and he knew Britt was right, and he didn’t want to take even more time to go over Britt’s inevitable rightness. There was too much to do. There always was.

  “Soon as I’m done,” he promised, trying to sound confident, and he counted on Britt to be too worried about demonstrating cohesion in front of Jenelle to push it, and he was right. Britt left the room, giving him a dark look as he did.

  Jenelle went back to work, scouring so hard her cheeks trembled. Every few minutes she cast a searching glance at him, which Harry ignored.

  They were getting the pattern of the days: a weekday might be thirty guests, but when it rained it might be five. One wonderful Saturday had been close to seventy. They needed more—he needed at least thirty on weeknights and seventy-five on weekends—but they weren’t ready to handle that yet. The servers were still getting comfortable with their systems; the cooks were still getting their rhythms down. Some nights they all hit it, just for a while. He could feel the energy humming through the place when it happened. All the ragged edges and darting eyes disappeared.

  But other nights were just a farce. Earlier that week a server had dropped a full tray in the dining room, Harry had accidentally sent out a nearly raw duck breast, and Jenelle had forgotten the aromatics in the fried seafood, so it just looked like a platter at Long John Silver’s. A server hadn’t shown up and so food had sat too long, melting or cooling or separating, until Britt had to comp a small fortune in dishes and drinks. Even then the energy in the room remained grim. It had been the kind of night you gave up on salvaging and just hoped would end.

  At least the numbers had begun to creep up, and though Harry had planned for this trickling start, he still visualized their funds as a deep and mostly empty bowl. At all times, sometimes peripherally and sometimes in the foremost space in his mind, he was aware of the bowl’s inexorable depletion and its minuscule replenishment.

  How had he never before fully grasped that the only way a restaurant got money was through selling food? You knew, but you didn’t know, and seen in this light—in the light of his loans and paychecks and purveyors—he thought the menu was ludicrously, criminally underpriced.

  Once he was cooking, his fatigue disappeared. It would drop back over him the moment the pace slowed, however, just as Britt would reappear so they could discuss Harry’s latest screwup. But until then Harry could cook, and he could forget his constant hunger and the preoccupation that led him to forget to eat in the first place. He forgot the shifty-looking kids who depressed him by being across the street each afternoon, drinking generic soda and tugging at their piercings. He even came close to forgetting his loan payments. He just cooked. He eyed the golden crust of Jenelle’s fried shellfish, he brushed the duck breast with mustard, he scattered herbs and olives.

  The music was loud tonight, some weird jaunty mix of fiddle and drums, but the waitstaff was nodding along to it, and that pallid, pierced, and languid crew could be trusted in matters of taste, so Harry decided to like it too. He was just deciding that the fiddle worked for him in a June Carter kind of way when Britt appeared behind the line, where he never ventured, looking grim. “Well, first crisis,” he said.

  A few minutes earlier, Britt said, Juan, the dishwasher, had poked his head out the kitchen door and caught Britt’s eye, his white apron appearing and disappearing in an instant. The kitchen staff were not to be on the floor during service, but there was Juan’s face, his dark eyes round with alarm, for just a flash.

  Britt had excused himself from a conversation at the door and headed back to the kitchen. He walked briskly; he did not run—he never allowed anyone to run on the floor.

  He knew that panicked look, and he was hoping for a minor catastrophe—some broken dishes, a shortage of fish.

  But in the kitchen he found Juan frantically placing buckets beneath two streams of hot water pouring from a pipe beneath the dishwasher. A busser was trying to move the racks of glassware from the dish sink to a far table, away from the wet floor, and another was throwing towels on the ground in a futile attempt to absorb the steaming puddles. Two feet away, Hector was serenely blowtorching a meringue.

  Britt froze. This was not Winesap. These were not his expert cooks and longtime dish guys who knew what to do, but a bunch of newbies in a new place, including him, plus Hector ignoring the water lapping at his feet.

  Britt realized that Juan was looking at him and snapped back to attention. “Turn the thing off,” he said of the dishwasher. “And get the mop and bucket,” he told the busser. “Start moving the water toward the drain. Juan, keep dumping the buckets so they don’t overflow. You’ll have to wash by hand for a bit. I’ll be right back.”

  “I have to be on the floor,” said the busser.

  “Oh no you don’t,” Britt told him. He took out his phone and talked as he looked through his contacts and dialed the dishwasher service. “This is triage. They can bus their own tables.”

  He peered out at the dining room and counted tables. They were three-quarters full. If he’d had clean dishes, he would have been delighted. Without the bussers the dining room would get cluttered, fast. He needed a repairman and he needed the staff to be two people at once.

  The crazy thing was that he was tempted not to say anything to his brother. Harry was working in a tight, focused rhythm on the line, and when Harry was in a zone it was much easier not to interrupt him, because you never quite knew how he would respond. He might get his rhythm back quickly or he might get so upset he’d be off his game for the rest of the night. It was exhausting managing Harry.

  Finally Britt went behind the bar, calling “Behind the line” as he did so that he wouldn’t get stabbed or burned by two cooks who were tightly attuned to each other’s placement and assumed no one else was in their space. This was another problem with the public cooking setup. He couldn’t yank his chef for a nice private crisis; he had to whisper it to him instead while the bar patrons watched over the rims of their wineglasses.

  “Dishwasher’s broken,” he murmured.

  “Fuck,” Harry said. He stopped all his motion, staring blankly at his pans and spoons and spatulas.

  “Keep cooking,” Britt said. Harry kneaded his forehead for a second, but then seemed to remember himself and started his work again.

  “How broken? Fucked or fixable?”

  “I don’t know yet. We’ll know when the guy gets here.” Britt was aware that he was making his tone reassuring and calm, as if he were talking to a child. “He’ll be here any minute.”

  Harry opened a drawer beneath the counter, pulled out two duck breasts, and slapped them on a plate to warm up. “And we do what in the meantime?”

  “We clean by hand,” Britt said, glancing sideways at Jenelle. Harry was moving more sloppily now. He set a pan down so roughly it made the other two jump. “This stuff happens,” Britt said. He reached up to pat Harry’s shoulder, unsure what else to do, but Harry batted his hand away. “Look, let’s talk in the kitchen.”

  “Can’t now,” Harry said, not looking at him. “Can’t relax, can’t come talk in the kitche
n. But tell me when he gets here. I want to see these guys at work.”

  Britt took a deep breath—he wasn’t going to push Harry further in front of the staff or the guests. A sidelong glance toward the other side of the bar confirmed that a few were watching intently. He said, hoping no one else could hear him, “All we can do is move forward, Harry. Take a breath and keep going.” But Harry didn’t reply.

  When a crisis hit, the whole world dwindled to a pinpoint: the next step and the one after that. Each task popped up before him and he knocked it back down. For the next hour Juan did dishes by hand, the busser wiped them dry, and Britt and the servers whisked them back out to the line. They swapped out buckets and managed to keep the floor from flooding again. Britt zigzagged between the floor and the kitchen, keeping the dining room clear and the dishes moving. The floorboards vibrated with the pounding feet of the servers. He had no time to see how Harry was doing. There was no end of the night or even end of the hour to consider—only this, until the repair guy finally arrived and Britt met him back in the kitchen.

  He had to force himself to return to normal speed. At least Britt had dealt with this repair guy before. Not good, not bad, but it was always useful to have a familiar face. Britt dispatched the busser to the front to sweep the dining room again and then watched the repairman slither down beneath the dishwasher and poke around.

  Harry came striding through the door, a towel in his hands. He chucked it into a kitchen linen bag and stood, arms crossed, beside Britt.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Britt said. The repair guy’s shoes had worn tread and a wad of gum on one sole.

  “I thought you knew this company,” Harry said.

  “I do,” Britt said. “That’s why they were here so fast. I’ve known them for years.”

  “We haven’t had this thing very long,” Harry said.

  “I need a part,” the repair guy called. He slid out from beneath the dishwasher and hauled himself to his feet. Britt extended a hand to help. “Let me run out to the truck.” He looked at Harry. “You the chef?”

  Harry held out a hand. “Co-owner,” he said.

  “Okay then,” the guy said. “Shouldn’t take long. Give me a second.”

  When the dishwasher guy had gone, Britt turned his back to Juan, Hector, and the busser and murmured to Harry, “Don’t start antagonizing this guy. I’ve worked with him before—he’s fine. It’s not a conspiracy.”

  “I know that,” Harry said. He glanced toward the front of the house, then eyed the back door again.

  “I’ll be right back,” Britt said.

  The dining room had filled further. Anna was covering the host stand, and he could see that three new tables had been seated already. Kelsey was removing a full plate of Korean rice sticks from a frowning couple; Heather had one plate too many stacked on her forearm and had to go utterly still when one began, sickeningly, to wobble. He did a fast circuit through the room, ensured that the new tables were covered, removed a tray of dishes, told Carrie to clear, and took three drink orders and dropped them with Travis. Jenelle shot him a pleading look. “I’ll get him back here,” Britt promised.

  In the kitchen, Harry was towering over the repairman while Juan scrubbed at a plate and darted the occasional glance at the two men.

  It was a shock to see Harry look so physically intimidating. He was well over six feet, and he’d gotten ropier since the restaurant had opened, which gave him a look not of skinniness but of intensity, even hunger. He looked, frankly, rather dangerous, as if he had been hunting his own food. The dishwasher guy had his hands on his hips and was shaking his head.

  “—doesn’t matter,” Harry was saying. “Get the part. You should have it anyway. It should be in your truck. This thing has to be working right now, even if that means you call a coworker and sit there holding the fucking pipes together with one hand while you wait.”

  Britt laid a hand on Harry’s shoulder, which felt like wood beneath his shirt. “What’s going on?”

  “Your chef needs his dishwasher—I get that,” said the repairman. “I’m here to do my job, man, but I can’t get the new valve while I sit here and talk to you, so you may as well back off.”

  Harry took a step closer to the repairman.

  “Stop it,” Britt said. His hand latched on to Harry’s arm without his intending it to. Harry didn’t seem to feel it. He reached out and touched the repair guy in the center of his chest. His forefinger landed with a delicacy that was somehow more threatening than a shove, as if Harry were a surgeon or a butcher, sussing out the tender space between the ribs.

  “Don’t,” Harry said. “Don’t talk to me like this is just how it has to be. I am here to do a job.” His voice had gone soft and venomous. Britt saw Hector set down his tools and take a cautious step toward them. Juan had stopped scrubbing and was just holding a plate beneath the faucet while he watched. Britt was still uselessly clasping his brother’s bicep, uncertain whether it was worse to intervene or not, because suddenly he had no idea what Harry would do.

  “You are making that job difficult,” Harry said. “You’re making it difficult for my staff, and my staff is already working as hard as they can. So don’t tell me why you can’t do your job to fix this brand-new dishwasher.” His finger tapped the man’s chest with each of his next words. “Do. A. Better. Fucking. Job.”

  The repairman blinked. Everyone was silent. Out in the dining room the sounds of dishes and voices and music clamored, and as a server entered the kitchen with a tray of empty plates, the spell was broken. Harry seemed to notice his own fingertip on the repairman’s coverall and withdrew it. He took a step back, looking slightly disoriented.

  “I have to be back on the line,” he said. It was not clear whom he was addressing. “Just—” He shook his head. “Just keep me posted.”

  The server trailed Harry back out the kitchen door. Hector returned to his workstation, Juan began washing the dish, and the repairman and Britt were left alone, looking at one another. The repairman brought out his phone. When he finished his call he said to Britt, “He’ll be right here.”

  “Thank you,” Britt said. He wiped his face.

  “What happened to your other place?” The repairman looked around the cramped kitchen appraisingly, the buckets beneath the dishwasher, the shelves packed with supplies. Britt could feel him wondering if this place would be open long enough for any of it to be used.

  “I still have it,” Britt said. The guy nodded, and Britt could see that he was thinking Britt was a fool to be here but at least he’d kept his backup business.

  “You’re a stand-up guy,” he said. “But if your chef ever touches me again, you’re gonna have a problem on your hands.”

  THEY WERE ALL THERE UNTIL PAST one o’clock. The last tables departed by eleven thirty, but by then the backlog of dishes was formidable. Harry and Jenelle broke down the line and joined Britt, Juan, and Hector in the back to work their way through the racks. By then they had turned on music, and everyone’s head nodded to the beat as they stacked and polished. The servers finished their sidework and joined them, polishing glassware and silverware.

  At midnight Britt disappeared to the front; he returned a minute later with a pitcher of beer and a stack of the thick plastic cups they used on the line and in the kitchen. Harry took a long pull from his but then swayed slightly before righting himself. Britt watched him, then said, “How do you feel?”

  “I feel fine,” Harry said.

  “We should talk tomorrow morning,” Britt said. “Touch base on a few things.” He would not air any grievances now, in front of staff, and probably not even tonight. They were all tired—Britt’s back was sore, his head was pounding, and he just kept thinking of cool sheets and a blowing fan. But Harry looked ill. He had missed the staff meal again, appearing only at the very end to go over a menu change.

  “Fine,” Harry said. He slid a rack of steaming plates to one end of the dish station and grabb
ed the next. Britt took the rack out to the line and began to stack the plates beneath the counter. A moment later Harry came out with another rack. He set it down next to Britt’s and began stacking the plates so carelessly that Britt thought they would chip.

  “What was that?” Britt finally asked.

  Harry sighed a grand, Shelleyesque sigh. “What was what?”

  “You threatened a vendor. You freaked out the staff. Hector thought he was going to have to pull you off him.”

  “I didn’t threaten,” Harry said. “I made it clear we wouldn’t tolerate this stuff, even if we are the new guys. You could see he was just trying to get away with slacking off, right?”

  “Of course I did,” Britt said. “But I would have fixed it if you’d let me handle it like a grown-up. I know this guy. I used to get along with him.”

  “Maybe,” Harry said. “But he should know me too.” His profile was stony.

  This wasn’t amusing in a man in his thirties. Britt didn’t find it admirable, or fierce, or whatever way his brother was selling this to himself. What the hell had happened to him? He needed a haircut, he needed to eat, and his beard was scrubby and untrimmed, creeping up his gaunt cheeks. Britt was exhausted too, but they worked in public; he didn’t go around looking like some short-order cook with a cigarette wedged where an incisor should have been.

  The dining room was empty and dark, the street outside deserted. Soon one of their employees would probably be mugged and would sue them. His brother was either unhinged or—maybe worse—deliberately behaving as if he were. All of Britt’s pride in this stylish room, in its great-looking servers and its eclectic menu, felt completely misplaced. A dishwasher repairman had taken one look around this place and seen its shabby, duct-taped heart.