“Leo,” Thea said. He looked up, startled. His ticket machine and the line’s were already spitting out the first tickets. “You ready? Here we go.”
THE NIGHT PASSED IN A RUSH of one-word conversations and slashes of his pen across tickets, the satisfying pop of paper impaled on the spike after the ticket was complete. Leo had no time to look out into the dining room, so he had to content himself with updates from Helene as she passed by.
For the first hour he was sweating and uncertain. The kitchen jargon sounded false in his mouth, and as neatly as he wiped down plates, replenished his serving trays and dish covers, as effectively as he wielded the kitchen torch, he felt adrift, an impostor.
At first he kept a close eye on Thea. She moved with reassuring grace and ease back there, her knife work smooth, her tongs so deftly handled they barely made a sound when clamping around a sizzling metal dish. Watching her, though, Leo began to worry. Her flawless confidence, her immersion in the job—she was irreplaceable. And maybe she knew this. She must. Why would such a practical, professional chef risk herself with him? When Leo asked himself why he had begun this affair, as thoroughly ill-advised as it was, it was easy to answer: there had been something so freeing in Britt’s absence and Leo’s own reemergence downstairs, something so intimate and partnered in his resulting work with Thea, that it seemed not at all transgressive. This was what he’d been unable to say to Britt, who clearly thought he was simply having a midlife crisis. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t engaging in some sad, boozy waitress-boffing. No, there had come a moment with Thea, just before the first time he gave in and kissed her, when Leo had felt a sensation of fearsome intensity, as if his head had breached a wave he hadn’t known he lay beneath and the air above it was nearly too pure and densely oxygenated to bear.
But what did Thea feel? Watching her work, Leo knew her both better and yet less than he ever had. He might be a fool—he could accept that—but what could she be thinking? Maybe she was willing to be with him because she already knew she was leaving and therefore risked little. Maybe she was more reckless than he had ever suspected. It was a disloyal thought, to punish her for what he’d wanted so badly, but for a long time as they worked across from one another, he could not entirely shut it down. He watched her slice a duck breast on a neat, even bias and expertly slip the flat of her knife beneath the meat to plate the slices, watched her gauge a meat temp with a touch of her fingertip, and wondered who she really was.
But soon, to his tremendous relief, he had no time to worry about any of this, nor to keep checking his phone or think too hard about where Harry might be. There was no time to wonder what Thea truly felt for him or for her job or whether he sounded like a poseur calling out the orders coming down the road or firing the next batch of entrées. He was calmed by the precision of the plates being handed to him over the pass, by the vibrant greens and scarlets of Dennis’s Edenic salads and his patchwork-quilt terrines, by Suzanne’s head-on shrimp gazing tenderly out from their fragrant tomato-based graves, and by Thea’s textbook meat temps and tight, elegantly centered plating. The rhythm of the service built and built until the seven-thirty rush began, and then the velocity peaked and just kept barreling forward, steadily frantic, for the next two hours.
During those hours Leo felt nothing, no hunger or thirst, no uncertainty over Harry’s well-being or Britt’s anger at him or Thea’s unknown and unknowable depths, no fears for the next day or even the end of the night. His consciousness was focused entirely on the next few steps, on perfecting what was imperfect, on ticking off each plate and dispatching orders with gratifying efficiency to the endless rotation of backwaiters and servers who appeared instinctively just as he needed them. He was part of the machine; around him the gears turned smoothly and cleanly; together they rolled right over obstacles and buffed away the jagged edges, and the hours rocketed forward, with mercifully little time to think.
ONCE BRITT HAD TOLD THE LIE, he had to stay with it. He didn’t lie to women, preferring the simple clarity of frankness to nicer explanations that only dragged things out. Nor did he did lie to his employees—he asked a lot of them, and honesty seemed a basic courtesy in return, so basic it had never occurred to him until now to articulate his position on it at all. And now, as he walked away from a group of servers who thought that Harry had something that sounded like food poisoning, he knew he was a liar, not simply someone who wisely kept his mouth shut when the need arose. Another problem Harry was responsible for.
Britt had an image of himself in a day or two, after Harry had been found somewhere, bloody and dying, when he would regret all he’d blamed on his brother when he should have been saving him with the force of his mind. The loop was impossible to stop; when anger was at the surface he thought he might regret it, when his fear was foremost he could only hope he would get a chance to be merely angry again, and then the switch began again.
Camille was back in the kitchen, wearing a baseball cap, comfortable shoes, and a long-sleeved, snug cotton shirt. Of course she knew to protect her arms and pamper her feet, to secure her hair and avoid any loose fabric—she’d worked in restaurants years ago. Hector and Jenelle had given her bins of shallots and carrots and greens to rinse and peel, and each time Britt went back to the kitchen he saw she was working on something a little more involved. Just before staff meal, she’d been beheading squid with Jenelle’s ten-inch knife and peeling off the transparent purple skins. As he watched, she drew the soft yellow innards from the sac and dropped them in a trash bowl, then cut the tentacles from the other end.
She seemed to be doing fine, but then her knife stopped moving. She stared down at the blade beside her fingers, her face a blank. She remained still for so long that Britt thought she’d cut herself and was in shock.
She startled when he touched her, looking up into his face before she knew who it was, and for an instant her expression was naked and empty, her eyes dark with worry, and then she saw it was Britt. Her face transformed into a perfect facsimile of her usual arch, alert self, a metamorphosis of such will that he didn’t dare ask her about what he’d seen a moment before.
AT STAFF MEAL HE HAD INTRODUCED her and Jason to the rest of the crew, repeated the feeble story about Harry being indisposed, and then had to hope his brother wouldn’t show up and prove him wrong.
The waitstaff was far less interested in Harry’s absence than they were in Camille’s appearance on the floor. Jenelle, Jason, and Hector were watching Britt closely—he could feel their eyes on him the entire night—but the servers merely shrugged and assumed that kitchen changes were typical, not caring who handed them their food as long as someone did, and for once Britt was profoundly grateful for their attitude.
They got through it. Jason’s station started off slowly as he tried to remember the components of each dish, and he and Jenelle had to try to hear each other under the din without making it obvious to the guests that Jason was new. But after a spate of delays and questions, he managed to find a groove. If every dish didn’t look exactly as Britt would like, the dishes were plated, they were at the right temp, they were going out to tables and not coming back. Once or twice Jason even made an accidental improvement, adding chorizo instead of arugula to the socca and baccalà, upping the basil and chile in the tuna conserve. The socca became richer and heavier than Harry had intended, the unctuous, oily flakes of fish turned herbal and brisk with heat, but the guests were exclaiming over both.
Camille was a glorified food runner-slash-busser-slash-hostess. She’d easily memorized the table numbers and seat positions, knew never to waste a trip out of the kitchen or the dining room by not carrying something with her, and never stopped clearing, watering, and refilling. Now and then he caught a glimpse of her, the dangle of a glittering earring as she reached for a plate, the swivel of her hips as she moved between waitstaff and tables, the sheer egolessness with which she’d taken on the most menial tasks in the place, and felt a surge of gratitude for her. Her efficiency calmed him; he
found it reassuring that she had changed her clothes after staff meal and now looked like the woman he saw each day. She had twisted her hair as she always did, threaded earrings through her earlobes as she always did, and somehow these rituals suggested that all was well.
He was thinking about this when suddenly a gentle, thorough wash of nostalgia overtook him, like a wave rolling up behind his knees. He had a vivid déjà vu of childhood, of Sundays in his parents’ kitchen at the weathered wooden table, of his brothers hollering and punching one another in the arm. He was so struck by the intensity of it, the calm of such a respite in the night’s tension, that he very nearly stopped short right there on the floor, first to enjoy the memory and then to figure out its source.
Something—a scent, he realized—was evoking the most comforting sense of sun through windows and the pleasant blend of hunger and an abundance of food, of maple syrup and something golden and toasting, an empty day stretching before him in which he and Leo could play a game of basketball, sneak a cigarette over by the city baseball diamonds.
He was approaching the server station as he snapped out of the reverie, and as he did he saw Josh glance furtively over his shoulder, see him, and whip back around. Two of the other servers were clustered beside him, and all three turned around and smiled guilelessly in Britt’s direction. Then they darted back out to their tables.
Britt strolled over to the station, refusing to let it show that he was investigating anything—not because of the servers but because of the guests, who could see straight into the station if they happened to look. When he got there, he realized what had caused that olfactory memory: on the coffee-cup warmer—correction: the griddle—the cups had been shoved to one side and three silver-dollar-sized pancakes were bubbling. A cream pitcher of batter and a small spatula—a plastic spatula, he noticed; were they actually being careful not to scratch the griddle with a metal spatula from the kitchen?—sat innocently next to the folded napkins. Behind the napkins was a bread plate bearing a pancake with a single bite taken out of it. His brother was missing, his other brother had lost his reason, his girlfriend was working like a dog, and all these little fuckers could think to do was make pancakes on the coffee griddle.
He stayed very calm. He unplugged the griddle, set the plate and its pancake, the spatula, and the pitcher of batter on the cooking surface, and carefully wound the griddle’s cord into a neat loop. Then he carried it all back to the kitchen, the warmth of the metal seeping through the napkin to his fingertips. Hector looked up, smiling when he saw the whole setup and then losing the smile when he saw Britt’s face. Britt gave him a dignified nod and kept going, past Hector to the back door that opened onto the alley, into which he stepped, looking both ways to see that no one was nearby, and hurled the entire mess—pan, cups, dish, utensils, and plate—against the brick wall.
WHEN THE LAST TABLES DEPARTED, the servers turned up the stereo as they finished cleaning the dining room. The door to the kitchen got propped open so that the room filled with the sounds of the dishwasher thrumming and the silver clinking, waiters laughing as they polished glasses and flatware. Camille reappeared periodically with a bus tub of folded napkins or polished silver and then strode back into the kitchen once more.
Britt asked Jason for his cell-phone number. He’d told himself at the beginning of the night that by this time he’d know, he’d have heard from Harry, from the police, from someone, but he’d heard nothing. They would need a hand tomorrow.
When it was over he left his car and Camille drove him home. He’d realized that he was too sapped to drive. At his apartment they stood in the kitchen and shared a beer, then peeled off their sweaty clothes and got beneath the shower. There was nothing sexy about it—they were both sore and spent from emotional tension and physical labor. Under the stream of the water their bodies seemed slick and pale.
The pleasure of being cool and dry in the soft sheets of the bed was almost unbearable. They lay side by side, hands clasped. “I don’t know how I can sleep,” said Britt into the darkness.
“He’s fine,” she said firmly. “He’s probably on his way back by now.” They let this fiction settle between them like a soap bubble while they waited for sleep.
CHAPTER 20
LEO MET BRITT AT WINESAP the next morning. The empty restaurant seemed cool and forbidding, all the energy of the previous night long gone.
Leo wished that Thea hadn’t had Iris last night. He’d had no choice but to include her in the communal farewell he’d bestowed on everyone. When Leo had left she’d been sitting at the bar, a beer before her, laughing at something Kelly had said. She’d looked loose and happy, her cheeks and eyes glowing. He’d been jealous of his employees, of everyone who got to enjoy this version of Thea when he had to leave. None of them saw her this way with any frequency, not even Leo.
His parents had already called that morning, his father focusing on Leo’s failure to keep Harry out of the restaurant business.
“I mean, it’s ridiculous,” his father said. “The hours, the failure rate. You all went to college! For what, so you could serve people and worry about the quality of…of”—he spluttered—“carrots?”
Leo couldn’t think of a thing to say. That his father might have harbored this feeling toward his career—toward the restaurant he’d named for a childhood memory!—had never occurred to him.
Britt was waiting for him in the dining room. They had both brought coffee and white paper bags, so each shrugged and set to work on the first of two coffees and the first of two pastries. Leo couldn’t tell if Britt’s offering meant anything at all, but either way they seemed to cancel each other out.
“Jason did a great job,” Britt said eventually, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “Which we knew he would, of course. Thank you, Leo.”
Leo nodded. “No problem. Thank him.”
“I did. I’ll come up with something else for him. A bonus, something.” Britt rubbed his face and pushed his hair back over his skull. He looked tired and papery around the eyes. “Anyway. How’d you work things over here?”
“Thea took Jason’s station and I expedited.”
Britt said, “You did, huh? Been a long time. How did it feel?”
Leo smiled. “I felt like a total fraud for the first hour. But I have to say that after that it felt good. Too busy to worry.” He stopped smiling. “I was afraid he wasn’t ready. But I thought that would mean, I don’t know—staff problems, low numbers. A problem menu.”
“Not this,” Britt said, and Leo had to agree.
“Britt,” he said. “You ever get the feeling that Dad’s disappointed we went into this business?”
Britt glanced up from his phone. “Sure,” he said. “You think he was happy when I said I was leaving a nice stable white-collar job to work at a restaurant?” He laughed. “Of course, when Harry did the same thing it was a sign of fearlessness. I can’t control what he thinks. Why?”
That was Britt: reasoned, brisk, a little chilly but also enviably serene.
“I just never thought of it before,” Leo said. “He’s upset that we let Harry get in over his head.”
Britt’s composure cracked, just for a moment, showing only in the vehemence with which he crumpled an empty coffee cup.
After a moment Britt said calmly, “I haven’t expedited since you made me learn back when we first opened. If we could fit an expediter in, I might try it again, just to show the kids I know how.” He tipped his chair back precariously and rolled his neck.
“We miss out, just watching,” said Leo, grateful to discuss business again. “It felt really good to be in the mix. Thea had a blast on the line. She’s really kind of made for that.” Britt hadn’t changed posture, but now he was eyeing Leo, his grayish-green eyes appraising.
Britt returned the front legs of his chair to the floor with a decisive thud. “You know what the first thing you said to me about this business was?”
“Yeah,” Leo said.
“You told me to
stay away from the staff.”
“At the time I was thinking more not to go after the waitresses.”
“This is worse,” Britt said wearily. “Not to be crass, but there’re a lot of waitresses out there. I don’t know of anybody else of Thea’s caliber in this area. What do we do if you blow this? Recruit someone from Philadelphia or Pittsburgh to come to Linden? That’s not happening. You know of anybody already here who might grow to fit her shoes? Me neither. And we’re not even talking about labor laws. She could sue the shit out of us.”
Leo ventured, “She’s not going to sue us.”
“No one ever starts off bad, Leo. Things go bad when you don’t expect them to.”
“Oh, well, thanks for that.”
“I’m sorry, I thought I had to state the obvious now. You seem to need it.”
“So what are you hoping to achieve?” Leo said. “You think if you come here and shame me, I’ll just dump her?”
“Would you?” Britt said, watching him cannily.
“Not a chance,” Leo said.
Britt nodded. “Then I guess there isn’t any more to say. We have bigger things to worry about.”
Leo took a drink of his coffee. “Do you think he’d go see any of his old school friends, or anything like that?”
“I thought maybe he’d go see Amanda,” Britt said. “He could have driven to New York in a couple of hours. Or maybe he went camping.”
“Maybe he’s in California, trying to win back Shelley.”
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