When You Were Everything

by Ashley Woodfolk

  “So I thought, what if we added soul food to the menu? You know, all the stuff people love: mac ’n’ cheese, greens, candied yams, ribs…but here we do it in smaller portions, with gourmet presentation?” He gestures to the plates on the table, with their smears of sauces and decorative garnishes, and I can see it: an à la carte menu where you pick as much or as little as you want. Regulars would love it, and the change might attract new clientele too. It’s a great idea, and I want to marvel at him, but I’m worried if I look up, I’ll forget how to breathe again.

  “Pop thinks it’s ‘too newfangled.’ Those were his actual words. But Lolly told me to work on getting my recipes right, and that we could feature one of my mini-plates as the special once a week as I work them out.” Dom nods at the four plates on the table. “These are the first few recipes that I think are in good shape. And I’m hoping if the rollout of the specials goes well, they’ll let me do more revisions to the menu.”

  He rubs his hand over his hair and I get a whiff of that Dom-scent, with a little flour and butter mixed in.

  I reach for a wing. I take a bite and it is crispy and juicy, still hot, and packed with flavor. I was planning to talk to Dom about his Macbeth paper, but now I can’t even remember why.

  “Damn,” I say.

  “Good?” he asks.

  I nod, and, after I finish the wing, I reach for the tiny pie. It’s peach, and when I bite into it, it’s syrupy but somehow not overly sweet. The thing that I thought was a rice ball is a “hush puppy,” Dom tells me—a small fried knob of cornbread. I eat it all. And when he tries to reach for the last rib, I give him a quick evil eye that makes him laugh and snatch his hand away. They’re cooked so well that the meat nearly slips away from the bone as I lift it to my mouth, and the sauce is tangy, with a slight kick that lingers on my tongue even once it’s gone. It’s all so good that it’s a little devastating.

  “So your mom’s still in Atlanta?” I ask as I napkin off my fingers and dab at my mouth. “You used to live there with her, right? I think I remember you saying that over the summer.”

  Dom yawns and looks around the now mostly empty restaurant. “Yeah,” he says, but he doesn’t say anything more about her.

  “I think being up all night finishing that paper is catching up to me.” He crosses his forearms and rests his chin on top of them. He closes his eyes for a second, and I take the opportunity to unabashedly stare at his pretty face. His skin is the color of the fire-stained bottom of a copper pot, and his eyelashes are so thick and black it looks like he’s wearing mascara. The sharp angles of his shaped-up hairline and the elegant swoops of his wide nose make me want to write poetry, and don’t even get me started on the pouty curve of his lips….

  He opens his eyes and catches me staring. He grins and I look down at my hands. They’ve come to rest on his paper. I slide the nearly forgotten pages slowly across the table. But I don’t say a word, embarrassed he caught me watching him, unmoored by his paper, which was so much better than I expected it to be.

  “So?” Dom says. I take a sip of my milky tea, the only thing I ordered that I actually got, and reach for the last hush puppy. “You can’t just read my whole paper, a paper you pretty much inspired, and then not tell me what you think.”

  I still don’t say anything because I’m disarmed by him a little, by the way he’s looking at me, by the way he can cook and write. A small part of me is also still a little too proud to admit he was right about Macbeth’s free will versus the witches and fate. I jokingly lift my hand and look around the restaurant like I need the check, and he rolls his eyes. “Nah, you’re not getting out of this that easily, Shorty.” He reaches across the table and pulls my hand down, and his palm is warm and rough on my arm. I shrug and grin, staying quiet.

  “You’re impossible,” he says, and he stands to leave.

  I let loose the laugh I was holding in. I shove the last bit of food left on the table, a quarter of the mini-pie, into my mouth. “You were right,” I mutter. I hope he doesn’t hear me since I’m talking around crust and fruit and a smile I can hardly hide, but he turns around almost instantly.

  “I was what?” he says. He squats next to the table with his elbows along the edge like a server trying to make sure he hears an order correctly in a crowded, bustling dining room. But Dolly’s isn’t either of the two, so I know Dom just wants to hear me.

  I roll my eyes even though I’m thrilled about every part of this situation—the food, the conversation, the closeness. I swallow the pie. “You were right, okay? Macbeth totally made those choices. Even if the prophecy made him think he deserved to be king, he chose to kill Duncan, and everyone else. He made the ultimately tragic decisions, not the witches.”

  Dom bites his bottom lip. “That’s interesting,” he says. “I was gonna tell you that writing the paper made me realize that it’s you who might be right after all.”

  Before he has a chance to elaborate, Pop is there, checking in on me. “You need anything else, hun?” he asks.

  “I don’t think so, but do you…need any help around here?” I ask him, remembering how he seated me and took my order. It’s so nice to be away from home and the drama with Layla; it’s thrilling being so close to Dom. I feel like I could talk to him forever.

  I’m desperate to have an excuse to hang out with him, and I’m not brave enough to just tell him that I want to. That I like him. And while I think we might be becoming friends, I’m not sure if that matters. My faith in friendship has been shaken, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever get it back.

  Pop looks surprised, but I’m already here every weekend. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch for me to come a few days a week too. “I could use the experience,” I add.

  “We won’t be able to pay you very much,” Pop says. He rubs a hand over his head the way Dom sometimes does.

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” I say. I look up at him with eyes full of hope.

  “Well, we really would appreciate the help,” he says. He looks like he’s thinking about it, and when I glance over at Dom his dark eyes are stretched wide and he’s nodding a little in Pop’s direction. It makes something inside me sprout wings and take flight.

  “Maybe you could hostess, and wait some tables too, for tips,” he adds. I nod enthusiastically and Pop smiles. “Okay, then! I don’t see why not. If you’re free now, maybe Dom can show you around?”

  HOW IT FEELS TO BREAK

  I follow Dom to the front of the restaurant, where I’ll spend most of my time. He says hi to a few regulars at the counter and then shows me the seating chart for the diner’s ten tables. He introduces me to the only other server they have left on shift today.

  “Business has been a little slow lately,” he tells me when we walk past the back windows. He points across the street, where a new gourmet burger place has opened, and a trendy tapas restaurant that only serves small Spanish-inspired plates and expensive cocktails. There’s construction on a corner opposite Dolly’s that Dom points out too. “That place is gonna do ramen,” he says, and there’s a darkness to his voice I’m not used to hearing. I want to get back to where we were at the table, winks and grins and giggles; him reaching out to lower my hand.

  “Do you think Pop would be cool with me only working a couple of days a week?”

  “I mean, we had no one, so I’m sure any help will be cool with him. What are you doing the other days?”

  “Tutoring, remember?” I say, hoping Dom will leave it at that.

  I didn’t mean to bring up Layla, not here, where everything has been making me smile. I look at the corner table where Layla and I used to sit, and I feel that particular hurt that only comes from falling, unexpectedly, into the past. Sometimes memories are trapdoors.

  “Right. Man, I thought Novak was chill,” he says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, she assigned
you to Layla. She knows you’re not cool with her anymore, right?”

  “Sorta. But I think she thinks it will be good for me, you know?” I twist one of my braids around my finger. “She couldn’t just give me someone I wanted to tutor when making me do it in the first place was a punishment for skipping.”

  Dom grins and raises his eyebrows, like something is dawning on him. “Oh snap. Is that why you said my name all loud in class?”

  I cover my face, but when Dom laughs I feel like the embarrassment in that moment was worth it for this one. “It’s not funny,” I say, slapping his chest. He catches my hand and holds it, and when I look up at his smiling face, he licks his lips and looks down at mine. I pull my hand away to take off my glasses. I busy myself cleaning the lenses with the hem of my shirt.

  “My bad,” he says, “if I gave you the impression that I needed a ton of help. I mostly just wanted an excuse to hang out with you.”

  He says this so easily, like it isn’t the kind of thing people are usually afraid to admit. I mean, I just did the same thing asking Pop to be their part-time, semivolunteer hostess, but I wouldn’t have been able to say it the way he did. I blush and look away from him at a portrait of an otherworldly Ella Fitzgerald in a long sparkling dress balanced on a seashell, a gorgeous reinterpretation of The Birth of Venus on the far right wall.

  “Where does all this art come from?” I ask, to talk about anything other than us. Dom covers his mouth and yawns. His eyelids look heavy, but he steps in front of me and clears his throat.

  “Different artists in the neighborhood mostly. Sometimes homeless kids. Lolly volunteers and started an art program that they run at this shelter in Bushwick on the weekends. We rotate the ‘exhibit,’ as Lolly calls it, every month or so. She picks the art,” he says.

  “That’s so cool,” I say. There are small price tags beneath the paintings, with the artist’s name and age. Ella was painted by a sixteen-year-old named Raymond Poole, and I wonder how someone with so much talent who’s the same age as me could end up on the streets. I cross my fingers behind my back, hoping against hope that someone buys his paintings and that it helps his situation, however little.

  We pass through the too-warm kitchen, turn a corner, and enter a room only a little bigger than a supply closet. Dom flips a switch and a tiny break room is thrown into harsh, fluorescent light. “So what happened to you two?” Dom asks.

  “Me and Layla?” I say, though I know that’s who he means.

  Dom yawns again and pours himself a cup of coffee, then lifts the pot and offers me some. I shake my head. “I’m more of a tea drinker,” I tell him.

  “I think I knew that,” he says, putting the coffeepot back down and reaching into the mini-fridge. He offers a bottle of water instead and I take it. He doesn’t repeat his question about me and Layla, but he looks at me expectantly.

  “Lots of things,” I finally say. “We crumbled. Or unraveled, I guess. Or whatever you want to call it.” I take a sip of my water. The hurt feels so much like when my parents decided they didn’t love each other anymore that I can feel a shift in my breathing. “We…broke up.”

  Dom snorts. “It’s not like it was a relationship,” he says, and I frown, annoyed at his reaction. Perhaps he doesn’t know how it feels…to break in this particular way. Or perhaps it’s different for boys? But girls cling to their friends for dear life as they wade through the rough waters of learning who they are while everything around and inside them is changing minute by minute. And aren’t we all a little bit in love with our best friends?

  “What would you call it, then?” I say. I don’t keep the sass out of my voice.

  “If it is,” Dom says slowly, realizing that I’m pissed, “can you guys…come back together?”

  I shake my head. “I thought we could, but that ship has sailed,” I say. “Some ugly stuff went down last year.”

  Dom says, “The Cleo I know wouldn’t give up on someone so easily.”

  “Guess you don’t know me as well as you think, then,” I say. I take a long pull from my water bottle, and when I put it back down on the table, I see Dom watching me in that quiet way of his. I feel my eyes trace the line of his collarbone. He takes a deep breath, and the hollow in his throat deepens. He’s about to speak, but I beat him to it.

  “Tell me more about Dolly’s,” I say, desperate to talk about something, anything, else. “When did it open? How long have you been helping out? What’s your favorite thing to cook?”

  For the next twenty minutes, Dom tells me more about Dolly’s than I expected him to know. He tells me Pop and Miss Dolly were able to open it with money they had saved up and a loan from the bank. Pop had to have one of his white friends cosign with him on the loan, because the bank didn’t trust a young black couple to make the required monthly payments in the seventies. He tells me that opening a bakery had been his Lolly’s dream, but a burger joint had been Pop’s, so they compromised. And that Pop proposed to Miss Dolly by slipping a key ring with a key to this place around her finger instead of a diamond.

  Pop loves being “front of house,” but he’s super-talented in the kitchen too. “If he’d been born at a different time,” Dom says, “or maybe in a different world, he’d be the star of his own cooking show, no question.”

  That’s why Dom started in the kitchen—to give Pop a chance to have more face time with customers. And that’s how he fell in love with cooking, experimenting with new recipes, and learning the ropes from Pop well enough that he could cover for him whenever they needed him to.

  “I love the…heat, you know? The pressure to perform? The way one decision can change the whole course of a meal, table, or even the whole service.” He moves his hands around a lot as he tells me all this—and hearing him talk about this is better than any magic trick.

  “That’s why I want to add new stuff to the menu. I’m worried that we won’t be able to keep up with the competition. The regulars, they’re all getting old, and the new people in the neighborhood are hipsters and like, white rich kids who just graduated college, you know?” I nod, because it’s impossible not to notice the shifts happening in our neighborhood, the way it doesn’t look the same anymore. There are more coffee shops than bodegas, more noodle and cocktail bars than places like Dolly’s.

  “I don’t want this place to get lost,” Dom says, his voice a little quieter than it was before. He takes another sip of his coffee and looks at me, like he’s making a decision. And when he starts talking again, I can tell he’s decided to trust me with something precious to him.

  “Lolly and Pop are already having trouble keeping up with the bills. That’s why we don’t have a hostess anymore. That’s why we’re down to only two servers.”

  “I didn’t realize,” I say softly, and I want to reach across the table and touch his hand. He nods solemnly and his eyes are on fire as he says what he says next. “They’ve done everything for me, Cleo. Everything. Keeping this place afloat is the least I can do.”

  I think about his paper, and how he was so adamant about Macbeth deciding his own fate. He wants to do everything he can for this place and he’s worried it won’t be enough.

  I follow Dom’s sleepy eyes as they look down to check the time on his phone.

  “Shit. It’s time to close up.” He stands and dumps his empty mug into the small sink. He yawns again and stretches and I want him to lay his heavy, sleepy head on my shoulder. I want to put his worries to bed along with him.

  “I can walk you out,” he says. But I don’t know how he could think I’m ready to say goodbye.

  I check my phone. There’s nothing from Mom, and the lack of notifications feels like a sign.

  “You’re tired,” I say. “And there’s only a few people still here, right?”

  “So?” Dom says.

  “So I can stick around and help,” I say. “I mean, only if you
want. I’m meeting Sydney later, but I have some time to kill.”

  Dom bites his bottom lip, rubs his hand over his hair, and grins.

  AURAS

  Sydney is holding a creamy-looking bubble tea and a sunset-colored one too when I meet her in Chinatown. She’s wearing a faux fur coat, sunglasses, and big pearly earrings, and she looks a bit like she could be an extra in an Audrey Hepburn movie, which is to say she stands out quite a bit on the littered, grubby sidewalks of downtown Manhattan.

  “Hey, girl,” she says. She hands me the creamy tea and loops her arm through mine, and her familiarity makes my heart squeeze. “What’s on the docket tonight?”

  So far, Sydney and I have done a photo shoot at the coffee shop Layla and I would stop by every morning, beat the high score on as many games as possible at the arcade Layla and I used to frequent in middle school, and ordered milkshakes as big as our heads with ridiculous toppings at the divey burger joint Layla took me to for my fifteenth birthday. We drank them so quickly we got brain freeze, and then we raced to see who could finish the crazy toppings—like cheesecake, M&M’s, and brownies—first.

  Tonight, a particular corner in Chinatown is on the itinerary: a tiny jewelry store that is more well known for its aura readings and crystals than the necklaces and bracelets they sell, at least among believers in that kind of thing.

  “Gigi first took me here when I was ten,” I tell Sydney as we push open the shop door. It’s tiny inside, and it smells a bit like a library, which is comforting to me for obvious reasons. “Gigi was really into all of this kind of stuff—chakras and horoscopes, auras and fate. She was always saying to listen when the universe is trying to tell you something. She got her aura read once a month, and every now and then she’d bring me with her. Then, after she died, I brought Layla whenever I came. But she was never that into it. I think it’s haram, so maybe that’s why.”