Bread and Butter (24 page)

“He seems anxious,” Camille said carefully.

“I’d think he’d be relieved,” Britt said. “But he’s freaking out about how to fix whatever might need fixing. And about what Leo thinks.”

“Have you talked to him about…I don’t know, just taking better care of himself?” she said.

“I try,” Britt said, but he wasn’t sure that was true. He talked to Harry about not flying off the handle; it wasn’t quite the same thing.

“Because he seems a little wound up,” she continued, a touch more forcefully. “Is this typical for him?”

“Kind of,” Britt said, frowning. “Listen, can we not discuss him the whole night? Let’s just have a good time.”

Camille blinked. For a time neither of them said anything, and then she took a look around the room and shrugged, gazing away from him. “Fine. Whatever. Maybe Leo can calm him down,” she said.

“Meaning what?” said Britt. He sounded petty even to himself.

Camille was staring at him. “Meaning there’s Leo, over by the bar, and maybe he can calm him down.”

And so he was, making his way through the scrum. Harry slouched just a little as he accepted a hug from Leo, his posture suddenly sagging between exhaustion and relief, so that for a moment it looked as if Leo were holding him up.

Britt looked away. Was it just petulance? He thought it might also be exhaustion, from the constant vigilance Harry seemed to require even as he saved his best self for everyone else. Britt pulled Camille a little closer to him, wanting her then, even if her loyalty was divided, even if he was angry with her too. He could see by the change in her expression that he wasn’t looking celebratory now, if he ever had been. She opened her mouth to speak but then seemed to change her mind. Instead she just pressed her forehead against his temple. The night seemed to have been going on forever.

“YOU’RE LOOKING PRETTY TIRED,”
Leo said. Leo looked Harry up and down, taking in his frame. “You ever eat?”

“Of course,” said Harry.

“I didn’t mean when your body has to consume itself. I meant a meal.”

“Jesus, you and Jenelle should get together. Suddenly everyone’s so concerned about my diet. I’m just not cooking for myself a whole lot.”

“Who’s Jenelle? The reviewer said you were cranelike.”

“Oh, right. That’s helpful, eh?” Harry swirled the liquid in his glass. “So, what’d you think?”

“I thought it was great!” Leo said.

“Seriously?”

“Listen, by any standard it was a great review. I’m proud of you.”

Harry looked toward the door, and when Leo turned he saw the back of Britt’s head as he slipped out. “That means a lot to me,” Harry said, but his voice had lost some energy.

“Well, I’m psyched for you,” Leo said, a little desperately. He wasn’t sure how many more ways he could say it.

“Could’ve been yours too,” Harry said. “All the glory, I mean.” He gestured in the direction of a group of dishwashers chugging beers in unison.

“Let’s not take it there,” Leo said, but Harry shook his head.

“It’s not a dig,” he said. “Well, yes it was. But I can’t figure it out, Leo. I made this great space. I built an amazing menu. I was bracing myself for a review because I thought that would tell me, but basically she loved it except for a couple things like the lamb’s neck.” Harry was standing very close to Leo, his gaze darting searchingly around Leo’s face.

“Is that it,” Harry continued, “the lamb’s neck? Was that why you passed? Because it’s one plate of food. And I keep fucking looking at my restaurant and trying to figure out what’s missing, and it’s making me nuts, because as far as I can tell, nothing is. But something must be, so just tell me. Tell me what you see that I don’t.”

“It was just me,” Leo said softly. He had to take a step back; beneath the beer on Harry’s breath was a desperate ketonic edge. “Harry, I don’t know. I thought it was the right choice at the time. I don’t know if it was. It was what I thought back then. And now it’s done.”

T
HE POSTREVIEW RUSH BEGAN
like a shot at five o’clock the next night and kicked the shit out of them straight through until midnight. Each subsequent evening hurtled over them the same way. Every Stray employee was on deck until the end
. T
he tables filled; the bar was crowded with people both standing and sitting, chomping on appetizers and waiting for tables or just there to have a drink and a snack.

Harry had always imagined success as a happy clamor of inquisitive faces and ringing glassware, but the reality was chaotic and even a little frightening—he had dreams of running through the streets of Linden, pursued by a smiling crowd that increased each time he looked back.

He upped his orders of food and booze and upped them again, trying to walk the balance between running out and having product that went bad before he could use it. Who knew if the rush would continue? But it did. Each day he got to the restaurant earlier than the day before, as the amount of food he had to prep continued to grow. In the last moments before sleep he often saw piles of shallots in his drifting mind, heard the thunk of the Hobart mixer, or found that he was holding the fingers of his left hand in the clawed position in which that hand remained much of the day, holding food in place while the knife continually rose and fell.

Spring streamed past them and became summer. By the time June came around, the restaurant had been at high speed for two months, and Harry couldn’t see any sign that it was letting up. Now and then he caught a glimpse of Britt moving about the dining room, where there were never quite enough servers. Britt looked as tired as the rest of them did. Jenelle and Hector were even less talkative than before, too busy hunched over their workstations even during prep to converse beyond the basics of position and tools. Even the servers, whose general pallor had always suggested a variety of unsavory pastimes, were paler than usual, with pouches beneath their heavily lined eyes.

But Harry thought he and Britt might be okay. They hadn’t fought again, at least. He was taking this as a good sign. Once a week or so Camille appeared at the bar to meet up with Britt, and when she did Harry often slipped an extra tempura shrimp into the fryer or sliced off a crisped bit of chicken and made it into an amuse. She ate the dishes, she arrived and departed with a wave, but she seemed to him to be a distant celebrity, shiny and eye-catching, friendly but remote.

He left the lamb’s neck on the menu, but he could not stop tweaking it. He tried it with artichokes, with toasts and little coins of new potato. He tried it with no starch at all, just carrot and parsley. He tried skewing it sweet-tart with gooseberries and skewing it savory and dark with thyme and garlic and braised cipolline onions
. T
hey all sold about the same—regularly, if not flying off the shelves
. T
he dish was a more of a cult item, one a guest ordered as much to announce himself to the restaurant as to allow the restaurant to show itself to him
. T
he point was, nothing revealed itself to Harry as the obvious course of action. He liked the dish no matter what, he would eat it no matter what, and he knew that this was a problem
. A
chef should be able to break down a dish to its components in a few bites, not view it as a mere lump of tastiness that had just appeared on a plate
. T
he more Harry tried to fix it, the more confused he became.

On the Saturday when he got the idea to try it with pesto, he began his day at the farmers’ market
. T
here was a little weekend market about fifteen minutes away, where he often shopped in a chef’s coat, not only to buy supplies but because people loved to see a chef at the market
. T
hey asked questions about where he worked and what he’d do with garlic scapes. It was better than a commercial
. T
he facts that this summer was hotter than the last and he felt dizzy and damp standing in the blaze of the morning sun, that it took longer to get in and out when he had to stop and chat all the time, and that every moment he was not barreling through his prep list it felt like something was drawing more tightly around his chest were not enough reason to skip the chef’s coat.

The pesto was going to be made with garlic scapes, which shouldn’t have been difficult: blanch them, shock them, puree them with olive oil, lemon juice, cheese, and nuts. Boom
. T
he result was supposed to be a vibrant green paste, garlicky in a subtler, greener-tasting way than one made with bulb garlic. He’d do a toast with pesto, maybe, serve it alongside the neck, or toss little new potatoes in it.

The problem arose once he was back at the restaurant with his produce
. A
ll he had to do was choose the right nut. Pine nuts, walnuts, almonds? He knew he should simply make a tiny batch of each and taste it, but he got caught up thinking about the rest of the menu
. Y
ou didn’t want almonds on too many dishes, and they were already in a tart
. W
alnuts? He was low on walnuts, and anyway they might disappear into the pesto. Or maybe they’d be a kind of stealth ingredient.

While he ruminated on this he started to put together flatbread dough, but as he was hauling out flour and yeast he began picturing how the bread would work on the line
. T
o get the best from a flatbread, to get its blistered edges and those chestnut-crowned bubbles, one had to cook it like a pizza, with last-minute intense heat. He couldn’t dedicate one whole oven to the heat he’d require, and anyway it might heat up the whole bar. He supposed he could do it in a hot oiled pan, but his range was crowded as it was, and he didn’t know if he had room for yet another dish cooked in a big sauté pan.

By this point Harry was standing before the mixer with an empty bag of flour, several pounds of which he’d already dumped into the bowl, working through calculations that should have been brisk and simple but that felt impossible to reconcile. Maybe he’d skip the flatbread and throw the flour back in its bag, but he could not recall whether he had added salt and yeast yet.

He began sifting through the flour with a spoon, looking for traces of yellowish powdered yeast or the coarser grains of salt. As he was doing this, he began thinking about the nuts again. He was wondering if he should toast them instead of blanching them. Maybe toasting was one of those things no one did but they ought to, one of those little tweaks that elevated a whole dish. Maybe toasting would work better with almonds than walnuts, or maybe walnuts over almonds, but then again maybe toasting would bring pine nuts back into play.

He realized that he was still standing there, hunched over the bowl of flour, stirring it with a spoon. He’d forgotten why he was digging through a bowl of flour in the first place.

Harry decided to leave it for a while, while he went out for almonds or walnuts or whatever. Whatever was cheapest, he decided. That was a reasonable way of making a decision—do what won’t bankrupt your restaurant.

And then he was out in the sunlight, and it was nine o’clock in the morning, and he was walking to his truck and trying to concentrate on pesto-smeared flatbread beside the lamb’s neck
. W
as pesto too much of a cliché? Was flatbread a cop-out? Then he was back to the flatbread question, wondering if he could use the salamander for flatbread, if that would be genius or if it would irreparably slow everything down.

He got into his truck and began to drive, but he did so unthinkingly, turning according to some hazy instinct rather than logic, ending up going in the opposite direction from the store where he’d intended to go
. T
he drive kept proceeding in these fits and starts—he’d correct himself, turn in the proper direction, then start thinking about some minutiae to do with nut variety or yeast or the end of the garlic scape season and whether anyone even wanted them anymore, because for a while there it seemed as if everyone was cooking with garlic scapes. Except why should seasonal produce become a cliché during its brief heyday? Was a tomato a cliché? A zucchini? Maybe the garlic scape would soon become as commonplace as carrots, so that it didn’t feel like such a trend to use them.

There were too many variables before he would ever get that far.

He had just thought of pistachios and was digging in the glove compartment for a scrap of paper on which to write that when the van pulled out in front of him. Or maybe it simply pulled into traffic at a reasonable distance and he failed to see it. He became aware of the van’s dull blue paint looming before him the moment his truck collided with it, creating a terrific bang and a flutter of broken glass.

Harry sat there clutching the steering wheel as the van doors opened and began to disgorge a number of flustered but unharmed senior citizens.

The driver of the van, a man in his sixties or seventies with thick square glasses and a floppy hat that hung down his back on a string, came rushing around to Harry’s truck. Harry gazed down at him, at the man’s fingers curled over the lip of the half-opened window.

“Young man,” the driver said. “Young man, are you all right?”

Harry knew you weren’t supposed to admit fault, and he wasn’t even sure it
was
his fault, but the man seemed so flustered, his glasses opaque and his white hair endearingly fluffy in the sunlight, his head turning this way and that as he fretted, explaining that he was supposed to be driving a group of seniors to the theater that night and with a broken taillight he couldn’t.

“It’s my fault,” Harry said, and he got out of the truck and joined the circle of people inspecting the damage. The truck was nearly unharmed, with a small dent in its fender, while the van’s taillight was pushed inward, the glass shattered on the roadway. The disparity seemed to convince the van’s driver of Harry’s guilt, and he turned rather cool and brusque as Harry wrote down his information. But when Harry pressed the paper into the man’s hand, that palm was extraordinarily soft, like a child’s, and a shudder of relief and retroactive fright coursed through him. The others got back in their van, busily discussing him, and left him standing beside his truck.

Harry wasn’t sure what to do. He should call his insurance company, but there was no need to phone the police. He got back in his truck and started it up. His hands were still shaking from the shock of the accident, but driving seemed to calm him. He forgot that he had begun the drive looking for a grocery store. He was just moving, in a rickety truck, and the pure uncomplicated motion felt so calming that he merged onto the highway. The blacktop stretched out before him, smooth and flat and flanked by Pennsylvania’s rolling hills.

The idea of his brother pinged like a bell in the distance. Maybe Harry ought to call him—but Britt no longer found Harry useful. He frowned when Harry spoke at staff meal; he frowned when Harry said hello to Camille; he frowned and shrugged when tasting the very best dish Harry could muster. Harry never even looked at Britt without knowing that he had disappointed him.

The flatness of the road seemed to quiet his mind a little. He almost managed to stop thinking about pesto, even though pistachios probably were the best idea, even though pesto changed so much depending on whether it was on bread or vegetables or pasta. And which shape of pasta. And which brand. Or homemade.

He was driving faster now, edging up over eighty as the truck began to vibrate. He didn’t know whether he had passed a sign for an Amish farm stand or the idea had just arrived and rooted itself unbidden—things did that to him now; they took hold before he knew where they’d come from—but suddenly Harry was thinking about pie. It helped him forget the pesto and the lamb’s neck as his mind listed all the fruit pies one could make at this time of year, then all the pies one might make at any time. In his head he listed cream pies and meringues and custards, things too gloppy and rustic to serve at the restaurant. He tried to enjoy the image of each pie as it passed through his mind, but the pies kept turning into great vats of dough and uncertainty about thickeners, numbers piling up as he scaled up recipes.

After a while it stopped helping. The attempt to focus was just too difficult. He was realizing now that
trying
was the problem—all that effort that never solved anything. Every day broke over his head just like the one before, no matter what he’d done to prepare.

Harry let the word “pie” tap a beat in his head until it didn’t mean anything at all. It was just a syllable he could say, his dry lips popping in rhythm with the stripes on the road.

Now he did pass a sign for an Amish roadside stand, which seemed not only fortuitous but a little chilling, as if he’d conjured it.

Sometimes this kind of thing happened to him at the restaurant. He had to ask Jenelle if they had already discussed the new lamb prep or if he had only thought about it, if he had told her what to do or she had somehow known without his verbalizing it. He was always a little surprised to learn he had told her, surprised to learn he still needed words to communicate his thoughts. He could no longer feel the division between himself and the entity that was the building and its teeming needs and movements. Stray was an animal, Harry not its owner so much as its parasite.

He veered into the right lane just in time for the exit and pulled off the expressway and onto a two-lane road, following an arrow and a sign with a silhouetted horse and buggy.

The landscape was all green fields and sprawling farmhouses, a single ancient gas station. There were no kids with cigarettes and tattoos. No one here had ever heard of his restaurant, an idea that left him feeling both exhilarated and frightened. If Stray could release him for this long—for by now it must have been many hours—then perhaps it didn’t exist after all.

He’d hoped for something small, like a lemonade stand, but the Amish farm stand was a building with a parking lot and a big sign among tables of lettuce, snap peas, and zucchini. The produce looked like play food. Harry got out and walked slowly among the tables, picking up a zucchini and sniffing it to determine whether it was real.