Bread and Butter (27 page)

“I’ll pay him whatever he wants,” Britt said.

“You can tell him in a few minutes, then,” Leo said.

“I will,” Britt said. “Listen—”

“I’ll keep trying Harry,” Leo said. “Let me know the instant you hear from him.” His voice was the silky professional one he used with job candidates who had fatally failed to impress him, with vendors who would never see another order from him.

L
EO HAD REFUSED TO BORROW
a chef’s coat. He was not about to don that uniform without having earned it. He just put on the striped navy apron, draped two clean dry towels over the tie at the waist, and stationed himself at the pass.

He felt a little ridiculous in his suit pants, dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and the borrowed apron. It did not help that when told he’d be expediting, the employees reacted with surprise of an intensity that was the tiniest bit unflattering. But how could they have realized he knew how to do this? He hadn’t expedited for years, not since the earliest days, when they were still gathering a stable core staff and he was sometimes required to step in. Only David, who had been at Winesap since the very beginning, was blasé. Of course, David enjoyed reminding his coworkers of his longevity, so he too might have forgotten and merely nodded sagely out of sheer habit.

On the line across from him, Thea was talking to him while she set up her station. “Apps take about ten minutes. Same with desserts. Dennis has a cold amuse all set to go, the servers just grab that themselves when they fire the app. They’ll let you know if you need to delay a fire on the entrée.” She glanced up as she chopped a last-minute bin of chervil and parsley. Leo winced, fearing for her fingers, as he watched the smooth motion of her chef’s knife. “Otherwise, when the apps go out, fire the entrées. Cross the served items off your tickets, move ’em down to the left as you go from app to entrée.”

“Got it,” he said. He’d forgotten how tight the timing really was back here. To the dining guest, the progression of the meal seemed leisurely and measured, but in fact the staff dealt with increments of five and ten minutes. And of course if the expediter timed it badly, if an extra five or ten minutes passed while the guest awaited a course, that felt like an eternity.

“You have your menu?” she asked. “Your list of finishings?”

“Got it,” Leo said again. His menu was carefully marked up; the correct one-word terminology for each dish had been highlighted, the cheat sheet for how to finish each dish jotted in the margins. For the most part he simply had to wipe plates and scatter them with fresh herbs or a drizzle of fragrant olive oil, but for the vegetarian tart he would have to brulée the Gruyère-scattered top with a kitchen torch
. T
hat he was looking forward to.

His phone beeped with a text from Britt. “Nothing,” he said to Thea after looking. She met his eyes, trying to discern whatever he wasn’t going to say in front of the other cooks, the backwaiters slicing bread, and the staff darting back and forth with armfuls of coffee cups and folded linens. Leo looked at the message again, as if the meaning would change.

The text was completely unlike Britt’s usual texts, which used full words and capitalization. Maybe Britt reserved his formal texting style for people he respected. Leo had been knocked down to those undeserving of vowels.

He looked up again at Thea and shrugged. He had not told her what Britt had said about them. He’d told her only that they needed to help out and send over a cook, interrupting her before she could volunteer. He didn’t know now why he had felt so vehemently that it must not be Thea. Simply the need to have her in-house? Dread—obsolete now—that she would give them away during a postshift drink? Or just fear that she would march into Stray, be energized by its youth and verve, and never return?

It was a relief to be able to look up and see her. She made him feel calmer than he ought to, distracted him from texting his parents to say there was no word. It was maddening to hear nothing, but reiterating the silence to them would make things worse. They had phoned him twice in the past couple of hours, and he was regretting having asked them to call him and not Britt. They were coming up with more detailed scenarios than any Leo had invented—Harry pinned beneath the truck on a deserted road, wandering the streets with amnesia after a blow to the head, the victim of a brutal, casual stabbing.

“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
. T
he 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
. W
atching her, though, Leo began to worry. Her flawless confidence, her immersion in the job—she was irreplaceable
. A
nd maybe she knew this. She must
. W
hy 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
. T
his 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
. T
here 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
. T
he 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
. A
nd 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
. A
nother 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
. T
he 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
. A
s 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
. W
hen 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.