Chapter 35
TWO YEARS AGO
“You can do better,” said Chef Garza. “Faster. Better. I really need you to bring it, Bennett. Come on, you have to be able to keep up.”
It took everything in Didion to remain calm.
She’d spent the entire service picking up Garza’s slack.
She had put out about a hundred fires, one of them an actual fire, and did all of it while remaining calm.
In this kitchen, it seemed that if you weren’t yelling or visibly panicking, you were perceived as not working hard.
No. Didion’s strength was her ability to move effortlessly, quickly through the weeds without ever getting stuck in them.
And as usual, Chef Garza misunderstood her.
“Yes, Chef,” said Didion, hands behind her back, fingernails carving half-moons into her palms.
“I don’t want to have to replace you, but I will. There are about a hundred chefs just like you out there, more talented, faster, prettier, better. And I’m giving you another chance to prove why I should keep you instead of finding one of them.”
“Sorry, how is it relevant that there are prettier chefs than me?” Didion bit back, the smallest drop of her ever-reserved anger leaking out.
Garza lifted his bushy brows at her. “Are you really going to make this into a feminist thing? Jesus, Bennett, get off the internet.”
It was hard to know where to begin with that. So, she said, “Yes, Chef.”
When she was finally released from Garza’s tiny, cigarette-stinking office, she burst out onto smoggy Madison Avenue, wanting to punch through a brick wall. She pulled out her phone to call her co-worker to vent, but then she saw a missed call from Austin James.
Austin fucking James. For the first time in eight years.
She’d unblocked him years ago, never wanting to be the type of girl who has a long list of people she’s “cut out” of her life.
But she hadn’t reached out, and neither had he.
It wasn’t that surprising, because they’d broken up.
And that was when they were kids, anyway.
She hadn’t really expected to hear from him.
Until now.
She stopped dead in her tracks, pissing off at least two people on the street as she did so.
There was also a text.
Hey. Sorry for calling out of the blue, but … wanna talk?
“Oh my god,” Didion said out loud to herself. “Oh my god.”
There was no one in her life who would know how crazy this was. No one to text a screenshot to.
As it often did, her heart panged as it came up against the empty space that should be filled by her sister.
Whoa, did she just tap Austin’s name? And now, as it started to ring, she wasn’t hanging up. Her stomach was like a pinball machine.
And then suddenly, she was talking to a ghost from her past.
He’d been thinking about her.
He’d had a few drinks, it was probably a huge mistake to call her, he’d be embarrassed tomorrow.
She didn’t want him to be embarrassed.
She could hear him grinning into the other end of the phone as they chatted, her cheeks already aching from the excitement of hearing his voice again.
Ten minutes ago, she couldn’t have imagined where she’d be. It was as unexpected as if she had walked out of that restaurant and been flattened by a city bus.
“Hey, so I know this is … crazy,” he began. “Would you … would you want to meet up?”
“M-meet up?” Her voice wobbled. “When?”
“Tomorrow?”
“I have a job…”
“Quit.”
“Do you know how many people would kill for my job?”
Even as she said it, her mind whirred with the idea. He was kidding, she was sure. But she could quit. What if she did? What if she didn’t even give two weeks’ notice, and she just left?
She would never.
Would she?
Could she?
“Where are you?” he asked.
“New York.”
“Mm.”
“Where are you?”
“Texas. West Texas. Kinda middle of nowhere.”
A taxi screamed by and a shirtless man threw a cup of what she hoped to god was coffee hard on the sidewalk, and she only barely sidestepped in time to not get hit by it.
Cars honked, people shouted, a gust of trash air wafted her way. And all the time, her phone had been buzzing with messages on the group chat from the restaurant. She glanced at them and saw that Garza needed everyone to come in early tomorrow.
She took a deep breath and got ready to jump. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
For a horrible moment, she thought he’d say the whole thing was a joke. He was only messing with her, damn.
He didn’t.
Twenty-four hours later, she was in his old truck again, windows down, Patsy Cline on the radio.
She was in a desert snow globe, the sky so huge, arching above them, a sunset of inky navy blue and streaks of hot orange, red, and yellow on the horizon, miles of nothing around them, only desert leading to mountain.
It was so perfect. She had been reckless, left her job. She wasn’t sure how she was going to pay rent—and she was going to need to move out anyway, since she lived with Garza’s niece.
Yet, she knew this was the kind of thing that made life worth living. Flying down the long empty road with days of the unknown pouring out in front of you, waiting to tumble the shape of you into something new.
He opened a beer when they got close enough—dangerous! Illegal! Reckless!—and nothing tasted better than that almost-cold Pacifico as they tore down the endless strip of road.
Not until they pulled up to the Stardust Motel.
Checked in. Opened the door of their cheap room and slammed it shut behind them.
As if they’d sworn to, the second they were alone, her body was against the wall, his body a wall against hers, hands grasping and lungs gasping, sounds of ecstasy and relief and surprise emitting from both of them with abandon.
It was like that for the next week.
They almost never came up for air. Their desire for each other was limitless. When they weren’t having sex, they were in the moments before or after sex, either in foreplay or the afterglow, a half-lidded focus on the vibrant, unfamiliar world.
They went to dive bars at night and ate fried food and drank smoky, citrusy ranch waters from pint glasses.
Didion wore crop tops and jean shorts and a pair of secondhand cowboy boots bought from a shop in town.
They played pool with strangers in noisy bars that got so competitive Didion lost her voice from laughing and yelling.
There were dirty jokes from dirty old men that nevertheless, were funny, and were nevertheless, endearing.
They heard fascinating stories from people they’d never see again.
They had electric-blue makeouts in the chlorinated pool at the motel, and they lay in a sweaty sex heap on the squeaky bed as a box fan blew on them.
After years of deferring, yes-chef-ing, being clean and proper and quiet and respectable, she was wild and slutty and happy and tipsy and horny and imperfect. All the things she hadn’t been. It was the answer to the question she never knew to ask.
Who was Didion when she let go?
It was more them than they’d ever even been at Birdsong. This world that they shared with no one who knew them.
Everyone who met them thought they were together, and why wouldn’t they?
He put his arm around her while they talked to new friends.
Smacked her on the ass when she went for another round.
Gave her piggyback rides to the car. She gave him shit and he loved it.
They kissed outside in the moonlight, dust kicking up in the wind; they slow-danced to sorrowful slide guitar as the bar closed down around them.
It was like they had stepped into a different reality. One where they were together, here, in this life. This life with nothing but new moments of glorious nothing.
On her fourth day, they pulled off on the road after Didion spotted a cardboard sign that said PUPPIES in fat Sharpie ink.
Someone had found a pregnant golden retriever wandering around in a nearby town.
The idea of this felt so unbelievably surreal, such a suburban dog living wildly out in the nowhere—a bit like how Didion saw herself.
They went into this stranger’s house, followed them out to a mudroom, where there was indeed a litter of golden retriever puppies.
A few months old. Past the snub-nosed part of development, and now in the furry, bouncy part. Downy blond fur and pink bellies.
One came bounding right up to Didion, jumped in her lap and curled up there, gazing at her, then panting at Austin.
“I’ve always wanted a dog,” Austin said.
“Me too.”
After hardly a moment of thought, he said, “We’ll take this one.”
Didion beamed. We.
It was so crazy! So against the rules! Who rescued a dog on a whim? Who talked in we without ever actually talking about the future?
It didn’t matter. They weren’t there to do things right. They were there to do things they wanted.
And then suddenly, they were three. They named her Birdie, after Birdsong.
He put an old red Levi’s bandana around Birdie’s neck, folded to fit her.
They brought her into bars with them and they became very, very popular with drunk girls.
They were often as enamored with the beautiful man holding the end of the leash—which was actually the turquoise strap from her purse—but he didn’t give any of them a second look.
Put his arm around Didion and showed them all whose he was, and who was his.
It was bliss.
Until the last day.
Didion had booked a round-trip ticket because of course she had. Anything else would have been at worst, presumptuous and delusional, and at best, inconvenient when eventually she had to return to real life.
She did have to return to real life, didn’t she?
The night before her flight, they drove back out of the depths of the desert and into Midland, where the airport was.
It was physically painful for Didion to leave the nothing and drive into the oil town, full of its Tilted Kilts and Outback Steakhouses and traffic.
A city that could bore you with its banality on a good day, but on a day like that, it almost killed her.
They checked into the chain hotel, which was offensively bright. She hated its huge parking lot and soda machines and bleach smell.
She wanted to be crazy. Wanted to be irresponsible. Wanted to say fuck it to everything, and drive right back out of that shithole town and back into the open air of nowhere.
Please, she silently implored him, ask me to stay. It can’t be me, it has to be you.
In their room, he took the sanitary matte plastic wrapping off the hotel room cups and filled them with woody, smoky sotol. Didion put her own bandana over the desk light in an effort to diffuse its light. Birdie curled up beside her and quickly fell asleep.
Once again, she held her breath and got ready to jump.
“What if I didn’t go?”
“What do you mean?” he asked her.
“What if I don’t get on the plane tomorrow?”
“I thought you had a job,” he said, giving that smile.
“I … quit. I quit to come.”
She had not told Austin this. She had only—