4
Reconstitute: To restore dried food to its original consistency; to change texture by letting it soak in warm water.
2015
Rock Landing was its own neighborhood within a neighborhood of New Haven.
It was a forgotten, ignored neighborhood that used to be a little fishing town swallowed—and regurgitated—by history.
Before they were condemned, New Haven’s oyster beds fed a lot of people.
Some of the beds came back.
Others did not.
Rock Landing, apparently, was built around one of the latter.
Getting there wasn’t an issue; it was close enough to walk, but Kyle had a car—if his 1992 Corolla still qualified as a car—that mostly ran, and he was willing to drive.
“You sure this area is safe?”
Gale held his wrist closer to his stomach.
He still had fifteen of the twenty dollars his dad had pressed into his hand; he wanted to keep it.
“Looks pretty sketchy.”
“It’s hard to say where it’s safe in New Haven,”
Kyle said.
“Nice today.
Murder-town tomorrow.
You’re a New Haven boy. You know.”
A New Haven boy who’s never been truly poor.
Until now.
“The kitchen feeds its local homeless,”
Kyle went on.
“Many of them with some kind of mental or drug issues.
Some are just poor people trying to get by.
There isn’t much housing around here that shouldn’t be condemned, but some of the guys I work with make do.
This”—he pointed—“is where they eat.”
It was an incongruity, the building Kyle pointed to.
Stone on the first floor, cedar shakes on the second.
Very Old World New England.
Likely an original home restored to some former glory, if former glory was homey and quaint.
Opening the door treated Gale to the delicious aromas—mostly garlic, if his nose was on its game—that came close to overpowering the ever-rank odor of a waterfront too long neglected.
“Wow.”
“Right? I told you it was good.”
“You told me your friends told you it was good.”
Kyle grimaced.
“Okay, so I been here.
Don’t rag on me.
We don’t all have daddies slipping us cash.”
“We grew up in the same neighborhood, Kyle.”
“Yeah, well, my parents are divorced.”
He never did make much sense, man.
“Why don’t we just go in.
I’m starving.”
Exaggeration.
Mostly.
The hunger pangs had been near constant the last couple of days.
If his parents knew he was at a soup kitchen, they’d be ashamed, but that twenty had to last until Wednesday.
Inside was everything Gale expected.
Ratty banquet tables and folding chairs and the indigent.
But it was also nothing he expected at all.
The tables and chairs were clean.
The floor wasn’t sticky.
A sign on the door read:
Clean Zone! If you’re not, there’s a wash station out back. Use it!
There were parents with their kids.
Teenagers clustered in groups and older people in singles and odd pairs, the oddest being the elderly woman wearing a Burger King crown and talking to herself in a corner.
All in all, there were about thirty eating bowls of what looked like pasta e fagioli.
Good choice, nutritionally.
Protein, veg, carbs.
It smelled delicious.
A group of young men waved at Kyle.
He waved back.
“What do we do now?”
Gale asked.
“We go sit with my buds.
Someone’ll bring food to the table.”
“A waitstaff?”
“Just a volunteer,”
Kyle said.
“More hygienic.”
More dignity. Nice.
“Who runs this place?”
Gale asked.
“It’s definitely not state.”
“You mean, who funds it?”
Kyle shrugged.
“Probably a church or something.
I don’t know.
But the lady in back doing the cooking is Regina. I think she runs the day to day.”
Kyle led Gale to the table of his work friends.
Good guys.
Few of them spoke more than get-by English but Gale had enough get-by Spanish to keep up.
He had no idea where they were from, and he felt kind of lame for being clueless like that.
A few minutes later, a man with the face of an old prizefighter brought two bowls and bamboo utensils to their table, set a plate of rolls between him and Kyle.
“You’re new.”
“I’m Gale.
Gale Carmichael.”
“Drugs?”
“Not anymore.”
“You sure? Regina doesn’t turn junkies away, but it’s better for everyone if we know who they are.”
Junkies.
Man, that’s harsh.
Gale was used to it.
The derision.
“Been clean for nineteen months.
I’m just poor.”
The man’s smile took ten years from the face Gale would have put at seventy.
“Sorry.
We don’t get many white boys in here.
When we do, they’re usually strung out.”
He held out his hand. “Troy.”
Gale rose to take it.
“Good to meet you.”
“Same.
Now, eat, before it gets cold.
Welcome to Regina’s Kitchen.”
“Thanks.”
Gale waited for the man to move on before shoveling a spoonful into his mouth.
Zesty, garlicky, rich, smoky.
His face stopped chewing in awed appreciation for the food in his mouth.
Whoever Regina was, she knew how to balance flavor.
“Told you,”
Kyle said. “Right?”
“Not what I was expecting.
How is this place not packed?”
“Location, dude.
No one wants to come to this area.
And the locals keep it on the down-low.
They know a good thing when they taste one. So, yeah. Don’t go blabbing. My guys told me. I told you. Needs to end there, you know?”
“Sure.”
Gale ate.
Slowly.
Savoring every mouthful.
Picking out the herbs and spices as they rolled across his tongue.
Marco put pasta e fagioli on the menu now and again; this was nothing like that.
His—rather, Frances’s—version was refined and delicate.
Delicious in its own way.
This was hearty.
Served in a bowl with crusty rolls, not on a plate with tweezer-placed microgreens.
Gale could have eaten more, but he was grateful for what he’d gotten and didn’t ask.
Especially since he was one hundred percent certain this would not be his last visit.
Spotting bus trays lined against one wall, he picked up his and Kyle’s dirty dishes, deposited them there.
The woman wearing the Burger King crown eyed him imperiously.
He smiled, though she didn’t, and bused her table of one, too.
Through the doorway, door propped open, he spotted Troy talking to a woman who had to be Regina.
All he could see of her was a long, thick, salt-and-pepper braid bisecting her white T-shirt, the comfortable roundness of a body that had never been lean, but didn’t push too hard into plump, and the backs of what could only be Vans slip-ons, sparkly gold.
“Can I help you?”
she asked over her shoulder.
“Sorry,”
Gale said.
“I just wanted to say thank you.
It was delicious.”
Regina’s brow furrowed, as if she couldn’t see very well.
She looked familiar, somehow, but Gale couldn’t place her in that moment it took for her to look at him, nod, and go back to the pot she was washing.
“Nice boy, helping clean up like that.”
Regina grunted, handing Troy a washed pot.
“Another cook.”
“How do you know?”
“I know one when I see one,”
she said.
“And he had a chef-knife tattoo.
They all do it these days.
No originality.”
“Maybe a rite of passage.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
Regina had one, too, though she’d been one of the originators, and a woman.
Women didn’t get tattoos, back then.
Most men didn’t either.
Now everyone had tattoos, and every chef had one of a knife.
“Give him another few years and he’ll end up moving back in with his parents, work at Home Depot or IKEA or some shit.
But yes, nice. Polite. Drugs?”
“He says he’s been clean for nineteen months.”
Counting in months was dangerous.
Just long enough to make a body feel like they’d beaten it.
Not long enough to claim victory.
Decades wasn’t long enough.
In her experience.
The fall from grace was never an if, only a when.
If you survived, you had a shot at regaining control.
Until the next fall.
She’d been waiting years for hers, and still it loomed, ever vigilant.
“Think he’ll be back?”
Troy asked.
“I imagine so.
That brace on his wrist is probably going to be a problem for him in the kitchen.”
“Yeah, I was thinking that.
I wonder where he works.”
Regina chuckled.
“Since when do you take interest in polite white boys?”
“Since we don’t get many like him in here.”
Troy sighed dramatically.
“Not white.
Responsible.
Willing. I’m getting too old for this work.”
Old.
Not entirely dependable.
One of the biggest reasons she didn’t pay him more than a twenty after a “volunteer”
shift.
Troy lived in subsidized housing, the assistance he was due as a vet and as an elder.
Never enough to live on, which was why he helped out in her kitchen.
The twenty.
The meals.
She knew the twenty she handed him bought him a bottle, which was why he rarely volunteered more than a couple of days in a row.
He also had to keep believing she was dirt-poor and running the kitchen on a well-intentioned shoestring.
Regina scrubbed another pot, handed it to Troy.
Another, and a last.
The kitchen, spotless.
The dining room, same.
Chairs tucked, tables wiped down with disinfectant.
Regina insisted on the cleanliness of her clientele but there was no way some of them could really clean up in the provided wash station.
Especially in the winter months.
Reaching for two teacups—the last two she’d kept, Bernardaud, A La Reine, for obvious reasons—Regina felt that twinge in her back.
The one reminding her, always, of the past she could not escape.
She refused the need to press a hand to it.
As if that would do any good.
Panaceas were like excuses; completely useless.
Never to be indulged in.
She poured tea into the cups, and headed out to the dining room where Gladys—aka, the Burger Queen—waited.
As always.
Troy never joined them.
He’d wait, like a gentleman, while her majesty held court.
She and Regina sat together in the empty dining room.
In the dark illuminated only by the battery-powered, flameless candles in the front windows Troy had put up at Christmas and she’d yet to take down.
“Another day done.”
Regina raised her cup.
Gladys sniffed in that imperious way she had.
“I’ve had better.”
Their habit, these words.
This tea.
Their ritual.
That first sip always restorative in the way the rest of the cup couldn’t replicate.
“Is the tea hot enough?”
Regina asked.
“Very nice.”
Gladys sipped daintily, pinkie raised in some pantomime from those years she taught young ladies how to be married women.
“Did you speak to your landlord about the refrigerator in your apartment?”
“Troy is seeing to that for me.”
Regina would have to ask him.
“Did you enjoy dinner tonight?”
“Of course.
You are a wonderful cook.
I’d hire you myself, but Mother would never agree to an Italian.
She only hires Irish. You understand.”
“Sure.”
So that was where they were; not those penniless teaching days after Mother and Daddy were taken from Gladys, leaving her penniless, but when she was still a young woman with a fine future and the promise of a vast inheritance, suitors lined up around the block.
Regina had no idea how much of the old woman’s past was real, and what was fantasy.
Gladys was consistent in her delusion, if delusion it was.
Eight o’clock.
Time to lock up.
Regina finished the tea in her cup.
Gladys knew her cue, as did Troy, who came out of the kitchen.
She offered to drive them.
They both said they needed the walk.
Habit.
Ritual.
The three of them.
It needed to be kept.
Every part of it.
Superstition, maybe, but Regina had a lot of those when it came to keeping life on an even keel.
Even Troy’s constant battle with alcohol—never conquered; never vanquished.
Standing there in the dark, staring at the flameless candle in the window, Regina let the quiet envelop her.
Seep into her.
She’d been all over the world, fed people in establishments where dinner for two cost thousands, and in shacks so ramshackle they could barely be called shacks.
The former filled her and cost her everything.
The latter drained everything she was and cost her what was left.
Regina was nothing if not a survivor.
This kitchen struck a balance—sustainable restitution.
Good work that didn’t fill her or drain her.
Not in those dangerous ways.
Time to go home.
Regina lifted the china cups and their saucers from the table.
In the still-bright kitchen, she washed them carefully.
Osvaldo had given her a service for twelve that first Christmas after money had become a disposable resource.
It cost more than she’d once upon a time made in a year of working two kitchens at the same time, just to make ends meet.
Like those young cooks at the table, including the polite white boy.
A gift from the man she once loved, in a life no longer hers.
Ancient past, so hazy she never knew what she remembered and what she imagined any more than did the Burger Queen.
Regina didn’t even remember why she kept the teacups when she had no idea where the rest of the service had gone.
Only that she found them in a box.
Wrapped in expensive lingerie she had no use for.
When she moved into the run-down little crapshack she turned into Regina’s Kitchen.
With the money from another life.
Earned by another woman.
She’d kept them as a reminder of what had been, of all she’d lost.
Regina locked up.
All those dead bolts.
She was pretty sure no one from the neighborhood would break in, but you just never knew.
Desperation made people do desperate things.
She unlocked the door leading to her apartment above, locked it again behind her.
Up the stairs she went.
Home.
A bedroom and a spare.
An office and a bathroom.
A sitting room and a kitchen.
A thousand square feet of well-appointed comfort and luxury no one who knew Regina Benuzzi, soup kitchen cook, would imagine her living in.
Those who had known Queenie B? They’d only laugh.