Chapter 27
— Chapter 27 —
When I get back to the bar, I’m short on gas, out of time. My eyes are red and teary. I dig through Step’s glove compartment and find old napkins and a mostly full bottle of Visine. The drops are so cold they make my eyeballs ache, but the strangeness of that feeling snaps me into the moment. I hope it’s a busy night so I won’t have time to think. Right now, my thoughts are unbearable.
In the kitchen, Carlos is peeling purple carrots singing Little Bunny Foo Foo as if he’s Plácido Domingo, and even though my heart is breaking, I laugh. He jumps, then starts laughing too.
“Oh, you got me, Freyalina!” he says. “I thought I was all alone.”
Sam left the specials on the bar. Tonight’s dinner is his meatloaf rebellion: spiced rabbit tagine with dried Bucurian apricots. The appetizer is bagna cauda made with clotted buffalo cream and Cantabrian anchovies, served with roasted rainbow carrots, fried whole fingerling potatoes, and pan-blistered haricot vert. The extra words sound like a collection of diseases, not something I’d want to eat. And the soup is Connecticut clear broth chowder with salt-cured pork belly and young quahog clam, which is completely ridiculous. Most people around here are red chowder or nothing. Some like the phlegmy New England bullshit I was stuck serving in Maine, but no one wants their chowder to be clear broth or to eat food specifically inspired by Connecticut. I make a mental note to ask if Carlos can throw together a chicken parm for my shift meal when Sam’s not looking.
Eddie and Tommy Tom come in before I have time to meet with Sam on the pronunciations, but it doesn’t matter because they ask if Carlos can make a couple of meatball subs, and I know we have meatballs in the freezer for the kids’ menu.
I run their order to the kitchen. Sam and Carlos are plating a family-style meal for the dining room, humming along as Sweet Child o’ Mine plays on the scratchy portable radio that’s been duct-taped to the kitchen wall since I started working here.
Sam strains a pot of capellini over the sink, steam fogging the kitchen. Carlos ladles pomodoro sauce into the bottom of the serving bowl, lets Sam pour some pasta, adds another ladleful. They are completely in sync. Sam is in a state of bliss, the trials and tribulations of meatloaf behind him.
Everything about food service is transient, but sometimes you have these perfect streaks—a few days or a week or maybe a month—when you get to work with people who move how you move and work how you work. It’s what I love about restaurants. Anyone who’s been in the business long enough understands the precious nature of that feeling. Three weeks from now, the dishwasher will get a job as a line cook across town, your favorite waitress will leave for business school, the assistant sous will get the yips and cut his fingers so many times you have to start checking plates before you serve. The rhythm will change and not everyone will be able to catch it or care to. So, when it’s good, you let yourself disappear into the busy nights and become the restaurant, which means, for as long as it lasts, you don’t have to be yourself.
I fold Eddie and Tom’s order slip and clip it to the line just as Sam and Carlos start screeching to the Oh, oh, oh part of the song. Carlos locks eyes with me, twisting his body like Axl Rose, still not spilling a single drop of sauce. I Axl-dance back for a split second, which surprises me as much as him, but my body feels good enough to move, and I need to be something other than myself.
Carlos grins and Sam shouts, “Whoo!” I feel a flash of happiness.
We are all laughing when I spin back to the door, pushing through to the bar.
And then there’s Bee. Sitting next to Eddie, looking exactly the way I’d imagine the thirty-year-old version of my very first friend. Her straight blond hair used to be so long she could sit on the end of her ponytail, but now it’s blunt cut to her shoulders, tucked behind both ears, showing off her high cheekbones.
“Woah. Frey! I like your hair,” she says, grinning.
She tips her head to the side, studying me, and I worry she might think I’m trying to be like her—I was jealous of her blond hair when we were kids.
“I’ve never had the courage to go that pale,” she says. There’s a little bit of lazy at the ends of her words like all the Westchester County kids whose parents grew up in the boroughs. “It works on you because you have dark eyebrows, so it looks punk rock. Pretty sure I’d look like I was fading.”
“Thanks,” I say. “WhacanIgechu?” Even though she managed to jump right in, I don’t know how to talk to Bee like I just saw her a week ago.
“On me.” Eddie taps the bar with his index finger, and I feel a little slip of my heart that I don’t want to feel.
“T they just liked kicking the ball around together.
“You must miss them,” I say. I would miss them, too, if they were mine.
Bee looks at me, kind and steady. “Hey, I’m sorry about your folks.”
“Thanks.” I pull the rag from my back pocket and use it to wipe an imaginary spot on the bar. If I look at Bee, I’ll cry, and I don’t think I have the strength to pull myself together. I hold up my order pad. “I’ll put this in.”
One of the waitresses watches the bar so I can take a bathroom break. As I’m walking out of the stall, Eddie walks in.
“Wrong room, bud,” I say, grinning to soften the blow.
“No. Bee told me.” He holds up a small blue packet. “I had a suture removal kit in my gear bag. I got you.”
“Really?”
“If it’s okay by you.”
My desire to lose the fishing wire in my gut overtakes any awkwardness I might feel. I turn the lock on the bathroom door, hear it click.
Eddie peels the lid off the suture kit and sets the plastic tray on the sink counter. He pulls a sterile packet of gloves from his pocket, rips them open, slipping them on with stunning efficiency. “Okay.” He gestures to my shirt. “Can you kinda… lift that and sit on the counter, lean back a little?”
I untuck my shirt and pull it above my incision, pushing the band of my pants below it. My face flushes as Eddie leans close to study the stitches.
“Damnit. This light is terrible. And I already… I only brought one set of gloves.” He looks into my eyes. “Can I ask you a favor?”
“Uh huh.”
He laughs. “This is about to get really awkward.”
I wave my hand over my exposed belly. “In for a penny…”
“I swear this isn’t… uh… I need my flashlight. From my front pocket.” He turns his hip toward me. I reach into his pocket, the denim pressing my hand against his warm, muscled thigh as I hook my fingers around his mini Maglite and fish it out.
“Thank you.” He grins, and it’s the kind, earnest smile he’s always had, except now the corners of his eyes crinkle nicely.
“Should I hold—” I switch the flashlight on and aim it at my incision.
“Yeah,” he says. “Angle down, tiny bit?”
“There?”
“Yeah. Good.” He grabs the scissors from the pack. “I’m going in.”
He clips the knot at one end and uses tweezers to pull the blue nylon from my skin, one loop at a time. It doesn’t hurt, but I can feel the tug. I clench my teeth and close my eyes.
“You alright?”
I nod.
“You’ve got a subcutaneous stitch too. It’ll come out in one long pull.”
This tug happens in a layer of skin I couldn’t comprehend before this moment. The thread sticks and slips, and then I feel the end of it.
“Done!” Eddie says.
I open my eyes.
He uses gauze to wipe my stomach.
I can’t look. I’m woozy, trying hard not to be.
He pulls off the gloves. “Still okay?” he asks, resting his hands on my shoulders to steady me. “Give yourself a sec.”
I notice the thin line along his cheek and run my finger over it without thinking. “I remember when you got that.”
He was playing ice hockey on the pond with his brother and a bunch of older boys when he fell and hit his face on another kid’s hockey stick. I heard him yell, and the other kids did that stupid laugh boys do when they don’t know how to handle a crisis.
“Whoo. I passed out when my mom pulled those stitches,” Eddie says.
“Yeah, but you were what? Six?”
“Maybe seven?”
I skated over to him as fast as I could and sat on the ice and held his hand while his brother ran home to get their mom. Eddie wouldn’t look at me while he cried, wouldn’t talk to me either, but he clung to my hand like he was scared I’d leave if he didn’t. So I stayed and tried not to stare. I wiped his neck with my mittens, careful not to touch the cut so it wouldn’t get infected, and my mom screamed at me later for ruining them. “You always make a mess of your nice things. You could have at least used his mittens,” she’d said.
“It healed nice,” I tell Eddie.
He rubs his hand over his scar. “Thanks.”
We stare at each other for a moment. I wonder if he’s cataloging all the ways I’m different or the same, like I am with him.
“You good to get down?” Eddie says, and I laugh. His face turns bright red. “I mean from the sink.”
“Yeah,” I say, but still feel off-kilter.
“I’m going to help you anyway.” He slides his arms under my armpits while I stand.
My knees wobble.
“Oh boy!” Eddie squeezes me tightly, maybe just holding me up. But it feels like a hug, so I hug him back.
“Thank you,” I say.
“It’s nothing.”
Once he’s sure I’m steady on my feet, we stagger our exits from the bathroom. He goes first.
Before I tuck my shirt, I look at my scar. It’s straight and thin, pink and purple. I can see the tiny holes where Eddie pulled the thread through, and I kinda hope at least one leaves a little mark.
When I get back, Sam is behind the bar, refilling his iced tea. I worry he might be annoyed by how long I was gone.
“Sorry, bathroom break,” I say.
“No skin off my teeth.” He makes a face. “That’s a gross expression, isn’t it?”
“No hair off my toenails,” I say, and Sam laughs.
He surveys the bar. “What is everyone eating? Is any of this on our menu?”
I point toward the business casual crew, directing Sam’s attention away from Eddie’s meatball sub and Bee’s special garlic bread. “That guy’s having the clear broth chowder,” I say.
Eddie, Tom, and Shorty stay past closing to have a beer with Carlos while he eats his shift meal. Bee is still reading at the bar, but she’s switched over to tea, and the guys keep teasing her.
Carlos made me chicken parm, but I have to sneak bites in the walk-in so Sam doesn’t feel like all we do is betray his menu. I’m running into the kitchen for another bite when Sam comes out of his office, finishing a rocks glass of whiskey.
“Hey,” he says. “Do you mind staying to let them hang a bit? I’ve got to be up early to meet with my microgreens supplier.”
“Yeah, no problem,” I say, even though I’m completely exhausted, everyone out there has already tipped, and my hourly wage is shit. I will take every dollar and smidge of job security I can get.
“Here.” Sam throws me a small ring of keys. “That’s your set. Hang on to ’em.”
“Really?”
He takes his pen and writes an eight-number sequence on the palm of my hand, tracing a few of the numbers a second time when the ballpoint stops turning against my skin. He’s close. I can smell the whiskey on his breath. It’s intimate, but not sexual, and the panic I expect to well up never comes.
“Safe is under my desk,” he says.
It seems insane, but he’s not wrong to trust me. And it’s not an uncommon experience—some people can sniff out my earnestness right away. I never even stole a lipstick from the drugstore as a teenager. So, while Sam could be dumb and using bad judgment, I think he actually sees me.
“Got it,” I say. “You alright to drive?”
He laughs. “I live two doors down. I’ll walk safely, promise.”
Sam leaves through the kitchen door and I lock up behind him. When I get out to the bar, the guys are gone, but Bee is still there, folding straw papers together to make a spring. When she’s done, she hands it to me.
“Can I get you anything else?” I ask.
“I’m fine. But I’ll wait and walk out with you.”
I want to tell her she doesn’t have to, but I’m not sure I want to be here alone at the end of the night. It’s familiar, but not the same.
Plus, I’ve missed Bee. For a very long time.