Chapter Seventeen
Gus texted on the morning of the fifty-eighth day, ten days out from the reopening now, a message shorter than any he’d sent me since the toast — Can I cook for you tonight.
Not test the menu. Just cook. I’ll bring everything.
— and I turned it over at the counter for a long moment, the way I’d turned over so much else that summer, before I typed back a single word, yes, and felt something unfamiliar move through me typing it, some small unguarded flicker of anticipation I hadn’t let myself feel about seeing him in longer than I could easily remember.
He arrived a little after six with two grocery bags instead of a folder, and I registered the difference the moment I saw them — relief, plain and immediate, at a man carrying food, not paperwork, ingredients instead of arguments.
I let him into the kitchen rather than the booth, and he stood for a moment just inside the door the way Ivy had two weeks earlier, taking in the releveled flat-top, the certified hood, the walk-in door standing open on its new hinges, and something crossed his face that looked almost like grief for a kitchen he’d never actually cooked in and understood, standing there, that he’d missed the entire making of.
“I want to cook you the eggs,” he said, unpacking the bags — a carton, a stick of good butter, a loaf of bread from a bakery I didn’t recognize, nothing else, the whole meal small and plain and entirely unlike anything August had ever put on a plate.
“I don’t know if you remember them. It’s been a long time since I made them for anyone. ”
I remembered them instantly, the memory arriving whole and unbidden the way certain smells arrive before the mind catches up to naming them — a cramped apartment kitchen eleven years ago, before August existed, before the wedding, before any of it, Gus at a secondhand stove making eggs in leftover fat from a steak he’d cooked us the night before, the first meal he’d ever made me that wasn’t for an audience, that wasn’t trying to prove anything, just butter and eggs and good bread and a man watching my face while I ate it like my reaction was the only review that had ever mattered to him.
“I remember,” I said. “You never made them again after we opened. I used to wonder why.”
“I know why now,” he said, quiet, setting the carton down on the counter with more care than eggs required. “I didn’t, then. I just knew my throat would close up every time I tried to make them, and it was easier to stop making the dish than to figure out why.”
I watched him work, the two of us standing at the flat-top the way we must have stood at that secondhand stove eleven years earlier, close enough that our shoulders brushed when either of us reached for something, and I felt the old ease of it arrive despite everything — two people who’d cooked side by side long enough that neither one needed to ask before handing the other a spoon, the whole exchange wordless and automatic, a choreography neither of us had to think our way through.
He cracked the eggs into the rendered fat with the same unhurried confidence I remembered, tilting the pan, spooning the hot fat back over the yolks the way you’d baste a chicken, and the smell of it filled the kitchen the way it had filled that cramped apartment a lifetime ago, and for a moment neither of us said anything at all, just worked, and it felt, standing there, like the first entirely unguarded half hour either of us had shared since the gala.
“My father used to make these,” he said, not looking up from the pan, his voice pitched low and careful in a way I recognized instantly as the sound of a man finally choosing to walk toward something instead of around it.
“Staff meal, at the end of a night, whatever fat was left in the pan from the steaks — nothing fancy, nothing on the actual menu, just something to eat standing up at the pass before we drove home. I used to sit on a milk crate in the corner of his kitchen doing homework while he cooked it, and he’d slide a plate over to me without saying anything, and that was, as far as I can tell, the entire shape of how my father told anybody he loved them.
Through food, standing up, no ceremony to it at all. ”
I didn’t say anything, understanding, the way I’d understood it the night of his first confession, that this wasn’t mine to pull out of him, only to receive when he finally decided to hand it over, and I stayed quiet and let him find his own way into it.
“His restaurant was called Calloway’s,” he said.
“A chophouse, outside Pittsburgh, in a mill town called Millvale where half the men who ate there worked the same shift my father did before he saved enough to open his own place. He built it from nothing — I mean that literally, he was twenty-six with a line cook’s wages and a bank loan he’d talked his way into, and for twelve years it actually worked.
I grew up in that kitchen the way you grew up in this one.
I thought, until I was fifteen, that this was simply what a life looked like — you worked, you built something, it held. ”
He plated the eggs, unhurried, sliding a piece of toast under each one the way I imagined his father must have done a thousand times, and set one plate in front of me and kept the other, and for a moment just stood there with his hands flat on the counter, not eating yet, gathering himself.
“He expanded,” he said. “A second location, three towns over, right when the mill that fed his first one started laying men off in waves nobody saw coming until it was already happening. He’d borrowed against the first place to open the second, which I didn’t understand the mechanics of at fifteen and understand with a sickening kind of clarity now, running a restaurant group myself, exactly how that decision must have felt in the moment — reasonable, even smart, right up until it wasn’t.
The second place never found its footing.
The first place started losing the exact customers the second one was supposed to be built on the strength of.
He tried to hold both for a year, maybe a little more, moving money between them the way you’d move it between two pockets in the same coat, and I didn’t know any of that was happening.
I just knew he stopped coming home some nights, and started coming home smelling like something other than the kitchen, and my mother started having the kind of conversations with him that stopped the second I walked into a room. ”
I reached over, without deciding to, and put my hand over his on the counter, and he let me, and didn’t stop talking.
“I came home from school on a Tuesday,” he said, “and there was a sheriff’s notice taped to the front door of Calloway’s.
Not the second place — the first one, the one I’d grown up in, the one with my father’s name literally on the sign.
I didn’t know what it meant, not really, I was fifteen, but I knew it meant something final by the way three of my friends’ parents had already called our house by the time I got there, and by the way my father was standing in the parking lot when I arrived, just standing there, looking at his own name on a piece of paper taped to a door he couldn’t open anymore.
He didn’t say anything to me for a long time.
Then he said, ‘Go on inside, there’s nothing to see here,’ which was the strangest thing to say about a building we could both plainly see, and I understood, even at fifteen, that he wasn’t talking about the building at all. ”
“What happened after,” I said, quiet, my hand still over his.
“He lost both places within the year,” Gus said.
“Auctioned off the equipment — I remember watching a man I’d known my whole life, one of the regulars, buy my father’s own flat-top for less than it was worth and not being able to look either of them in the eye while it happened.
My mother left two years later, not entirely because of it, I think, though it didn’t help, and remarried and moved to Florida, and my father spent the rest of his life cooking in other men’s kitchens — a line job at a chain steakhouse forty minutes from where his own restaurant used to stand, wearing somebody else’s logo on his shirt, making somebody else’s menu, and never once, as far as I know, telling a single person he worked with that he used to own the place with his name on the door three towns over.
He died on shift, eight years ago. Heart attack, at the line, during a Friday dinner rush, and the last fifteen years of his life he spent cooking with real skill in a kitchen that never once had his name on it, and it wasn’t until I was standing at his funeral that I let myself understand what I’d apparently decided, at fifteen, watching that sheriff’s notice, I was never going to let happen to me — needing help, in public, where anyone could watch it happen and talk about it for years afterward the way this whole town talked about my father. ”
I sat with that, my hand still over his, feeling the whole shape of ten years finally resolve into something I could hold rather than only sense the outline of.
“You went to Ivy,” I said, “instead of me, because you thought if I watched you need saving, I’d end up watching you the way that town watched your father. ”