Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
The rest of Ben’s time in Michigan passes quickly, probably because it isn’t very long.
He has to weather all day Friday helping his parents prep for the weekend—they’d kindly given the staff both Thursday and Friday off for the holiday, though no such allowances were extended to Ben—but texting with Pete makes the time move faster.
Rick has asked Pete out for a Saturday evening drink, and so they spend a lot of the day speculating about what he could want, the concepts getting increasingly more absurd.
By the time Ben goes to bed Friday night, Pete has fully steeled himself to be sworn into the Fish Crusades, though he’s planning to turncoat Rick and fight on the side of the sea if it really comes down to it.
The whole thing is insane, but Ben falls asleep laughing anyway.
On Saturday, Ben’s flying out in the early evening, so he’s able to bail out of family bonding time after lunch.
Everyone seems a bit relieved to see him go; it doesn’t bother Ben as much as it once did.
After all, he’s a little relieved to see the last of them for a few months, although he’ll also, in a strange way, miss them.
He’s often wondered if that’s the universal nature of family: being with them feeling both good and bad at once, like scratching a mosquito bite, or poking a bruise.
Maybe it’s just the nature of his family; he supposes it wouldn’t matter either way.
Regardless, he and Pete text back and forth all day, right up until the point Ben’s boarding the airplane.
His flight, landing at around nine thirty, will run right over Rick’s proposed time for drinks with Pete, and Ben spends it looking forward to turning his phone back on, and finding out what exactly it was Rick wanted.
Pete’s actual best guess was that this was some kind of bonding ritual, and holiday related—apparently it wouldn’t be the first time.
But Ben’s not so sure: He’s been watching the numbers climb on the first of their Christmas videos, the ones with the sponsored content worked in, which had posted the day before Thanksgiving.
The numbers are high—not only for sponsored content, but for their content.
It’s probably the seasonal draw, and while Ben, if he’s honest, hates to give Christmas credit for anything, he has to admit it’s worked nicely for them here.
He thinks, though he’s kept this thought to himself, that Rick probably has some news about the future of the show, or what Formica’s planning to do with them next.
All in all, by the time his plane lands at JFK and the captain releases him from cell-signal jail, Ben’s a little excited, and a little nervous, and jiggling slightly with both anticipation and how much coffee he consumed during his long airport wait.
But when he turns his phone on, there are no messages from Pete. Not one.
A tiny sinkhole, barely bigger than a pea, opens in the pit of Ben’s stomach.
Still, he tells himself it’s fine. Of course it’s fine—Pete’s probably still out at drinks with Rick, that’s all.
Ben has no right to be worried about the frequency of Pete’s texts anyway; they’ve hooked up once, they haven’t even technically had the dating conversation, and if anything, up until now they’ve been messaging too much.
This is fine. Normal. Nothing to get worked up about.
The last text Pete did send him, before Ben turned on Airplane Mode, had said Ben should let Pete know when he lands.
So he does, typing and deleting several drafts before eventually going with, Made it back to NYC, still in one piece!
Hope you can say the same. Just send a hook emoji if you need extraction from the Fish Wars.
But Pete doesn’t answer; not while Ben’s in the airport, and not in the cab ride back, and not while Ben listens to an incomprehensible earful from Roux, who is clearly deeply offended to have been left at the mercies of a highly paid cat sitter for a week.
When Pete finally does reply, it’s nearly midnight, and the text is short, and clipped, and weird: sorry for radio silence. too much to drink. catch u tomorrow.
The sinkhole in Ben’s stomach, which has been growing for the last few hours, yawns out now to be the size of a small car.
But… Pete said he’d catch Ben tomorrow, right?
So they’re still on for their brunch plans; not all is lost. Ben doesn’t have to panic, or lie awake gripped with dread, or castigate himself for a week of thinking it was all going to work out. He doesn’t. He doesn’t.
He does it anyway, of course, but he tells himself he’s choosing to, and could opt out if he wanted.
On Sunday morning, it takes such an unbelievable amount of effort to keep himself from texting Pete something like, DO YOU HATE ME SUDDENLY?
that he, instead, texts roughly everyone else he knows.
He also spends a frankly unnecessary amount of time reading and rereading the Castillo’s menu, looking for throughlines to Pete’s cooking, pieces of him on the page.
He finds a lot: Pete clearly wrote this menu, the descriptions matching the voice he uses in his work for Gastronome.
By the time 10 a.m. rolls around with no reply to the text Ben sent Pete late last night—No worries at all, feel better!
—the sinkhole in the pit of his stomach has grown teeth, and become more of a gaping maw.
He seriously and passionately considers texting, Are our plans still on?
Let me know if I should still come to brunch? ??
But looking at it written out, the cursor blinking accusingly at him after the last question mark, makes Ben feel so weak-willed and pathetic that he deletes it furiously, shoving his phone deep into the pocket of his charcoal-gray jeans.
“Do you know what?” Ben says to Roux, who is watching him inquisitively from her current perch on top of a basket of what was, until she climbed into it directly out of the litterbox, clean laundry.
“I’m going. I’m going! The man invited me to brunch—come anytime, he said, and I asked if Sunday worked, and he said that it did.
And then, at the end of the call, he said he’d see me Sunday!
That’s a plan, my feline friend. It would be weirder if I didn’t go. ”
Slowly, and somehow managing to communicate an enormous amount of doubt, Roux flicks her tail back and forth.
“Okay, yes,” Ben admits, trying not to think about the fact that he is being successfully cross-examined by an animal who can’t figure out how cupboards work.
“Yes, he’s been a little strange! And silent!
And yes, I have considered the possibility that he’s decided I’m not worth the trouble, or that Chris sat him down and impressed upon him how nuts I am, or that Rick told him—told him—oh, I don’t know!
” Truthfully, Ben can’t work out what Rick might have told Pete to make him reconsider the way things have been going between them, though he’s put a lot of effort into trying.
“But regardless, if he does want to tell me he’s decided I’m annoying, or intolerable, or whatever it is, after all this, he’s not going to ghost me!
He can tell me to my face if that’s how he feels. ”
Roux seems to consider this. After a moment, she lowers her head so it’s resting atop Ben’s second-favorite knit sweater.
Making direct eye contact with him, seeming to be trying to communicate very intently, she sticks out her rough tongue and begins licking the sweater, creating pulled threads and pills immediately.
“Oh, what do you know,” Ben mutters. “You’d eat twist ties if I let you.” Ignoring her irritated mew, he grabs his coat and heads out the door.
On the journey, which somehow manages both to take a long time and to move too quickly for Ben’s liking, his anxiety swells within him, seeming to crowd out room for even his breath.
He tries to wrestle it back down, to crush it away into something manageable, but it’s a bit like trying to close an overfilled suitcase, or shut the door on a burning fire.
By the time he finds himself standing on the pavement in front of Castillo’s—in the same spot, he realizes with an abrupt pang, where Pete’s infamous childhood home video was filmed—he is half-ready to turn around again, so sure his bad vibes will poison the entire encounter.
Then he steps foot inside the restaurant and realizes immediately that his vibes won’t make any difference one way or the other.
The average diner—or, the average diner who has never spent any time in the food service industry—is not generally aware of what Ben privately thinks of as “restaurant vibe rancidity.” This is not because they have never encountered it before.
In fact, nearly everyone who has dined in restaurants has, at some point or another, eaten in one on a high-rancidity night.
To those guests without specialized knowledge, it would likely have manifested very subtly, only at the edges of things: the sound of breaking china and swearing in the kitchen, a curt edge to the waiter’s tone as she asks if there’s anything else she can get you, the sense that certain members of staff are bristling as they pass one another between tables.
Perhaps a few plates of food slightly below the place’s usual standards might be laid before the diners, or a round of drinks that isn’t what was ordered.
They might leave murmuring, amongst themselves, “Off their game tonight a little, huh? Maybe the regular chef’s on vacation. ”