Chapter Six
Alonzo
For two solid weeks I got myself home by seven nearly every night, and I'd like that on the record, because for a man like me it lands just shy of a miracle.
I run the mornings at El Colibrí—in before dawn for the prep, riding the lunch push—and most nights the dinner service belongs to Héctor, which means most nights I'm technically free to go home and be a person.
The trouble is that I almost never do. The place is in my blood; I linger, I find one more thing to fix, and somehow midnight finds me still there with a rag over my shoulder.
Two solid weeks of actually walking out the door at six-thirty, keys in my hand and the kitchen still roaring behind me—that was no small thing, and I knew it.
I was proud of it. I won't pretend I wasn't. The rough patch after Hank's birthday had spooked me—Beth gone quiet and far-off for the better part of a week, that cool weather she gets where she's polite and somewhere else at the same time—and I'd hated every day of it.
But I'd kept my head down and stayed patient and waited her out the way you wait out a cold front, and sure enough it had broken.
We'd made up. I think about that night more than I should, honestly—the way she finally turned toward me in the dark, the way the whole stiff careful distance between us just dissolved—and I'd come away from it certain of two things.
One, that I'd never get tired of that woman as long as I lived.
And two, that the whole cold stretch had been about nothing.
Because that's the part I'd landed on, lying there after with her warm and forgiven against me: there'd been nothing to it.
I'd helped a friend who was drowning. That's all.
That's the entire crime. And Beth had needed a few days to get there, to come down off whatever it was—and people get insecure, it happens, it doesn't make them bad—and the kindest thing I could do, the manly thing, was not throw it back at her.
So I didn't. I just decided I'd show her.
Two weeks of home-by-seven, dinner on the table, my phone face-down.
Proof, laid down brick by brick, that she had absolutely nothing in this world to worry about.
The wedding wasn't helping anybody's nerves, I'll say that.
It had gotten away from us. We'd started with a plan a man could understand—courthouse on a Friday, then a backyard thing, burgers and a keg and Carmen's cousin's band murdering some Fleetwood Mac.
Somewhere between my mother and the Pinch sisters and a guest list that bred in the dark like rabbits, it had quietly become A Wedding, the kind with capital letters and a binder Beth hauled around everywhere and, apparently, a cake worth driving an hour into the next county to put in your mouth.
But the restaurant—the restaurant I understood all the way to the floor.
That night was a Friday, though, and Friday I keep for myself.
Héctor can have every other dinner rush on the calendar, but Friday night the line is mine, the way it's been mine since I was nineteen—and a Friday at El Colibrí is controlled war.
By six the kitchen had become a single hot organism, eight of us crammed onto a line built for five, and I was at the pass calling tickets over the roar of the flat-top and the salsa Diego refuses to turn down no matter how many times our mother tells him to.
Héctor was flying on sauté. Yoli, who's worked garde manger since before I was legally allowed to drink, was plating ceviche faster than I could read the dupes off the rail.
When it's good, when it's really running, the whole line moves like one animal with sixteen hands—nobody looks, nobody asks, you just feel the body next to you and trust it—and there is no feeling on this earth like a clean Friday at full tilt.
People chase that high with much worse things than food.
My great-grandfather opened this place in a building that used to be a feed store, back when there were maybe four Colombian families in the whole county and you couldn't buy a plantain within a hundred miles of here.
He cooked the food of a country he was never going back to—I think so he wouldn't forget the taste of it—and the town came, the way a town will always come for anything cooked with that much wanting in it, and they never stopped.
Four generations later we still make my great-grandmother's ajiaco the slow way, with the guascas and the three kinds of potato, and the bandeja paisa that takes two days to do right, and the arepas my abuela still slaps out by hand at the prep table every single morning while she narrates, in detail, everything I'm doing wrong with my life.
I didn't always want it. That's the truest thing I can tell you about myself and that kitchen.
At twenty-two I'd have done anything to get gone—small town, family business, my father's shadow, the whole thing felt like a hand closing around my throat—so I left, and I cooked in the city, in a glass box with white tablecloths and tweezers and a chef who threw sauté pans, where we'd lay three artful smears on a plate and charge a man his car payment for the privilege.
And I was good at it. And I hated it down to the marrow, because somewhere under all those tweezers I'd lost the only thing that ever made food worth doing, which is this: you make it for somebody.
You set it down in front of a person and you watch their face, and for as long as they're eating it they are happy, and they are safe, and they belong to you.
So I came home. I stood back at that prep table beside my abuela and let her reteach me every single thing the city had trained me to be ashamed of, and I haven't regretted it for one hour since.
Around eight I left Héctor the pass and went out to walk the floor, the way I do on Friday nights—the part of the job the cooks rib me for, where I quit being the chef and turn back into a Vargas.
The Olsens had table four, where they've sat every anniversary for nineteen years. Ruth caught my hand in both of hers before I'd gotten a word out.
"Alonzo. That sancocho." Her eyes were already going. "That's Walter's bowl. That's the exact bowl he used to order. I haven't been able to touch it since the funeral, I couldn't bring myself—"
"Same pot, Miss Ruth." I crouched down next to her chair so I wasn't standing over her, because you don't stand over somebody who's gone somewhere tender.
"Same recipe, more or less the same hands.
Your Walter had the best taste in this whole town, you know that?
Ordered the finest thing on the menu, every single time, nineteen years running. "
"He did, didn't he." She laughed, wet, and reached up to pat my cheek. "You're a good boy. You tell your grandmother she raised that one right."
"She won't believe a word of it, but I'll pass it along."
A table of girls celebrating something I never did catch sent their empanada plate back to the kitchen with a napkin folded on top that just said !
!! in red pen. A little boy in the window booth knighted me with a plantain chip, and I went down on one knee and let him.
And on his way out, Pastor Coyle stopped me at the register, both hands pressed flat to the front of his shirt like a man taking inventory.
"You're going to have to answer for this waistline come Judgment Day, son. You and that grandmother of yours both."
"Put us in Sunday's sermon, Pastor. Best advertising in the county."
"Don't think I won't."
That's what I'm good at. That is the thing I can do all the way down to the bone—read a whole room full of people and give every last one of them exactly what they need, send nobody home hungry, leave nobody at the table alone.
I walked back into my hot, loud, beautiful kitchen feeling like the luckiest man in three counties.
I'm telling you all this so you understand that I'm not a careless man, and I'm not a stupid one. I could read a room of forty strangers in the time it took me to cross it.
It was only ever the one woman I couldn't see.
? ? ?
On Saturday my phone buzzed against the steel a little before three, and it was her, which made me grin like an idiot—because thirty seconds earlier I'd been standing at the pass thinking I ought to text and find out whether she wanted me to swing by the shop and grab her for the cake thing, or just meet me there.
"Hey—you read my mind," I said. "I was about to text you. You want me to come get you at four, or you wanna meet me at the—"
"Babe." Her voice was frayed all the way down, and behind it I could hear the cooler running and the bell on her shop door.
"I can't go. I'm so sorry, I can't. The Whitfield bride moved the whole delivery up to tomorrow morning and changed her palette on me again on top of it, and I've got forty centerpieces and two hands and no time to breathe, let alone drive to Hartsville to eat cake. "
"Hey. It's okay. We'll just push it."
"We can't, that's the whole problem—Clementine books out for months, and we're already cutting it close for March.
So go. Go for both of us. Taste everything, narrow it down to two you actually love, take pictures so I can see, and we'll pick tonight in bed like normal people.
" A breath. "And Alonzo—do not just pick the chocolate one because it's chocolate. I mean it. I know you."
"I would never," I said, which we both knew was a lie, and she laughed, tired and real, and that laugh felt like the whole two careful weeks paying off at once.
I was pulling my keys, untying my apron with my teeth, when I came out the back and nearly walked into Lola clocking out at the little desk by the door.
"You're escaping early." She squinted at me. "Where are you off to all dressed like a person?"