Chapter 2 #2
And there — for just a second, before the shutter came down again — Dante saw it.
The thing under the grump. Not stubbornness.
Something closer to a man standing in a burning building insisting the fire is fine, the fire is under control, the fire is a feature.
Dante knew that man. Dante had a lot of that man in his own history.
"Okay," Dante said, gentle, and meant it, and did not say any of the forty other things.
Nick looked at him like the gentleness was suspicious. Which, fair.
***
The rush came at eight-ten and it came all at once, the way the worst ones do.
The bell went and a location scout walked in — Dante clocked the lanyard, the clipboard, the way the guy sized up the neon and the vinyl like set dressing — and behind him came his entire crew, twelve people who'd been up since four shooting a car commercial two blocks over and wanted, immediately, all-day breakfast for twelve.
On top of the booths already full. On top of the wholesale flower delivery Gloria had to sign for. On top of a Friday.
Dante watched it hit the floor and watched Nick try to catch all of it with two hands.
That was the thing about Nick, Dante would think later — he'd have run into that fire himself, no hesitation, no help.
He was already moving, already trying to seat twelve and sign for flowers and cover Gloria's section and take the scout's order, all at once, alone, because doing it alone was the only way he trusted it to get done.
The tickets started stacking on the rail.
Three, five, eight, a wall of them, a dozen egg orders and the cold spot on the flat-top that would murder half of them if you didn't know it was there.
Dante knew it was there.
"Nick." He didn't yell it. You never yelled it; yelling was how a line lost its head.
He said it just loud enough, the flat calm you learned in rooms worse than this one.
"Nick. Look at me. Stop taking orders. Just run food and pour coffee — that's it, that's your whole job now, hands and legs, I've got the board. "
Nick's head came up. For one second the two of them just looked at each other across the pass, and Dante watched the man's every instinct fight it — my floor, my father's floor, I hold the line alone — watched it clean as a struck match.
"The scramble," Nick said.
"Stays exactly the same. I'm not reinventing anything, I'm just faster than the grill's mean streak. Go. Flowers first, they're double-parked."
And Nick — God help him, Dante would remember this — Nick went.
Through the pass Dante caught him in pieces: signing the florist's clipboard with a pen clamped in his teeth, sliding coffee refills down the counter one-handed, dropping plates in front of the crew and squaring every last one of them.
Taking orders from the cook in his own father's kitchen, hating it, doing it anyway — because underneath all that granite the man wanted to save this place more than he wanted to be right about it. Barely more. But more.
Then it was just Dante and the board and the old black flat-top, and this, at least, Dante knew how to do in his sleep, had done in his sleep, would probably do in his coffin.
He fired the eggs on the warm right side and drove the hot orders through the center and left the cold spot empty like a chair nobody sat in.
He called it low and even. He plated in threes.
He read the whole rail at once the way you read a piece of music, top to bottom, and he pulled a service back from the edge of a cliff it hadn't even known it was standing on, and eleven minutes later the last of the scout's twelve plates went up on the pass, hot, together, correct.
"Order up," Dante said, into a kitchen that had gone suddenly, ringingly quiet. "All day."
Nick came to the pass. He didn't pick up the plates right away. He looked at the empty rail — clean, every ticket killed — and then he looked at Dante, and whatever was on his face, it wasn't the till-drawer thing anymore. It was closer to the look a man gives a card he didn't know he was holding.
"That's —" Nick stopped. Started over, which Dante was learning was a whole event. "The eggs are right."
"The eggs are always going to be right," Dante said. "That's the deal."
Nick reached back to the warmer and took down a plate. The scramble — the actual scramble, untouched, sacred — and beside it, Dante saw, a small dish of the garlic rice. He set it on the pass in front of Dante.
"You didn't eat." It came out like an accusation. "You've been here since six and you didn't eat."
He didn't wait for an answer. He gathered the scout's plates, four up each arm, and carried them out to the floor.
They stood there — well, Dante stood there, holding a plate he hadn't asked for, that had his own rice on it, that Nick had built without a word and shoved at him like the man could not physically say the sentence thank you but could, apparently, say it in eggs.
The radio's saxophone filled back in around the edges of the quiet.
Out on the floor twelve exhausted crew members were making the specific noise happy fed people make.
Gloria was laughing at something. The gloom outside had gone thin and pearly, close to breaking.
And Dante felt it move through him, warm and total and absolutely unauthorized — the thing he'd promised himself in a stranger's kitchen he would not, under any circumstances, let himself feel.
I could save this place.
I want to save this place.
He turned back to wipe down a flat-top that didn't need wiping, so the man across the pass wouldn't see his face do whatever it was about to do.
Four days. Four days and a diner with a death sentence and a scowling landlord of a partner who couldn't say thank you if you spotted him the first two words.
One foot out, he reminded himself, scrubbing at nothing. You don't do staying. It's not a you thing.
His hands, he noticed, had already started prepping tomorrow.