Chapter 8
Last Call
You could tell a lot about a kitchen by how it sounded empty, and the Skylark, empty, sounded like a held breath.
Dante came in through the alley at ten the next night — after close, when he knew Nick would be upstairs or gone, because he was a coward in exactly one direction and always had been — and stood in the dark of the kitchen that had been his for a month and would not be his by Friday.
He'd come for his knives. That was the story.
A man comes back for his knives; that's allowed, that's not weakness, that's just tools.
He rolled them one at a time into the canvas the way his lola had taught him, the paring knife, the petty, the big carbon gyuto he'd bought with his first real paycheck and carried through four cities and never once let anybody else touch.
His hands were steady. His hands were always steady.
It was the rest of him that had stopped working.
The recipe cards were still taped to the hood.
AVGOLEMONO — do NOT rush the eggs. RICE PUDDING.
the good scramble. He stood in front of them a long time.
He could take a photo. That was the modern thing, you photographed the dead man's handwriting and you carried it in a phone instead of on your arm, and then you had it, you had the custard, you could make Sunday anywhere.
He didn't take the photo. They weren't his.
Nothing here had ever really been his — a man had told him that in this room the day before, precisely, with the cold accuracy of a scale: you're a clause.
And the terrible thing, the thing Dante kept turning over like a stone in his mouth, was how fast some old part of him had said yes.
Finally. There it is. Now I don't have to be scared of it coming, because it came.
He'd spent his whole life bracing for the exact sentence Nick had said, and there was a sick, familiar relief in finally getting hit by the thing you'd been flinching from for thirty-four years.
See. Told you. Don't put the roots down. Look what grows.
He carried the knife roll to the pass and set it down, and because he was leaving and there was no one to see, he let himself stand in the middle of the kitchen one last time and feel all of it.
The cold spot on the flat-top, back left, that he'd spent a month cooking around and would never cook around again.
The hook where he'd hung the apron. The scratched little window of the walk-in.
Through the pass, out the front glass, the sign burned gold and whole against the dark — both wings, the thing that had come back to life the night he kissed a grumpy man in an alley and made the mistake of letting himself believe he'd found the place he finally got to stop.
That was the thing he was actually losing.
Not the job — he'd had a dozen jobs and he'd have a dozen more, and the one up the freeway was better than this one on paper in every measurable way.
What he was leaving in this dark room was the first place in his adult life that had felt like his lola's kitchen.
Like being fed instead of only feeding. Like a table where somebody would keep a chair for him.
Kain na. Come eat, sit down before I have to say it twice.
There was nobody left in the building to say it to him.
He'd seen to that — by loving a man who couldn't, and then not fighting him when he proved it.
He'd texted Rey from the parking lot an hour ago.
Three words. I'm in. Thursday. Rey had sent back a champagne emoji and THANK GOD, brother, i'll have the walk-in stocked and then, a minute later, because Rey had known him a long time, you okay?
And Dante had put the phone in his pocket without answering, which was the answer.
He'd typed things to Nick too, in the parking lot.
Deleted them. I didn't mean to hide it. It stopped being a job somewhere around the galaktoboureko and I got scared.
I've been scared the whole time, same as you — we're the same coward in two different flavors.
He'd gotten all the way to the send button, and then he'd heard it again, clear as the sign's hum, the cold exact voice saying you're a clause, and he'd deleted that too.
You didn't beg to stay in a place that had already told you what you were worth.
His lola hadn't raised a man who begged.
She'd raised a man who cooked for people and left before the leaving could get done to him — and if that had turned out to be the loneliest possible way to move through a life, well.
It was the only recipe he'd ever been given.
Thursday. Tomorrow. He'd load the car, he'd drive the forty minutes up the 710 into a different life, he'd build somebody's exposed-brick dream and put his own name on a door for once and never have to smell coffee-and-cinnamon again without wanting to put his fist through a wall.
Everything he'd told himself he wanted. Clean.
His. Leaving before it could be done to him, one more time, the way he always won by losing first.
He zipped the knife roll. It was the loudest sound in the building.
***
The bell over the front door went, and Dante's whole stupid heart lunged before his brain could stop it — Nick — and then a woman's voice said, "It's just me," and the heart sat back down, and it was Thea, letting herself in with a key, standing in the dark dining room in the wash of the lit sign.
"Gloria said you'd come tonight for your knives." Thea Roussos looked around the room she couldn't stand to be in, the coffee smell, her father's ghost, and Dante watched her make herself do it anyway, stand inside the thing that hurt. "She was right. She's always right. It's insufferable."
"I was just leaving."
"I know. That's why I came." Thea crossed to the counter — not to the stool, he noticed, never the stool, that was a whole family of people leaving one chair empty — and set down a manila envelope.
The buyout. Her half, ready to sign. "I got what I wanted," she said.
"You should know that. Friday my brother takes Meridian's money, we split it, I finally get to grieve our dad somewhere that doesn't smell like him.
I win. This is me winning." Her voice did something.
"So why do I feel like I'm about to help him make the worst mistake of his whole life. "
Dante didn't say anything. It wasn't his to say anymore.
"I came to see the room," Thea said. "Marisol won't shut up about the dinner.
The line down the block. The sign coming back.
I couldn't picture it — this place, full, at night, people fighting to get in — I've been telling everyone it was a tired old diner ready to be put down, and Marisol keeps saying you should have seen it, Thea, you should have seen your brother laugh.
" She turned and looked at Dante directly, and she had Nick's eyes, exactly, that same pricing scan, except she was letting him see all the way in.
"He laughed. In there. My brother, who did the math in his head at our father's funeral.
And then you show up in my life for one day, on the phone, I cook here, and now the sign's lit and the room's full and he laughs — and yesterday he said something so cruel to you that Gloria walked out on him for the first time in twenty-two years.
" She shook her head slowly. "You want to know my brother?
That's my brother. He can't say the true thing.
He says the cash-register thing, the cold exact thing, and then he stands in the quiet he made and he hates himself so much he can barely breathe, and he'd rather you leave hating him than stay and watch him be scared.
He's been doing it since we were kids. He did it to me after Dad died.
He'll do it to you Friday if you let him, and then he'll spend the rest of his life alone over a drawer that adds up, telling himself it was the responsible choice. "
"He fired me," Dante said, and hated how it came out — young, and torn. "He called me a clause."
"He called you the thing he's most afraid you are, so it wouldn't hurt as much when it turned out to be true."
"So I'm supposed to what — stay?" Dante heard his own voice go rough.
"Stand in a kitchen where the guy I —" he couldn't finish that either "— where he can reach into a will any time he gets scared and cut me back down to a percentage?
I've done that. I've done the version where I make myself small and useful and grateful in somebody's kitchen and they take the best thing I've got and put their own name on it.
I got a tattoo so I'd stop being able to hear my dead grandmother, and it didn't work — you think I won't hear you're a clause for the rest of my life?
" He shook his head. "I'm not doing the small version again.
Not even for —" Not even for him. He shut his mouth.
"I'm not telling you to stay." Thea picked the envelope back up, held it.
"I don't even know you. You want to take the good job and go be happy somewhere my family can't wreck it, God, I'd get in the car with you.
" She was quiet a second. "I'm just telling you what I know, because Gloria made me, and because I watched you flinch just now when the bell rang and hope it was him.
People who've got one foot out the door don't do that.
Whatever you are, Dante, you're not a clause either.
" She went to the door. "Lock up when you go. Shoulder it twice."