Chapter 4
Prep Work
They had gotten very good, in two days, at not being in the same three feet of kitchen at the same time.
It was a whole choreography now, unspoken, worked out entirely through peripheral vision — Dante at the flat-top, Nick at the pass; Dante turning for the walk-in the exact second Nick turned for the register; two men who had almost done something on a Sunday night now conducting an entire Tuesday breakfast service like a pair of magnets flipped to repel.
Dante slid a plate up. Nick took it without letting their hands get within a zip code of each other.
Neither of them said orange. Neither of them said two inches.
Neither of them said anything at all that wasn't a table number.
This is fine, Dante thought, cracking eggs one-handed into the ramekin, four in a row, tk-tk-tk-tk. This is the healthiest thing you've done in years. You want a man you can't have in a business you can't keep, so you're simply not going to look at him. Genius. Nobel-tier avoidance.
His phone buzzed against his hip.
He knew who it was before he wiped his hand and checked, because there was only one person who texted him at six-forty in the morning, and it was the person who used to text him at six-forty in the morning from the station next to his, back when Dante had a career and a chef who smiled at him on camera and stabbed him everywhere the cameras weren't.
REY: space is SIGNED brother. keys thursday. arts district, exposed brick, the whole disgusting dream
REY: i need my chef. i've been telling investors i have a chef. that chef is you. don't make me a liar in front of men in vests
REY: end of the month, D. tell me you're in.
Dante looked at the little gray bubbles for exactly as long as he let himself, then put the phone back in his pocket, face-in, like that would help.
End of the month. Which was, what — nineteen days?
Twenty? A real kitchen with his name on the door instead of a clause.
His own menu, no dead man's recipe cards over the range to try to be worthy of, no scowling co-owner squaring plates and breaking Dante's whole heart by accident.
Everything Dante had told himself he wanted, back when he could still remember wanting things cleanly.
"You burned that," Nick said from the pass.
Dante looked down. He'd let an over-easy go to lace on the hot side, brown and crisp at the edges, ruined. He hadn't burned an egg since he was nineteen.
"Refire," he said, and scraped it, and did not look at his pocket. "You didn't see that."
"Saw the whole thing." But Nick said it without heat — said it, in fact, almost gently, with something watchful underneath — and when Dante glanced up, Nick was already looking somewhere else, wiping down a spot on the pass that didn't need it.
Two days of not looking, and the man still somehow knew the exact moment Dante's hands had stopped trusting themselves.
Great, Dante thought. He notices. Cool. Love that for me.
Gloria found him twenty minutes later, hiding in the walk-in doing an inventory that did not need doing, and stood in the doorway with her arms crossed and her reading glasses pushed up into her hair.
"You two had a fight."
"We did not have a fight."
"You're doing the dance. All morning, the dance — he goes left, you go right.
Twenty-two years on this floor, I know what the dance means.
" She narrowed her eyes. "Except it's the wrong dance.
A fight-dance, you slam things. This is the other one.
" A slow, terrible smile started at one corner of her mouth. "Anak. What did you two do."
"I made dessert. He ate dessert. It was a very normal Sunday."
"Mm."
"That's a lot of editorializing for one mm."
"I have more m's," Gloria said serenely, and hoisted a case of eggs like it weighed nothing, and left him there in the cold with his breath fogging and his phone still buzzing soft against his hip like a second heartbeat he hadn't asked for.
Rey, probably. Or the ghost of Rey. Dante had spent three years learning that the fastest way to lose a thing was to let anybody see how badly you wanted it — his lola's kitchen first, then a real one, then a whole career, then his own dish with somebody else's name on it, each one taken the second he relaxed enough to call it his.
So you kept moving. You kept it light. You left before the leaving could be done to you, and you did it grinning, so nobody ever got to watch it cost you anything.
He was very, very good at leaving.
He was starting to suspect he had never once been any good at wanting to stay.
***
Nick came to him after the rush, which was the first surprising thing.
Dante was breaking down the flat-top, scraping the day's carbon into the trough, when Nick set a coffee down next to him on the stainless — Dante's coffee, the way Dante took it, which meant the man had been paying a kind of attention Dante was trying very hard not to feel things about — and then set down, beside the coffee, a green accordion folder gone soft at the corners.
"This is the books," Nick said.
Dante went still. He knew what that folder was.
It was the twin of the one in the office, the one behind the insurance binder, the one Nick had described in the dark on Sunday like a wound he was showing a doctor.
This one was thicker. This one was the whole diner, laid open on the counter, and Nick had carried it out and set it down in front of a man he'd known for eleven days.
"Nick —"
"You keep doing math in your head. During service.
I can see you doing it — you look at the room and your mouth moves.
" Nick's jaw did the thing, the losing-an-argument thing, except he wasn't losing this one, he was choosing it.
"So do it on paper. With the real numbers.
You own fifteen percent of this. You should get to see how bad the fifteen percent is. "
They did it in the corner booth — booth four, the one with the tear in the vinyl Stavros had patched with tape the exact red of the seat so you almost couldn't tell — with the folder open between them and two coffees going cold and the gloom finally breaking up outside into that hard noon gold that made the whole street look briefly like it was worth saving.
And it was bad. Dante had known it was bad from covers and checks, but the paper was worse: the rent alone, come October, would eat every dollar of a good month and start on a bad one.
There was no version of the current Skylark that survived seven thousand four hundred dollars.
Not with the current hours. Not with the current menu.
Not doing it the way Stavros had done it.
"So we don't do it the way he did it," Dante said, before he'd decided to say it, before he could remember he was leaving in nineteen days.
Nick's face started to close.
"Hear me out. The scramble stays." Dante put both hands flat on the table, the way you gentle a spooked line.
"Everything on that wall stays. I mean it — I didn't come here to bulldoze your dad, I came here to stand next to him.
But he's got you open six to two, breakfast and lunch, and then this whole beautiful room goes dark for eighteen hours a night in a neighborhood that is crawling, Nick, crawling, with people who would kill for exactly this at dinner.
Weekend dinner service. Friday, Saturday.
All-day breakfast, but at night — eggs and wine, comfort and a little bit of somewhere-else.
Your dad's classics and three things of mine next to them.
We fill this room after dark and we make the number make sense, and we do it loud, and we do it with the whole block, so that when the lease comes up we're not a diner nobody would miss — we're the thing the street shows up for. "
Nick was quiet for a long moment. Out on the floor Gloria had stopped refilling ketchups and was very obviously not-listening from behind the counter, the way she not-listened, with her whole body angled toward them.
"Sunny side," Nick said finally.
"What?"
"That's what he called the mood he wanted the place to have.
When I was a kid." Nick was looking at the folder, not at Dante, and his voice had gone somewhere careful.
"Anybody could walk in feeling like garbage and he'd get them a coffee and he'd say — every time, corny as hell — we'll get you sunny side up.
It's on a sign in the back office. Faded to nothing.
I forgot it was there." He looked up, and something in his face had come unlatched, just slightly, just enough.
"If we're doing this. If we're actually doing this.
That's what it's called. The dinner thing. Sunny Side."
Dante had spent three years in kitchens where naming a menu concept took a branding agency and a mood board and four thousand dollars.
He looked at this grumpy, grieving man handing him his dead father's phrase across a taped-up booth, and he had to look at the ketchups for a second, same as Nick had had to look at the ceiling on Sunday.
"Yeah," he said, when he could. "Sunny Side. That's — yeah."
"It can't just be a menu, though." Nick had a pen now, and a paper placemat turned over to the blank side, and he was — Dante clocked this with something dangerously close to tenderness — sketching a floor plan.
Numbers Nick could do. Numbers were where the man filed the feelings he wouldn't say out loud.
"If we open the room at night and nobody comes, we've spent money we don't have proving we should close.
It has to land the first weekend. It has to be full. "