Chapter 4 #2
"So we make it an event." Dante leaned in over the placemat.
"Not a soft open — a loud one. One night, invite the whole block.
The vintage shops, the record store, the flower guys, every regular and their cousin.
Free tastes of the Sunny Side menu, wine, door open, lights on.
We turn the relaunch into a thing the neighborhood throws for itself.
People don't fight to save a diner. They fight to save the place something happened to them. "
"That's a lot of free food."
"It's marketing you can eat. Cheaper than a single ad and it can't be scrolled past." He was moving now, the old engine turning over — the good version of it, the version he'd forgotten he still had under the burnout.
"And it does the other thing. Meridian's whole story is that this block is empty and tired and ready to be scraped flat.
So we make a liar out of them. We get a hundred people through that door in one night, somebody takes a picture, and suddenly the Skylark isn't a tear-down, it's the reason the street's still alive.
You can't bulldoze the thing everybody just showed up for. "
Gloria had given up all pretense and come to stand at the end of the booth, dish towel over her shoulder, looking down at the placemat and the two heads bent over it.
"Marisol at the flower shop still runs the merchants' association," she said.
"She loved your father. She'd put it in the newsletter, she'd talk the whole block into it.
And half of Cambodia Town owes this diner a favor or a funeral.
" She tapped the placemat once, decisive.
"You want the room full, you don't buy an ad. You ask the aunties."
Nick looked up at her, then at Dante, then back down at the floor plan he'd drawn on the back of a placemat like a man who had, at some point in the last twenty minutes and entirely against his better judgment, started to believe this might actually work.
"Two weeks," he said. "First Friday of Sunny Side dinner, two weeks out.
Quiet — just the block, no promises. See if the room fills, see if the food holds under fire.
" He set the pen down and squared it to the edge of the placemat, without thinking, the way he squared everything.
"If it works, we build. We've got till the end of September to make this place impossible to close. So we make it impossible."
"Impossible," Dante agreed, and did not think about the fact that the end of September was a great deal further away than the end of the month, and that he had already promised a man in a vest he'd be somewhere else by then.
***
They stayed late to test the menu, which was the second surprising thing, because staying late together was exactly the activity two magnets set to repel should have known better than to schedule.
The gloom had come back for the evening.
The floor was dark, the chairs up on the tables, and it was just the two of them in the cone of light over the range, Dante cooking and Nick tasting — Nick, who couldn't cook, turning out to have a palate like a trap, catching the half-gram of fish sauce in the adobo gravy, the exact place the ube pancake went from interesting to too much.
They worked through it plate by plate. Longganisa next to loukaniko, the two sausages arguing happily on the same board.
Calamansi where Stavros would've put lemon.
Garlic rice under a fried egg with a lace of crisp Dante finally let himself want on purpose.
"That one," Nick said, around a forkful, and it was the closest thing to joy Dante had seen on him. "Don't touch that one. That one's done."
"You like it."
"I said don't touch it. That's Roussos for I like it." Nick reached for the calamansi to squeeze more over the rice, and Dante reached to move the hot pan out of his way, and their hands met on the handle.
Neither of them let go.
It wasn't the counting-a-till distance and it wasn't the two-inches distance — it was no distance, Nick's hand warm and rough over the back of Dante's on a pan handle, and the whole loud repelling machinery of two days just quit, the way a fridge compressor quits, leaving a silence you didn't know had a sound until it stopped.
Dante could smell the garlic and the char and, under it, Nick — coffee and clean sweat and something that was just him.
Nick wasn't pulling away. Nick was looking at their hands like the number was finally coming out right.
One second. Two. Three, which was one whole second longer than anything that could still be called an accident.
Dante's phone buzzed against his hip. Rey. End of the month, D.
He didn't check it. But he felt it — the little mechanical insistence of it, buzzing right there against the exact place he kept his one foot out the door — and it was enough. He slid his hand out from under Nick's, easy, smiling, sunshine snapping back on like a breaker thrown.
"Plate's done," he said lightly. "You're going to make me burn something twice in one day."
"Right." Nick straightened, cleared his throat, took his hand back. "Late."
"Late," Dante agreed.
But he stood there after Nick had gone to kill the lights, holding a pan he didn't need to be holding, feeling the ghost of a rough warm hand over his and the buzz of an escape hatch against his hip, and understood, with the specific dread of a man watching his own house catch, that he was in a lot of trouble.
He had a signed lease waiting in the Arts District and a dead man's kindness in his mouth and a co-owner whose I like it was a threat, and every single one of his careful rules for staying light was currently on fire.
One foot out, he told himself.
The other foot, he noticed, had not moved from this kitchen in eleven days.