Chapter 5
Full Flame
At six-fifteen, fifteen minutes before the first Sunny Side dinner in the history of the Skylark, the dining room was empty and Nick was certain, with a calm that felt almost restful, that they had made a terrible mistake.
He stood at the pass and looked out at it — the tables Dante had insisted they turn ninety degrees so the room felt less like a lunch counter and more like an evening, the votives Marisol had donated from the flower shop, the CLOSED-FOR-A-PRIVATE-EVENT card in the window, the chalkboard where Dante's handwriting spelled out longganisa and loukaniko and a thing called ube br?lée that Nick still didn't entirely believe in.
Two weeks of prep. A menu tested to death.
Wine Nick had paid for out of the account that could not afford wine.
And a room, at six-fifteen, containing exactly zero people.
"Nobody's coming," he said.
"It's six-fifteen." Dante came through from the kitchen wiping his hands, and he'd changed — a clean chef's coat, sleeves still shoved up, the calamansi branch and the kain na showing.
He looked, Nick registered with the part of his brain that had stopped cooperating weeks ago, extremely good.
"Nobody comes at six-fifteen to a thing that starts at six-thirty.
That's a rule. You want them to walk in and see a full room, not be the full room. "
"You've done this before."
"I've opened rooms, yeah." Something crossed his face and left. "Never one I cared if it worked."
The votives guttered. Gloria moved through the room straightening things that were already straight, which was how Gloria prayed.
Nick took out his phone, looked at it, put it away.
He'd texted Thea that morning — first Sunny Side tonight, 6:30, there's a seat with your name on it — and gotten back three dots that appeared, thought about it, and vanished.
She hadn't set foot in the diner since April.
She loved this place and couldn't stand to be inside it, both at full volume, the way she did everything, and Nick had learned the hard way not to push.
Still. He'd have liked her to see the room turned ninety degrees.
He'd have liked her to see it full before she signed her half of it away to a man with a gray font.
"She's not coming," he said, to nobody.
"There's a lot of night left." Which wasn't a yes and wasn't a lie, and Dante squeezed his shoulder once on the way back to the line.
At six-thirty-one the bell went, and it was Marisol from the flower shop with her husband and her sister, and then it was the record-store guy and two of the vintage kids cleaned up unrecognizably, and then it was a whole table of Cambodian aunties who had, Gloria informed Nick in an undertone, personally guaranteed the turnout and would be personally offended if the loukaniko came out dry — and then it was, impossibly, a line.
An actual line, out the door Stavros had picked to look glad to see you, down the sidewalk under the broken bird, people Nick had never seen in his life reading the chalkboard and waiting to get into his father's dark diner on a Friday night.
Manny came in his good shirt, the one with a collar, and stood in the doorway a moment looking up at the chalkboard like a man reading a headstone that had surprised him by being kind.
Delfin ordered the loukaniko and then, when it landed, ordered the longganisa too — "for research.
" Somebody's kid drew on a votive with a crayon.
The record-store guy dropped a five in a tip jar that hadn't existed an hour ago and said, "Don't you dare let them close this," to Nick's face, like Nick had a say, like anybody who loved a thing ever got the vote on whether they kept it.
Nick stood at the pass and felt something come loose in his chest that he did not have a name or a plan for.
"Breathe," Dante said, passing behind him, close, one hand landing flat between Nick's shoulder blades for exactly one second — long enough to steady him, short enough to deny later.
"You're going to run food and pour wine.
That's your whole job. I've got the board.
Go be the guy whose dad built this place.
That's the only thing they came to see anyway. "
***
The flat-top nearly killed them at eight-ten, because of course it did.
Slammed — forty covers in the room and the aunties on their second bottle and a ticket rail gone solid — the old griddle picked that exact moment to remind everyone whose kitchen this had originally been, the pilot on the far burner guttering low so the whole hot side dropped thirty degrees mid-rush.
Nick saw it happen the way you see a tray start to tip: the sear stopped searing, the tickets started to back, and for one bad second the entire night hung there ready to fall.
Dante didn't even look up. "Nick. Long match, top drawer, left of the sink. Don't reach over the flame, reach under."
Nick found it. Nick, who could not cook, who had spent his whole life on the money side of that pass telling himself the kitchen was his father's country and not his, got down on the greasy floor with a long match and relit his father's burner from underneath while a chef he was in serious trouble over called a service back from the dead above his head — and when the flame caught blue and the hot side came roaring back, Dante said, "There he is," in a voice so warm and unguarded that Nick nearly stayed down on the floor just to have a reason not to show his face.
The next twenty minutes were the closest thing to war Nick had stood inside since the funeral home, and Dante ran them like a man born to it.
He worked the whole line by himself — there was no line, it was just him, one man and forty covers and a griddle with a grudge — and he never raised his voice and he never dropped a plate and he found, somewhere in each stacked ticket, the exact half-second of slack that let the next one through.
Nick had watched his father cook his entire life and had never once wanted to be back there in the heat, in the country that wasn't his.
Watching Dante, for the first time, he almost did.
Not to cook. Just to stand that close to somebody that good at the thing they loved.
They found a rhythm after that. More than a rhythm.
Nick ran plates and poured wine and told the story of the diner forty times to forty strangers, and every time he turned back to the pass Dante was there with the next round up, hot, together, correct, meeting Nick's eyes over the rail with a look that said we're doing it, we're actually doing it — and somewhere in the middle of it, without deciding to, Nick started to enjoy himself.
In his father's diner. For the first time since the funeral.
The realization arrived and he braced for the guilt to follow it, the way it always followed, and it just — didn't. There was too much light in the room for it.
Once, reaching past each other at the pass — Nick for a wine glass, Dante for a plate — they collided, hip to hip, and neither of them apologized or moved for a half-second longer than the collision strictly required.
Dante grinned down at his rail. Nick went back out to the floor with his ears hot and a stupid thing happening to his mouth that he had to physically put away before he reached the aunties' table.
Gloria caught it. Gloria caught everything.
She said nothing, which from Gloria was practically a wedding toast.
Then, at nine-forty, the sign came back.
Nobody caused it. That was the thing Nick would hold onto.
He was carrying a tray of ube br?lée past the front windows when the streetlight outside stuttered, some surge off the block or the grid or God, and out on the pole above the door the dead wing of the skylark — dark since his birthday, dark since before his father was cold — sputtered, caught, and burned.
Gold. The whole bird, both wings, the way it hadn't been in the better part of a year, throwing its glad light down onto the sidewalk and the line and the room full of people who had come to save it.
It shouldn't have meant anything. It was a neon tube and a power surge, and Nick had a spare transformer in the back he'd been too broke and too heartsick to install.
But his father had bought that bird to say glad to see you before you got through the door, and for ten months it had been saying it with one wing, and now, tonight, of all the nights —
The whole dining room saw it through the glass and erupted — the aunties on their feet, the vintage kids whooping, Gloria pressing both hands to her mouth — and Nick stood there in the middle of it holding a tray of dessert his father had never heard of, under a sign his father had bought to look glad, fully lit for the first time in a year, and he laughed.
Out loud. Helpless. The first real one in ten months, the kind that used up his whole chest, standing there laughing at a light bulb in front of a hundred people while his eyes did something that was absolutely, definitely just the votives.
It felt like permission. That was the closest Nick could get to it later — that the sign coming back felt like his father reaching down through a bad power grid to flip the CLOSED card in his son's chest over to OPEN, to say the one thing Nick had spent ten months refusing to hear: You're allowed.
Fill the room. Change the eggs. Let the kid in. You're allowed to still be glad.
Across the room, at the pass, Dante had stopped cooking to watch him do it.
***
The last of them went home a little after eleven, fed and loud and promising to come back, promising to tell people, promising the way happy people over-promise, and then it was just the wreckage and the quiet and the two of them, and Dante's whole body was still humming like a struck pan.
He carried the last bus tub out to the alley to breathe.