Chapter 5
The compressor came on the first of March, and Jared Soto came with it.
She hadn’t hired him. He turned up in the alley behind a flatbed with a man she didn’t know, and when she came out he was already up on the tailgate with his hands on the crate, and he said, “You’re going to want this through the back,” which was correct.
“Who are you.”
“Jared. Soto.” He got a corner up. “I do the Boyles’ place. Frank Dietz said you had a walk-in with a dead compressor and a doorframe that’s out of square, and he said the doorframe is a bigger problem, and he’s right.”
“Frank Dietz talks a lot.”
“He does.” He looked at her over the crate. “I’m not here to be hired. I’m here because that crate’s four hundred pounds and you’ve got two hands and only one of them works.”
She thought about being insulted and decided not to bother.
They got it through the back door on a pallet jack borrowed from the Mercantile and it took two hours and most of her vocabulary.
Afterward he stood in the middle of her kitchen with his hands on his hips looking up at the ceiling, and then at the floor, and then at the swinging door, which had never hung straight in her lifetime.
“That’s not the door,” he said. “That’s the building. Whole corner’s gone down about an inch and a half since they put the stone step in.”
“1911.”
“Sure. That’s about how long an inch and a half takes.” He toed the soft place in front of the service door. “You get a jack under there and you take it back up over about two weeks, quarter turn a day, and everything else in here stops being wrong.”
“What does that cost?”
He told her. It was less than the roof and more than she had.
“I’ll get back to you,” she said.
“Sure.” He picked up his coat. At the back door he stopped. “It’s a good room out there.”
“It’s a wreck.”
“No, it isn’t,” he said. “It’s dirty. That’s different.”
* * *
She did the numbers that night, properly, for the first time.
Not the list on the back of a delivery sheet. The real thing, on paper, at the long window table, with her father’s old ledger open beside her for the shape of it, because the shape of it is the only part you can’t invent.
Covers. Cost per cover. Winter covers versus July covers, which in this village is the difference between forty and two hundred. What she’d need in the door on a Tuesday in March to not be losing money, which turned out to be a number so small it embarrassed her.
She had nine thousand dollars of her own in a credit union account in Suttons Bay that had been her father’s and had never had Seth’s name anywhere near it.
She had a building, free and clear, with no note on it.
She had, she realized somewhere around two in the morning, been handed the only thing she had ever wanted, and it had cost her a marriage and three fingertips, and she was not going to waste it.
She wrote at the top of a clean page: Open Friday, March 20. Dinner only. Wednesday through Sunday.
Then she wrote: You have done this before.
Then she sat back and looked at both sentences and started to shake, and it was not from the cold.
She went through the building after that with a flashlight and a notebook, room by room.
The walk-in needed a compressor and the compressor needed three-phase and there was three-phase, because her father had put it in for a dough sheeter he never bought.
The hood was sound. Two of the four burners on the north range wanted new thermocouples, which is a forty-dollar part and an afternoon.
The ice machine was dead and she was not replacing it; you can buy bagged ice from the Mercantile for less than the machine costs to sit there.
The dining room floor was the dining room floor. Eighty years of people, oiled twice a year until it stopped being oiled twice a year, and it would take a week and a drum sander and she was not going to do it, because a sanded floor in a room like that looks like a bank.
Upstairs she did not go.
She stood at the bottom of the back stairs with the flashlight pointed up them and did not go, and wrote rooms — later on a clean line and closed the notebook.
When she was done she had four pages and a number at the bottom, and the number was survivable, and she sat at the long window table and understood that she had been doing this sum in her head, in pieces, on and off, for eight years, the way you keep touching a tooth.
* * *
She hired four people in eight days and two of them had worked for her father.
Dot Feddema came out of retirement to run the floor, at sixty-nine, on the condition that nobody ever ask her to carry more than two plates at once, which she then ignored from the first Friday onward.
The Dietz girl, Renata, nineteen and fast and rude, on the pass.
A boy named Cody Cutter, Marla’s nephew, who could not cook but could wash and did it like he was angry at it, which is the correct way.
And Marilyn Tibbet, who had been her father’s sauté cook for twelve years and had spent the last eight frying whitefish in a bar on the Peninsula road, and who came in and stood in the kitchen and put one hand flat on the stainless and said, “Well,” and had to go stand in the walk-in for a minute.
Talia understood entirely. She went out and stood at the pass and waited.
That was the week Talia stopped sleeping properly and started sleeping well, which are different things.
She was up at four and down at midnight and she ached in places she had forgotten could ache, and she came up the back stairs every night with her calves on fire and lay down and went out like a light.
In February she had lain awake in a hospital bed and then in a cold room, and the nights had been ten hours long. In March they were four hours and they went past like a hand going over a table.
Everybody tells you work is a way of not feeling things, and it is, and they say that as though it were a failing. Talia Lassiter would have told anybody who asked that March was the first month since the Christmas before last when she had woken up and known what she was for.
* * *
They opened on Friday, March 20, at five in the afternoon.
She did not advertise it. There was nothing to advertise with. Marla Cutter put a card up by the register and Bailey told the fire department and Frank Dietz told everyone he had ever met, and that was the whole of it.
The first party came at ten to five and stood outside because the door was still locked. By quarter past five there were nineteen people in the dining room. By six there were forty-one and the private room was open, which her father never would have allowed.
At twenty past seven Dot came through the swinging door and said, “There’s a line.”
“A what?”
“On the sidewalk. There’s a line, Talia.”
She went out through the dining room with a towel in her hand and looked through the glass of her own front door.
There were maybe fifteen people out there in the cold, in coats, on the sidewalk in front of a building that had been shut for eight years, waiting to get into a dining room in a village of four hundred people on a Friday night in March.
Walt was at the front of it. He had put on a tie.
Behind him were the Dietzes and two of Marla’s brothers and a couple she did not recognize who had driven from Northport because somebody had told somebody.
Ed Coughlin’s wife. A man from the road commission with his mother.
Ruthie Danko, at eighty-four, in a wheelchair her grandson had pushed a quarter mile in March because Ruthie had heard the Tierney House was open and had said, apparently, “Well then I’m going. ”
They had been outside in the cold for twenty minutes and not one of them had knocked.
Talia could never explain this to anybody from anywhere else, and she had tried, at tables, with summer people, and watched it not land.
They would not knock. It would have been rude.
They stood on a wet sidewalk in March in front of a building they had all eaten in as children and waited for a woman to be ready, because she had been in a ditch six weeks earlier and everybody knew it.
She stood behind the door where they couldn’t see her and pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth and then she went back to the kitchen and told Marilyn to fire everything.
* * *
There is a thing that happens to a cook about forty minutes into a service that is going wrong in the right way, and Talia had not felt it in eight years and had forgotten it existed.
The tickets go up faster than the food comes off and there is a point where you can either panic or go somewhere else, and if you go somewhere else the whole room narrows to about three feet of steel in front of you and time stops being a thing that applies.
She could not hold a knife. She stood at the pass and ran it with her voice and her left hand and thirty years in that building, and at some point around seven she heard herself say “heard” and “away” and “walk in two” in a voice that was her father’s exactly, and Marilyn looked up once across the line and did not say anything.
They did ninety-six covers.
She hadn’t ordered for ninety-six. They ran out of whitefish at half past eight and out of potatoes at nine, and the last twenty people got what there was, which was beans and rice and a fried egg on it, which is what she had fed the whole village in February, and three separate tables told her it was the best thing they’d eaten all year.
At eleven the room was empty and the front door was locked and Renata was singing something unpleasant in the dish pit and Dot was sitting down for the first time in six hours.
Talia counted the drawer at the long window table.
She did it twice, because the first number seemed like a mistake.
It was not a mistake. After food cost, after the four of them, after the gas, she had made nine hundred and sixty dollars in one night in a building she had been told for eight years was a nice idea for someday.
She put her forehead down on her grandfather’s table and stayed there a while.