Three Little Words

by Jenny Holiday

  She sighed plaintively. “One can dream.”

  He got out a shucking knife. “I have this thing about food waste. It makes me insane, basically.” He picked up one of the oysters and slid the blade between the shells. “Some of it is inevitable—it still makes me insane, mind you, even when it’s inevitable—but this was just outright stupidity. I hate throwing food away.”

  “My dad did, too. He used to have this thing he called the clean plate club. He never made you take anything, but if you took it—if you put it on your plate—you weren’t leaving until it went in your belly.”

  “Ah, I know this club. My nana was the same. I guess I grew up to be a card-carrying member.”

  “My mom used to be the opposite, though.” Gia stared into space like she was remembering, but it must not have been a nice memory, because her mouth was pinched. “She was obsessed with dieting. She’d take food off my plate when my dad wasn’t looking, and wrap it in napkins and throw it away. She was like the anti–clean plate club, I guess.”

  That was fucked up. Bennett paused in his shucking and eyed her. “I’ll pop your egg in and come back to this.”

  “No way! Eggs are for plebes. I’m having oysters for breakfast.”

  He grinned and resumed shucking.

  “But you should probably send something outside to the homeless guy.”

  “Oh, shit.” He’d completely forgotten about that. What had he just been thinking about Gia taking up all the space in a room? He poured a to-go cup of coffee and set about microwaving some leftover jambalaya he found in the fridge. “Excuse me for a sec.”

  He went outside—the guy had cleared the alley so the back door opened easily. He held out the coffee and food. “Thanks, man. You’re welcome to come in to eat this—get warmed up.”

  The man declined, so Bennett told him about pay-what-you-can-night and sent him on his way.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out a way to repurpose leftovers,” he said when he came back inside, returning to the topic of food waste as he resumed shucking oysters. “Food banks mostly take nonperishable stuff, but we don’t end up with much extra in the non-perishable department because we order only what we need. I mostly have the perishables down to a science, too, and honestly, the dumpster-diving crowd gets the rest, which sounds gross, but there’s a difference between produce that’s high-enough quality to serve here and produce that’s actually gone bad—a good few days’ difference. It’s the leftovers that dog me. You wouldn’t believe how much cooked food gets thrown away, either because we have a slow night and make too much or because people don’t finish their plates and don’t want doggie bags.” Which was another thing that drove him crazy. Who came to a nice place like his, spent money on dinner, and then declined to take the leftovers home? That was the problem with this fine dining bullshit; people were too hoity-toity for their own good. He would take pay-what-you-can night any day. That crowd always joined the goddamned clean plate club. “I wish there was a way to match up hungry people with leftovers.”

  “You know what you could do…” Gia’s brow furrowed like she was thinking hard. “Plug in a refrigerator outside—out back. Stick the leftovers in there. I read about something like this once when I was working in London. It became kind of a thing. Other people—not even people associated with the restaurant—would leave fresh food in there, too. Anyone who needed it could come and take it.”

  Bennett stopped shucking. He was dumbfounded. Because that was…simple. Effective. “Brilliant,” he declared.

  “You would probably have to do battle with city inspectors if they found out,” Gia went on. “But call it a community refrigerator.”

  Exactly. His limbs buzzed with excitement. He couldn’t yet afford his fully nonprofit restaurant—where every night was pay-what-you-can night—but a community refrigerator was a pretty good stepping stone. He even had a refrigerator in the kitchen that was underused; with a little reorganization, it could easily be moved outside.

  “You’d get some good press,” Gia went on. “I could help with that, if you like. Then the city becomes the big bad wolf who wants to throw away food and starve homeless people and stifle innovation and all that.”

  He slid a plate of shucked oysters to the middle of the table between them, then moved to a fridge to grab the trio of dipping sauces they served with oysters. “You are a genius.”

  She shrugged but also flushed a little. “Nah. That article just stuck with me for some reason.”

  “Well, thank you.” Gia might be hard to take sometimes, but she had just solved one of his most enduring, nagging problems. He decanted the sauces into three little dishes and gestured to them in turn. “Horseradish, traditional mignonette, and lemon dill.”

  Gia picked up an oyster, drizzled some of the lemon sauce—his favorite—on it, made an anticipatory noise that was half sigh, half moan, tilted her head back, and slurped it up.

  God help him.

  Oysters were supposedly aphrodisiacs. Bennett had never found them to be personally, but customers who ordered them often asked about the concept. He always answered that the scientific explanation was that they were loaded with amino acids that increased sex hormone production. And depending on how uptight his customers looked, he might add a joking wink-wink throwaway line about the oysters’ resemblance to a certain part of the female anatomy.

  But maybe he’d had it all wrong. Maybe the aphrodisiac power of oysters was in watching the right sort of person eat them.

  Gia lifted her head, but her eyes remained closed. Would she fall back on her post-tasting refrain?

  “Oh my God.”

  Yes. He was still batting a thousand. Not that he’d cooked the oyster or done anything to prepare it other than contract with the best supplier in the city and then throw together a simple sauce, but he’d take the credit anyway.

  Gia sighed—a big, heavy, contented one—and picked up another oyster. She was in her own world, not aware of him at all, so he was free to watch her graceful neck extend as she tipped her head back again. God, it was as bad as watching her eat the boudin balls, though this time she wasn’t doing it on purpose. Worse, maybe, because of the barely-there, delicate slurping noises she made as she transferred the oysters from their shells to her mouth.

  She worked her way through half a dozen while he watched, torturing himself.

  Then, as if she were coming out of a trance, she shook her head and looked down at the plate, then up at him.

  “I’m sorry! I’m hogging them all!” She slid the plate toward him, but he held his hands up.

  “Nah, that’s okay. They kind of lose their appeal when you have them around all the time.” Which wasn’t actually true, but the pleasure of eating oysters was nothing compared to the pleasure of watching Gia eat oysters. “They’re all yours.”

  A slow smile unfurled as she pulled the plate back.

  * * *

  Triumph.

  Gia hung up the phone and did a little victory wiggle-dance on her stool.

  “Well?” Bennett looked up from where he was doing prep work for the next day with a few members of his staff.

  “We can fly out of Baltimore tonight. The storm hit from Philly northward, so there are no flight disruptions there. I got us on a seven o’clock flight this evening, and the trains are still running out of Penn, so we’re set.”

  He flashed her a smile that…kind of took her breath away. There was just something about its crookedness coexisting with its intensity that got to her.

  Which was dumb. He was just happy they had a plan to get out of town. “What time’s the train?”

  “Three thirty.” She checked the time on her phone. “Which means we’re suddenly awash in time.” She was snowed in in New York City for the next several hours. What did she want to do?

  She only had to think about it for five seconds. Normally she wouldn’t even have needed to devote five, but she did spare a passing thought for the possible consequences if she messed up. But
Wendy seriously would not care if Gia showed up bald, as long as she brought the dress. It was just an informal beach wedding in front of a handful of friends.

  And anyway, Gia was an expert. She could always fix it later.

  There were also the endless expanses of white in Bennett’s apartment, but, once again, she was an expert.

  “Any chance I can go back to your place and kick back a little now that we’ve got the travel sorted?” she asked Bennett.

  “Sure.” He flipped her the keys. “You need me to come with you?”

  “Nope,” she said. “But I do need you to tell me where the closest CVS is.”

  An hour later, she had rinsed away all evidence of her efforts and was eyeing her handiwork critically in the mirror. It looked good. She’d achieved an even application, and her hairline wasn’t dyed too badly.

  Suck it, Lukas. Blondes do not have more fun.

  Unless she decided to be blond. She always had fun with her hair, no matter what color it was. Even though her first home dye job had been Lukas’s doing, today she changed up her hair because it was a creative outlet. A kind of liberation. It meant she wasn’t on a job. It meant she could be whoever she wanted to be.

  She smiled at her reflection. And today she was a badass on the way to a wedding.

  * * *

  When Bennett got home a little after one o’clock bearing lunch and planning to get his stuff together for the trip, Gia had blue hair.

  “Wow,” he said as she beamed at him and performed a twirl. He could only surmise that she’d done this to her hair on purpose.

  “Do you like it?”

  There was only one answer here, given her obvious excitement, and that was, “Yes.”

  It wasn’t bad. Per se. It was a sort of wash of color over her regular honey brown. The result was a kind of a pastel tint. There was something appealingly badass about it.

  But it was blue.

  Where he came from, only old ladies had blue hair.

  To be fair, women Gia’s age from his social circles in Charleston walked around with shellacked helmets of hair that made them look like their mothers ahead of their time, and this was certainly better than that.

  “I don’t have a job booked for at least the next month,” she said, as if this explained anything. He must have looked confused, because she added, “I can’t change anything dramatic about my appearance before a job, and I love dyeing my hair.”

  “You look like it’s 1977, and you’re off to a Ramones concert.”

  He’d meant that only as a statement of fact, but she must have taken it as a compliment. She flipped her hair and grinned.

  “I brought lunch.” He unloaded takeout containers from his bag and set one in front of her. “It’s only grilled cheese—Monday staff lunches are always simple—but these are made from the best gouda in the city.”

  “Oh, I’m not hungry.”

  How could she not be hungry? She’d eaten a dozen oysters five hours ago, and as delicious at they were, oysters weren’t exactly caloric powerhouses. Maybe she’d snacked while dyeing her hair.

  Whatever; not his problem. He would wrap it up, and she could eat it later.

  “Well, it’s a good thing you didn’t waste your photo on the coffee this morning,” he said between bites of his own sandwich. “Blue hair is much more photo-worthy than coffee.”

  “Oh, I never take pictures of myself.”

  “You document your life, but you’re never in the pictures?” That seemed kind of odd.

  “I pose for pictures for a living. I don’t need to do it in my spare time, too.”

  Put like that, he could see her logic. And to meet someone not obsessed with selfies was kind of refreshing.

  She got her camera out and opened it. “So I think I’ll just snap a shot of you in this gorgeous apartment.”

  He was in the middle of a particularly gooey bite of sandwich, so it took him a moment to answer. “Nah, you can do better than me and melted cheese.”

  “That’s true,” she said, but she winked at him, and her tone was warmer than it had been earlier.

  Man. It was going to be a long day. Gia Gallo was one complicated creature, and they had an epic journey ahead of them.

  Chapter Four

  Once Bennett and Miss Blue Hair had settled in on their train to Baltimore, Bennett let out a big sigh. They were finally on their way.

  He didn’t like to leave the restaurant. But damn, now that he was away from it, it was…almost nice? Bennett loved cooking. Feeding people was such a powerful, elemental thing: transforming ingredients in the best possible way in order to nourish people. To make them happy, maybe, too, if he was lucky. But the business side of things he could do without. Payroll, insurance, inventory. He understood that all that shit was necessary, that he wouldn’t have a restaurant without it. But honestly, he hated it. He hadn’t even really realized how much until he was faced with the prospect of a week away from it.

  Maybe he should give more serious thought to hiring a manager. He’d always resisted the idea, figuring that because he was so territorial, so obsessed with doing things his way, he’d be looking over the shoulder of anyone he hired anyway. So he just did everything himself. Lived and breathed Boudin. He had literally never taken more than two consecutive days off in the six years it had been open—and those had always included a Monday, when they were closed anyway. A week was unprecedented.

  But if there was anyone he’d take a vacation for, it was Noah. The two of them weren’t into displays of devotion, but they’d had a pretty serious bromance going there before Noah left town. Bennett was aware that he kept people at a distance since the accident. Even the girlfriends he’d had, he could see, in retrospect, he had somehow failed to fully let into his heart. But Noah had easily become a friend, probably out of sheer proximity. They lived in the same building, and Noah used to come to Boudin almost every day after work. He was a night owl, so they’d often go out after Bennett closed the restaurant, Noah for a beer and Bennett for an iced tea.

  Plus Noah was just a good guy. They had a lot in common. They both worked a ton. Neither of them was into the party scene. And they both had almost singular priorities. His was the restaurant; Noah’s had been the well-being of his sister and mother, whom he’d supported since he was a teenager and his dad died.

  Shit, he missed Noah. It was hard to stomach the fact that he was never coming back to New York. Perhaps some trips to Toronto were in order. Now that Bennett was embarking on this whole strange “take a vacation” thing, maybe he could do it again?

  “Hey,” he said to Gia, who was staring out the window. “What’s the weather like in Toronto?”

  “Oh, you know, it’s Canada,” she said mildly. “We all live in igloos.”

  He suppressed a grin. “That can’t be true, because I source some award-winning Riesling from the Niagara region of Canada, and I’m pretty sure igloos and climates that can support vineyards don’t coexist. So there must be some part of that country that isn’t freezing.”

  “Toronto’s not that different than New York, actually,” she said. “Hot and humid in the summer. Some snow in the winter, but also some rain and slush. When you get outside of the city, though, you get some really good snow.”

  “Good snow,” he said, teasing her. “I’m not sure I understand those two words together.”

  “See? You do miss Charleston!”

  His impulse was to say no, but maybe she was right. “I miss some parts of Charleston,” he conceded. “The weather, for sure. I can’t wait to hit the beach in Florida.”

  “Ugh.” She wrinkled her nose.

  “Ugh? Who says ugh about a beach? Beaches, like, calm your soul and shit.”

  “And get sand in your unmentionable areas. I’ve done enough posing on beaches to make me immune to them. Give me a forest for soul-calming purposes any day. I’ve been looking into this St. Petersburg place.” She got out her phone, punched at it for a second, and handed it to him. S
he had called up a web page for a place called Boyd Hill Nature Preserve. “I’m a big hiker, but I’ve never spent any time in southern forests, so it’s gonna be all cool and creepy. You guys have some weird-ass trees.”

  “The South does have some weird-ass trees. In my house growing up, our yard had a bunch of live oaks with moss hanging from them. You get used to them, but objectively speaking, they’re kind of eerie.”

  “You miss those trees,” she said.

  “Yes.” He did miss those trees. He hadn’t thought about them in years, but he did. He used to climb up into them when he was a kid, with a bagful of his nana’s famous pecan shortbread.

  “But not your family?”

  He missed Nana. But she was dead. Had been since he was ten, way before his life went off the rails, which he was glad about. She’d never had to see him at his worst. “No,” he said firmly. “I don’t miss them.”

  “So you miss the weather and the trees.” Gia’s tone was skeptical, like that wasn’t enough. Like he was withholding some portion of the truth. And she was right.

  “I got my start in the restaurant business in Charleston, from this legendary local guy named Marc Lalande. He taught me everything I know. I miss him, and his restaurant.”

  He did miss Lalande. A lot. He had been more than a mentor. He had been the father Bennett needed when he broke with his parents. He had taught Bennett how to cook, but also how to be in the world. How to be a decent man.

  “How long since you’ve been back?” Gia asked.

  “I’ve actually only been back once since I left, which was fourteen years ago.” That trip had not been pleasant. It had been too hard, it turned out, to suddenly be back in the land of his misspent youth. It was irrational, but he’d spent the visit constantly looking over his shoulder, alternately hoping and dreading that he might run into his parents.

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “You know that saying, ‘You can’t go home again’?”

  She looked at him for a long time, her amber eyes seeming to bore into his soul, but then suddenly she turned and pointed out the window. “What do you think? Picture-worthy? In a there’s-beauty-in-decay kind of way?”