Any food lover who happened to wander through that corridor of the Midwest would end up at the store; in a region sparsely stocked with food destinations, the place was a Venus flytrap for gastronomes running low on inspiration or imported mostarda. So it was no surprise to walk into the bakery one morning and find a chef whose picture he recognized from Food & Wine. She was short and muscular as a fireplug, with rough blond hair and flat gray eyes. She’d been bent over the stainless steel work surface, pressing tart dough into shells in a blur of thumbs. At first Harry found it odd—why would a chef of her stature be screwing around in a Michigan pastry kitchen? But later, after a couple of years on the island, he came to understand. A cook cooked. Even while traveling, even while doing professional or personal research, a cook found it anathema to stroll through town like a tourist.
Amanda had bought an old restaurant building and set about calling on her contacts to staff it. She’d been leery of Milwaukee and Chicago cooks, fearing that anyone comfortable in a large city would go crazy on the quiet island almost immediately. He’d followed her to the island and persuaded Shelley to join him for one reason: he thought Amanda was a visionary. Her argument was that the island was locked in that destructive tourist-and-townie pattern that always ruined a place with more natural beauty than steady industry.
Harry agreed. He thought the psychology of tourist towns was like that of abusive marriages, a tangle of resentment and financial need. Or he thought so before he arrived, when he still had time and energy to theorize about things like the psychology of tourist towns. Once he was there, he was too busy being a lowly prep cook, the only one without significant kitchen experience and therefore the one dedicated to peeling vegetables, skimming stocks, picking over beans. At first it was awful. It was painful in the muscles and the back and the joints, and Harry realized that zipping around the store chitchatting with regulars about expensive sardines had not prepared him for the daily monotony of manual labor. He’d been snappish with Shelley and silent at work, mortified to have taken the two of them there so they could maximize both their penury and their misery. Shelley kept complaining about a cook named Jeff, whom Harry found abrasive and loudmouthed and who liked to enumerate his scars among the line cooks but nattered on about sun salutations and centering when he was on pastry next to Shelley. Her tone when she bitched about Jeff suggested that such a creature would never have come into her life without Harry’s direct intervention, and maybe she was right.
Harry soon longed for department meetings, tedious subtitled movies, the stately green civilization of campus, and the petulant undergrads who answered their cell phones in class. Even at the salmon cannery he hadn’t felt so lost—that had been dangerous and unpleasant work, but finite and edifying. It was worth knowing what a factory job was really like, how to go to a shady bar and hold his own. But on the island, with no end date in sight, Harry had felt completely unmoored. Why had he ever gotten this degree or that fellowship if the long-term plan was only to separate stones from beans? For the first time he’d felt that he might be slumming. Worse, that he was trying to slum and yet not even skilled enough to be above his own job.
But after a few weeks he began to settle into his routine. He realized he loved the frigid early mornings on the island, the sounds of wildlife outside the kitchen windows, the undulating shoreline of the stony beaches, the way a beer and a cheeseburger tasted shockingly delicious and earned when your muscles were tired and your brain fizzed with exhaustion.
As original employees began to depart, he took on more duties. He found himself within earshot as Amanda developed her dishes, and he got to see how many iterations they might go through before one met her standards. Usually he thought a dish was fine right from the start, but he learned to listen to Amanda talking about its proportions and food costs, how the wording on the menu suggested what the experience of a dish would be, and how plating naturally showed one the most enjoyable way to eat it. It was a lot like writing a thesis, actually, that same process of gathering information around a rough kernel of thought, a vague sense of flavor combination that might lurk in the back of the mind, and then the editing and revising and rearranging.
Soon he was learning how to cook on the line, starting with salads and apps and trying out the meat station on a slow night. When a line of tickets stretched before him, his mind went as quiet as it ever could—not truly quiet, perhaps, but hyperfocused on a series of concrete actions strung before him like beads on a necklace. The nights passed so quickly he sometimes felt a little drunk when they were over. And if Amanda became more irritable and silent as the busy season drew to a close, if that idiot Jeff kept sidling up to Shelley to talk about his great-grandmother’s sourdough starter, which he claimed his family had nurtured for three generations, and if, most tellingly, Shelley had stopped bitching about Jeff altogether, Harry could take that. He barely noticed any of it for a full three years, until finally Amanda had to pull him aside and tell him the restaurant was closing. He’d been shocked, though he had no right to be. It should have been obvious from the dwindling tickets and the early nights, but Harry had been enjoying spending the free time trying out his own dishes, aping Amanda’s process to see if it worked for him too. It was embarrassing to be a scholar, a close reader, who’d failed to look up long enough to take in what everyone else seemed to have known for months.
Amanda had planned to feed the restaurant and the island at once, and it would have worked if only none of them had been human. But they could do it just so long out there, gorgeous though the setting was. After a while it didn’t matter if they were milling their own flour and smoking their own trout. You could labor away in obscurity for only so long before someone had to come in the door and give you money.
On his last night on the island, Amanda invited him to dinner at her cottage. It was just the two of them, because everyone else had already dispersed. The night had had an air of mourning and relief. Amanda’s blond hair was down around her shoulders, and she wore faded black jeans and a T-shirt as she bustled around her kitchen while Harry sliced a few rounds of hard salami and set them on a plate next to olives and pickled peppers. An open bottle of red wine sat on the table beside two juice glasses. The rest of her glassware was already boxed. They’d cleaned out the restaurant supplies after the final night, hauling away the last wedges of cheese and tins of anchovy, a few quarts of cream and buttermilk. On a plate on her counter sat two pork chops and a handful of chopped bacon, which he knew had come from the walk-in.
“So where do you go tomorrow?” Amanda asked. She glanced at him over her shoulder, her gray eyes startlingly pale in the dimming light of the kitchen.
“I’m going to run through Ann Arbor and see a few people, I guess. And then I’m not sure. Just get a job while I decide the next thing. Maybe I’ll finish my dissertation. I don’t know. What about you?”
She lifted her hands in gesture of uncertainty and then sat down opposite him, took a slice of salami, and peeled off its wrapping.
“Sorry, I forgot to take that off,” Harry said.
Amanda shrugged. “I have enough savings for a little while. But really the only thing to do at this point is get another cooking job.” Harry searched her face for embarrassment, but she looked unperturbed. He was beginning to realize that the closing of a restaurant was old hat in this industry, an understanding that still shocked him a little. It hadn’t occurred to him while he was killing himself that it could be so likely to fail. That was what had been harder than anything else, harder than Shelley ditching him, which turned out to be kind of easy. It had never occurred to him that the work, that insane and endless work, would not pay off.
Amanda was saying, “I’ll probably start thinking about the next place, start looking for backers at some point. Right now I just want to put my head down and cook for a while. I’ll just start talking to people, see who needs a new chef.”
Harry had nodded thoughtfully. It sounded a lot better than returning to acade
mia, which would require a certain amount of groveling before an adviser or two, and for what? To pick up research he now could barely recall.
“You’d give me a reference, right?” he said.
“I’d give you a limb.”
“It’s hard to imagine going back into academia. Maybe eventually. Or maybe I should keep going with this. Look for a line cook position or something.”
“You can aim higher than that,” she said. “You got a real crash course. Normally I wouldn’t say that, but you did end up doing a lot here. Something to think about.”
“Maybe my brothers need a sous chef,” Harry had said. He laughed, trying to imagine an interview with Leo and Britt, how quickly it would devolve into some childhood mockery. They might even start there.
“You’re from Pennsylvania, right? Where, near Philadelphia?”
“Sort of. It’s a good hour and a half away, but getting more transplants from the city. My brothers’ place is probably the nicest one in town, which is why it’s at the edge of a far nicer town. A few years ago I think I’d have been doing chicken Alfredo day in and day out. But I hear it’s starting to change.”
It occurred to him that a few of the Italian and Eastern European grocery stores his parents had once taken them to might still exist. His parents had never been ardent eaters, except for the occasional adventure of hauling the boys into a different neighborhood for a particular item. Then they went back to chicken à la king and baked spaghetti until another craving hit.
As he thought about this, Harry experienced a longing to be in Linden, if only for a visit. He wanted to see if any of those places still existed, if any new ones had sprung up. Most likely there were now Middle Eastern, Indian, and Asian shops scattered around the area. As he sipped his wine at Amanda’s table, he started thinking about an ice cream place he’d forgotten about till just then, about the doughnut shop he used to visit after the bars closed to buy apple fritters at three a.m., straight out of the fryer. Some of it was curiosity, some of it was nostalgia; most of it was weariness.
Amanda poured more wine into his glass and got up to start the bacon. Harry watched her work, feeling exhausted but peaceful, happy to observe the elegant way she flipped the bacon in its hot pan, the rush of the gas flame, the comforting sizzle of fat and the rich, smoky-sweet scent that filled the room.
THE KNOCK AT THE RESTAURANT WINDOW sounded just before dark, startling him. He’d been sitting at the bar, hunched over a spread of uniform catalogs and information on various types of point-of-sale software, all of which cost several thousand more than he’d intended to spend on servers with pads and pens. Well, Britt’s money could cover the POS system. When Harry looked up, he saw only a homeless guy at the window, knocking and waving. He waved back, then raised both hands helplessly and shrugged. Just how many guys were going to be knocking at the kitchen door, or the front door, and asking for handouts?
The man moved on, and as he disappeared Harry sighed and picked up his phone. He’d been avoiding it for days, maybe weeks, but he was alone in downtown Linden in his empty restaurant space not long before the opening, and no one would know.
“Harry,” she said, sounding entirely unsurprised.
“Hi, Shell. How’s it going out there?”
A gusty sigh. “Oh,” she said, “it’s moving along. We got a nice review in the paper the other day. That’s something. Except it was one of those lame ones where they just describe. You know, ‘The salad has cucumber, tomato, and carrot and a choice of dressing.’ That kind of thing.”
“You’re serving that kind of salad?” Harry said.
“No, we’re serving local greens and a tarragon vinaigrette, Harry. I was making a point.”
“Oh.”
“Right.”
Harry tapped his pen on the bar. It was never easy talking to Shelley. She always seemed to be responding to something happening just beyond your shoulder, or something you’d said in your last conversation but didn’t remember. “I’m opening a place of my own,” he blurted. “With my brother. He just signed on.”
“I thought you hated your brothers,” she said mildly.
“Of course I don’t hate my brothers,” Harry protested. “Jesus, when did I ever say that?”
“It was more something one sensed. You seemed to have a lot of unresolved feelings toward them. And they never came to visit.”
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t easy for them to get away from Winesap. You know how that goes. I certainly never said I hated them.”
“Which one?”
“Which what?”
“You said one brother signed on. Which one, the shallow one or the serious one?”
Harry gave up. “The shallow one,” he said, then amended: “Britt.”
“Well, that should be helpful,” Shelley said. “It’s not like he has to be your spiritual guide. He probably has a good eye for color and whatnot. Jeff does too, but there’s more to him than that.”
“That’s nice,” said Harry. “Listen—”
“Let me send you a link,” Shelley said. “To our website. I’d love your opinion. But also I think you might enjoy seeing the scenery out here. Why didn’t we ever go to Northern California, Harry?”
“We were indentured to Amanda, for one thing. And for another, you hate flying and you were sure California would be a pollen-swarm.”
“I don’t think I thought that.”
“I really do.”
“Hmm. Well, I was wrong. Here, I sent it. Got it?”
Harry opened his e-mail, clicked the link in her message, and up popped the browser with their website. La Nonna. No bad Godfather music played; no scary mustachioed chefs leered out from the page. Harry couldn’t help but be relieved. He’d had no idea what kind of horror show Jeff might come up with in service to a pizza place. You just never knew what people would do once they were making all the decisions. But the images looked clean and crisp, the restaurant interior warm and inviting and casual, farmhouse tables and high ceilings and a fire roaring in the background.
“You’re right,” he said. “It looks great. Good for you, Shell. You guys did a nice job. Never occurred to me Jeff would be capable of it.”
“I know what you mean,” she said, “but I’m proud of it too. Thank you, Harry.”
“You’re welcome.”
“If you ever come out this way, we’d love to buy you dinner. Bring your brother. Or bring a girl if you’re seeing one. Are you seeing anyone?”
“Shelley. I need something from you.” He heard the plea plucked from his mouth as if on a hook: his voice didn’t even sound like his own.
“What’s that?”
“I just want your input. I need your opinion on what I’m doing here.”
She made a murmuring, noncommittal sound. “I don’t think you need me. Why else do you have your brother?”
“That’s why I need you,” he admitted. “I prodded these guys for months and Britt finally either gains confidence in me or loses his mind and signs on, and now I think he’s going to take a close look at what I’ve been doing here and know it’s just a big clusterfuck. I don’t even know what I’ve been doing here all this time. I mean, I’ve done a ton—you should have seen this joint when I leased it, and now it looks nice, it looks beautiful, even, but we open in a few weeks, and he’s got me buying POS systems and leasing dishwashers, and I thought I would remember more from working with Amanda, you know? But I don’t remember shit, or else I never knew shit to begin with. And you do, Shell. You grew up with this, you know it like the back of your hand. I just need a fresh opinion.”
There was a long silence. Harry realized he could hear voices hollering and metal clanging about in the background. She must be at the restaurant, of course. The sounds of a thriving, bustling business place made him both nostalgic and terrified. Impossible to believe his place would ever be filled with voices and cooks and customers. But it had to be. He had an operating budget for two months after opening, and after that money
had to come in. That was it. Money came in or they died and his brother never forgave him for decimating his finances—though Britt would be fine. It was Harry who wouldn’t. Britt would go back to Winesap, and maybe Harry would get a job there too, as a dishwasher or shallot-peeler.
“Fine,” Shelley said. “Send me your website materials and your business plan, send me your menu. I’ll take a look.”
Harry closed his eyes. “I was hoping you’d come out here, actually.”
“That seems unnecessary, doesn’t it? Besides, it’s practically winter out there, Harry. Do you recall what happens to my skin in winter? I crack like clay. It takes weeks of moisturizing just to even it out again. And I don’t know how Jeff would feel about that.”
“I’m sure Jeff would be pleased to moisturize you.”
“I meant me staying with you.”
“Well, you don’t have to,” he said. “I’ve been staying with my parents anyway. Though maybe that helps.”
“No,” she said, “your parents don’t like me. You’d better get me a hotel room, I suppose.”
“They like you,” he said. “What hotel?”
“It doesn’t matter. Not one near a highway, please. Look, Harry. I’ll come out for a day or two and I’ll take a look around and tell you what I see. Next week, perhaps? There’s some dried fig festival here that’s going to cut into our business anyway. But then I have to get back. Jeff needs me here.”
“That’s all I’m asking. And if Jeff has any issues, just remind him he still owes me a girlfriend, so we’ll call it square.”
“Now you’re being ridiculous. You left me mentally and spiritually long before I left you geographically.”
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