The Insides Read Free Page B

heads back to the front kitchen, where he will spend an hour or so planning the day’s specials out on a whiteboard. Angel, a slender guy, half Puerto Rican, half Cuban, sits in the rear kitchen with them for a couple of minutes, watching them appreciatively. Watching her. Even without turning away from the task in front of her, she can feel something in that look. An invitation. Hers to respond to or to ignore. This note in the look is something new. It started about a month ago, which, she notes, somewhat uneasily, lines up almost exactly with the date Angel’s wife moved out.
    Don’t shit where you eat
, she tells herself this afternoon, as she tells herself every afternoon, when she feels the invitation in Angel’s look. But on some other level she already knows that it’s going to happen, that she will accept the invitation eventually, whether she wants to or not. It’s just a matter of time. But she makes herself not think of that. Instead, she imagines smoking a cigarette. She imagines it in great detail.
    Ollie’s playlist moves into its final songs, long pieces of Louisiana sludge rock. The basement is finally empty now, the walk-ins nearly full. She’s lost the competitionagain. Neither she nor Guychardson remark upon it, but she knows that he’s noticed, and she knows that he’s noticed that she’s noticed. A couple of the cooks and the lead servers have shown up, congregating around Jon’s whiteboard. Laughter and easy talk. Somebody’s turning leftover bison into the family meal.
    And at the end of that final hour she jams her iPod back in her pocket and joins everybody in the main kitchen and listens to Jon and Angel talk the staff through the plan for the night. Half-listens, really: her work for the day, at this point, is done. Sometimes, if they’re shorthanded, she’ll work an additional shift, but they don’t need her tonight, so she wolfs down an enormous bowl of shepherd’s pie and cleans up her knife kit and dunks her apron in the laundry bin. She receives a few claps on the back from the friendlier cooks and heads out through the service entrance. She has the cigarette she fantasized about earlier, her second of the day. She’s trying to quit. Guychardson follows her out, lacquered box under his arm, and with one wave back over his shoulder at her he disappears, into the waning light.
    And then she stands there, alone, her hair and fingers stinking of iron and offal and brine and smoke, her head ringing with the memories of the roaring noise which soundtracked her day’s work. Now, on the evening air, she hears the murmur of a line out front, just beginning to form. People have come to dine on the food that she’s handled and prepped. There’s satisfaction in hearing that murmur, satisfaction in being exhausted from long hours of labor. This is as happy, these days, as she ever gets.
    She rides the 6 back to the Bronx, walks the quartermile from the station to her apartment. When she gets inside she flips on the light and finds a little tableau that Victor has laid out for her: a Glencairn whiskey glass, a spoon, an unopened bottle of single malt Scotch, and a note. T REAT FOR YOU IN THE REFRIGERATOR , says the note. P AIR W/ THE S COTCH FOR BEST RESULTS. XOXO
    Well, OK. She opens the fridge and finds a table-setting card marked with an O, propped against a coffee mug filled with chocolate mousse.
    She sits down, fills the glass halfway with Scotch, and takes a bite of the mousse. Holds it in her mouth, disassembling it, the way she knows Victor would want her to do. She detects honey, vanilla, but also the faintest note of something dank, like a rotting leaf; echoed by the bogginess of the Scotch that she uses to swish it away. It is a wholly Victor concoction: delicious, but delicious in a way that has a little bit of difficulty in it, something the faintest bit unlikable for the mouth to puzzle over.
    She texts him as she’s mulling through the second mouthful. He’ll be at