37

Here,” Hero had said during the breakfast shift, “I fix.”

Pella waved him off. “Forget it. It’s fine.” Really her finger didn’t feel too bad; it was stiff and purplish but not overly painful from moment to moment. Every once in a while she’d jam it on a pot or plate or the beveled lip of the sink, and a yelp of pain would escape her. Chef Spirodocus had told her she could go home, but she didn’t want to go home—she wanted to sort silverware into bins, blast bacon fat from shallow pans. After breakfast ended she wanted to restock the so-called salad bar with ketchup and syrup and blueberry yogurt, skim the yellow crust off the mayonnaise, replenish the ice that underlay the stainless-steel tins. Today was Friday, her double-shift day. She wanted to work. She didn’t want to think about last night with Mike or tonight with David. She wanted to be here among the rolling Portuguese and the tinny salsa that wailed from somebody’s radio, the mingling roars of the trash compactor and the power washer, water everywhere, the added roar of Chef Spirodocus when he got upset. She wanted to keep moving, to stay right here in the heart of the noise. She had built up a tiny bit of momentum in her life, going to lectures and swimming and working, checking out books from the library, falling asleep when her head hit the pillow. She’d caught herself thinking that spending four years at Westish might not be the worst thing in the world. But she could also sense how tenuous this progress was, how easy it would be to slow down and shut down and wind up back where she started, in bed all day but unable to sleep, terrified by the day and doubly terrified by the night, never picking up the phone, comforted only by the thought of never needing comfort again.

“Here.” Hero beckoned her impatiently. With a cleaver he lopped off a length of white woven first-aid tape, wound it around her injured and ring fingers so the two were bound firmly together. “No jams.”

“Hmph,” said Pella, impressed. She looked tough, like a football player. After a few hours of steam and soapy hot water the tape’s glue dissolved and Hero cut another length. She made it through both of her shifts without jamming her finger again. Then, the lunch dishes done, her uniform covered in food slop and dishwasher scum, her skin by a sheen of sticky gold grease, she sank down at a round faux-wood table in the empty dining hall with a fresh bag of ice for her finger. The afternoon light through the tall mullioned windows was itself deepening to a greasy gold. David would be arriving soon.

Between shifts Chef Spirodocus had thrust a stiff envelope into her hand. Now she pulled it from her pocket, feeling oddly nervous as she folded and tore the perforated edges. And there it was—an honest-to-God paycheck, made out to Pella Therese Affenlight. The government had taken out taxes: Social Security, Medicare, state, federal. They added up to $49.83. Her first direct contribution to trash collection and public schooling, the maintenance of highways and libraries, the killing of people in war.

She kept looking at the check, though there wasn’t much to see. She and David used to spend more on dinner. But it wasn’t nothing, especially here in the middle of nowhere, especially when your meals and rent were free. And it was hers. She wouldn’t have to ask her father for money anymore. She could buy some underwear to replace what she’d left at Mike’s.

She needed to shower and change, David showed up early for everything, but instead she poured herself a Sprite from the drink dispenser and sat back down to admire the check some more. She still planned to sell her ring, but this was something better. Like Ishmael said: Being paid—what will compare with it! It was embarrassing, how proud of herself she felt. The check proved that she’d been alive these weeks, that she’d accomplished something, however trivial. This was why people grew so attached to earning money, even money they didn’t need. This was how they justified themselves. This was how they kept score.

Chef Spirodocus clomped out of the kitchen in his backache-relieving clogs, frowning down at his clipboard. “Pella,” he said. “You’re still here.” He pronounced it as a great truth of which she might be unaware.

“Still here.” Pella slid the check off the table with her good hand, tapped its edge against the table’s underside. Chef Spirodocus sat down across from her. “You should go home,” he said. “You look tired.”

In Pella’s experience this was a way of telling a woman she looked bad, old, past her prime. “You mean I have bags under my eyes.”

Chef Spirodocus looked up from his clipboard. “Bags? What bags? I mean you worked hard and became tired. Go home. Drink a glass of wine with your boyfriend.”

“My boyfriend,” Pella said, “is at baseball practice.”

Chef Spirodocus waved his stubby fingers. “So find a new one. A girl like you can choose.” He set down his clipboard and looked at her with a solemn expression. “You’re a fine employee,” he said, his voice thick with feeling.

“Thank you.”

He waved his fingers again, as if to brush away the casualness of her response. “Listen to me. You care about the kitchen. You dry the spots from the glasses. You think nobody notices”—he tapped himself on the temple, near the eye—“but I notice. A fine employee.”

Pella felt her own eyes getting moist. Humans are ridiculous creatures, she thought, or maybe it’s just me: a purportedly intelligent person, purportedly aware of the ways in which women and wage laborers have been oppressed for millennia—and I get choked up because somebody tells me I’m good at washing dishes. “Thank you,” she said again, this time with earnest emotion that easily matched Chef Spirodocus’s own.

He dropped an elbow onto the table, squished his supple chin against his stubby-fingered hand, eyed her with a melancholy squint. “The god is in the detail, as they say. You understand this. I think you would make a good chef.”

“Really?”

Chef Spirodocus shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “If it was what you wanted.”

“Huh.” Pella imagined in a flash the restaurant she would own: small and white, all painted white but warmly so. And every so often she would take a white chair or a white table and paint it according to her mood, paint a door frame or a section of filigreed molding, hang a canvas on the white wall, so that bit by bit the whiteness of the restaurant would emerge into color. So as customers sat there over the course of weeks and months and years the place would slowly bloom and change before their eyes, sliding from whiteness into something ingeniously raucous, a riot of green and mango and orange. And then when the job was finished she’d obliterate what she’d done with a blizzard of white paint and start again. That was the kind of restaurant she’d like to own. The food being served was fuzzier in her mind: she saw the white plates move and clatter but couldn’t tell what was on them. She could see the clean sharp arrangements on the plates, the contrasts of color and texture, but not the foods themselves. She’d have to learn a lot about food. And really when the restaurant actually opened she’d be so busy cooking, running the kitchen, that she wouldn’t have time to paint. So really she’d have to develop a whole new idea of restaurants and how they worked, not an interior decorator’s idea but a chef’s idea, and this was an idea she didn’t yet have, but would maybe someday like to have. Or maybe she didn’t want to be a chef at all, but the possibility of doing something, pursuing something, seemed, for the first time in a long time, not only appealing but real.

“Now go home,” ordered Chef Spirodocus. He pushed back his chair and resumed glaring at his clipboard. “And if you don’t quit after a month, the way all these children quit, maybe I can teach you something about food. I’m not some hack, after all.”