Bread and Butter (13 page)

A lot of people never did leave Linden, or they left and returned, and for years he hadn’t understood why anyone would come back. After Amanda’s restaurant closed, however, he’d had to think about the next step, and Harry had experienced a longing for Linden for the first time, its gray downtown with its pockets of life centered around pubs, its cheap pizza places and taco joints. He got extremely nostalgic for Moretti’s, which had closed years before. He craved pierogi, which he did not like. He stopped remembering some neighborhoods as blighted and saw them as picturesque.

If a place as isolated and territorial as a remote tourist island could try to revitalize itself, why not Linden? Linden was in a much more populated area, and instead of creating new infrastructure from the ground up, he could get what he needed from what was already there. His brothers had laid a lot of the groundwork with Winesap—groundwork Harry had never fully appreciated until then
. T
hat was the first glimmer he’d had, as he’d tried to figure out his post-Amanda life, that moving home need not be a failure but could be an opportunity.

Now, for some reason, he missed Shelley
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ell, not so much Shelley herself. She had been melancholy and easily piqued and host to a frightening number of minor ailments and inner adversities to ubiquitous substances, but Shelley had known how to run a restaurant. She didn’t want to know; she’d grown up in a restaurant family in St. Louis, and she hadn’t intended to stay in the business, but Harry had begged
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manda’s restaurant had been too great an opportunity to pass up, and he’d felt he needed a companion in there with him. It was a chance to go from dilettante to pro, from occasional maker of ravioli to cook, and to do it all with a larger purpose. He hadn’t been there just to serve some tourists a nice pâté. (Though he had done so, primarily out of defiance, after months of practice
. W
hen a table was being nitpicky or snobbish, he’d roll out a hostile, elegant little still life centered on the unctuous rosy brown velvet square studded with green pistachios and dark garnet pigeon breast, accompanied by hand-ground mustard and silky sheets of pickled turnip. He’d had to stop eventually. Pigeon was a pricey form of psychological warfare, and Shelley complained that cooking pâté made her hair smell of blood.)

Harry had met Shelley when he was in Ann Arbor, devoting himself to a now abandoned degree in comparative lit. He was financing his cooking habit with a job at a specialty foods store, which he took primarily for the discount and the tasting research. Shelley had worked there too, rotating from baking to cheese-making to counter serving as her various immune deficiencies allowed, and this flickering in and out of Harry’s vision had been her best advertisement. She would appear, willowy and indifferently competent at any number of despised tasks, remote until Harry got her to laugh at least once. Laughter transformed her; he spent the next three years trying to coax it out of her. During those early weeks Harry would glimpse her at the deli counter, handing over beautifully composed and wrapped sandwiches the size of footballs, her wrist trembling with their weight, or ladling a batch of ricotta into tubs in the creamery, her hair pulled back in a way that emphasized her lemur’s eyes and tiny coral mouth
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hen Harry showed up at work hungover and decimated after Catherine left for England, Shelley attached herself to him, all commiseration and lentil soup. It just went on from there, until Amanda Carroll came through Ann Arbor putting out feelers for people who were damaged, crazy, or zealous enough to move to a remote island year-round.

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
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t 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
. W
hy 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
. W
orse, 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
. W
hen 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
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he nights passed so quickly he sometimes felt a little drunk when they were over
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nd 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
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fter a while it didn’t matter if they were milling their own flour and smoking their own trout
. Y
ou 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
, A
manda invited him to dinner at her cottage. It was just the two of them, because everyone else had already dispersed
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he night had had an air of mourning and relief
. A
manda’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
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n open bottle of red wine sat on the table beside two juice glasses
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he rest of her glassware was already boxed
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hey’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 academia, 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.