Radhya takes a big breath in. “Are you frustrating sometimes? Yes. Have you made extremely questionable decisions? Also, yes.”
“And did you judge me for those decisions?”
“Yeah,” Radhya says. “I’m both imperfectandjudgmental.” She takes another bite of grilled cheese. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.” She sits forward. “Starting my own business is incredibly risky. My stomach hurts all the time. I have stress dreams where I’m surrounded by ticket printers that won’t stop.”She pauses. “When Brodsky’s sells, I have to figure out a new venue. And Josh might not want to keep doing the pop-ups.”
Ari stops chewing. “Why not?”
“He’s been talking about cooking somewhere else. California, maybe. Fresh start.”
Ari tries and fails to picture Josh in any other location. He feels so rooted to the city, like he and Manhattan are in a co-dependent relationship.
“Do you need a sassy, charming waitress?” Ari asks, trying to push Josh out of her mind.
“No. I need a sassy, charming best friend. Preferably one who lets me give fantastic advice and then ignores it.”
Ari snorts, making Radhya laugh.
“In that case…” Ari stares at the TV, waiting for her throat to loosen up a bit. “I need to tell you about this guy I knew.”
“Okay.” Radhya doesn’t move a muscle, like she’s afraid that the slightest flinch will send Ari fleeing into the night.
“We hated each other for a long time. And then we didn’t. We became friends. And that’s the hardest kind of connection for me. Obviously.” She takes a breath. “He’s one of those people who never has to smell items in their refrigerator before consuming them. Crumbs and misplaced apostrophes are his mortal enemies. He knows exactly how smart he is but doesn’t realize he’s funny. If I could get him to laugh or just, like,hrmphor look exasperated, it made my entire day. Which, I guess, wasn’t hard because I’ve been miserable.” It’s painful to say it all in past tense. “He justgotme. He saw me in this way that other people never do. We’re really different, but I could talk to him about anything—all the stuff I tried really hard to hide from everyone else because I felt so”—she swallows—“ashamed of how much I was hurting. Even though I was at my lowest point,he just accepted me. But then we…you know.” Her eyes well up again. “And I convinced myself it was this huge mistake because I couldn’t deal with what it actually meant. But I—I miss him, Rad. I r-really—”
This time she doesn’t try to hold back the big, ugly sobs.
Rad wraps her arms around Ari’s shoulders, getting them both tangled in the blanket.
“Hey,” Radhya says softly. “Breathe?” Ari swallows and takes a gasping inhale, like she’s finally coming up for air. “Start from the beginning.”
JOSH WALKS SOUTHon Avenue A, across the west boundary of Tompkins Square Park, past a stupid new expensive kefir bar, a Starbucks, a bodega, and whatever the Pyramid Club is now.
Everything else on the block may have changed, but despite his cursed attempt at transforming Brodsky’s into The Brod, his mother had taken it upon herself to revert the place back to its old form. The checkered floor has been mopped thousands of times, but the white squares have been beige forever. As a kid, Josh would volunteer to wipe down the tables, scour the sinks—anything to put chaotic things inorder.
More than that, the place has a specific scent. No matter how many spice blends Radhya grinds in the kitchen, he’ll forever detect the smell of stale cigarette smoke from the days of smoking sections separated by nothing but a warped panel of plexiglass. The sweet-and-sour sauce that accompanied every serving of stuffed cabbage. Frankfurters sizzling on the flattop. Containers of coleslaw, macaroni salad, egg salad, and some concoction his dad called “health salad” that only one regular ever ordered.
Danny’s food was so familiar to Josh, he couldn’t properly evaluate it: the specific tang of Uncle Morrie’s brown mustard, the slightly sweet glaze of brisket, the foamy head of a chocolate egg cream that clung to your upper lip. In the years of preparing absurdly complex dishes for the city’s most discerning diners, Josh isn’t sure he’s ever made people as happy as the regulars at Brodsky’s seemed to be.
In a few weeks, he could sign a pile of tabbed legal and financial documents, relinquishing custody of a hallowed institution to some “hospitality chain.” Will he feel lifelong regret or will it mark the start of an exciting new chapter? Maybe working in Sonoma is the game changer he’s been needing for the last year. No, two years. Fuck, possibly five or six years.
Josh sets down his knife roll and flips on the lights. It’s quiet in here on Wednesdays. He’s been coming in when the pop-up isn’t open to try things out. Ideas for recipes. New techniques. A lot of bread. Loaves of challah. There’s something satisfying about making the same thing over and over again and improving it incrementally each time.
“The Waiting” plays a tick too loud over the radio. It’s fitting. Danny Kestenberg was the human embodiment of a Tom Petty song. This kitchen still feels haunted by his stubborn ghost. Sometimes Josh swears he can feel Danny looking over his shoulder, muttering as Josh pickles shallots or braises red cabbage.
Something catches his attention on the other side of the front windows: a specific cadence of heels clicking on pavement.
The bell over the door jingles as Abby walks past the tables and behind the counter, opens the beverage fridge, and pulls out a can of Dr. Brown’s Diet Black Cherry. She fills a glass with iceand pours the soda just up to the rim with the practiced hand of someone who’s done this a thousand times.
Without a word, she marches into the walk-in cooler and returns with a 128-ounce jar of mayonnaise and a case of eggs. Josh had hard-boiled them to prep for Radhya’s egg kheema.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
Abby pulls a stack of bowls down from an overhead shelf. Her heels sink into the kitchen mat. “I told you I was bringing the offers. We need to make a decision.”
“No. What are you doing with my prep bowls?” At some point in the last few months, he’d started thinking of the kitchen equipment ashis.
“Making lunch,” she says, setting up a familiar assembly line on the prep table. “Since when do we sit around a table without a nosh?”
Egg salad wasn’t Josh’s plan for this afternoon. But the clatter of two giant metal bowls on the stainless-steel prep table, the sound of shells gently crunching against the counter, the whip of them being tossed into the compost bin—it’s all a familiar, undeniable tune. It seems to bring his dad back to life for a fleeting moment.
