"We've got six pounds of ground beef left and the line hasn't stopped. If I keep serving full portions, we run out by four. If I drop the patties by two ounces each, we make it to six."
I stare at him. "You calculated that in your head?"
"It's just math."
"It's not just math. It's supply chain management and you're doing it in your head while simultaneously running a serving line. That's not just math, that's a skill."
He looks away. His ears go pink at the tips. It's the first time I've seen him react to a compliment with anything other than blankness. The pink tips of his ears are so human, so normal, that I want to grab him and kiss him, but of course I don't.
"I just don't want anyone to show up and there not be any left," he says quietly. "I know what that feels like."
He says it like it's nothing. But I hear what's under it and it's not nothing. It's a kid who has been hungry and shown up to empty tables. He's learned to make things stretch because nobody was going to stretch them for him.
I don't say anything. I just go back to the grill and make the patties two ounces smaller like he told me to.
We feed the last plate before six. The grill is scraped clean. The cooler is empty. The folding tables are bare except for a few scattered napkins and a squeeze bottle of ketchup that's been in the sun so long it's basically warm tomato soup. By my count, we fed somewhere around a hundred and twenty people today.
A hundred and twenty plates. Every piece of food that was going to spoil in my walk-in cooler, turned into meals for power crews and first responders and families and neighbors and strangers.
We clean up in the hot late-afternoon light. Stormy breaks down the folding tables and stacks them against the building. I scrape Big Bertha clean and cover her with a tarp. We don't talk much. Not because things are tense or awkward but because we're tired in the good way, the bone-deep way that comes from work that matters.
"Hey, Stormy."
He looks up from the table he's folding.
"You know how many people we fed today?"
"Hundred and twenty, give or take. I was counting."
"I knew you were." I lean against Big Bertha and cross my arms. "A hundred and twenty people, and you knew every single one of them by the time they left. You remembered the woman in scrubs liked extra sauce. You remembered the oldguy on the bucket wanted ribs. You remembered that little girl didn't like pickles. How do you do that?"
He shrugs. The one-shoulder shrug. "I pay attention."
"You do more than pay attention. You made people feel like they mattered today. That's not a small thing, especially right now when most people feel like everything they had just got washed away. You handed them a plate and you treated them as if they were somebody. That matters."
He's standing very still. The folding table is half-collapsed in his hands, and he's looking at me. There's an expression on his face that I've never seen before. It's raw and unguarded and it looks as though it hurts, the way new things hurt when you're not used to feeling them.
"I've never done anything like this before," he says. "I've never been part of something like this."
"Like what?"
He looks at the empty parking lot. The bare tables. Big Bertha cooling under her tarp. The bar behind us, wrecked and gutted and still standing.
"Something that mattered," he says. "Something worthwhile."
The sunset is starting behind us, painting the sky in those ridiculous colors that look like God hired a painter who doesn't know when to stop. I put my hand on Big Bertha's lid and I look at this kid standing in my parking lot. He's holding a folding table, wearing my bar's name across his chest, and I think about how he calculated portions in his head so nobody would show up hungry to an empty table. I think about how he brought a plate to an old man who didn't ask for one. I think about how he crouched down to a little girl's level and remembered she didn't like pickles.
I think about what Mickey said. Your dad would be proud. He would be. Not just of me. Of Stormy too.
Of whatever this is becoming.
And oh, God, I sure as hell hope it's becoming a thing with us.
I'll wait for it, if it is. I'll wait forever if I need to. I've got nothing but time.
"Come on," I say. "Let's get cleaned up. We've got another big day tomorrow."
"What's tomorrow?"
