“I’m aware of the time.”
“We have a lunch special. Grilled cheese on sourdough with tomato soup.”
He looked up from the laptop for the first time. “I have a dairy allergy.”
Anna blinked. “You have a dairy allergy.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re auditing a grilled cheese restaurant.”
Something shifted behind his eyes—not quite humor, but an awareness that the universe had arranged this particular irony and he had chosen not to find it funny. “Rick didn’t mention the menu when he assigned me.”
“So, you can’t eat anything we serve.”
“The focaccia doesn’t have dairy.”
“The focaccia is bread. You can’t just eat bread for a week.”
“I can eat bread for a week.”
“That’s not—Michael. We’re a restaurant. Let me feed you something.”
“The bread is fine.”
Anna stood in the doorway and looked at him—pressed shirt, precise handwriting, files in stacks, a man who had organized her entire financial history into columns and couldn’t eat a grilled cheese. Something about it was so absurd that she almost laughed. She didn’t, because his face was serious in the way that suggested he was always serious and laughing at him would be unkind.
“I’ll see what we have,” she said.
She went back to the kitchen. Joey was waiting at the counter with his arms still folded.
“Well?”
“He has a dairy allergy.”
Joey’s face went through several stages. Shock. Confusion. A brief detour through something that looked like personal offense. Then his jaw set and his eyes narrowed and Anna recognized the expression—it was the same one he got when someone returned a sandwich and said it was “fine.”
“A dairy allergy,” Joey said. “At a grilled cheese restaurant.”
“That’s what I said.”
“This is a challenge.”
“Joey—”
“This is a professional challenge and I accept it.” He turned toward the kitchen. “We have olives. We have that gazpacho I froze last week. The focaccia is dairy-free. I can work with this.”
He disappeared into the walk-in. Anna heard containers being moved, lids being opened and closed, what sounded like a very focused inventory being conducted at speed.
She went back to the lunch rush and let Joey work.
The afternoon wound down. The last tables cleared by two-thirty. Tyler left at three for a photography session. Bernie outlasted the final customer and stood at three-fifteen, tucking his tablet under his arm and easing his bad knee straight before trusting it with his weight.
“See you tomorrow,” he said at the door. “Tell the auditor to eat something.”
“Joey’s handling it.”
“Good.” Bernie pushed through the door and was gone.
