“We’re done here.”
I want to argue. I want to demand answers. I want to do something other than sit here like an idiot while my entire world collapses around me. But I know Chef Michel well—have studied his every expression for years in order to appease him. There’s no winning this fight.
So I go.
I clean out my locker with numb fingers; a spare hair tie, a notebook of recipes, a photo of Art and me I’d taped to the inside of the door, and I walk out the back entrance, the same one I’ve used every single day for three years. I stand in the alley, staring at the brick wall and the fire escape I once climbed with Danny to smoke a cigarette after a brutal shift.
And then it hits me. All at once, like a tsunami crashing over my head.
I’m never going back.
The sob tears out of me. I end up crouched against the wall, crying so hard I can barely breathe, while the kitchen I gave everything to carries along without me just a few feet away.
The next few weeks blur together in a haze of rejection and confusion. I apply to every restaurant in Boston worth workingat, then the ones that aren’t, then the ones I swore I’d never set foot in—the tourist traps, the chains, the places where the food comes preportioned in plastic bags.
Nobody calls me back. Nobody will even entertain thethoughtof me.
And it’s only when I’ve finally accepted defeat that I walk into the front door of my father’s brownstone.
The lights are on in the kitchen.
“Papa?”
“In here,mon chou!”
His voice is jovial, and I find him at the stove, in his suit, tie loosened, and his sleeves rolled up, stirring something in a copper pot that smells like heaven.
There’s a whole spread on the counter.
Fresh bread, Brie, a salad. Red wine’s breathing on the table in a decanter I bought him last Christmas.
“You’re cooking?” I ask. “It’s almost ten thirty.”
He tsks but doesn’t stop stirring. “You think I’ll sleep knowing my daughter’s working herself to death and not eating properly?”
Work.That’s a generous term for it.
“Does it help if I say I made your favorite?”
I move closer, peering over his shoulder. “Coq au vin?”
It’snotmy favorite, but I’ll never tell him otherwise.
It was the dish he made every time he needed to make something right when I was growing up, and I used to love it; the smell of herbs and wine filling the house meant he was home, at least for a night. A pause in whatever crisis had kept him gone or buried in phone calls behind closed doors.
But as I got older, the pattern stopped being comfortingand started being obvious. Coq au vin meant he was apologizing without saying the words. It meant another long absence, another silent security detail shadowing me on routine errands.
And we never talked about any of it because we never reallycould.
He didn’t tell, and I didn’t ask, and somewhere along the way we made an unspoken pact to pretend the world he lived in and the world he made for me could stay separate.
And where does the coq au vin come in? Well, my mother died twenty-four years ago giving birth to me, so my father had to be both parents, and he did it the only way he knew how: through food.
He learned to cook from my grandmother in Lyon, and she learned from her mother, and so on and so forth, back through generations of people who believed that love was something you fed people.
“So,” my father says, cutting into his chicken. “Art’s in town, yes?”
I nod, mouth full.
