“You like potatoes and omelets?”
“Sure.”
“Good. You do the omelets, I’ll do the potatoes.”
“I thought you were making breakfast.”
“You need to earn your keep.”
“Since when?”
His eyebrows lifted. “You don’t know how to make an omelet?”
“Sure I do.” But despite her love of cooking shows, she didn’t know if her technique would pass muster with a real chef.
Ben diced the potatoes and began sautéing them, adding seasonings and what seemed like an obscene amount of butter while he cooked some vegetables for omelet filling on another burner.
On her first try, May got shells in the eggs, forgot the salt, and failed to get the pan hot enough. When she tried a bite from the edge, the eggs tasted rubbery and bland.
“How’s that coming?” Ben asked.
She carried the empty bowl, the whisk, and the container of eggs over to the countertop on his side of the stove. “You’re making them.”
“You sure?”
“I can’t take the heat, Master Chef.”
“Crack the eggs for me, at least.”
She picked four out and cracked the first one on the lip of the bowl.
“I like mine best without the crunchy shell bits in there,” he said.
“Shut up.”
He stirred the potatoes. She glanced over at him. “And quit smirking.”
“All right, princess.”
Two men came in and began setting up their workstations on a long galvanized steel table nearby. One brought a big tray of what looked like miniature chickens out of the refrigerator, and the other retrieved a vast quantity of onions and began chopping them at a speed that astonished her. Ben greeted them by name—Luis, Pedro—but they kept their heads down, their eyes on the flashing knives in their hands as they said hello. Deferential? Or else they just didn’t want to cut off their own fingers.
May kept her back to them and focused on Ben’s graceful economy as he moved from one pan to the other, stirring and seasoning and flipping eggs in a symphony of hotness.
How had she ever thought he was nothing more than a dishwasher who liked to cook, especially after watching him make French toast yesterday morning? He moved with fluid grace, as though cooking was a language he’d learned to speak at birth.
He loved it. Obvious as a neon sign.
At their station nearby, one prep cook chopped carrots into precise cubes while the other separated chickens into pieces. A freckle-faced redhead pushed backward through the kitchen doors on crutches—an awkward job that left her little room to maneuver in the kitchen, which wasn’t a large space. Ben finished sliding the second omelet onto a plate and said, “That’s Sam. Keep an eye on the potatoes, okay? I’ll be back in a minute.”
He crossed to her, and they fell into a conversation that seemed to consist mostly of shorthand. May caught the gist of it—something to do with produce quality from a supplier, the prices of various cuts of meat, a shortage of hotel pans. Ben made a disdainful remark about someone he referred to as “your sauce guy.” Sam asked questions about people May hadn’t met, and Ben answered them, his tone of voice growing gradually darker and growlier.
Five minutes turned into ten. She stirred the potatoes until they started to look rubbery, then took them off the heat. The omelets cooled and took on a glazed appearance.
She caught enough of what Ben was saying to understand that he had been covering for Sam for a few days while her injury kept her from the kitchen and someone named Perry was out of town for a funeral.
She also caught enough to understand that the conversation was putting him in a foul mood.
Or maybe it was the people. As Ben and Sam talked, nine o’clock came and went, and the kitchen filled with a steady stream of strangers in white coats. They pushed through the door, greeting the two chefs by name.