Truly (New York 1)

“No, that visual’s going to last me for a while.” She snapped her flipper and flung the ball up to the top of the table. “Carry on.”

Ben shook his head and took another drink, but he obliged her. “So Sandy had family money and connections, and she was even more ambitious than me. We opened our own restaurant less than a year after we met—with a hell of a lot more fanfare than our wedding, actually.”

“What was it called?”

“Is called. She’s still got it open. Sardo.” Ben’s eyebrows sank into their chevron of concentration. “Here, I’ve got this.” He took her button back. When the ball dropped toward him, he caught it and balanced it on the tip of his flipper. He bounced it there, toying with it, and then sent it back into play.

“The best part was planning the menu. I’d been thinking about it for years, testing recipes. I did a kind of heated-up Sardinian theme. Lots of seafood, homey pasta, and chile peppers, because I like them, and because nobody was doing much with chiles then.”

“It sounds great.”

He smiled, a quick flash of teeth that did nothing to warm her. “The food was great. But once we got the place off the ground, it was a fucking nightmare. I hardly slept. I didn’t even really eat. All I cared about was getting good reviews. Being the best.”

That didn’t sound so great.

“The worst part is, I was so deep into it, I just thought it was life. This was my identity, you know? This thirty-year-old guy with stress-induced hypertension, popping anxiety medicine and yelling at my staff all day long.”

His volume dropped. “I think I sort of got to the point where I’d forgotten there was any way to communicate other than taking orders or giving them. My dad was always giving them. Every kitchen I’d worked in for eight years, I’d been taking orders. I liked being the one in charge for a change.”

Ben let the ball fall down the drain and looked up at her. “You really want to hear the rest of this?”

She wanted to touch him. Put her hand on skin, on his arm, to tell him she was already on his side, and he didn’t have to close himself off like that. He didn’t have to defend himself against whatever he was afraid she would think or say.

“I do.”

He took a few steps away and leaned against the wall, as far from her as he could get in the tiny space they were sharing with the pinball machine. After polishing off the beer, he set it on the glass and crossed his arms.

“It’s not an excuse. I can’t excuse it. All I can say is that before you own a restaurant, you have no idea how much work it is. Any restaurant is, but especially if you’re as obsessed as Sandy and I were with getting those goddamn Michelin stars. You have to be completely consistent every night. Same food, same presentation, exactly as perfect as it was the night before. It’s like putting on an opera in a phone booth—there’s never enough room or enough time. You’re constantly under pressure, and I’m the director. I’m the one who has to bring it off, you understand?”

What she understood was that he’d cared deeply, and he’d suffered for it. She understood that he’d chosen a particular sort of life for himself, and then he’d let it consume him.

And that probably he’d wanted to be consumed, or he wouldn’t have done it.

When she nodded, he said, “So the kitchen was crowded, because it was always crowded, and Friday’s the worst. Sandy’s got these assholes with cameras right in my face, screen testing me for a two-bit cooking show she was all excited about. I kept telling her I didn’t want to be on TV—it was all I could do to handle the kitchen—but she insisted that this was how we were going to make it big. She had a talent for the money stuff, the marketing. I mean, that’s obvious, right? Look how far she’s gone since she got rid of my sorry ass.”

Another little smile, cynical this time.

“The kitchen was supposed to be mine, though, and these guys were fucking up the rhythm. The grill guy kept burning shit or sending it out undercooked. When I lost my temper and yelled at him, the TV producer was like, ‘Do that again, we want to get it from another angle.’ As if I was this cartoon character, you know? A caricature of myself. And I was—actually, I just lost it.” He met her eyes. “Imagine that.”

May moved around the pinball machine to stand in front of him. She slid her hand down the inside of his arm to touch the skin at his wrist and gripped his hand. A risky move, but he would either take her comfort or reject it. She had to offer.

He looked down at her, his expression tolerant. “I have a temper,” he said, with a hint of humor. “You might have noticed?”

“Just possibly.”

“You know, when I was younger, I never got mad. I was one of those colorless, invisible kids. Teachers forgot my name. Never said much. Never felt much. That’s what most of my memories are like—

kind of washed-out and vague. Except for the farm. I can still smell the farm. If I were artsy, like you, I could paint what the lake looked like from up on top of the chicken house. I can hear the bees and remember what the handle of the big honey extractor felt like in my hand, and I don’t remember ever being angry when I was doing that. I remember my parents being angry. But I was okay, I think. I had this way of removing myself.”

She saw him again as she’d imagined him on the Brooklyn Bridge. That skinny adolescent Ben, shoving his feelings into his pockets, pushing them down with his fists.

He’d had years to practice. A whole childhood spent learning how to feel nothing.

“And I don’t think I was too bad in college, either,” he said. “You could ask Connor. In Europe, and then back here in the city, working in other people’s kitchens, I didn’t have the luxury of being pissed off. But once I was in charge—once I had a little power, and people working under me—well, by then I’d worked under a lot of chefs in a lot of kitchens, and most of them are assholes. You can’t run a restaurant with finesse. Everybody’s crammed together, bumping into each other. There aren’t any windows, usually, and you’re in there together for ten hours or longer, cut off from the rest of the world, busting your balls. Somebody’s got to run the place.”

He shook his head. “And this is going to sound weird, maybe, but that was how Sandy wanted me to be. The kitchen version of myself. Right after she got hired on where I was the sous chef, I got ticked off at one of the prep cooks and dumped a whole bunch of his work in the garbage, yelling at him to do it over again until he got it right. She saw it, and half an hour later she asked if I wanted to get dinner later. She liked it when I was like that. At first anyway.”

“I hate it,” May said.