But Pete doesn’t answer; not while Ben’s in the airport, and not in the cab ride back, and not while Ben listens to an incomprehensible earful from Roux, who is clearly deeply offended to have been left at the mercies of a highly paid cat sitter for a week. When Pete finally does reply, it’s nearly midnight, and the text is short, and clipped, and weird:sorry for radio silence. too much to drink. catch u tomorrow.
The sinkhole in Ben’s stomach, which has been growing for the last few hours, yawns out now to be the size of a small car. But…Pete said he’d catch Ben tomorrow, right? So they’re still on for their brunch plans; not all is lost. Ben doesn’t have to panic, or lie awake gripped with dread, or castigate himself for a week of thinking it was all going to work out. He doesn’t. Hedoesn’t.
He does it anyway, of course, but he tells himself he’s choosing to, and could opt out if he wanted.
On Sunday morning, it takes such an unbelievable amount of effort to keep himself from texting Pete something like,DO YOU HATE ME SUDDENLY?that he, instead, texts roughly everyone else he knows. He also spends a frankly unnecessary amount of time reading and rereading the Castillo’s menu, looking for throughlines to Pete’s cooking, pieces of him on the page. He finds a lot: Pete clearlywrotethis menu, the descriptions matching the voice he uses in his work forGastronome.
By the time 10 a.m. rolls around with no reply to the text Ben sent Pete late last night—No worries at all, feel better!—the sinkhole in the pit of his stomach has grown teeth, and become more of a gaping maw. He seriously and passionately considers texting,Are our plans still on? Let me know if I should still come to brunch???
But looking at it written out, the cursor blinking accusingly at him after the last question mark, makes Ben feel so weak-willed and pathetic that he deletes it furiously, shoving his phone deep into the pocket of his charcoal-gray jeans.
“Do you know what?” Ben says to Roux, who is watching him inquisitively from her current perch on top of a basket of what was, until she climbed into it directly out of the litterbox, clean laundry. “I’m going. I’m going! The man invited me to brunch—comeanytime, he said, and I asked if Sunday worked, and he said that itdid. And then, at the end of the call, he said he’d see me Sunday! That’s aplan, my feline friend. It would be weirder if Ididn’tgo.”
Slowly, and somehow managing to communicate an enormous amount of doubt, Roux flicks her tail back and forth.
“Okay,yes,” Ben admits, trying not to think about the fact that he is being successfully cross-examined by an animal who can’t figure out how cupboards work. “Yes, he’s been a little strange! And silent! And yes, Ihaveconsidered the possibility that he’s decided I’m not worth the trouble, or that Chris sat him down and impressed upon him hownutsI am, or that Rick told him—told him—oh, I don’t know!” Truthfully, Ben can’t work outwhatRick might have told Pete to make him reconsider the way things have been going between them, though he’s put a lot of effort into trying. “But regardless, if hedoeswant to tell me he’s decided I’m annoying, or intolerable, orwhatever it is, after all this, he’s not going to ghost me! He can tell me to my face if that’s how he feels.”
Roux seems to consider this. After a moment, she lowers her head so it’s resting atop Ben’s second-favorite knit sweater. Making direct eye contact with him, seeming to be trying to communicate very intently, she sticks out her rough tongue and begins licking the sweater, creating pulled threads and pills immediately.
“Oh, what do you know,” Ben mutters. “You’d eat twist ties if I let you.” Ignoring her irritated mew, he grabs his coat and heads out the door.
On the journey, which somehow manages both to take a long time and to move too quickly for Ben’s liking, his anxiety swells within him, seeming to crowd out room for even his breath. He tries to wrestle it back down, to crush it away into something manageable, but it’s a bit like trying to close an overfilled suitcase, or shut the door on a burning fire. By the time he finds himself standing on the pavement in front of Castillo’s—in the same spot, he realizes with an abrupt pang, where Pete’s infamous childhood home video was filmed—he is half-ready to turn around again, so sure his bad vibes will poison the entire encounter.
Then he steps foot inside the restaurant and realizes immediately thathisvibes won’t make any difference one way or the other.
The average diner—or, the average diner who has never spent any time in the food service industry—is not generally aware of what Ben privately thinks of as “restaurant vibe rancidity.” This is not because they have never encountered it before. In fact, nearly everyone who has dined in restaurants has, at some point or another, eaten in one on a high-rancidity night. To those guests without specialized knowledge, it would likely have manifested very subtly, only at the edges of things:the sound of breaking china and swearing in the kitchen, a curt edge to the waiter’s tone as she asks if there’s anything else she can get you, the sense that certain members of staff are bristling as they pass one another between tables. Perhaps a few plates of food slightly below the place’s usual standards might be laid before the diners, or a round of drinks that isn’t what was ordered. They might leave murmuring, amongst themselves, “Off their game tonight a little, huh? Maybe the regular chef’s on vacation.”
But to Ben, and to anyone who has spent time working in restaurants, a high-rancidity night is obvious from the moment you step through the door. The causes are infinitely varied—interpersonal drama, financial drama, staffing issues, management issues, all of the above—but the results are always the same. Left to fester, low rancidity can become high rancidity with disquieting speed in the back of house, one person’s bad mood dispersing like noxious gas to infect everyone else. Having grown up in a restaurant and thus been the Patient Zero responsible for more than a few high-rancidity nights there, Ben’s senses for these things are finely tuned. Even Renata, hopeless though she is with a knife or a pan, can tell a good vibe from a bad one; more than once she and Ben have met somewhere for dinner, walked inside, looked at each other, and walked right back out, not needing to exchange a word. It wasn’tworth it—high-rancidity nights, in addition to being unpleasant, were the nights with the highest chances of cut corners and mistakes. If you had, as Ben did, the ability to sense when it was happening, you were always better off just coming back another time.
The vibes in Castillo’s this morning are so rancid that Ben almostdoesturn on his heel and walk out, on sheer instinct alone. There are so many signs it’s hard to count them all—the diners look gray-faced and uncomfortable, first of all,many of them staring down at their plates in awkward silence. The waitstaff, also, look unhappy, though there’s an air of desperation to them that the diners don’t possess, which Ben knows implicitly is because the diners cango homewithout risking their jobs. The hostess, white-knuckling a lovely, art deco-style stand which Ben would admire if circumstances were different, gives Ben a wide-eyed look, one which clearly reads, “Your brunching spirit will die a slow death here today; run! Flee! Save yourself!”
All of this pales in comparison to the screaming coming from the kitchen. Ben thinks, honestly, that it probably would have tippedanyoneoff as to how things are going at Castillo’s today, whether they had Ben’s food service background or not.
“When I want your damn help, I’ll ask for it!” This voice is deep and unfamiliar, lightly accented, and, above all else, furious. “I’m not achild, and this ismyplace. If I say I can do it?—”
“But youcan’tdo it!” This voice Ben knows; it’s Pete’s, and it’sveryupset. Ben winces. “This keeps happening over and over again! What was it last week—oh, the pot of stuffing for the chile rellenos?—”
“I wouldn’t’ve dropped it if one of you hadn’t spilled oil on the?—”
“Dad, c’mon.” Pete sounds pained, now, though still perfectly audible out here in the dining room. “There wasn’t any oil. It was the same thing asthis,the same thing italwaysis: You say you can do it, and I say, ‘Are you sure? I’d be happy to help you,’ and you tell me to shove it and stop talking down to you. So I back off, and then youcan’tdo it, because it’stoo heavy,and then it’s a big mess that sets back the whole?—”
“Too heavy? Tooheavy? Ridiculous! I’m strong as an ox, you know that. It was the damn slippery handles. Look, stop being such a worrier and get out of the?—”
“Aw, Jesus, Dad, don’t?—”
There is a loud, resounding crash, which is followed by a long beat of dead silence.
When Pete’s voice sounds from the back again, it’s much quieter, but still perfectly audible, since absolutely nobody else in the building is currently making so much as a peep. “Well. Okay. There it is. So much for the atol de elote! But for the record, this isexactlywhat I said would happen.”
There’s a sound from the kitchen like someone scoffing, but it’s Pete’s voice that carries on, dropping into a despondent register Ben recognizes from filming. “Hell. Somebody needs to clean this up, and we’ll have to eighty-six it off a bunch of tickets; there isn’t time to make a fresh batch before those tables are turned. But I’m sorry, I…I need to take a fifteen. I’ll come back after and deal with?—”
Pete’s father’s voice is a roar now; Ben’s whole body tenses up on Pete’s behalf even as he wonders if it’s embarrassment driving the older man’s rage. “I didn’tsayyou could take a?—”
“You’re notpayingme,” Pete snarls, as he pushes the double doors to the front of the house open. “I’m here tohelpyou, as I keeptrying to do, so I can do whatever I want…”
He trails off, his mouth parting slightly in surprise, as he spots Ben waiting next to the hostess stand.
Ben realizes, in a hideous moment of perfect clarity, that he has absolutelyno ideawhat to do. Not one. His mind is a vast and yawing abyss, into which any request for something to say falls like a stone, bouncing back to Ben with an echo that sounds a lot like, “Gooood luuuuuck wiiiiith thaaaaaat, brooooo.”
