He wasn’t the first one to give me a beer, but he taught me how to eat stone crab. He showed me how to pick out the perfect watermelon. He got me on ADHD medication. Helped me apply to the Culinary Institute of America.
My father split as soon as my mother told him she was pregnant. My mother handed me to a social worker when I was born without a second glance. Once, in middle school, I got into a fistfight with the real son of a set of foster parents who took me in for the extra cash and had to spend the night on my case worker’s office couch. When she went out for a cigarette, I found my file and read it cover to cover. I wasn’t wanted. I never had been wanted—until Sal.
“He shouldn’t have left me the restaurant,” I mutter as we walk down the hallway.
Hurt flashes in Kiara’s eyes. “He wanted you to have it.”
“You’re his daughter.”
“I already have a career.” In the kitchen, she points to a bar stool at the island. “Sit.”
“Kiara, I don’t want it.”
“Jack, you got...”
“Fired?”
She grimaces. “You don’t have a job anymore. But you do have what Dad left you.”
Every part of my body is screaming to flee, but I sit instead. Kiara bustles around the kitchen, heating up the chili, cutting a thick slice of cornbread dotted with jalapeño. The kitchen is humble but fastidiously neat, exactly as I remember it. Sal treated cooking like his religion, and his home kitchen reflected that.
“How is the practice?” I ask, as Kiara sets down the food. She opens a beer for me, and another for herself.
I eye it for a moment. Drinking like a fish is part of what got me in this whole mess.
I lift the glass bottle to my lips. I’ll commit tomorrow.
“It’s good.” Kiara leans across the kitchen island. “We’re expanding. And we started working with a no-kill shelter to provide health services.”
“Sal must have been ecstatic.”
“He was happy I was happy.” She swigs her beer. “He was loyal to the people he cared about.”
“Unlike someone else you know.”
“At least you’re self-aware.”
“Ki.”
“You left.” Her chestnut eyes fill with tears. “You left without saying a word, Jack. We woke up the morning of the hearing, and you were gone. We were supposed to be family. You told me you were my brother.”
The pain in her voice twists in my gut like a knife. “I know.”
Sal and Kiara thinking they loved me wasn’t enough to banish the panicky dread of when it would all fall apart. When Sal wanted to adopt me for real, make me his son the way Kiara was his daughter, I fled. Left for culinary school months early. It was easierto endure the hurt of losing him and Kiara then, I reasoned, than waiting for rejection that felt inevitable. For the other shoe to drop, the way it always did.
I had an easy excuse, too, after Sal sat me down and told me he expected me to come back to Florida after culinary school and help run the Sailfish. I never wanted to stay in Florida, in a town full of painful memories. I had loftier ambitions than what he could offer.
At the time, I imagined the ties between us being severed with all the delicacy of a guillotine. It’s unnerving to think of him watching me drift from restaurant to restaurant, all while our stiff, once-a-season calls dwindled to nothing.
“Do you know how hard it was to watch as Dad realized what happened?” she says. “Seeing your room cleaned out, your car gone from the driveway? The only other time I saw him so lost was when Mom died.”
I take another sip of beer, flicking my gaze to the tile floor. For months now, I’ve wondered if he left me the restaurant not as a gift but as punishment for running when it counted most.
Feels like it, anyway.
“I’m sorry.”
“You should be.” Her voice sounds taut, steely, the way it always did when she was holding back strong emotions.
