Chapter Text
Gloria, I smell it on your breath
Gloria, booze and peppermint
Gloria, no one said enough is enough
Gloria, they found you on the floor
Gloria, my hand was tied to yours
Gloria by the Lumineers
Service by service, the Bear grows. Carmen shrinks.
It’s the little things, first. Jettisoning the small shit so that the ship keeps on sailing—like podcasts on the walk over, so that he can spend the time considering the workflow, the dishes, the aircon settings and the sandwich window hours. Coffee, which makes him too jittery to plate sometimes. Even smoking takes a small but noticeable hit—he forces himself to skip out on breaks during the day and tries to make up for it later, chain smoking to an extent even he finds objectively gross, but does anyway.
It’s that thing inside him, he thinks. That selfish sense of desperation, that even when having another American Spirit sounds hot and ashy and nauseating, he’s already lighting it before he even considers the option that he doesn’t have to, that no one is making him, that it might still be there later. It’s like a fucking compulsion, it’s insane. But he does it anyway. He fits three smoke breaks into one, a combination body wash-shampoo-conditioner of lung damage, and doesn’t smoke again until he’s walking back to his apartment. It’s good. It works. It’s what he did in New York.
He—he also breaks up with Claire. Officially. Carmy is pretty fucking happy to just call the whole thing implied and never face her again, but he can already see the way Sydney and Sugar might look at him, all eyebrows and disgust mixed with reluctant pity. So they do it the right way: in the apartment hallway, disentangling their personal items from each other—a pair of scrubs, an expensive pot—while trying to keep their voices soft enough that eavesdropping neighbors don’t get the satisfaction.
Carmy says the right things like baptismal rights, old and rote and full of promises he doesn’t have the power to keep: “Not you, it’s me,” he says. He doesn’t look her in the eye. “It’s not fair to you.” “We can keep in touch if you want.”
The whole time Claire says very little. Her eyes are wet and glassy, and she looks tired. After, she says she’s got a twenty-four hour shift tomorrow. It’s hard to know if she’s twisting the knife or not, trying to make him feel bad, but after she says it she shakes her head and presses her lips together, not quite looking at him, either. “But I’m sure you’re gunna spend almost as much time at the restaurant, right?”
Admonished—not everyone is holding a fucking knife to begin with, dumbass—Carmy shrugs.
Claire looks at him. Her eyebrows are drawn up, and she’s almost wincing. If anyone’s holding a knife, if anyone’s doing the twisting, Carmy thinks, it’s not her. He feels the blade in his palm and through it, both at the same time.
“Yeah,” he says, voice cracking. He presses lips together and shrugs. “Yeah. Maybe. But, like, no one’ll die on it.”
Carmy’s not looking at her, so it’s a shock when she reaches out, presses her hand against his shoulder, and grabs it, tight and serious. The action makes him shrink a little bit, too sudden and direct, too intense, and he doesn’t like the feeling of being held like that, not when he’s so uncertain of how she’s feeling about him, if she’s worried or angry or both. But he doesn’t pull away.
“Don’t,” she says, after a second. She loosens her grip a little, tilts her head, tries to catch his eye. He forces himself to let her. “Don’t die on it, okay?”
That’s where they leave it. Clarie as the person who graciously allows herself to be broken up with, who gathers her things the same day, who doesn’t scream in the hallway or let tears track down her cheeks, and who sensibly refuses to keep Carmy’s expensive pot, and Carmy as the person who has to be gently reminded not to off himself as soon as she walks back to her car.
Those are the pieces of himself he’s jettisoning, he thinks. Or at least, the ones he’s trying to fucking audit—all the ones that reach out, that grab at other people, that tear pieces of skin off when he drags them back. He tries to cut out the parts of him that touch someone else, and in return: tape with clean edges. Months that end fully booked. Write-ups and Yelp reviews, clean plates, clean floors, sharp knives, and money, not a lot but not too little, either. Enough that Syd feels comfortable asking for a paycheck, and enough that Carmy doesn’t start selling blood just to write it.
It’s worth it, he’s sure about it. It’s pissing Sugar and Richie and Sydney off. But he’s good like this, and it’s working. People like the food. They don’t need to like him.
Carmy’s thinking about all this on his walk in, which is dark and preoccupied, which is why he doesn’t immediately clock the figure, leaned against the back entrance to the kitchen. He’s pulling out his keys from his pocket, barely a foot away from it when he does, and he stumbles back as soon as the he registers that there’s a person standing in front of him, slumped against the brick, keys clutched tightly in his palm like he might have to make a weapon out of them.
“Fuck, what the fuck—?” he stutters. The figure startles, like he’d been sleeping, and immediately goes on defense, shaking his head and shifting into the light.
Carmy quickly traces his eyes over his now visible face and searches his memory until he finds him—Josh, the chef Marcus had fired during friends and family. Carmy realizes suddenly that he’d never gotten the full story on why exactly he had been fired and barely finds a second to hope that it wasn’t because he was a fucking homicidal maniac before Josh is already apologizing, hands outstretched, face twisted painfully.
The image is so odd and out of place that for a second Carmy forgets that he’s supposed to be here, that he’s not the one who should feel ashamed. It’s a strange feeling, like he knows this moment, like he’s lived it, and he’s not playing the right role. Something filters in his brain, a memory that’s distant but real, fuzzy but sharp enough to stick in his chest. Something from New York, probably, but he shoves it aside, trims it away from himself like every other fucking thing.
“What the fuck?” he repeats. This feels inadequate. He tries again. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“Look, I’m sorry,” he says, also repeating himself. “I know this is weird I just—”
“It’s weird—what the fuck, it’s not weird, it’s fucking psycho—?”
“No, like, I know that—”
“Get the fuck out, what the fuck?”
“I want my job back.”
Carmy blinks, hard, too shocked for a second to say anything.
“What the fuck? No. What the fuck?”
Josh shakes his head. He cuts through the air with his hand, a clean slice, and shakes it some more, frantic, apologetic.
“No, no, listen—listen, I’m sorry. I wanted to say I’m sorry before—I know what it’s like, right? I’m not going to come during business hours when everything’s fucking happening, so I just thought—?”
“You thought you’d scare the shit out of me at five in the morning and get your job back?”
“No, I just—I wanted to apologize. I was being so fucking stupid, doing that shit on your property, right, okay, and—I can not do it. I can not do it at work. I don’t need to. It makes me better, whatever, but like, I don’t need to. And I’m not going to.”
“You’re not going to—” Carmy has lost the plot. He searches so hard in his memory for why he’d gotten fired, but nothing comes up. He remembers Syd shrugging it off with a knowing and playful trust me, Carm, and that Sugar had shrugged and said she wasn’t sure. He remembers not wanting to ask Marcus about it—not wanting to ask Marcus to do anything, even though he’d still shown up every morning except the funeral. Mostly, he remembers it being the least of his problems.
But he doesn’t have to remember, actually, doesn’t even have to fucking ask, because Josh wasn’t done talking.
“Like, it’s not an addiction thing, man, it just makes me better.”
Ah.
Carmy swallows his realization through a long, breathless sigh. He brings a hand up to cover his face. He doesn’t need to ask, now, to fill in the blanks—the mid-service dismissal makes sense if he’d been using at the restaurant, and the fact that no one felt the need to rehash the reason he’d been let go, even as they pestered Carmy for a replacement. It’s an ugly thing, but it’s a familiar one. After all, he wouldn’t have been the first.
He pinches the bridge of his nose.
“It doesn’t do that,” Carmy finds himself saying. He thinks he’d been trying to sigh, but the words fell out instead. “That shit doesn’t make you better.”
Josh stands, face still open and desperate. He scratches at his arm. Hating himself for it, Carmy wonders if he’s high, now, or if he’s thinking about it. It turns out he’d missed a lot of signs, with Mikey. Now they all stand out, blood-red, and too late.
“It makes me better at this,” he says.
“It made you fucking unemployed.”
“I’m saying I don’t have to do it,” he says. “It’s not an addiction. I’m telling you I can stop while I’m here. It’s a non-issue.”
It’s Richie’s voice that Carmy hears instead. Richie’s voice fifteen years ago, the first time he’d caught him and Mikey sharing a joint on the stoop of the house, while Mom was knocked out with a hangover upstairs. Are you ever going to stop being such a whiny fucking kid? It’s not a big deal, Carmen. The memory makes him irritable. Josh makes him irritable. The fact that he’s spending time dealing with this when he should be in the kitchen prepping is making him fucking irritable.
“You can stop literally whenever the fuck you want,” Carmy says, after a second. He shakes out the keys from his palm to get the one that he wants, and starts to walk towards the door to unlock it. “But you’re not doing it here. Get the fuck out before the window opens at eleven, alright? Thank you. Please.”
Josh probably starts to protest, but Carmy has already swung the door open and closed it behind him before he registers what he’s saying. He’s just not fucking interested in it. It’s all the same fucking shit: I can stop, it just helps me sleep, it’s just for fun, it’s not a big deal. It’s all bullshit, and it’s not Josh’s fault that he’s been hearing it since he’d been fucking born, carved into their walls like the ten fucking commandments. It’s fucking bullshit, and he doesn’t have the time.
He tries to make up for it by skipping counting to ten and letting the air reach the bottom of his lungs, like his pamphlet from Al-Anon suggested when shit like this came up. Sugar would be disappointed, but it’s pointless to try to knead this knot from his chest so early in the day, with so much time for it to grow back again. He’ll get to it tonight, with all the other things that will inevitably tighten it. He’ll do it all at once. He’ll take very deep fucking breaths.
Still buttoning up his coat, shaving off the precious seconds he’d already wasted this morning, he walks into the kitchen and surveys it for disaster, but instead finds only Marcus, tipping out dough onto a lightly floured surface, pulling it away from the edges of the bowl with an impressive singular focus. Carmy pulls down a pot, smoothly, to make just enough noise that Marcus notices he’s there, but not enough to disturb him.
“Morning, Chef,” he says, without looking up. “You’re five minutes late, man.”
Carmy looks over at Marcus, incredulous.
“You punch my card now?”
Marcus laughs.
“You come in a half hour after me, every day. Today it’s a half hour and five minutes.”
Carmy brushes his forehead with the back of his palm and shrugs. It’s an uncomfortable feeling to know that Marcus has been paying that much attention to his ins and outs, but whatever. At least someone is appreciating it.
“Yeah, well, I was talking to Josh.”
Marcus suddenly stops his kneading and looks up at Carmy, an oddly pained expression spread across his face.
“Shit, Carm,” he says. “He’s still out there?”
Eyebrows raised, Carmy nods. He pulls out veg from the refrigerator under the station—prep work, technically below him, but it saves on labor and he’s never hated the monotony, not the way that some people did.
“He was asking for his job back.”
Marcus groans. “Still? I told him to shove off this morning, but—”
“He didn’t,” Carmy says, with a bit of mirth. He pulls out an onion, uses the knife to rip the skin off in even, quick strips. That’s the kind of shit he actually kind of fucking loves to do, clean things up like this, and now there’s a renewed joy in it, given that he’s choosing to do it and there’s no one above him to give him shit if he doesn’t do it the way they learned it twenty fucking years ago in Europe. “He’s fucking dedicated, at least.”
Marcus laughs a bit and then is quiet for a moment—just the sounds of them both in a kitchen, quiet except for the rustle of onion skins and the steady, soft pound of dough against the counter. It’s the most peaceful this place gets, and why Carmy shows up so early. Soon, everyone will roll in—Tina and Ebrahem and the new hires, Sugar with her baby threatening to christen the kitchen floor any second. Sydney will come in with her ideas and her worries, and Richie will come in with his, and they will pretend they are fundamentally opposite people while both annoying him in the exact same way. Soon, the whole thing will light up, and he’ll feel it like electricity up his skin.
But for now, it’s quiet. For fifteen more minutes, it’s quiet.
“I did the right thing, right?” Marcus asks, after a moment. “I know it wasn’t my call. I talked about it with Syd, though, so—”
Carmy shakes his head. He’s peeling his last onion.
“No,” he says, quickly, guiltlessly. “That’s—I would’ve done the same thing, sorry. I wasn’t trying to make you feel shitty about it. He’s just probably still outside.”
Marcus sucks his teeth.
“You want me to go out there and tell him to scratch?”
Carmy shrugs.
“He’ll fuck off when the withdrawl kicks in,” he says, matter-of-fact. He starts slicing through the first onion and Marcus, satisfied with that, goes back to kneading the dough. It ends up being true, Carmy figures, because when Tina turns up, smoothing her hair back and complaining about the train as usual, she doesn’t stop to mention the ex-employee jonesing for a second chance perched on their doorstep. She sets her things down and comes over to squeeze Carmy’s shoulders warmly before she pulls out her own prep.
“You see anyone outside, Tina?” Marcus asks. Tina turns with both eyebrows raised.
“What’re you talking about?” she asks. “See anyone. Like a delivery guy?”
Marcus snorts.
“No, like Josh,” he says.
“Josh?” Tina asks, like she’s trying to place the name. It takes her a second before she snaps her fingers with relief. “Josh! No, why would I see Josh? Is he suing us or something?”
“Let’s hope not,” Carmy says. He’s ready to drop the subject completely. It’s a waste of time, and he’s half-worried about summoning him like a dog, his face pressed in the window mournfully waiting for them to throw him onion skins or something. “Tina, how do you feel about trying out family style tonight?”
Tina thinks on this for a moment, pressing down the towels on her chef whites with the palms of her hands. Family style is starting to feel more and more like a pipe dream—he’d brought it up to Syd that first day, covered in tomato sauce, covered in memories, thick with it, because he’d remembered that it was Mikey’s idea. Then they’d scrapped it, for friends and family, for the first few weeks, since Marcus’ mom, since Sugar’s morning sickness, since the abysmal night when the seafood delivery got fucked because of flooding. But now things are good. Things are evening out. Carmy wants to do it. No one else seems to give a fuck.
“I don’t know, Jeff,” Tina says, predictably. “Things are working right now.”
“We’ll keep them working,” Carmy says.
Tina licks her lips and nods, but does little to seem convinced. Carmy feels his own mouth twitch with frustration, feels the need to stamp his foot, to move his weight, and then tries to filter that through his increasingly failing attempts not to be an asshole.
“It’s what we’re doing,” he says. “That’s always been the plan, right, chef?”
Tina holds out both palms, shrugging, soft, like she’s talking to a wild animal. “Yes, chef,” she says, not unkindly.
“It’s what I want to do,” Carmy says, a little sharp. He suddenly needs someone to agree with him on this, even though he knows it will be unsatisfying when she does. “It’s what Mikey wanted to do.”
Tina opens her mouth, possibly to give in, or at least, to say that she did, but before anything comes out of it, Sydney blusters in. She’s got her hair tied back with a block-print bandana, and looks a little wind-swept, but her movements are certain, confident, commanding. She greets everyone loudly and warmly, “Good morning, Chefs!” and then slides up next to Carmy, pulling out her knives, brushing up against his shoulder in a quick, more personal greeting.
“Marcus texted me,” she says, instead of good morning. “Josh is back?”
“Josh is not back,” Carmy says, instead of good morning. “Do you think we’re ready for family style?”
“No,” Sydney says, smoothly. Carmy feels his hands itch. He channels the feeling into his knifework. “Should we call someone about Josh?”
“Uh—maybe, if he shows up again,” Carmy says, dismissively. Everyone seems very focused on Josh, or, more likely, intent on fucking ignoring him. “Why do you think we’re not ready for family style?”
“Uh,” says Sydney, blowing through a breath. “It’s not that I don’t think we’re ready, it’s that I don’t think we need it, and also people know what we do now and so they’re expecting certain things, and those things are going well, and it feels crazy to change that?”
Carmy clenches his jaw. It’s too fucking early for this, but it’s also too late—too early in the morning, too late in their day, too early to try something new, too late to start it.
“It was always supposed to be family style,” he points out. “That’s what we always planned.”
Sydney pulls out a container of lemons from underneath and sets it down on the counter, just a decibel too loud. Carmy looks up from the onions and watches her face twist through about twenty different feelings before she sighs and shrugs, pulling out her knife from the roll.
“Right. But, like, that’s what I meant, things are going well—”
“Okay, you wanted a star, Syd, things can’t just go well, they have to be—”
Sugar interrupts the rest of his sentence. Well, less Sugar. More Sugar’s arrival. More Richie, who has his arm around her shoulder and is walking her in, other hand out like he’s waving down a fucking plane. He’s gotten all weird and sweet and protective of Sugar now that her stomach extends past what her arms can reach. He loudly calls out for everyone to clear a path to the office, and Sugar keeps swatting his hand away, annoyed out of her fucking mind.
“I didn’t even trip, Richie,” she says, reaching behind her and pulling his arm off. She leans over to Tina and winces apologetically. “Don’t move, Tina, you’re fine. I didn’t trip. I stumbled.”
“Those stairs, man, they’re killer, though,” says Richie. “Everyone fucking trips on those stairs.”
“Alright, well, I don’t,” Sugar says, over-sweet, with a wide smile and even wider eyes. “Thank you, Richie, for the escort. Really. I’m good. Baby’s good. We’re all good.”
Richie shrugs, hands out in front of him defensively.
“Just trying to help,” he says. It’s so Richie that it gets on Carmy’s nerves just on principle, threatens to shatter the fragile truce they’d drawn since the fridge incident. “Just being careful since Chef Scrooge over here wants you to come in until the contractions are two minutes apart.”
Carmy rolls his eyes.
“Sugar can stop coming in whenever she wants, cousin, you fucking know that. Sugar knows that. Right, Sug?”
“Carm’s a very lenient dictator,” she says, sweetly, walking over to him.
“I’m not a dictator. If I were a dictator people would actually fucking listen to me.”
“Aw,” says Sugar, then she leans over to kiss him on the cheek, awkwardly moving around her belly to do it. At first Carmy thinks it’s just a sweet thing, maternal instincts kicking in early, not that Sugar has ever been devoid of them. But instead, just before she pulls away, she whispers the bad news gently.
“Mom called,” she says, softly, sorry, still that little bit hopeful. “She’s gunna call you later, okay?”
She kisses him again and pats him on the arm, and doesn’t give him a chance to answer before she walks, slowly, to the office. Carmy squeezes his eyes shut, hard. The knot in his chest doubles in size. It’ll take hours to untangle, at this point, but that’s fine.
“So it’s a fucking no on family style?”
“No on family style, chef,” says Sydney, also sounding a bit sorry.
“Fine,” he grinds out. Then he takes a deep breath and nods, reminds himself that he trusts Sydney, that he’s not trying to push this thing until it breaks. He’s always fucking doing that. If Sydney says they’re not ready, then they’re not ready. “That’s fine. Let’s just get through tonight, then. But think about it, guys, please.”
In unison:
“Yes, chef.”
Carmy pretends that they mean it.
-
With everyone’s help in the early hours to contribute to prep work, it allows enough wiggle room in the workflow to allow for some of the staff to work for the window while the rest continue to prepare for dinner service. Ebraham heads the operation, of course, but he still needs a few people to help cook and assemble and run the window. Richie sometimes takes post for a few hours based on staffing and if he sees any of the old crew in line outside, but mostly he sticks to front of house dutifully, checking over the place settings and the guest list and filling in chips and cracks where their cheap, starter furniture has started to show wear. All of this together gives Carmy about an hour where he can sit down with Sugar in the office and go over paperwork shit, taxes and licenses and reviews and paystubs and all the stuff Carmy finds tedious and difficult to read.
Mostly, he just signs whatever Sugar shows him and occasionally contributes a new problem for her to solve, or vice versa. It’s a relatively peaceful hour except when they’re fighting about something, but today she seems unbothered, even when he comes in blisteringly hot, rubbing his forehead and already angry.
“Does everyone fucking hate the family style thing?”
“Aw,” says Sugar. “No one hates it, Carm.”
“It’s always been the plan, right? Like I’m not just making it up?”
Sugar winces a little, tries to turn it into a shrug.
“It’s been your plan, yeah,” she says. Carmy opens his mouth, Sugar does, too.
“And Mikey’s. I know it was Mikey’s, too. Nobody hates the idea, Bear. It’s just a lot right now.”
Carmy pinches the bridge of his nose. He nods. He holds his breath and his words together, tight beneath his ribs. He’s always caught off guard when someone’s gentle about it, even though Sugar usually is, lately. It always arrests him, ties his hands together with guilt. If she’s not angry, then he shouldn’t be, and if he’s not angry, all that’s left to feel is grief.
“Whatever,” he says, through his teeth. “What’s up on your end?”
Sugar sifts through some papers, looking relieved to do something else.
“Uh—honestly, not much,” she says. “We’re caught up on paperwork for now. Things are looking—you know, okay, money wise. Not great. It’d be better to get a parachute if things start to die down, obviously. But yeah. Things are going okay for now. Table twelve wanted to be comped for the meal because of the timing issues last night, which is like, fucking ridiculous, considering how fucking late they stayed catching up or whatever, but that’s fine because I’m going to call them later and—”
“You’ll call them?”
Sugar turns her head, taken aback.
“Uh, yes, that’s my job. I’ll call them.”
Carmy raises his eyebrows and nods, lips pressed against his index finger. That’s fine. Sugar’s fine at that kind of thing, just—
“What’s wrong with me calling them?”
“Nothing,” Carmy says, quickly. “Nothing, that’s your job. You can just be a little—”
Sugar laughs, in that way she can laugh that makes the hair on the back of Carmy’s neck stand up.
“What, hormonal? Bitchy? God, I’m not going to scare them off, Carm. You think I’m some kind of tyrant just because I’m pregnant?”
Now Carmy really does raise his eyebrows.
“Woah, Sug,” he says. “No. What? Where’s that from? I was just going to say, like—I don’t fucking know. Passionate. Fucking Italian. You know. When you’re pissed off at people.”
“No, sorry,” she says, wincing a little, now admonished. “Richie’s just driving me fucking crazy. And Pete. It’s not your fault. And you’re right. I’ll be nice to them.”
“I was just gunna say, like—”
“The customer is always right?”
“Oh, fuck, no,” Carmy says, with feeling. “I was just going to say, comping their drinks wouldn’t kill us. Is that all you’ve got for me?”
Sugar agrees to comp their drinks at most, and looks again through the papers. Carmy catches a glance at most of them, looking for red overdue stamps or anything that looks vaguely like a bill, but they mostly seem like paid invoices. It’s a lot of invoices, to be fair, but at least they’re paid. Sugar hums and shakes her head.
“No, I don’t think so....or—actually, are we worried about Josh?”
Carmy rolls his eyes.
“Fucking Christ. He bugging you, too?”
Sugar winces.
“There’s a few messages on the phone.”
“Jesus.”
“They’re not rude or threatening or anything,” Sugar says, quickly. Too quickly. Carmy glances over her and finds exactly what he didn’t want to: a little pout to her lip, a little wrinkle in her brow. He stops himself from groaning before Sugar can even say it. “He sounds a little sad, actually.”
“Don’t,” says Carmy, already irritated.
“Don’t what, Carmen?”
“Don’t do that, Sugar. He’s not one of those cats you can feed outside. He’s a drug addict and he doesn’t fucking need anything from us, okay?”
Sugar scoffs. Carmy hasn’t complained about the cats yet because he couldn’t give two shits about what wild animals Sugar leaves a bowl out for, and, if he’s honest, he’s kind of grown accustomed to them sniffing at his feet during his one allotted smoke break for the day. But Josh isn’t a fucking cat, and Carmy already doesn’t want to hear this. He’d gotten enough of it from Josh this morning, and now Sugar’s ready to give him the rest: she can’t help it, it’s not her fault, it’s a disease, she doesn’t mean to. He’s good without it. He’s so fucking good without it.
“I’m not saying we have to give him anything.”
“Yes, you are. You look all sad. This is how we ended up with Pete.”
“You like Pete now.”
“Pete doesn’t do coke in my parking lot.”
Christ, he’d love to smoke now. But there’s no way he’d make it through the rest of the night without another break, so he’s going to have to push himself a bit. Thankfully, Sugar backs down after this, since there really isn’t a rebuttal for that. Cocaine is always kind of a conversation killer in that way. She just presses her lips together, disappointed, and turns to the computer.
“Alright,” she says. “I’ll call table twelve. We’ll ignore Josh. That’s all I’ve got for you, Bear.”
Carmy lets out a breath, long and relieved. It’s always biting nails, coming in for this hour. So many shoes have been unceremoniously dropped between eleven and twelve o’clock in this very office, and so when there’s not an overdue bill, or a court summons, or a fire code violation, it feels like a miracle.
When Carmy sees a miracle, though, he gets anxious. It’s easier to shatter it himself then wait for God to do it, which is why, after he nods and they share a moment of quiet, Sugar sipping her tea and clicking through social media posts on the computer and Carmy bouncing a pen on his palm, he asks about Mom.
“What’d she want?”
“Hm?”
“Mom. When she called. What’d she want?”
Sugar rubs her face, looking tired. Carmy feels immediately bad for asking—some people like miracles, and Sugar’s one of them. He forgets sometimes that he’s able to ruin them so quickly and so completely for other people.
“Uh, she wanted us to come over,” she says. “She wouldn’t—wouldn’t say why. I’m not sure.”
“Oh,” Carmy says. “Right. Alright. You’re gunna go?”
Sugar bites her lip.
“I don’t know. I want to. But I’m trying not to—get involved. I don’t want to get stressed out before the baby comes, you know? I’m not supposed to.”
“You’re not supposed to get stressed out before the baby comes and you’re still here?”
Sugar smiles.
“This doesn’t really stress me out,” she says. “Is that crazy?”
It’s an objectively insane thing to say. But as Carmy stares at her, the conspiratorial crinkle of her eyes, the smallest smile across her lips, pushing shyly into her cheeks, he figures that she really does mean it, and he figures he hopes that it’s true, that maybe she enjoys putting out fires and stripping away disasters like he enjoys peeling onion skins. It would make him feel less guilty about sitting across from her and her unborn kid, getting dragged to the office before they take their first breath.
He hopes it’s true. It doesn’t make it any less insane.
“It’s crazy,” he confirms, and then there’s nothing else to say.
—
Service is fine. It’s fine. Mom calls about halfway through, which Carmy is grateful for because it gives him the excuse not to pick up. In the end, it’s just fine. Everyone’s getting comfortable with this, and everything is fine, which means everyone is happy with it, which means no one is trying, which means everything is falling apart in Carmy’s head—no one’s pushing any limits, which would be okay if they were just trying to pay Cicero back except they’re not supposed to be, Sydney wants a star, so—it should be more than fine.
At the end of the night when everyone is handing out good jobs and one-armed hugs and overly-flirtatious gratitudes, Carmy can’t help but let it drive him a little crazy. It’s good. It’s fine. But it isn’t enough, and he feels like he’s the only one who sees it, except that he doesn’t want to be the asshole who brings down the mood and he can’t force himself to mean it when he says great night tonight so he ends up just saying next to nothing, even though Sydney looks at him weird, underneath her brow like she does when there’s something she wants to say but has to work up the courage to first.
“You’re angry about family style,” she says, as they’re gathering their things from the lockers, peeling off their jackets, under the delusion it might help them smell a little less like fish and garlic. They’re always the last ones to leave, lately, always the two of them peeling off the day together in the small, freshly-painted locker room. Sometimes it’s companionable silence, sometimes, they joke, and sometimes, like now, it’s when they talk about shit. “Right?”
Carmy’s jaw twitches.
“I’m not angry,” he says. “You’re the one who wanted a star.”
“I feel like you’re putting words in my mouth,” she says.
Carmy furrows his eyebrows, pulling his head back and looking at her incredulously.
“I want a star, are those the words I’m putting in your mouth? The ones you literally said?”
Sydney pulls off her jacket and stuffs it in a tote, leaning down to pick up a cardigan. As she does it, she rolls her eyes, and while she’s pulling on her cardigan, she shakes her head at herself, like she’s going to say something, and then abandons it. And then, as she’s buttoning it, she says it anyway.
“Hey, do you know that you’re being an asshole lately?”
Carmy clenches his jaw. The thing is that he does know that—Richie has said as much. He looks down at the floor, which he examines too closely for comfort. There’s only so much Zep Heavy Duty you can put on tile like this. The grit and grime of it has outlived two of its owners. It will probably outlive him and Sydney both.
“I don’t want to be,” he says, after a second, still looking at the tile. He feels that same grime in his own skin sometimes, sick with too much cigarette ash, too much self-pity, too much anger. He swallows the feeling back and glances up at her. “Sorry. I’m just—I’m just...I’m trying.”
Sydney blinks at him, all large brown eyes and pressed together lips. For a second she still looks plainly annoyed and then her faces evens out, like she’s made a decision, and she raps her fist once against the metal locker, a small but present echo.
“I know,” she says. She looks up at the ceiling. Then she laughs, shrugs, affable. “Besides, you could be worse.”
“Oh, yeah?” Carmy says, sort-of laughing.
Moments like this are when he forgets to pull back, to shrink, to keep a distance. He tries to remind himself that there’s a point to keeping distance, that the point is what Sydney wants, so it doesn’t matter if she winces or stares at him, confused and uncertain. But when it’s just them like this, when she’s smiling or it’s late, he forgets what it is she wants, and he forgets what it is he wants, too, and it’s too easy to pretend to just want this.
Sydney half-smiles, but it looks displaced. Carmy feels the loss of it in an instant.
“Yeah,” she says. “I have a friend who still works in New York.”
Carmy scoffs.
“Yeah, that’ll fucking do it,” he says.
“Pretty crazy stories,” she says. Her voice sounds odd.
Carmy swallows, only sort-of nods. The warmth has suddenly cooled, and while part of him still wants to return to it, the other part realizes how little he is motivated by what he wants and how much he is motivated by what he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to be an asshole. He doesn’t want to disappoint Sydney. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone. He doesn’t want to be talking about fucking New York.
When it becomes clear that Carmy doesn’t plan to do anything except nod and finish putting away his shit, Sydney clicks her tongue, rolls her eyes.
“You really don’t check the email, do you?”
Carmy turns to her. His jacket is zipped. It’s time to fucking go. They have five, maybe six, hours of sleep, if they’re lucky. Sydney wants to waste some of this time chatting about the email. It’s fucking absurd the amount of people who nag him about looking tired or staying too late and then continually find inane shit to keep him up at night.
“Sugar checks the email,” he says. “Why?”
Sydney shrugs, palms up, cheeks puffed out, looking defensive.
“Check the fucking email, dude,” she says. “Get back to me tomorrow.”
The first thing Carmy thinks when he opens the Bear’s email is: this is a new fucking way to have a panic attack. Normally the terror is all physical, all hands and knives and veg, heat and sweat and shouting, ash and dust and headlights through drywall. This time he’s sweating bullets opening fucking Outlook in the privacy of his own nearly-empty El train. He scrolls through a few things—invoices, reservation requests, write-ups, good stuff, good business, but as soon as he sees the name, he knows exactly which email Sydney had been talking about.
The name doesn’t matter, actually. It kind of slips from his brain each time that he reads it—all that he knows is that he recognizes it as someone he’d hired at EMP, someone who had worked with him in New York. He hates this shit. He hates this fucking shit, he hates bringing it up, he hates that Sydney told him to check the email and he hates that someone that knew him then can still reach him. He puts his phone face down on his lap and looks at the ceiling, doing deep breaths, squeezing his eyes shut. It’s so fucking dumb. He picks up the phone.
The beginning of the email is mostly bullshit niceties. She says she hopes he’s doing well which is bullshit because no one in New York wanted anyone to do well. She says she’s sorry she doesn’t have his personal email, which is also bullshit, because he hired her with it and it hasn’t changed. She says she wishes she were reaching out under better circumstances. Which is bullshit. Better circumstances rarely fucking exist.
She goes on to say, at length, that many of his previous employees, and therefore, Chef’s employees, are working together on some kind of document. The email does not go on to say, at any length, if the document is legal, journalistic, or written in fucking gel pen. Which is bullshit.
The document, it does say, is going to outline the many instances of abuse of power, verbal assault, and even (fucking even) physical battery that were experienced during his five year tenure as Chef de Cuisine at Eleven Madison Park.
Helpfully, she ends it:
This document would be shared with other like-minded professionals and hopefully contribute to a culture shift that would eliminate this kind of pointless abuse and help to ensure a brighter future for our community and our profession. Please consider contributing your story, if you’re comfortable, or, at the very least, your support.
Carmy focuses on his breathing. If he passes out on the El he’ll never fucking hear the end of it from Richie. He squeezes his eyes shut. He thinks: this is such fucking bullshit. Then he thinks: if it’s bullshit, it shouldn’t make me feel this scared. Then, with some relief, like he’s actually fucking lost it, he thinks: it doesn’t matter if I’m scared. It’s like finding the magic fucking word. It’s like fishing a key from the subway grate. All of the sudden, miracles about miracles, he can breathe again. He opens his eyes. He takes a deep breath. He deletes the fucking email.