Their baker, Tara, hasn’t lifted her head off her knees yet. He gives her a nudge with his boot, but she doesn’t move. Rose stands next to Martin, smoking and chewing gum at the same time. “Like menthol,” she explained to him once. Charlie nudges her for a cigarette even though he has a nearly full pack in his back pocket. “No,” she says, scowling at him. She reminds him of a cigarette — skinny, dirty, stinky, but still appealing in a way he could never explain. She’s added to the sleeves on her arms, swirls of stars mingling with twisting koi tails. He glares at her tight-lipped, dagger-eyed face and vaguely recalls a remark he made to her last night, something off the cuff, something about intelligence and a sack of bricks. “Don’t say no to me,” he says. She yanks out a cigarette and throws it at him. She’s the only one who refuses to call him Chef; she calls him Charlie, that is if she’s speaking to him at all. She’s above it: above taking requests, above scraping people’s leftovers into the garbage, and Charlie has a strong hunch she also feels she’s above him. He puts the cigarette to his lips without looking anyone in the eye. James, one of his kitchen runts, whips out his lighter. Asskisser, Charlie thinks as he leans the tip of the cigarette into the offered flame, catching the fire before a gust of wind blows it out. “Looking a little tired, Chef,” James says.
“It was a late night,” Charlie says. Rich, one of their First Cooks and an exchange student from Japan, beams at him. His hair stands straight up from his head and even in the wind remains immobile. Last night, he emptied the hot deep fryer oil into a plastic bucket, which meant Charlie was at the restaurant until the wee hours of the morning, drinking wine and jingling his keys while he watched Rich bop around the kitchen cleaning up the mess. The grease had melted the bottom of the bucket and poured out over the floor, also melting the bottoms of Rich’s shoes. It was difficult to get angry at him, because he spoke very little English and was also an unnaturally happy person. A bubble of chaos followed him wherever he went, and yet he was the only cook in Charlie’s kitchen who never cracked under pressure.
The cigarette doesn’t calm or ease the strain on Charlie’s lungs. He smacks his tongue against the pasty roof of his mouth. The birthday card has made him aware of a foul taste he suspects may be his life rotting away from the inside out. He’s parched, but he’s decided not to drink today. He wants to preserve an edge for negotiations. He hacks and spits into the ashtray can. “Fortune House,” Charlie laughs hoarsely, trying to distract himself from his thirst. “I was so stoned there one night. Was I with you?” he asks Martin.
“Could’ve been.” Martin smiles at the memory he may or may not have.
“The two-foot tower of chicken feet in the middle of the table,” Charlie says. “Did you help me build that?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Martin grins, nodding his head.
“This story again,” Rose says, rolling her eyes.
“What’s up your butt today?” Charlie turns to glare at her.
“You got kicked out. For some reason you were barefoot. You walked into a club, cut your foot, ended up in emerg, tetanus shot. Hardy, har, har.” She gets up, brushing dust off the back of her black pants and flicks her cigarette butt over the railing. “I’m fucking bored,” she says, stomping up the steps and slamming the back door behind her.
“Oh, stuff it, Rose,” Charlie calls after her, spitting into the garbage again. He briefly indulges a fantasy of flicking his cigarette butt into the bird’s nest she’s concocted with chopsticks at the nape of her neck. He imagines it stiff with hairspray. The fire would be quick, merciless.
Susan’s wife pulls into the parking lot and Susan climbs out of the passenger side, barely able to get the door shut before the car goes peeling out again.
“Finish the story,” Martin says.
“Naw,” Charlie says, with a shrug. “It’s been told.”
Susan strides toward them wearing a short skirt, a loose-fitting blazer, and sunglasses, even though the sky is dark with clouds. The consensus among the staff is that Susan is certifiably insane, yet people are still attracted to her in the way eyes are unwillingly drawn to an eviscerated creature on the side of the road. She’s only been at the restaurant for a few months, but Charlie already knows intimate details involving her sex life, gynecological exams, and bowel difficulties. She spent the last five years managing one of the top fine dining restaurants in Toronto, and her first week at Marinacove she walked around with a look of horror on her face — horror at the rude pops as wine bottles were uncorked, horror at the elementary way in which the napkins were folded, horror at the wet rings left from napkinless glasses. Her mission is to keep the bread-cutting board continuously crumbless. She keeps a razor in the back for the days when Martin forgets to shave, which are most days. She likes Rose for some reason, even though Rose is a terrible server, lazy and prone to rudeness and unwilling to carry more than two plates at a time due to weak wrists. Rose has to take air out back at least once a night, but never clues into the fact that her lightheadedness may be attributed to the serious lack in her daily caloric intake. She and Susan seem to share an affinity, though, for ridicule and laughter with a serrated edge. Susan’s laugh belies her fine-dining background; there’s something rough there, guttural, something that hints at small towns, strip malls, and truck stops. It makes for an odd juxtaposition with her shiny suits and blond-highlighted hair. Charlie pretends not to hear Susan calling him in her sing-song, sugar-drippy voice. This is not a good sign. Usually he and Susan mutually ignore each other. He smokes hurriedly and shuffles inside so he doesn’t have to say hello back.
As he clomps through the hall toward the kitchen, he accidently steps on Aisha’s ultrasound photo, which has fallen from the corkboard. She pinned it there for him when he admitted to not knowing how to tell the staff about the incoming baby. He stops briefly to rub a foot print off the paper and pin it back up, putting in an extra pushpin to hold the photo in place. He likes the corner picture best, the baby (or beast) staring straight at the camera with a hollow-eyed stare and mini-raptor’s hungry grin. There was some celebrating among the staff after Aisha posted the photo. The cooks were all overly enthusiastic, patting Charlie on the back and grinning at him like goons with that hopeful look he recognized as an expectation of free beer. Rose looked horrified and wished Aisha luck. Susan pulled two slim cigarillos out of the glass case on the bar and she and Charlie smoked them out back beside the dumpsters so their strong smell wouldn’t find its way into the restaurant.
“A father, eh!” Susan said, shaking her head and letting the smoke drift from her open mouth.
“Yep.” Charlie took note of his posture: taller, chest expanded, sturdy, reliable.
“My father was a fucking imbecile.” She laughed with that raspy tickle that unsettled him. He felt his body slacken under her words, his belly protruding to its natural state. He remembered what she was wearing that day: a tight-fitting white suit that glowed against the dirty grey of the back alley. She shone like a lesbian Madonna. He felt blinded by her truth — it was painful to the eyes. “You’ll be fine,” she said. “You’ll be better than him, at least.”
When Aisha told him she was pregnant he walked right out the door, down the hall, down the stairs, along the banks of English Bay, up the steep hill on Davie, into his favourite French bistro, and back down the hill on Davie before going home. He ate a piece of Alsatian pie at the bistro and felt miserable afterwards — he hated eating alone. In that entire length of time Aisha’s position on the couch and the expression on her face had not changed. She was gazing ecstatically into the maple tree outside their window when he left and she was gazing at the damn tree when he returned. Somehow he knew this meant she would not be leaving. It felt too easy; there was no discussion, no decision to be something new together. Their lives were running parallel and then all of a sudden they found themselves joined, two random atoms suddenly fused by a magnetic force.