“I . . . DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT you mean,” I confessed.
He sighed and leaned back again, looking around the park, to a group of young people taking photos under the arch. “Then let me set the scene. Seven years ago. You’re . . . what, twenty-two? I find you, and I’m a stranger, right? Because you won’t know me for another seven years.”
His words caught me off guard, and I almost choked on my beer as I tried to take another sip. What had he said earlier? “I think it was a little longer for me”? “You—you know, then? That . . .”
“Yeah,” he replied shortly. “I do.”
I wasn’t sure what was more shocking: the realization that he had thought about coming to find me, or the fact that at some point in the next few weeks before he moved out of my aunt’s apartment, I would tell him the truth. I sat up a little straighter at the realization—“I make it back, then, don’t I? To the apartment in your time?”
He concentrated on a streetlight. “I don’t remember.”
I studied his face for a long moment, trying to see if I could tell if he was lying, the set of his mouth, an uncertainty in his eyes, but he didn’t betray anything, not even when he caught me staring, and returned it.
“I don’t remember, Lemon,” he insisted, and I quickly looked away.
Does something happen? I wanted to ask. Something so terrible that he couldn’t even tell me? I tried to think back and remember that summer seven years ago, when I went gallivanting off with my aunt at a moment’s notice. It was the first and only time my aunt and I stole away for months, charging our phones in cafés and sleeping in hostels. The next year I had a job at Strauss & Adder, and so we planned a trip at the end of summer every year instead. We’d meet at the Met on my birthday, suitcases in hand, and we’d sit and visit van Gogh for a while, and then leave for places unknown.
I didn’t remember the day I came home from that glorious summer abroad seven years ago. I remembered taxiing way too long on the tarmac in LaGuardia, so long they ran out of complimentary wine, and I remembered dropping my aunt off at her apartment, hugging her goodbye, and being so tired I accidentally caught a taxi with another person already inside.
I frowned.
James reached toward me and smoothed out the skin between my brows with his thumb. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to, because I figured I had that look on my face again, that distant sour one, like I was sucking on a lemon drop.
“Do you not remember, or do you not want to tell me?” I asked, pulling away from him, and he tilted his head to one side and debated on how to answer.
“Is there a third option?”
“Sure, but what is it?”
He hesitated, and looked down at his half-eaten fajita as if he was trying to figure out how to say what he needed to, and suddenly I got the terrible feeling that it would just make everything worse.
“Sorry,” I said quickly. “You don’t have to answer that. Wow, I—I really don’t know how to carry on a normal conversation, do I? What’s your favorite band? Favorite book? Favorite color?”
“Tsk, tsk, you still have to guess it—oh, no,” he added quieter, catching sight of something behind me, and his gaze darkened. “I feel like I’m about to regret this.”
“What?” I glanced over my shoulder.
Miguel and Isa were closing up the truck, pulling down their window covering and locking their doors, before heading over our way. I checked my watch. They really did close at ten sharp, didn’t they?
James said as they came over, “I hope you don’t have what I think you have in that brown bag, Miguel.”
“Pffff, absolutely not. Want one?” Miguel added to me, sliding to sit down beside me, and offered me the contents of the bag. I took out a chip, and it looked to be coated in sugar.
I tasted one. Definitely brown sugar. “Oh, that’s good. What is that?”
James arched an eyebrow at Miguel, and took one himself. “Miguel’s actual specialty,” he told me. “Tortilla chips tossed in cinnamon sugar and something else. Still haven’t figured it out.”
Miguel tsked. “Not even Isa knows it.”
The dessert chips were lovely and sweet, and had a nice greasy crunch to them. They were quite perfect after the fajitas. I ate another one. “Cayenne pepper?” I guessed.
Taking a handful of them from the bag, Isa said, “He’ll never tell you—whether you’re right or wrong. My bet is dehydrated sriracha.”
“Doesn’t have the right kick for sriracha,” James mused.
Miguel just looked happy that no one could guess it. “Why’s it matter? Do you want to take all of my secrets?”
“Might help with his cookbook,” Isa said. “God knows he can’t do breads.”
“I’m not bad at them,” James replied indignantly, “and chips aren’t bread.”
She laughed and scrubbed his hair. “Says the guy who almost failed Intro to Breads twice.”
“And,” Miguel added, looking at me, “he wears it like a badge of honor.” Then he reached over and pulled James’s hair back from behind his ear to show me the tattoo there. The whisk I’d seen before, now faded, the lines a little blurry.
James made a disgruntled noise and slapped Miguel’s hand away. “Yeah, don’t give away all my secrets.”
“Pffff” Miguel waved his hand at James, and leaned into me. “You know how he got that tattoo?”
“It’s fucking hilarious,” Isa added, slinging an arm around James’s shoulder.
“Don’t listen to them,” James pleaded to me, his hand brushing across mine, too light and lingering not to be purposeful. “They’ll tell you nothing but lies. They’re liars.”
“Speaking of Intro to Breads . . . first day at CIA. The three of us were the oldest people there,” Miguel said, and James shook his head.
“Oh, no, not that story.”
“It’s a good story!” Miguel rebutted, and leaned toward me. “Anyway, this guy gets called on by the chef teaching us, and we’re all elbow deep in dough, right?”
“I hate this story so much,” James groaned, pulling his hand down his face in agony.
“He was asked—Isa, what was he asked?”
She took another chip from the bag. “He was asked what he was doing.”
“I was following directions,” James mumbled.
“He says—to this super-stodgy chef, by the way—‘What does it look like I’m doing? I’m beatin’ it.’ Elbow deep in dough. Flour on his face. Yeast spilled across the counter. Using—what the fuck were you using? A wooden spoon? He was pure chaos.”
Isa cackled. “And the teacher just looked at him and said, ‘Whisk, you whisk it.’ ”
James pointed out, “To be fair, I’d never seen a Danish whisk in my life. Then Isa decided that we’d all go out drinking that night and wound up at a tattoo shop and”—he shrugged—“that’s it. That’s the story.”
To which Miguel and Isa both showed me the utensils behind their left ears, too—a spatula and a ladle.
“Well, now I feel left out,” I said. “I want a cooking utensil behind my ear. Which one would I be?”
Isa took another handful of chips from the bag. “Nah, you’re not a cooking utensil. You’d be . . . hmm.”
“A paintbrush,” James said so very certainly.
Miguel asked, “You’re a painter?”
“It’s just a hobby,” I quickly replied. “I’m a book publicist, actually. It’s a great job. I work under one of the most talented people in my field, and it’s such an honor. I love it.”
On the other side of James, Isa asked, “Why do you love it?”
I opened my mouth—and froze.
That was a harder question than I thought.
The thing was, I loved my job, too, but if I was honest with myself? I wasn’t sure I was passionate about it anymore—not like Rhonda was, or the person I used to be, six months ago, who just kept climbing higher and higher, and that’s all she wanted, but—
I saw how hungry and excited Drew was about the possibility of acquiring James’s book, how even as she neared retirement, Rhonda was passionate about her job until the very end, and mostly I just felt . . . tired.
I thought about the last conversation I had with my aunt—“Let’s go on an adventure, my darling.”
And, honestly? An adventure sounded nice.
“I . . . just do,” I ended up replying. “And it helps that my two best friends also work with me. What made you want to be a chef?” I asked her.
“My mom’s a renowned pastry chef—excuse me, pâtissiere. I grew up in the backs of kitchens,” Isa said. “I think my favorite thing, though? The way a fresh croissant smells. Nothing like it.”
“Or when you get the perfect blend of salt, acid, and fat . . .” Miguel kissed the tips of his fingers and threw it into the sky. “Makes a dish sing.”
“Or the people who come to taste your art,” James agreed, and then he pursed his lips, and shook his head. “The truth is most restaurant jobs pay shit. You work terrible hours. While you make great food, you usually eat shit when you get home. Or you’re too tired to eat. This business isn’t for everyone. If you’re not pursuing something worthwhile, then why are you in the kitchen?”
“I can’t remember the last time I cooked for myself,” Isa deadpanned, a distant look in her eyes.
Miguel threw back the rest of his beer. “I can’t remember the last time someone complimented my food.”
“I can’t, either, and I’m about to open a restaurant, hopefully to critical acclaim, so here’s hoping something changes,” James added, finishing the rest of his beer, too, and pushing himself to his feet. He grabbed the empty plates and beer bottles, and went to go throw them away. As he left, a sinking feeling began to settle in my stomach.
Isa sighed, eating another chip. “I’m so afraid he’s going to burn out.”
Miguel rubbed the back of his neck. “I know.”
I watched James retreat to the trash can at the edge of the square. “Burn out?”
“Yeah,” Miguel told me, watching James kick a can down the sidewalk, then pick it up, and throw it away with the rest of the trash. “I just . . . sometimes think he’s doing too much. Not doing enough for himself.”
“He wants to make his grandpa proud,” I pointed out.
He nodded. “Yeah, well, at what point should he start wanting to do something for himself? If it wasn’t his grandpa, it was Chef Gauthier, if it wasn’t Gauthier, it was whatever he thought he needed to do to get to the next level. Over and over and over again,” he said, rolling his hand to emphasize.
“Maybe it’s what he wants to do, too,” Isa pointed out.
“Maybe,” Miguel replied, “but maybe there’s something in doing the thing that brings you joy, too. Even if it’s not the thing that gets you a fuckin’ Michelin star.”
I finished my beer as James returned, his hands in his dark-wash jeans. He sat down hard between us again, and leaned back on his hands. “Okay, enough complaining about work. Lemon, did you know I probably wouldn’t have survived CIA without these two?”
“He was such a pain,” Isa complained, and ate another chip.
I eyed James. “I believe that.”
He looked stricken. “Hey . . .”
“We have a lot of stories,” Miguel agreed.
I took another handful of chips, and told his friends, “I’ve nowhere to be. Tell me everything.”
Isa hummed excitedly and hopped to her feet. If James liked to talk with his hands, Isa liked to talk with her whole body. She moved when she spoke, I quickly found out, pacing back and forth, turning on her heels, like sitting still was the bane of her existence. “Well, you are looking at the three top chefs from CIA the year we graduated,” she began, motioning to the three of them. “And two of us almost didn’t graduate—but not from a lack of trying.”
James leaned in close to me and muttered, his voice low and a little playful, “I’ll let you guess which two.”
“Not you, surely,” I replied, and his mouth twitched into the barest grin.
Isa went on, “We sort of all gravitated toward each other, since we were some of the oldest there.”
James said, louder, though he didn’t lean away from me. Our shoulders brushed, and I felt like a teenager, my heart skipping up into my throat. “I think I was the oldest in our class . . .”
“No, no.” Miguel waved his hand. “There was that retired accountant. What was her name? Beatrice? Bernadette?”
Isa snapped her fingers and pointed to him. “Bertie! She’s the reason we went abroad that summer, remember? When we catered for that nude colony on the coast of France?”
James had a far-off look in his eyes, as if he was recounting a war zone. “I wish I didn’t.”
Miguel went on, “Or the time we almost poisoned the Queen of England.”
“We did not,” James corrected. “Not even remotely.”
But all I took out of that was “You cooked for the queen?”
He shook his head. “God rest her soul. It wasn’t that big of a deal—”
“Hell yeah, it was! Listen, he never gets excited for anything. It was for a banquet, right? Some real fancy shit, and we’d gotten in on good recs. Though I don’t think you were working that kitchen, were you, Isa?”
“No, I was getting drunk down in Shoreditch.”
“Right, right.” Miguel nodded, remembering. “Well, if it wasn’t for that poison taster, no one would’ve caught it.”
“Paprika and ground chili pepper look similar, okay?” James massaged the bridge of his nose, and then said a little quieter, “And I was a little hungover.”
“Oh my god,” I gasped. “You were almost an assassin?”
“Ground chili pepper would not have killed the queen,” he replied indignantly, knocking his shoulder against mine. Even through our clothes, he was warm, and this close, I could smell the hints of his aftershave—a woodsy cedar and rose. “Cayenne, on the other hand? Probably.”
“That’s not even the fun story!” Miguel went on, a spark in his eyes. He waxed poetically about some other stories with James, stories of a one-night stand in Glasgow, a meet-cute with a mobster in Madrid that ended in a high-speed moped chase down the Gran Via, traveling as far and as wide as he’d said, far back in my aunt’s apartment, he hoped he would.
We talked until our cinnamon-sugar-crusted fingers hit the bottom of the chip bag, and it was a good night. The kind of good night that I hadn’t had in a while.
The kind of good that stuck to your bones, thick and warm, and coated your soul in golden light.
Good food with good friends.
By the end of all of it, James was laughing again, his smile easy as he talked about his early days as a line cook at the Olive Branch, and the meat vendor who tried to hook him up with his daughter.
“I think you actually went on a date, didn’t you?” Isa asked.
James ducked his head. “One. We quickly figured out we were not compatible. But she did have a baby goat she dressed up in welly boots. So damn cute,” he admitted.
Miguel asked, “Wasn’t that the fall after you came to NYC? When you got promoted to line at the Branch?” By then I was so invested I wanted every little dirty, embarrassing thing James Iwan Ashton had ever done or been a part of. “After you met that girl, right?”
Something changed in James’s posture then, as we leaned against each other. He went rigid. “Not this story.”
“Oh, come on.” Isa rolled her eyes, and told me, “He never shut up about her. Not once, not for a second. What was her name? It had something to do with a song, right?”
“A song?” I both did and didn’t want to know.
“Yeah,” Miguel agreed, and started to sing it. “Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine.”
