Page 11 of The End of Summer

Those lips – I could see the bottom one starting to tremble, so I leaned down to Gretchen and said, “Listen, Stumbelina, if you start crying, you’ll make this a whole lot worse than it has to be.” Then, I left to grab the clothes.

The news made it to the kitchen at lightning speed, and by the time I returned to the private dining room, my father was there. In the havoc that followed, David stripped off his pants, gratefully accepting my offer of pressed khakis and a clean shirt. Gretchen was cleaning up the floor, her feet bare, piling individual steamers onto the tray and swallowing her tears, and my father was clearing the table. “Get a new tablecloth,now,Brady,” he said to me.

“On it, Chef,” I replied. I grabbed new linens, napkins, silverware, dinner plates, and tasting plates. High-tailed it back to the room and Gretchen was gone, along with the fallen tray.

My father and I worked in tandem, wordlessly, to get Krumholtz and company seated and re-situated with fresh drinks and food. Everything was on the house, my father insisted, and I was to stay put in the room and serve them myself. David Krumholtz, class act that he is, didn’t make a big stink about it. “Shit happens,” he told me. “Really. Every now and again I ask my wife to aggressively throw food at me. Keeps me humble,” he laughed.

Some people are just nice like that.

Unfortunately, Chef Brax is not one of those people.

Later that night, my perfectionist father had no trouble eliminating me from both his place of business as well as his house. “That was anembarrassmentto my kitchen, Brady. How could you call in a rookie for one of the most exclusive guests of the season? You never took my work seriously,” he accused me, all but foaming at the mouth. “You try being in the service industry. See how easy it is.”

I laughed when he said that – probably not my best reaction.

“Are you kidding me?” I retorted. “Iamin the service industry! More than you are – you don’t servefood; youcookit! Do you think it’s easymanaging the schedules of a bunch of college kids who ride bicycles to work and come and go like the wind? Do you think it’s just no big deal handling reservations, seating people, covering two dining rooms with barely any help?”

Instead of a normal response, my father slammed his fist down on the butcher block counter and said, “How dare you speak to me like that? You call yourself a manager? A managerhandlesthings, Brady. A chef should never have toleave the kitchen to work the floor. But you think you’re so fucking great? Then I’m sure you’llmanagejust fine living somewhere else.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“I want you gone by this weekend,” he enunciated for emphasis. “I’m sick and tired of you belittling everything that matters to me.” His eyes overflowed with venom and fire, reminiscent of the fights he used to have with my mother back when she was still around. I knew better than to ask if he was serious. As I walked out of the room, shaking my head, he called after me. “And good luck finding a job as cushy as the one I gave you.”

Just like that, I was fired and homeless, all at the hands of my own father. We avoided each other for the remainder of the week. I reached out to my core people directly. Nance was beside herself; she felt responsible, she said, and all but begged me to let her petition my dad to get my job back. Trish and Monty were sorry to hear about my departure as well, but in this business people come and go, and often they run into each other again at some other restaurant. Happens all the time in Cape Cod.

Nance had an in with Luis, a line cook at the pub who had to go to the Dominican Republic for the summer to take care of his ailing mother. This left his apartment vacant. He wasn’t planning to sublet it, because it was too much of a hassle to move everything into storage – so Nance was able to get me in there, basically as a couch surfer, for the summer. Luis put all of his personal affects in his bedroom, leaving me a sagging sofa, a bathroom, and a kitchen to callmy own until August 31st. All I had to do was cover his rent and utilities.

Of course, nobody mentioned that it was a subterranean situation, as if I was some kind of hibernating gopher.

“Yo,” Big Mike says, lumbering over from the garbage can. “We good?”

“All set,” I reply.

I climb into the passenger seat and absorb the way the illegal tints make the morning sun look like midnight. “Dark enough in here for you?” I joke.

“Don’t talk shit about my whip,” he laughs, turning up his system and bobbing his head up and down to the beat of some indie rapper named Larry June. The engine roars as he backs the truck up carefully, creating more air pollution than my Hyundai Elantra could generate in a week. And, while one might expect a truck like this to peel out onto the street, Big Mike cautiously makes a right turn and proceeds to drive the speed limit all the way back to my new digs.

“Sorry I couldn’t hang out for longer,” he comments with a smirk. “Gina made these plans weeks ago.”

“It’s all good, bro. I really appreciate your help. Have fun at your spa day.”

Mike laughs, a hearty sound that starts deep in his belly. “Someone’s jealous.”

“Just don’t let her try and wax you.”

“Nah. We already discussed that the girls could only use me for rubdown practice.” He winks. Big Mike’s girlfriend is in cosmetology school to become an aesthetician but two of her friends have their final next week in massage therapy. They’re “studying” on Big Mike this afternoon. “It workedout perfectly. You strained my poor muscles all morning with hard labor, and now they can knead out all the knots in my back. I earned it.”

“You got work tonight?” Unsurprisingly, he’s got a decent side hustle as a glorified bodyguard.

“Indeed I do. So, it’s extra important that my body be worshipped like the temple it is before I have to go put it at risk in service of others tonight. Should be good money, though. Two-hundred bucks for basically showing up and standing around for like an hour. Can’t hate on that.”

“You’ve got the life, man. I’ll just be over here scouring the internet for a new job and reorganizing the boxes in my glorified crawl space.”

“Could be worse,” Big Mike reminds me, pulling into the parking lot in front of my new abode. His flaming hair peeks out from the sides of his kelly-green Celtics hat. He is sunshine, personified.

I bite my tongue, tempted to comment that it could be better, too. But then I remember the thing he said earlier. “Obstacles are just opportunities in disguise, right?”

Big Mike nods, cheesing. “Hard facts, my man.” He juts his chin out towards what I imagine is the garbage shed. “I just saw a honey walk right in there. You could wife her up, for all we know.”

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