Page 22 of Christmas with the Irish Devil
Felix sticks his head into the walk-in and then sticks his whole body inside because he never learned to stop dramatizing. “Chef,” he calls, echo going round the racks. “We are short on cream.”
“Use evaporated milk and pretend to be French,” I say. “It is a storm day. They will forgive us if we make it taste like memory.”
“Memory I can do,” he says, and comes out flushed and grinning, arms full.
At nine, the fisherwoman knocks twice on the back door and lets herself in. She is as tall as a mast and red-cheeked and she wears two knives on her belt like a warning and a promise. She names each scallop boat the shells came from, taps the rough edge of one shell with her thumbnail the way a musician tests a drum. She pours a dozen on ice just for me, for tasting. I pop one with a twist of the wrist and the sweet brine hits my tongue and I close my eyes at the first clean rush of it. I tip the shell to the mouth of the baby and say, “We are eating the weather,” and the baby answers with a lazy roll of heel against palm.
“Kid has taste,” the fisherwoman says. “How far along are you now, Chef?”
“Eight months,” I say. “He is punctual and I am out of breath.”
“Then bring him soup and sit sometimes,” she says, and clamps one big hand on my shoulder. “Salt on your lips. Good luck in your bones.”
By lunch we are busy. The town wakes slower in a storm, but hunger always wins. A couple in thick sweaters shares a pot of mussels and two slices of brown bread and talk to each other with their heads bent, private as prayer. A woman reads a paperback and eats every shred of fennel on her plate, eyeswet but not from the soup. Two men in clean work jackets sit at the bar and ask me, through the pass, whether we will do the Guinness cake on Christmas Eve. “We will,” I say, and they nod as if a treaty has been confirmed.
Between tickets, between the heat and the clatter, the baby shifts again. I lean one hand on the low boy and breathe until the room returns to a single point. Noor makes a motion with the stool. I shake my head. “Not yet,” I say. “Give me two more fires.”
We send scallops that look lacquered and smell like a promise fulfilled. We send soup that glows like late afternoon. We send a plate of roasted carrots with cumin and honey and a puck of goat’s cheese rolled in cracked pepper. We send bread that lands with a soft knock and breaks into a steam that smells like kelp and memory and wet stone.
At the lull Marta appears at the end of the line with her ledger under her arm. She watches me for a moment and then sets the ledger down and takes my tongs without asking.
“You hydrate,” she says. “I plate.”
“You will plate too neatly,” I say, but I drink the water anyway.
She leans close so I do not have to lean toward her. “The caterers from the inn called,” she says in a low voice. “They want you to design the Christmas Eve menu. Six courses. Family style. They asked for the soda bread curls.”
“They always ask for the curls,” I say. “What is the budget.”
“Small,” she says. “Like a pocket full of buttons.”
“Then we will make the buttons shine,” I say.
Marta smiles, quick and fierce. “You always do.”
The snow picks up in the afternoon and then drops away to a lazy dusting, as if the sky grew bored. A woman in a green parka comes in and orders tea and looks at the baby with the open curiosity of someone who is trying not to cry in public. I bringher a slice of cake because she needs it and because I can. She thanks me the way you thank a miracle you did not want to ask for.
By four, the deliveries have stopped. The town tucks itself in. We prep for dinner by counting candles and counting scallops and counting how many times I need to tell Felix to stop tasting the persillade with a spoon. “It is parsley and garlic,” I say. “It will taste like parsley and garlic every time.”
“It tastes like Italy,” he says. “I have never been.”
“You can visit with your mouth,” I say. “Wash the spoon.”
We run a staff meal because I hate sending a crew into service on just coffee and hope. Noor makes rice with saffron and crisp edges and I top it with roasted fennel and the last of the lemon peel and a handful of almonds I bash with the bottom of a pan because I cannot find the food processor blade. We eat out of bowls while standing around the prep table and I lean against the counter with a relief that makes my knees weak.
“Chef,” Luis says between bites, “what are you naming him.”
“I am naming him later,” I say. “I am naming him when he tells me his name.”
“You are weird,” he says, delighted.
“Thank you,” I say.
Dinner starts early. Snow does that. People eat when the light leaves. The room blurs into heat and laughter and the steady rhythm of orders moving from paper to pan to plate. The baby kicks in time with the ticket machine, which either means I am raising a percussionist or a tyrant. After the first hour I forget about everything but the line, muscle memory taking the wheel while my brain does math in the background, where did we put the extra thyme, how many scallops left, start confit now or tomorrow, drink water, breathe, check the salt.
Halfway through service the door opens and a wind arrives with a woman I know too well. She is thirty and sharp as afilleting knife, a food writer who gave us an early review that still keeps people walking through the door in bad weather. She sticks her head into the pass and asks if we will ever do a chef’s table. “When the baby can hold a whisk,” I say. She grins and then her eyes slip to my belly and soften. I keep moving, but I feel the kindness like a hand at my back.
At nine, when the rush begins its slow descent into the kind of contented noise that means dessert, Marta slides a plate onto the pass for me. The Guinness cake has a gloss like a piano and wears a veil of whipped cream that could ruin marriages. I take a fork to it and eat two bites standing with a spoon in my other hand because I refuse to choose between two good things. The cake tastes like holidays I used to like, like my mother’s kitchen when she was in a good mood, like a song in a pub that everyone knows. It tastes like grief too. I swallow both.
