She didn’t want to tell Ruby to eat. The girl had food in the house, after all, so she could eat if she wanted to, but she obviously didn’t, or couldn’t. And telling her to was going to get them both nowhere so she needed to park that for the moment and just work out what else she could do to help.
“You know I’m pretty close to having a fit of the vapors myself,” she said. “My bees are out of sorts and I swear I’m right there with them so I’m going to make us both a cup of lemon tea and then you know what we’re going to do?”
She wiped the tears from Ruby’s hollow cheeks. “We’re going to lie on that great big bed of yours and look at your scrapbook.”
If there was a simple way to fix a problem quickly, her grampa had always said, you’re a fool not to try it. Sugar didn’t know how to get Ruby to eat more, but she did know how to make her feel better, so she would take it from there.
In the kitchen, she added to Ruby’s tea a spoonful of the bee pollen she had in her pocket. Bee pollen, in her opinion, was one of the world’s unsung superfoods and, while it would hardly restore Ruby to health the way eating three good meals a day could, it would at least give the starving girl a smidgeon of energy to help get her through the next few hours. Actually, Sugar needed a little oomph of her own so added a few grains to her tea too, then carried both cups into Ruby’s room where she was nestling like a tiny twig into the many overstuffed pillows of her vast sleigh bed, the scrapbook open on her lap.
“It was a good week,” Ruby said. “Will you read them to me?”
She was now down to one one-eighth of a cracker, two wedges of orange, a stick of celery, half a jar of baby food and a carrot but she had nixed the diet soda. She was not going to go back to the hospital, she was not going to even try quinoa; she just wanted to hear nice things about happy people.
Sugar slipped off her shoes, nestled back against the pillows herself, and picked up the scrapbook.
“Brenda Lord and Victor Hamilton were married yesterday at Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church in Westhampton Beach, N.Y.,” she read.
‘I knew from the moment I first saw him that we would end up getting married,’ said the bride, who is taking her husband’s name. ‘It just took a couple of years for him to see it the same way.’”
“That happens quite a lot,” said Ruby. “With the taking a while to see it that way.”
“Well, according to Mr. Hamilton, ‘Brenda knows exactly what she wants and once I got used to that, I saw how handy it could be.’ Sugar continued.
‘Our fate was sealed the first time he told me not to worry, that everything would be all right,’ said Mrs. Hamilton. ‘He had no way of knowing that it would be, but I loved that he said that anyway.’”
“He sounds pretty cool,” Ruby said. “But she sounds bossy. Read me another one.”
“You want to add a little please or thank you to that?”
“Please or thank you,” Ruby obliged.
“Benjamin Fielding and Gail Greenberg were married Sunday evening at Beth El Congregation in New York,” Sugar read. “The couple were introduced by their fathers, who met at Mr. Greenberg’s synagogue and decided their children would be perfect for each other.
‘Naturally I did not believe that this would be the case,’ Mr. Fielding said, ‘so I did not call Gail after my father gave me her number.’
‘And I wouldn’t have gone out with him even if he had called,’ added Ms. Greenberg. ‘Getting set up by your parents is not usually a recipe for success.’”
“I happen to know that Ms. Greenberg is right about that,” said Sugar.
“Continue, please,” instructed Ruby.
“However, a few months later the pair met by coincidence at a dinner party being hosted by a mutual friend and, to their great amusement, they got on extremely well.
‘She was as smart and funny as she was beautiful,’ said Mr. Fielding. ‘That was a pretty big night, actually, to discover my soul mate—and that my parents were right!’”
“You see?” Ruby said. “It took a while for them to see it but it worked out in the end.”
“It was nice what he said about her being smart and funny and beautiful,” Sugar admitted.
“Has anybody ever said that about you?”
“Not recently,” Sugar said, “but my mama did fix me up once, although I didn’t know it at the time.”
“And what happened?”
“It didn’t work out,” Sugar said. “In the end.”
“But in the beginning?”
“In the beginning? It’s funny you should ask me that. I hadn’t thought much about the beginning until today.”
“And?”
“And now I have thought about it I would have to say that in the beginning it was pretty good but the beginning is only the beginning and it’s kind of the middle and the end that really matter.”
“What made it so good to start out with?”
“I guess I was just crazy in love with him and I thought that was all you had to be for everything to work out OK.”
“What did it feel like to be crazy in love?”
Sugar lay back on the pillows. What a question. What did it feel like? “You know, being in love is not as much fun as they make it look in the movies. Most the time you feel like you ate a bowlful of bad shrimp. Your head tries to tell you one thing but your body has a whole different take on it. It’s like being on a runaway roller coaster with a belly full of barbecue.”
“I imagined that about the roller coaster,” Ruby said. “But not with all the food. You make it sound scary.”
“It is scary, sweetie, because one person never truly knows what is going on in another person’s head. So your heart might be at the front of the roller coaster but your other body parts are at the back and the person you’re crazy in love with might be on a whole different ride, plus there are twists and turns. It’s complicated.”
“What happened in the end?”
Sugar closed her eyes and pictured Grady the last time she had seen him. “I’m not sure that I want to talk about that right now.”
“Did he break your heart?”
“I don’t know about that.”
“You must know if your heart is broken, Sugar. You must be able to feel it and it hurts, like everything inside you is black and hard and not dead, exactly, but pretty close.”
“OK, well, I suppose he did break my heart then,” Sugar said. “But it didn’t happen the way I thought hearts got broken. It didn’t mean I wasn’t in love with him anymore, which was kind of strange. And it wasn’t sudden. I guess it broke slowly, and it was a whole lot of little heartbreaks that one day joined up to make one big one, and then—well that was sudden, and it did not come at a good time, not for anyone, which only made it worse.”
“Is it still broken?” Ruby asked.
“No, honey, hearts don’t stay broken. That’s the good thing. Just like everything else, they can be mended. And anyway that was a long time ago.”
Ruby turned her head away from Sugar and reached out to stroke the dark green brocade drapes framing the view of the building next door.
“I don’t think anyone will ever love me like Mr. Fielding loves Ms. Greenberg,” she said.
“Oh, but someone will,” Sugar protested. “Someone definitely will. Someone might be loving you like that right now and you don’t even know it.”
“I’d know it,” Ruby said. “I know I’d know it.”
“Well that’s the thing about love, Ruby. You don’t know. Mr. Fielding and Ms. Greenberg are a perfect example. They particularly didn’t want to find love with each other—and then they met and whammo, there it was, love in all her glory, nothing to do with them at all.”
She thought of Theo, of how she’d felt when their hands touched on the street the day they met, of how her insides quivered just at the very thought of him, of how one part of her—the part that wasn’t scarred by her past—had melted at the thought of a handsome stranger with beauti
ful blue eyes and a bewitching certainty saying he saw their future together.
“But I’m the last person who has any business talking about love,” she said. “You ought to talk to George. He seems to have a pretty good take on it.”
“Will you stay here for a while?” Ruby asked her. “Till I go to sleep?”
“Of course, honey. Of course.”
She looked so young, lying in that giant empty sea of a bed. Too young to know about feeling black and hard and almost dead inside. But she’d certainly nailed the feeling; Sugar had known it well. In fact, she knew it still. And she’d been wrong to tell Ruby that hearts did not stay broken. They did. It was just that until she met Theo Fitzgerald, she didn’t know hers was one of them.
23RD
Nate slid in the diner’s kitchen door just as the clock beside the extractor fan showed it was fifteen seconds after his start time. Everyone knew the clock was seven minutes fast but that made no difference to Chef.
“So pleased you could join us, Your Majesty,” he called, his gravelly voice dripping with sarcasm. “Up all night banging your boyfriend? So dee-lighted for you. Oh no, wait a minute, that’s right, I’m not. No, turns out I don’t give a crap about your night or your day or who or what you bang and how often or how little or anything that goes on in your miserable little pissant world outside of this kitchen. Now move your fat sorry ass and get to work.”
Nate shuffled in behind the grill, his cheeks aflame, thankful at least for the usual clatter and clang, the noisy bustle and hiss of the busy kitchen. Silence would only make it worse.
“Shouldn’t let him treat you like that, dude,” said LeBron, a nice kid who’d worked there for only a couple of months but already had the chef’s number. “Douche has got a major bug up his ass today.”
Douche’s bug had traveled farther with each passing day since Citroen’s three stars from what Nate could tell.
“I’m not letting him do anything,” he said as quietly as he could while he scraped the grill plate clean.
“You two girls quit your gossiping and flip some fricking burgers,” Chef roared.
“Flipping as we speak, Chef,” LeBron said. “Under control. All orders cleared. Just keep ’em coming.”
Nate looked at all the definitely uncleared orders clipped up above LeBron’s head. LeBron could do that sort of thing. He possessed the easy sort of confidence that Nate would have given anything for. He had a buff body too. He worked out with his older brother six times a week, he told Nate, a little pointedly perhaps, but he was not being mean, and in fact had asked Nate if he wanted to join them, but he didn’t.
Nate had been overweight for as long as he could remember but was far too self-conscious to go to a gym.
The girls who worked at the diner loved LeBron. He could have dated any one of them if he wanted but he told Nate they weren’t his type, not even Tracy, the prettiest of all, whose thick blond hair fell in springy ringlets down her back. In his bravest moments, which he nonetheless kept to himself, Nate thought Tracy might have been his type. She’d picked up his apron the time Chef cut it off him in a fit of rage and threw it on the floor, and after that she had smiled at him at least once every shift.
But that was it.
This shift, LeBron was only working a half day so after attempting a series of complicated high fives, which Nate bungled, as usual, he sloped off.
Envying even the way he could slope, Nate sat in the doorway of the building next door with the lunch he’d brought from home. He was halfway through his first sandwich when he realized that Tracy and her friends were having a smoke on the neighboring stoop—and they were talking about him.
“So Nate’s gay, right?” Felicia asked.
“Chef certainly seems to think so,” her friend Beatty answered.
“I don’t know if he’s gay, but he could be one of those nothings,” Tracy suggested. “My cousin Lucas is like that. He just sits at my aunt’s house fooling around on the Internet all day and eating Cheetos and shit. Doesn’t even leave the house anymore.”
“Probably looking at porn,” said Beatty.
“No, my aunt checked his computer when he was in the bathroom a while back. Weirdo is looking at real estate. Like the dude doesn’t even have a job and he thinks he can buy a house in Cape Cod or something.”
They all laughed and started talking about some other loser they all knew while Nate pressed himself back against the doorway, hoping they wouldn’t see him, his cheeks burning as he started on his second artichoke and sundried tomato on rye with fresh farm ham and mozzarella cheese. He wasn’t gay and Chef would just as likely bully him for being straight, especially if he knew how bad he was at it. Tracy was not his type after all. How could she write him off as “one of those nothings”? How could anybody write anybody else off as a nothing? Nobody was nothing.
And her cousin Lucas might stay at home eating Cheetos but at least he dreamed of being somewhere else, of doing something else, and there was nothing wrong with that. Nate might be stuck down the grill line at a crappy diner flipping burgers for customers who didn’t know their Wagyu beef from a hole in the ground but that didn’t mean he always would be. He had graduated from culinary college with an excellent degree, after all, his tutors all agreeing that he was a man born to feed people, that he had a gift for it, that he would rise to great heights. And although his family upstate thought he was nuts to want to cook for a living—that was woman’s work and in New York City? Please!—on campus Nate believed he had found his true place in the world.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t the real world.
In the heat of your average working Manhattan kitchen it wasn’t just a matter of feeding people, of taking a baby romaine and some parmigiano and a perfectly boiled egg and some Spanish anchovy and Italian oil and sourdough croutons and making the world’s best Caesar salad. Well, it might be, if he was working for Mario Batali or Daniel Boulud or even Roland Morant.
But the truth of the matter was that having a gift for feeding people was only a small part of what was required. What was more important was the ability to remain supremely assertive in a hierarchy designed to suit the bold and boisterous and to swallow the quiet and fearful.
The nothings.
Yet somewhere deep down inside himself, buried beneath exquisite almond croissants, or exotic lunchtime bagels, or his homemade apple pie or three-layered coconut cake, Nate truly believed that he was good at what he did. The diner was crappy but the burgers he flipped were good. Even Chef knew that. (Which was why he treated him like dirt instead of firing him.) And one day Nate would show him how talented he really was. One day he would show everyone.
Or that’s what he told himself late at night when he pulled out his neat little gardening kit and lavished his precious window boxes with all the tenderness he had no one else to show.
24TH
Sugar had grown accustomed to hearing Nate digging in his garden in the middle of the night. Usually she found it oddly soothing enough to lull her back to sleep but tonight her mind was whirring with worry about Ruby, thoughts of Theo and echoes of George so when she heard the scrape of a trowel against soil, she got up, slipped on her robe, made two cups of tea with a slug of bourbon in each, and took them out onto the terrace.
It was a full moon and the light shimmered and bounced off the surrounding rooftops, casting eerie spiderweb shadows beneath water towers and behind fire escapes.
She could see the tops of the Tompkins Square Park elms moving beyond the buildings to the north and thought she could even hear them rustling.
“It’s a different world up here, don’t you think?” she said, handing a cup to Nate through the window. “Only ever seeing the tops of things. It’s like we’re truly the cream of the crop.”
Nate sniffed loudly and kept digging.
“Bad day at the office?” she asked.
“I’m going to try heirloom cherry tomatoes this year,” he said. “I just found this Greek recipe with f
eta cheese and shrimp. I think you’ll really like it.”
“Sounds delicious,” agreed Sugar. “Although it’s your pastries I dream about. Speaking of which, did you see the ad on JobFinder for a pastry chef at Citroen?”
Nate had told Sugar about Roland Morant, about what a genius he was supposed to be, about how mad it made Chef that Citroen had got three stars. Of course he had seen the ad—just when he thought his day could not get any worse. He’d seen it, felt sick about it, made a tiramisu, planted more basil, twice baked some pistachio biscotti, recalled every word of the conversation he had overheard with Tracy and wished he was dead.
“Is that something you would think of going for?” Sugar asked.
“No,” he said, sniffing again, digging lemongrass roots into the soil.
“You don’t want to get away from your situation at the diner?”
“It’s not that bad,” he said, but even in the moonlight she could see him color.
“Well, if you say so, but I’ve tasted your food, Nate, and I think you’re wasted on a boss who doesn’t appreciate you. Your place is with someone who will applaud your talent as will his customers so it’s a win-win-win situation and everybody knows they are hands down the best kind.”
“Every pastry chef in New York will be going for that Citroen job.”
“But they won’t all be as good as you! And if you have to do a trial, you could make some of your almond croissants or your finikias. You could use my honey. In fact, you know what? You could take a starter hive of bees and Roland Morant could keep them on his own rooftop. No other pastry chef would think of that! How about it?”
“I couldn’t do a trial. I’m no good under pressure.”
“You work with that bully at the diner every single day, Nate. You’re always under pressure. You know, it’s all very well to keep your light under a bushel—in fact it’s a deeply endearing feature, one of many you exhibit if I may be so bold. But in the meantime the rest of us aren’t eating as well as we could be.”
Nate knew he just didn’t have the cojones to pull off a stunt like that. He couldn’t even imagine walking into the restaurant holding a starter hive of bees. How would he shake Morant’s hand? How would he even open the door? He would be sweaty. What if the bees escaped?