Cilantro and Smoke

Reggie Oakley counted his garnish knives twice before he believed they were all there, and then he wiped down the walnut bar top for the third time anyway, because his hands needed something to do and the halogen lights above Óxido's bar showed every water spot like a crime. He was twenty-four now, two years past the worst morning of his life, and he had learned that the trick to getting through a night was making everything square before anybody walked in. Bottles lined up by height. Citrus cut and covered. The smoking gun loaded with mesquite chips, because the chef wanted a smoked old fashioned on the pairing menu and Reggie had spent a week getting the burn right, testing chips in the back alley like a mad scientist until the smoke tasted like something worth charging fourteen dollars for.

He was twenty-two when Layla Masterson walked out of his life, and he was twenty-three when he finally stopped checking his phone for her, and those two facts were related in a way he did not like to think about. Eight months they had together, which was nothing in the scheme of things and everything in the scheme of him, and she had ended it with a text sent from a gate at Maurice-Bergstrom, fourteen words that he could still recite if he let himself, which he did not. Transferred to a culinary program in Spain. Did not warn him. Did not call. Just a text at six in the morning while he was prepping for brunch, and he had read it standing at his kitchen counter in his socks, and then he had gone to work anyway because the schedule said he was on and that was the only thing holding him upright that week.

The week after, he had drowned it in Fernet, which was a stupid way to grieve and also the only way he knew, since he worked in a bar and the medicine was right there. His buddy Des had cut him off on day six, physically reached across the bar and put a hand over Reggie's glass, and said, "You're gonna make yourself the cautionary tale, man, and I'm not bussing your body out of here." Reggie had laughed for the first time in days at that, and something had sort of clicked, and he had gone home and slept fourteen hours and woken up angry instead of sad, which was a better fuel. He built his whole craft on that anger for about a year, and then somewhere in there the anger burned down to coals and what was left was just work, and the work was good, and he told people he was happy being single and mostly he believed it.

"Oakley, we've got a guest chef in the house tonight, so if she needs anything from your station, you play nice." That was Ethan, the floor manager, sticking his head through the pass with the tone of a man who knew something, and Reggie waved him off without looking up, because he did not care about some visiting cook from a stage circuit, he had a full reservation book and two new cocktails to dial in.

He did look up about ten minutes later, though, when the kitchen door swung and a voice he knew came through it.

Reggie heard her before he saw her, which was a thing that had happened to him exactly once before in his life and he remembered it vividly. She was laughing at something the chef said, that low laugh that came out more like a cough, and the sound crossed the dining room and found him behind the walnut like it had a homing device. Then the chef was leading her through on a tour, pointing out the Expo station and the walk-in, and she turned her head to scan the room the way cooks do, checking the geometry of a new kitchen, and her eyes stopped on Reggie and stayed there.

Twenty feet of tile between them, plus the width of the pass, and the air across all of it went tight, like the moment after a cork comes out. Layla Masterson was twenty-five now, and she had kept the haircut, short on the sides with the top pushed over, and she had a burn scar on her left forearm he did not remember, new since he'd known her, and her whites were rolled at the sleeves the way they always were because she hated tight cuffs. She did not smile. She did not look away either. The chef kept talking about the plancha and she let him, and her eyes never moved off Reggie, and Reggie found that his hands had stopped wiping the bar and were just sitting there on the rag like they had forgotten their job.

"Well," Des said quietly, coming up beside him with a crate of lime juice, "that's a bad look on your face."

"Shut up, Des."

"That her?"

"I said shut up."

Des set the crate down slow, the way you set things down when you are being deliberately annoying, and looked from Reggie to the kitchen and back. "The Spain girl? The text girl? She's cooking our collab?"

"That's what Ethan said, apparently."

"Man." Des picked the crate back up. "I'm gonna be over here, not helping you, for the rest of the night."

Service was still two hours out and the dining room was doing that pre-shift hum, chairs being squared, the sound system going low, and Reggie made himself go back to his station and made himself think about ratios and nothing else. It did not work. He could feel her on the other side of the pass, hear her voice in fragments whenever the chef stopped near her, asking about the smoker, asking where the dry storage was, and every fragment went through him as if he had taken the first sip of something strong.

It was during that lull, with the kitchen half-staffed and nobody watching, that he found himself walking. He did not fully decide to walk. His feet made the call. He came around the end of the bar, pushed through the swinging door into the back kitchen, and she was coming out of the dry storage with a tub of dried chiles in her arms, and he stepped in through the doorway before she could pass, and now it was just the two of them between steel shelving and fifty-pound sacks of rice.

"Reggie." She said it like she had been practicing it in the car.

"Layla."

"I was gonna come say hi after service, I didn't want to mess with your head before you had to work the bar, and then I saw you and, well." She shifted the tub to her hip. "You look good."

"You're standing in my dry storage."

"I'm carrying your chiles, actually, so we're kinda sharing it." She looked down at the floor for a second, and when she came back up she was doing the thing she used to do, which was talk fast when she was nervous. "Look, I know how I left. I know. A text, Reggie, from the airport, while you were prepping brunch, and I have thought about that text probably every week for two years, and there is no version of it that wasn't cowardly, and I am sorry. I'm sorry I didn't call. I'm sorry I didn't let you be mad at me in person."

"You could've been mad at me in person anytime," he said, and his voice came out flat and cold, which surprised him because he had expected it to shake. "You chose the exit row instead."

"That's not fair."

"Maybe not." He folded his arms, because his hands needed to be somewhere that was not near her. "But you don't get to grade my fairness. You got to ghost me and go to Valencia and become whoever you are now, and I got to find your text at six a.m. and serve a hundred covers like nothing happened, so we're not even on fair. Service is in two hours. If you need chiles, they're on the third shelf. I've got a bar to run."

"Reggie, please, five minutes, I just..."

"Two hours," he said, and he stepped past her, and she smelled like wood smoke and lime, which was the whole restaurant in a bottle and also exactly her, and he hated that he noticed it. "After the last ticket, if you still want to talk, fine. Right now you're a guest cook in my house and I've got a job."

He pushed back through the swinging door and the dining room was cool and bright and normal, and Des looked up from the juice crate with his eyebrows already raised, and Reggie pointed a finger at him without a word.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

"Fair," Des said. "You good?"

Reggie picked up his rag and wiped the bar a fourth time, which was not a thing he needed and was exactly a thing he needed. "No," he said. "But I'm gonna be."

The first ticket printed at 6:04 and after that the night stopped being a night and became a machine, which was fine, because machines do not have feelings, and Reggie was grateful to be a part of one for a while. Ethan ran the floor with his calm voice and his little hip pivots, the dining room filled in waves, and the pass lit up with orders that had Layla's name on the line beside them, and for two hours his entire world was sugar, smoke, citrus, and not thinking about the woman four feet away who was shouting garnish tickets like she had worked this kitchen her whole life.

"Bar, two smoked old fashioneds and whatever the hell a tamarind flip is, go," the expediter called, and Reggie was already reaching.

"Tamarind flip is tamarind, egg, rum, nutmeg, two minutes," he called back, and then, because he could not help himself, "tell chef her chile rub smells incredible through my wall."

"He says stop flirting and make drinks," Layla's voice came back, and the whole line laughed, and Reggie laughed too before he could stop himself, and that was the problem with kitchens, they turned everything into rhythm, and his body remembered rhythm even when his heart was trying not to.

The rush got worse around 7:30, which it always did, three six-tops landing at once plus a party of eight that Ethan had warned nobody about, and after that it was not conversation anymore, it was just calls and answers, the pass becoming a rope they pulled on from opposite sides. She called for garnish and he slid it. He called for plated rims on the mezcal cocktails and she sent them back done better than he asked. Somewhere in the middle of it he stopped watching his hands. The old thing came back, the thing from when they used to cook together in that tiny apartment kitchen with one burner that worked, where she would call for lime and he would have it zested before she finished the word, and the line cooks noticed it, he could tell, the way they started glancing at the two of them, the new girl and the bar guy who were finishing each other's tickets.

"Fire six on the duck," somebody called.

"Heard," Layla said. "Bar, that party of eight wants the smoke show at the table, you got the chips?"

"Tell them ten minutes and yes, I've got the chips." He had spent a week on those chips. He was not going to admit that to her tonight.

"Ten minutes, he says, and yes," she relayed, and then she leaned into the pass window with her forearms on the steel, sleeves rolled the way she always rolled them because she hated tight cuffs, and looked at him across the whole dining room noise like it was quiet. "Your smoker is dialed, by the way. Whoever runs it cares."

"You ran it for an hour before service."

"Yeah, well." She grinned, short hair pushed over, scar on her left forearm he did not remember her having, and did not ask about. "I had a good teacher once."

"You had a teacher who you never called back."

"Heard, chef," she said, but she was still smiling, a smaller smile now, and she pulled back into the kitchen, and Reggie turned back to his bar and told himself that counting coupe glasses was a productive use of his attention.

The last ticket printed at 10:52. The dining room drained the way it always did, in that slow tide of coats and checks and half-finished conversations, Ethan walking the floor doing his final pass, and by 11:20 the kitchen was in breakdown, pans scraping, the dishwasher running, the smell of smoke settling into everything like it lived there. Reggie told himself to go home. Instead he stood at the walnut bar, which he had wiped down already, and built a drink he had not built for anyone in two years.

He had named it the night after the text came in, which Des found hilarious and which Reggie had never once put on the menu, because you do not put a wound on a menu. Ghost pepper honey, measured in drops because a full dash would strip paint, mezcal, lime, a float of something floral, and a spray of wood smoke over the top before the glass went down. He had made it once, tasted it, decided it was too honest, and shelved it.

He made it again now, and he carried it through the swinging door with the smoke still curling off the surface, and found her at the steel counter picking cilantro stems out of a container that did not need picking, which told him she also did not know how to leave a room.

"What's that?" she asked.

"Off menu. It's not on anything, it's not going on anything." He set it on the counter in front of her. "Made it a while back. It's got a name already, so don't get any ideas."

"Reggie." She looked at the drink, then at him. "You named a drink?"

"Taste it first."

She picked it up and took a sip, and he watched her face do the whole sequence, first the sweetness