Her Last Catering Job

I figured out around eleven in the morning that day that it really was my last job. Twenty-nine years of catering, and the last tray I would ever line up was sitting in Fran's oven getting warm. I'm fifty-two, and my knees had been voting for retirement for about five years before I finally listened.

Fran is forty-five and teaches art history at Michigan, and I've known her since we both worked a wedding in Toledo fifteen years ago where the best man got drunk and proposed to the cake. She hugged me at the door of her apartment, that big converted Victorian near campus, and said, "You're not allowed to leave Ann Arbor, I just decided."

"Well, I'm leaving Thursday, so you've got me for one more party and then that's it," I told her.

"One more party." She said it like she was tasting something sour. "Okay. But I get the crab cakes."

"Everybody gets the crab cakes. That's the whole point of crab cakes."

The apartment was warm and the windows were open and the lilacs outside were doing their thing, all purple and heavy in the air. Students were walking up and down the street in that end-of-semester shuffle, half of them carrying boxes. The department party was supposed to end at ten-thirty and it was already going strong at nine.

I was restocking the serving table when a guy came up on my left. Young, white, tall, kind of shaggy hair like he'd been arguing with a comb and lost. I'd put him at twenty-eight, maybe. He was holding a plate with three crab cakes on it, which is a compliment in itself.

"You're the one who made these mini crab cakes, right? They're incredible," he said, and he was grinning like he'd caught me doing something good.

"That's me. Marguerite." I put out my hand, because my mother, a proud Black Texan, raised me right.

"Ivan." His handshake was gentle. "I've had, I don't know, six of these? I stopped counting because it started to feel like a problem."

"Six is not a problem. Six is a review. Tell your friends."

"Oh, I have been telling everybody. There's a small crowd forming near the kitchen. I might be responsible for that." He looked a little embarrassed about it, which was charming. "So is this like a family recipe?"

"Family recipe I stole from a restaurant in Chicago when I was twenty-three and working the line there. The chef had it written on a card taped inside a cabinet, and I memorized it on my break for two weeks straight."

"You memorized a recipe to steal it?"

"I didn't steal it, I absorbed it. There's a difference and the difference is that the chef gave me the card when I quit." I laughed. "Best farewell gift I ever got. Better than the watches."

"So how long have you been doing this? Catering?"

"Twenty-nine years. And this is the last one. I move to New Mexico this week."

He actually stopped chewing. "Wait, this is your last job? Like ever?"

"Last one. Santa Fe. I bought a little house out there two years ago and I've been saving to stop working, and the saving math finally said go."

"Wow. Okay, that's, hmm. That's a big thing." He set his plate down on the table and turned toward me full on. "What made you pick Santa Fe?"

"The light. Everybody says that and everybody's right. You stand outside at five in the evening and the whole world turns pink and you think, yeah, this is where old women go to be happy."

"You're not old."

"I'm fifty-two, sweetheart, and I have earned every year. Don't take that away from me."

He laughed and put his hands up. "Fine, fifty-two, that's not old, that's established. There's a difference and the difference is you're not allowed to call yourself old around people who are still trying to get established."

"What about you? What are you working on? You've got grad student written all over you."

"How can you tell?"

"You're holding a plate of free food like it might get recalled, and you have the posture of a man who sits in chairs thinking for money."

"That is devastatingly accurate." He was grinning again. "Philosophy. I'm finishing a dissertation on Kierkegaard, actually."

"Kierkegaard. Say more, but say it slow, I want to see how long it takes before I need a nap."

He talked for a solid two minutes about anxiety and repetition and something he called the aesthetic sphere, and honestly some of it landed, because he was funny about it. He did voices. He did a whole bit about how Kierkegaard broke off an engagement and then wrote six hundred pages about it instead of just going to therapy.

"See, that's the thing about him," Ivan said, waving a crab cake like a pointer. "He's the most personal philosopher who ever lived. Every big idea he has is just him working through his own bad decisions in public."

"So he's the first blogger."

"He is the first blogger. Oh my god, that's so accurate I'm going to be upset about it for a week."

"And after your defense, what happens? You find a school and teach other sad kids about the first blogger?"

"That's the dream, yeah. There's a job in Ohio I'm up for. It's not glamorous but it's a job." He shrugged. "My whole plan for the summer is defend, move, and then lie in a park somewhere for a month."

"That sounds healthy. Most grad students I meet look like they haven't been outside since the last eclipse."

"Hey now. I've been outside. I'm outside right now." He gestured at the whole apartment, which was not outside, and I laughed at him.

Fran appeared at my elbow then, pulling me away with a hand on my arm. "Marguerite, come meet these people before they eat everything you made. This is Dennis, he's in Renaissance, and Jo, she's finishing her masters. Dennis, Jo, this is Marguerite, and these crab cakes are hers, so thank her properly."

They thanked me properly. Dennis wanted to know if I'd ever catered a museum event, and Jo asked if I'd ever considered doing a cookbook, and I told them the truth, which was that I'd fed about forty weddings and a hundred retirement parties and I was done, done, done. They were sweet about it. Fran kept a hand on my shoulder the whole time like she was afraid I'd bolt out the fire escape and leave her early, which I honestly might have, because I don't do feelings at parties.

While Fran talked me around the room, I could feel the Kierkegaard kid watching me from the couch. Not in a creepy way. In that way where a person is interested and hasn't decided what to do about it yet. I've been looked at a lot over twenty-nine years of holding trays, and most of it slides off, but this one had a way of watching that was more like listening. Like whatever I said next was going to be the important part.

I passed him again on a refill run and he held up his plate. "I've been rationing. Two left. I'm being very disciplined."

"That's growth. Write that down for your dissertation."

"Discipline and the crab cake. Kierkegaard would have something to say about that."

"Kierkegaard never had a good crab cake, that's my professional opinion."

"You might be right. Despair is just not having access to good seafood." He shifted over on the couch to make room, which I did not take, because I still had three trays to manage and a woman my age knows better than to sit down at her own farewell party. But I stood next to the couch a minute, and he looked up at me and said, "So when do you actually get off tonight? Like, done working, I mean."

"Eleven, if Fran lets me. Midnight if she doesn't."

"And then you pack? Or do you get a day off before New Mexico?"

"One day off. Wednesday. Then I drive." I looked at the clock on Fran's wall, the big yellow one that's always been five minutes slow. "Everything's in boxes at my place except the good pan. The crab cake pan. I'm driving it out there myself so the airline can't lose it."

"That's the only sensible thing I've heard all semester. Guard the pan."

The party wound down the way parties do, which is slowly and then all at once. By ten thirty Fran was standing at the door walking people out with that professor voice she has, all warmth and goodbye, and by ten forty-five it was just Fran and me and a floor that looked like a hundred people had eaten off it, because a hundred people had eaten off it.

I was in the kitchen stacking the last of the trays when he came in.

"Need help?"

"Guests don't help." I didn't look up from the tray. "It's a rule. It's how I know my whole life hasn't been a waste."

"Well, good news, I'm not a guest anymore. The party's over. I'm just a guy in a kitchen now." He picked up a dish towel like he was going to do something with it. "Ivan."

"I know your name, Ivan. You told me twice." I handed him a stack of little plates. "Fine. Dry. Don't break anything, it's all I've got left."

So we did dishes for a while, which is a funny way to spend the last hour of a farewell party, but nobody ever asked me how I wanted to spend it, so I guess it was mine to spend.

Fran came through once with her coat on and kissed my cheek. "You're a saint and I'm going to miss you every single time I order pizza now." She pointed at Ivan on her way out the door. "Lock the bottom lock when you leave, it sticks."

And then it was just us, and the sink running, and the windows open to the lilacs coming off the front porch of that old Victorian.

He handed me a dried plate and didn't say anything for a second, which for him I figured was a record.

"There's half a bottle of that white open," I said. "If Fran's not drinking it, it's going down the sink, and I've thrown out too much good wine in my life to do it again."

"Is that a caterer thing or a you thing?"

"Same thing. Twenty-nine years, you either learn to hate waste or you quit."

He found two glasses that had survived the night and poured, and we stood there at the counter drinking wine out of mismatched glasses like two people who had just met at a bus stop, except with better snacks.

"To the pan," he said, raising his glass. "May it arrive in Santa Fe safe."

"To the pan." I drank. "I've been making those crab cakes under my own name for almost thirty years, and the chef who gave me the card never once asked for a cut."

"That's the most honest crime I've ever heard."

"It wasn't a crime. He gave me the card. I just like the version where I'm a thief."

He laughed, and I will say this for the kid, he laughed with his whole face, none of that grad school half-smile business. He was twenty-eight, maybe, tall, that shaggy hair that looked like he cut it himself in a mirror, and he had the kind of skin that goes pink at the ears when he's pleased, which right now it was doing.

"So Thursday," he said. "You drive out Thursday."

"Wednesday I rest. Thursday I drive. Santa Fe by Saturday if my back holds, which it will, because it has to." I picked up the good pan, wrapped in a dish towel, and set it by my bag where I could see it. "I bought a house out there two years ago. Little adobe thing. I've been paying on it while renting here, which everybody told me was crazy, and it might be, but it's my crazy."

"Why Santa Fe?"

"Because my mother raised me in Texas and I got the heat in me, but I wanted a prettier version of it. And because nobody in Santa Fe knows I can make crab cakes, so I get to be a whole new mystery." I sipped the wine. "Why Kierkegaard, for real? Not the party answer."

He thought about it while he dried the last plate. "Because he was lonely and wrote it down. Most people are lonely and just, I don't know, watch television about it. He looked straight at the worst part of being alive and kept his sense of humor about it. That seemed like a skill worth studying."

"That is a good answer."

"I've been practicing it in case a caterer asked."

The kitchen had gotten quiet in that way kitchens do after a long night, both of us leaning on the counter, glasses nearly empty, the big yellow clock on Fran's wall saying a time that was five minutes behind the truth.

And then he did a thing I want to get exactly right, because I've gone over it since. He reached over and touched the back of my hand. Just that. Two fingers, light, on my hand where it rested on the counter.

"I know this is your last night in town," he said, "and I don't want to waste it on small talk."

I looked at him. Fifty-two years old, and I looked at a twenty-eight-year-old philosopher across a counter of dirty dishes, and I did not laugh, and I did not say something clever, which for me is basically a marriage proposal.