Line at the Undergrad

The Undergrad sits on the edge of campus, wedged between a phone repair shop and a nail salon, and on Tuesday nights it's about ninety percent empty. That's why I like Tuesdays. Slow tickets, good prep time, and a sous chef who leaves me alone as long as the mise doesn't run out.

I'm Janie Hayes, I'm 28, and I've been a line cook for six years now. Before that I was a biology major who washed out junior year, which is a long story I don't tell at parties. The short version is that I got in my own way, and then I got out of town, and then I got back to town because rent is cheap here and my knife skills travel.

Six months ago Sherri Baldwin hired me off two trial shifts and one very good sea bass special. She respects my knife work. She has told me, to my face, that she does not respect my attitude. Fair enough, honestly.

That Tuesday started normal. I got in at three, cut onions, blanched the green beans, argued with the dishwasher about the sanitize cycle. Around six thirty Helen Dawkins, the front-of-house manager, leaned into my station with two plates that had come back.

"Table twelve says the pork is over," she said. "I told them it's supposed to be medium well, but the guy's a regular so we're redoing it anyway."

"Fine. It's fine. It is medium well. That's literally the spec."

"I know, Janie. I'm just the messenger."

Helen is 25, sharp as a box grater, and she's spent six months trying to make me lose my cool because she thinks it's funny. She hasn't managed it yet. I remade the pork, we had a decent two-hour rush, and by nine we were dying down. That's when things stopped being normal.

I had my back to the kitchen door, working a crate of shallots, when I heard Sherri say, "Hey, Sloan, is that the printer that died?"

I didn't turn around. I knew that voice. Seven years since summer session ended and I still knew that voice from three words.

Sloan Dyer was my lab partner sophomore year of college. We were both 21 that summer, both staying on campus for a short session, and we hooked up twice. Twice. Two nights, two months apart, and then I stopped answering her texts and she stopped sending them, and it was finished. She's 28 now, same as me, and apparently she manages restaurants, because Sherri said, casual as anything, "Sloan's managing the new place across the street."

"You know her?" I asked, still not turning around.

"From the manager meetings at the brewpub. Why?"

"No reason. Print tickets."

"You've got that look."

"I don't have a look."

"You've got a whole face, Hayes. Use it."

Then the voice was closer. "You're still here," she said, and I didn't know if it was a greeting or an accusation.

I set the knife down and turned around. Sloan Dyer, in a black polo with some other restaurant's logo on it, holding a dead ticket printer like a peace offering. Her hair was shorter than I remembered. Everything else was exactly what I remembered, which was the problem.

"Sherri," she said, "mine's cooked. Ribbon and gear, both."

"Order one tomorrow and use ours till it comes," Sherri said. "Janie, this is Sloan, we've covered that?"

"Covered," I said.

"We've met," Sloan said. "A while back."

"Long back," I said.

Helen appeared at the pass with her radar for gossip fully engaged. "Wait, you two know each other?"

"We had a class," Sloan said.

"They had a class," Helen repeated, like it was a fun word.

I picked the knife back up and went back to the shallots. Sloan stood there for another minute, printer under her arm, and then Sherri called her toward the bar to look at the POS terminal, and she went. I dodged through the kitchen doors before she could come back this way, and I spent the next hour buried in prep because I refused to let her see me flustered. I julienned carrots that didn't need julienning. I portioned butter. I wiped down a clean station three times. You can call it hiding if you want, I've called it worse.

"Janie." It was Helen, at ten, tapping the pass. "We're low on arugula. Walk-in's got a case in the back, the one with the service sticker."

"On it."

The walk-in is at the end of the hall, past the dry storage. It doubles as the confessional around here, because it's the only place where you can hear yourself think and nobody watches you cry over a dead fry station or whatever. I pulled the door open and the light flickered on, and Sloan Dyer was standing in there, next to the shelving, blocking about half the doorway with one shoulder.

"Sherri said the printer situation," she said, like that explained anything.

"The printer situation," I said. "Sure."

"I'm not ambushing you. Helen's just out front and I wanted two minutes."

"You've got your two minutes."

She didn't move out of the doorway, and I didn't ask her to, and I want to be fair to both of us, we're adults, we were both clear-headed, and I could have walked away. I stood there in the cold with a case of arugula between us and waited.

"Why didn't you ever call?" she said. "After that second night."

"Sloan."

"I've thought about it for seven years. Seven years. I sent you three texts and you answered none of them. Then you blocked me, which, okay, message received, but I never got an actual reason."

"It wasn't about you."

"That's not a reason, that's a bandage."

I hauled the arugula case up off the floor and held it against my hip so my hands had a job. "I was a mess that summer. You saw the tail end of it. I failed organic the second time and I was on academic probation and my dad had just stopped paying my rent, and you were this person who had her whole life figured out. I couldn't be somebody's third thing."

"I wasn't asking to be a third thing. I was asking for a phone call."

"Well, I didn't make it. Sorry."

"That's it? Seven years of sorry?"

I looked at her. She had goosebumps on her arms from the cooler, and she wasn't leaving, and neither was I, which told me something I wasn't ready to hear. "What do you want from me, Sloan? A full accounting? I was 21 and drowning, and you were easy to be around, and easy scared me. There. That's the whole sad story."

"Easy," she repeated.

"Don't make it weird."

"You're the one who made it weird. You made it weird in August of '19 and you're making it weird right now in a walk-in cooler."

"Can I get past you? Helen needs the arugula."

"In a second." She shifted her weight. "Are you seeing anybody?"

"That's none of your business."

"So no."

"Sloan."

"I'm asking because I'm in town now. I manage the place across the street. I'm going to be here every day. You're going to be here every day. We can do this awkward-dance thing for six months or you can tell me to go to hell once, with words, and I'll leave you alone."

Sherri's voice came down the hall, muffled. "Janie, you fall asleep in there?"

"Getting arugula!" I yelled back, which was technically true.

Sloan stepped aside, not quite enough room to be polite, so I had to brush past her shoulder, and she said, low, "You still make that face when you don't have an answer."

"I don't have a face."

"You've got a whole face. Helen told me at the bar."

I got the case back to the line and Helen took one look at me and grinned. "So what was that?"

"That was a printer situation."

"Uh huh. She stood in the walk-in for ten minutes for a printer situation."

"Helen."

"I'm just saying, for a classmate, she's got a lot of nerve."

"Prep the arugula."

At close, Sherri counted the drawer while I broke down my station, and she said, without looking up, "Whatever that was, sort it out on your own time. You dropped three seconds on every ticket after nine."

"Nothing happened."

"Sure. But I've managed kitchens eleven years, and nothing happening looks different than that."

I clocked out at eleven forty and stood in the parking lot deciding whether to walk around the block to avoid passing the bar. Sloan was out on the sidewalk, coat on, locking the door of her own place. Across the street she saw me. Of course she saw me.

"Janie," she called.

I could have kept walking. Any reasonable person would have kept walking. "What."

"Tomorrow. Come by after your shift. Have a drink. If you hate it, you leave and I never bring it up again."

"And if I don't hate it?"

"Then we figure out why you blocked a girl over a couple of texts."

I didn't say yes. I didn't say no either. I said, "I'm out at eleven forty," and she said, "I know. I watch you close," which should have been creepy and somehow wasn't, and then she got in her car and left me standing in the lot with a very bad feeling about tomorrow.

The next night was a Wednesday, which at The Undergrad is supposed to mean slow and turned out to mean chaos. I got there at three and Sherri had me butchering chickens before I even tied my apron.

"You're doing the specials tonight," she said. "Sea bass. Don't make me regret it."

"You loved my sea bass. It's the reason I'm here."

"It's one of two reasons. The other one was desperation." She handed me a tub of fish and went back to the office.

Helen showed up at four with her hair down instead of up, which I'd learned meant she was in a mood. "So," she said, leaning on my station. "Is she coming back tonight?"

"Who?"

"You know who. Tall, smug, other restaurant."

"Sloan runs a restaurant, not a food truck. And I don't know. Why would I know?"

"Because you stood in a walk-in with her for ten minutes arguing about arugula." She straightened up when Sherri looked out from the office. "Fine. Fine. I'll find out myself. She's coming to the manager thing Friday."

"There's a manager thing?"

"There's always a manager thing. You don't get invited because you'd set fire to it." She flounced off and I went back to the fish.

The printer jammed at six fifteen. Not our printer, our printer was fine. Sloan's printer. She'd come over to use ours because hers had died the night before, which I hadn't agreed to, she'd just appeared at the pass with a stack of tickets in her hand and said, "Yours still works, right?" to Helen, who said yes before I could say no.

So now her servers were walking across the street with tickets, and our printer was printing for two restaurants, and around seven it jammed. Then it jammed again. Then it started spitting out half tickets, the top half of a ticket for a burger and the bottom half of a ticket for somebody's risotto, and I was standing there holding two pieces of paper that together made no dinner at all.

"Sherri, I need the printer."

"Reprint from the terminal."

"The terminal's doing the same thing."

"Then do it from the bar."

"The bar's Helen, and Helen's in a mood."

Sherri came out and looked at the printer, which chose that moment to feed four blank tickets through in a row, and said a word I won't repeat. "Helen, call the tech. Janie, hold the line together. We've got two tops of six coming in from her place at seven thirty."

By seven thirty we had three tops of six, because of course we did. And because God has a sense of humor, right about then the fryer caught an edge.

It wasn't a fire fire. It was oil foaming up over the back edge because somebody, and I have my suspicions, had topped off the fryer without telling anybody, and the moment I dropped a basket the whole thing climbed the back panel and I was yelling "Fire, edge of the fryer, fire" and Sherri had the extinguisher and Helen had the doors and for about ninety seconds nobody was eating anything.

We got it out. It was fine. The panel was scorched and the fryer was down and Sherri stood there with the extinguisher and looked at me and said, "Well. That's Wednesday."

Then it got worse, in the way that kitchens do, meaning it got busy. With one fryer down and the printer possessed, every ticket became a small personal problem, and I was plating two restaurants' worth of food off one line, and that is when Sloan Dyer walked into my kitchen.

"Your server said you were drowning," she said. She'd tied her hair back with what looked like a rubber band from the newspaper. "Where do you want me."

"At your own restaurant."

"My fryer is down. My kitchen's half closed. I sent everybody home." She was already washing her hands. She'd worked lines before, I remembered that, back before the management track. "Pass or sauté?"

"Sherri assigns stations."

Sherri looked up from the expeditor spot, looked at Sloan, looked at me, and said, "Sloan, you're on pass. Read tickets, call the table numbers. Janie, don't burn anything." And that ended it, because Sherri is a practical woman and I was one pair of hands on a two-pair-of-hands night.

So for the next hour it was her shoulder against mine at the pass, her voice low and steady calling out eighty sixes and table numbers while I built plates, and I will admit, since apparently I admit things now, that it went well. She remembered garnish timings. She knew what a dead plate looked like. When a ticket came in wrong she didn't yell, she just said, "Refire, they'll wait," in that same even voice she used to use in lab when I was panicking about a titration.

"Where'd you learn the pass?" I asked, sliding her two bass specials.

"Two years on a line in Chicago before I moved up. You forget I cooked?"

"I forget everything about you on purpose."

"Well, keep the parts where I know what a rail looks like." She called the next table, and I heard Helen out front laughing at something one of the Sloan servers said, and the tickets kept coming, and I stopped thinking about seven years and started thinking about nine minutes, which is what the bass needed, and that was better for everybody.

We cut the last ticket at nine forty. The dining rooms on both sides of the street were emptying out.