The Anniversary Special

Caitlin had planned this night for three weeks, and so far the rain was winning.

She stood in the doorway of The Gilded Gutter with water running off the hem of her coat and pooling around her shoes. Mikey stood beside her, shaking rain out of his hair like a dog, which got him a look from a woman in a nice scarf.

"Sorry," he told the woman. Then, to Caitlin, "I can't believe you remembered the place."

"Of course I remembered," she said. "You wouldn't shut up about it for a month."

"I was working here back then. It was all I had."

She was twenty-three, and Mikey was twenty-five, and they had been married exactly one year that night. They had met at a gallery opening when she was twenty-two and he was twenty-four, back when he still tried to sound like he knew things about paintings. She had liked him better once he gave that up.

The Gilded Gutter sat in the industrial district, wedged between a printing shop and a place that fixed forklifts. It was small and loud and always full, and the kitchen was open to the dining room so you could watch the cooks yell at each other. Steam fogged the front windows. The rain hammered the glass hard enough that it seemed aimed directly at them.

The hostess stand was mobbed. A woman with a clipboard was working through a list of names, crossing them off one by one, and the crowd around her kept trying to move up the list by sheer proximity.

Caitlin gave their name. The woman with the clipboard found it, ran her pen down the page, and frowned.

"Okay, so," she said. "It's gonna be about an hour."

"An hour?" Caitlin said.

"There was a water main thing on Fourth and half our staff got stuck on the wrong side of it. Plus everybody in the city decided to eat out tonight because nobody wants to cook in this weather. I'm sorry. It's gonna be an hour, maybe a little more."

Caitlin nodded and stepped aside, and Mikey watched her do the math on her face. She had booked this three weeks out. She had gotten a babysitter for the cat, sort of, meaning she had bribed the neighbor, a grad student, with leftover lasagna. She had worn the dress. The dress was not made for standing in a doorway for an hour while rain dripped off her coat onto the floor.

"Hey," Mikey said. "We can go somewhere else."

"No. This is the place. I want it to be this place."

"Okay. Then we wait."

They found a sliver of wall to lean against, out of the main traffic. A server went by with four plates balanced up one arm. Another server, a tall woman with dark hair pulled back tight, caught sight of them and did a double take.

"Mikey?" she said. "Mikey Flores?"

"Hey, Ana!" He grinned. "How's it going?"

"Insane. Absolutely insane tonight. Why are you standing in my doorway getting rained on?" Ana was thirty and had been serving booths at the Gutter for six years, since before Mikey worked there. She had trained him, back when he was twenty-two and useless, and she never let him forget it.

"Anniversary," he said. "She booked us in."

"One year," Caitlin said, and held up her left hand like a prize.

"Congrats. And I'm sorry, because you're about to stand there for an hour."

"We heard," Caitlin said. Her voice did the thing where it stayed polite and flattened out at the same time.

Ana looked at her, then at the mob at the hostess stand, then back toward the kitchen. She seemed to make a decision.

"Stay here," she said, and disappeared into the crowd.

Mikey squeezed Caitlin's hand. "You okay?"

"I'm fine. I just had a whole plan and the plan is now standing in a doorway."

"The plan is still good. The plan is you and me and dinner."

"The plan had a timeline."

He laughed, and she tried not to, and failed a little, which was how most of their fights ended. One year in and she was still learning that about him, that he could take the temperature down with a laugh at exactly the right moment, and that maybe she resented it a tiny bit and was grateful for it at the same time.

Then the kitchen doors swung open and a big man came out wiping his hands on a towel.

Rex was thirty-five and had bought the Gutter five years ago, when he was thirty, from a man everyone said was dying and who in fact did die, about a year later, still owing Rex money. Rex cooked in his own kitchen every night, which nobody could explain, because he also handled the books and the suppliers and the health inspector. He was broad and quiet and had a way of looking at people like he was reading a receipt.

He spotted Mikey and came over through the crowd, which parted for him the way crowds do for the person holding the food.

"Flores," he said. "You still selling my beer?"

"Somebody's gotta."

"Who's this?"

"My wife. Caitlin. Caitlin, Rex."

"Anniversary, I heard," Rex said. He looked at Caitlin the way he looked at everything, steady and a beat too long. "One year. Congratulations. And I'm sorry about the wait. Tonight is a mess."

"It's fine," Caitlin said, in the flattened voice.

"It's not fine," Rex said. "You booked three weeks out, in the rain, in a nice dress, and we've got you standing by the coat rack. Come on. I've got a booth in the back nobody uses."

Ana, passing with a tray, said, "Rex, table nine is asking about the specials again."

"Tell table nine I'll be out in ten minutes and to stop asking."

He led them through the dining room, past the open kitchen where three cooks were working in a steam cloud, shouting numbers at each other. The noise swallowed everything. Caitlin caught a look at the grill and the line of tickets hanging from the rail, more tickets than she would have thought the rail could hold.

The booth in the back sat in a little alcove behind the wine racks. It was dark and quiet, or at least quiet compared to the front, and the booth itself was old wood with a scarred table. A single candle sat in a holder that had once probably been fancy.

"Nobody sits back here," Rex said. "People don't like it. Feels like a cellar. You two like cellars?"

"We like quiet," Caitlin said.

"Then you're in the right spot." Rex set his towel over his shoulder. "I'm gonna take care of you tonight. Not Ana, not the line, me. I'll send out a few things, no menu, and you tell me at the end if I wasted your anniversary."

"That sounds great," Mikey said.

"It does," Caitlin said, and meant it, mostly.

Rex paused. He looked at the booth, then at the two of them, then at the candle, like he was checking something off a list only he had.

"You picked a good night," he said. "Rain like this, the building settles in. Old places get comfortable when it rains."

"Comfortable," Mikey said.

"This building's older than both of us put together. It likes being full. Likes the noise and the steam. Keeps it, I don't know, awake." He smiled, which he had not done yet, and the smile was fine, normal, a man glad to have guests. "Ignore me. Chefs talk nonsense when it's busy. Water for both of you?"

"Please," Caitlin said.

He went, and the kitchen doors swallowed him, and the noise came rushing back in like a tide.

Caitlin slid into the corner of the booth next to Mikey and pulled off her coat at last. Her dress had survived. She smoothed it down and lit the candle with the match tucked under the holder, an old habit from somewhere.

"You okay now?" Mikey asked.

"I'm okay now!"

The candle flame stood up straight in the still air of the alcove. Out in the dining room, the crowd roared and the cooks shouted and the rain kept hammering the windows like it wanted in.

Somewhere behind the wine racks, in the dark of the alcove wall, something Caitlin could not name turned its attention toward their little table, and settled down to wait.

The water came first, in heavy glasses that fogged with condensation, and then nothing for a while. Caitlin and Mikey sat in the little booth and drank the water and listened to the noise of the dining room like people listening to the ocean. Rain ran down the window beside the alcove in long crooked lines.

"Do you remember the name of that gallery," Mikey said. "The one where we met."

"Rosenquist. I only remember because the owner kept calling it Joanne's and it clearly hurt his feelings."

"He gave me a free glass of wine for knowing what a lithograph was."

"He gave you a free glass of wine for standing too close to the cheese table. I watched him do it. I thought, there goes a man who does not know what a lithograph is."

"That's fair. I still don't."

She laughed, and it surprised her a little, because she had spent most of the evening not laughing. Under the table her knee bumped his and stayed there.

Then the kitchen doors opened and Rex came out himself, carrying one plate in each hand, which was against every rule of service and clearly something he never did. He set the plates down without ceremony. On each one was a small pile of seared mushrooms, browned hard at the edges, sitting in a shallow pool of dark sauce.

"Chanterelles," he said. "From a guy upstate who only picks after it rains. Which is why they're not on the menu, because this guy only exists when it rains, apparently. The sauce is smoke and dried cherry and a few other things I'm not going to tell you about."

"It smells amazing," Mikey said.

"It smells like a campfire and syrup," Caitlin said, and it did, the smoke first and then something sweet underneath it, old and dark, like the smell of a room nobody had opened in years but which had kept something good in it.

"Then eat," Rex said. "I'll be back with the next thing. Don't rush it. That's the whole point of a dish like this."

He went back through the doors and the noise swallowed him again.

The mushrooms were hot and soft in the middle and almost crisp outside, and the sauce was bitter first and sweet last, and Caitlin took one bite and then stopped chewing for a second because something moved in her chest. It was not the taste exactly. It was something the taste dragged up with it, like a hook pulling a line out of deep water.

"Okay, this is ridiculous," Mikey said through a full mouth.

"Right?"

"I want to know what the other things in the sauce are. I'm gonna spend years on this."

"Smoke and syrup," Caitlin said again, softly, because the second bite confirmed the first, the warmth spreading out from her stomach into her arms and up her neck, a slow pleasant heat like standing too close to a fire on a cold night. And with the warmth came pictures. Her grandmother's kitchen, which she had not thought about in maybe five years, the green tile and the pot always on the back burner. The night she and Mikey got caught in the rain walking home from that gallery, two years ago almost to the month, laughing and sprinting and her shoes ruined, and the kiss under a shop awning where they finally stopped to catch their breath. Their wedding, the cake, her cousin's speech that went on too long. All of it arriving at once, warm and wet and close, as if the sauce had loosened a lid on a jar she had packed away tight.

Her eyes were stinging. She blinked and laughed at herself.

"Sorry. These mushrooms are doing something to me."

"Good something?"

"Good something. Weird something." She looked at him in the candlelight. "Do you feel that? The room feels different."

"The room is a cellar, Rex warned us."

"It feels bigger than it did. Or closer. I can't tell."

Mikey reached for his water and then, instead, under the table, his hand found her knee. Just rested there. And even through the fabric of her dress the touch went through her like a current, the warmth from the food and the warmth from the touch meeting somewhere in the middle and doubling. She set her fork down.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi."

"It's been a while," she said. "Since we've been us. Just us. Not tired us. Not us with schedules."

"I know. I've missed us too." His thumb moved a slow small circle on her knee. "Tonight got off to such a bad start I forgot what the point of it was."

"The point was this. Sitting in a cellar eating mystery sauce and looking at your face."

"You like my face."

"It's a decent face. It's held up okay for two years."

He laughed and leaned in, and she met him halfway, and they kissed by the candle, which was clumsy and normal and exactly right. His mouth tasted like smoke and cherry. Her hand came up and found the back of his neck, the short rough hair there, and the dining room noise fell away to nothing, or almost nothing, a distant surf sound, the roar of tables and tickets and the cooks shouting numbers all going soft and far like it was happening in another building, another town. There was just the candle and the warm food smell and his hand sliding up her thigh a few slow inches, respectful and also not, and her breath going shallow.

"Is this okay?" he murmured against her mouth.

"Yes. It's very okay." Her fingers tightened in his hair. "But Rex could come back any second," she whispered, not pulling away.

"Rex strikes me like someone who knocks."

"Rex strikes me like someone who doesn't need to. It's his kitchen."

"Then we're safe for at least a minute."

She kissed him again, longer, and the warm feeling in her chest spread further, down her arms, into her hands, and the pictures kept coming behind her closed eyes, her grandmother's green tile, the rain on the night they met, all of it sweet and all of it strangely close, as though the memories were being handed to her one at a time by someone standing just behind her shoulder. She would have thought about that more if her thigh had not been under his warm hand.

Somewhere in the dining room a glass broke and a table cheered. The candle flame bent sideways toward the wine racks, though there was no draft, and then stood back up.

"I really did plan this whole night," she said into his collar. "Three weeks of planning. Reservations, the cat, everything. And the best part is a booth behind the wine racks