The Last Order

The call came in at six fifteen on a Friday night, which any electrician will tell you is the worst possible time to get a call from a restaurant, and I almost didn't answer because I was sitting on my couch with a beer and a sandwich and the first hour off I'd had in two weeks. But the number was Chad Snyder's, and Chad only calls when something's actually on fire, so I answered with my mouth full and he was talking over me before I could even say hello, something about breakers flickering and the dinner rush going to hell and can you come now, Ray, please, I'm begging you. I'm forty-three years old, I've been running my own electrical work for fifteen of those years, and I have never once heard Chad Snyder say please, so I put the sandwich in the fridge, dumped the beer down the sink, and grabbed my bag.

The Copper Skillet sits on a corner downtown, big windows, copper wainscoting Chad put in himself back when he opened the place at forty, and you could see from a block away that something was wrong because half the dining room lights were doing a stutter step, on and off and on again, like the building was blinking. I parked the van in the alley, hauled my kit through the back door, and walked straight into chaos. The kitchen was slammed, tickets hanging off the rail like laundry, and Carmen was at the line working the sauté station with her hair pinned back under a cap, calling out orders in that voice she gets when the shift has gone sideways and she's the only one holding it together. She's forty-one, my girlfriend, five years now, and I have seen her in a lot of situations but I don't think I'd ever seen her quite this swamped.

"Ray, thank God," Nellie said, appearing at my elbow with a tray of water glasses. Nellie Gates is twenty-nine, been serving there six years, and she knows everybody's business including mine, which is how I got dating Carmen in the first place back when I came out to fix a walk-in freezer and Carmen and I got to talking over a broken compressor. "Chad's losing his mind, the lights keep doing that thing, and two tables walked out already."

"Two tables walking out doesn't trip a breaker," I said, and she just shrugged and balanced the tray and went back to the floor, because that's Nellie, all business even when the building's falling apart.

I found Chad by the office, standing in the doorway with a printed receipt in his hand like he was going to eat it. "Ray. Man. It started about an hour ago, the dining room lights flicker, then the kitchen, then it settles down, then it starts again. I checked the panel myself."

"You checked the panel."

"I looked at the panel," he admitted.

"Yeah, that's what I figured." I set my bag down outside the door to the electrical room, which Chad kept mostly as a storage closet because he never believed he'd need the space, and pulled the door open with my shoulder because it stuck like always. The panel was there under a shelf of paper towels, and I stood in front of it with my meter and my flashlight, and I will admit the first thing I did was look back through the doorway at Carmen on the line, because I'm a man and she's my girl and even mid-crisis I look.

The flicker wasn't a flicker, it turned out, once I got the cover off. It was a main lug issue, one of the lugs sitting loose and arcing, and arcing lugs in a panel are the kind of thing you don't fix in twenty minutes between courses, they're the kind of thing you fix by killing the power and pulling the meter and doing it right. I stood there with my flashlight beam on it and did the math, and the math said the whole restaurant goes dark for a couple hours minimum, parts run to the supply house if I don't have the right lugs on the truck, and Chad was going to lose his Friday night either way.

"Chad," I called, and he came to the doorway, and I showed him the scorch mark on the lug with my flashlight. "This isn't flickering. This is arcing. This could've burned the place down, you understand that? You got lucky."

"How long to fix it?"

"I kill the main, I do it right, two hours if I've got the parts and three if I don't. Or you keep running like this and gamble, and I don't recommend the gamble."

Chad looked at the scorch mark, then at the dining room full of people spending money, and I watched him do the same math I'd just done, only his math had dollar signs in it. "Can we finish the rush first?"

"No. Every minute it runs like this is a minute closer to a fire, and I'm not standing here watching it happen. Kill it now or find another electrician, but if you find another electrician, put it in writing that I told you."

He swore, quietly, in that way he swears, like the word costs him money, and then he walked out front and I heard him break the news to the room, apologies, comped desserts, the whole speech. And then I threw the main breaker, and The Copper Skillet went dark, all of it, the hum of the kitchen and the noise of the room and the register all dropping out at once into a silence you don't hear in restaurants, ever.

The backup generator was supposed to catch the emergency lights and the registers, and for about four seconds it did, a cough of light in the hall and over the exits, and then it coughed again and died, and the building went fully black except for my flashlight and the green glow of Chad's phone.

"Ray," Nellie's voice came out of the dark, wobbling a little. "That's not supposed to happen, right?"

"That's not supposed to happen," I said, already walking, because if the genset won't start on a night you need it, there's a reason, and reasons on generators are usually fuel or battery or a transfer switch that never got maintained, and all three of those were Chad's department. The genset lived in a lean-to off the back alley, and I got the door open and shone the light in and found the fuel gauge sitting on empty, bone empty, like nobody had looked at it since the last outage, which going by the dust was sometime in the previous administration of the building, years back.

I came back inside and found everybody clustered in the kitchen by phone light, the kitchen staff, Carmen still in her apron, Nellie, Chad, the dishwasher guy whose name I always forget, everybody lit from below in the manner of kids telling ghost stories. "Generator's out of fuel," I said. "Also your panel's got a burnt main lug, and also the utility has to pull your meter before I can work on it safely, which means phone calls and waiting. So this is not a quick one."

"The food's already cooked for half the tickets," Carmen said into the dark. "Cold line, cold walk-in, this fridge is already warming up. We're dead in the water anyway, Chad."

"Not dead," Chad said, and I could hear him bargaining with himself. "We finish what we can, comp the rest, send people home. Nellie, get the guests' info, we'll comp their next meal, make it right. Ray, whatever you need, order it, bill me, just get me back online tonight if you can."

"Can't work it till the utility clears the meter," I said. "Could be an hour, could be three, depends on who's on call. Then an hour or two of actual work in the dark. You're looking at a long night."

Chad locked the front doors against the walk-in traffic, put a handwritten sign up that I could see through the glass from the kitchen, closed due to power failure, sorry, and started calling the utility's emergency line, and I sat down on a milk crate in the dark kitchen with my bag at my feet and my phone's flashlight propped against the salt shaker, and that's when Carmen pulled a stool over next to me and sat down, close, her knee against mine in the dark.

"Hey, stranger," she said.

"Hey yourself. Long week?"

"Long month." She was quiet a second, and I could hear Chad arguing with somebody at the utility in the other room, and Nellie lighting candles she'd found somewhere, little tea lights going down the pass, which was against about four health codes but made the kitchen look like something out of a movie. "It's kind of nice, actually," she said. "Quiet. Nobody yelling orders."

"It'll get loud again the second I fix this."

"Yeah," she said, and her knee pressed a little harder against mine. "Well. While it lasts."

I had the lug kit on the truck, it turned out, which meant no supply house run, which meant the whole thing came down to the utility and their schedule, and I told Chad that, and he said fine, fine, just stay, and Nellie brought everybody leftover bread and the staff started eating ticket food off the line by candlelight like it was a weird dark dinner party, and I checked my phone and saw that the utility had put me on a list with a two-hour estimate, and it was going on nine by then, and Carmen leaned over and said, real low, so nobody else heard it, "Five years since that freezer, you know that? Five years this month."

I did know it. I'd been carrying a little plan around in my head about it for three weeks, a dinner reservation I hadn't made yet, and the dry spell we'd both been pretending not to notice, months of passing each other in the hallway, her doubles, my callouts, the two of us like ships in our own house. "I know it," I said. "I was going to do something about it, too. Something better than this."

"This is fine," she said, looking around at the candlelit dead kitchen, the ruined Friday, the wrecked dining room. "This is plenty fine."

* * *

By ten the dining room was empty and locked, the utility had come and gone and pulled the meter and left me a clearance tag, and I was in the electrical room by work light with the panel open and dead and safe, doing the actual repair while Carmen sat on an upturned bus tub in the doorway keeping me company, because there was nothing left for her to do and the rest of the staff had been sent home except Nellie, who was out front on her phone with her feet up on a chair, and Chad, who kept wandering past the doorway like a man pacing a hospital waiting room.

"You don't have to sit in here, it's boring," I told her, stripping the burnt lug off with the wrench, the smell of it sharp and burnt in the little room.

"I know," she said. "I want to anyway."

So she sat, and told me about the night, the two tables that walked, the guy who'd sent back the same steak twice, and I worked, and it was easy, the two of us talking in a dark little room the way we used to talk on job sites before either of us admitted anything, and somewhere in there I realized I hadn't felt this easy with her in months, and that the feeling had a shape to it, and that shape was going to last exactly as long as it took me to tighten that lug and close that panel, and then it would be Monday again, and her doubles, and my callouts, and the hallway. And I decided, standing there in the work light with a wrench in my hand, that Monday could wait its turn.

The lug went on clean, which is the kind of thing an electrician will tell you feels better than it should, and when I buttoned the panel back up and killed the work light, Carmen was still sitting on the bus tub, and she didn't get up right away, just sat there in the dark with her hands folded in her lap like she was waiting for something, so I asked her what, and she said nothing, nothing, I'm just sitting, and I let her sit, because after the month she'd had she'd earned the right to sit anywhere she wanted for as long as she wanted.

We came out front and the place had gone quiet in that way a restaurant never goes quiet, no fryers, no vents, no radio over the dish pit, just the two of us and Nellie's phone tinnying out some podcast and Chad standing at the bar doing arithmetic on a napkin by candlelight, muttering numbers at it like they owed him money. The tea lights had migrated, somehow, from the pass to the tables out front, little points of flame going down the middle of the dining room between the set tables, and the big windows on the corner showed nothing but the dark street and the rain starting up again, and I'll tell you it made the place look like something out of a different life, some life where we had money and time and went out to places like this on purpose.

Carmen stopped in the middle of the dining room and looked around at it, and I stood next to her and looked too, and neither of us needed to say anything about it, which was its own kind of talking, the kind we used to be good at.

"Chad," Nellie called from her chair, "utility's texting me now, they say the truck's close."

"Truck's been close for an hour," Chad said, not looking up from his napkin. "Close is a word they use."

I checked my tag, checked my watch, did the math. "Realistically, power's back by midnight, maybe a little after. Then I re-energize, walk the building, check your equipment, and you're open for lunch tomorrow like nothing happened."

Chad looked up at that and I watched him do the math on losing a Friday night against gaining a Saturday, and the Saturday won, because Chad's fair that way even when he's grumbling, he was forty when he opened this place eight years ago and he's been fair ever since. "Fine. Fine.