The Rinse and Repeat

I got to the Wash and Rinse at five fifteen on a Friday night with a notebook in my pocket and a heart that still felt like it had been wrung out and hung to dry, which is what three months after Colin will do to you even when you're thirty-four years old and supposedly know better. Trevor was waiting by the kitchen door with a clipboard and the expression of a man who had already given up on the evening.

"Ezra, thank god, you're here, it's about to get insane," he said, handing me a stool that had no business being in a kitchen. "Festival Friday, the whole street's closed, we've got two seatings booked solid and a third walk-in crowd coming around eight. Just write whatever, make me sound charming, I'll pay you the hundred I promised and we're square."

We'd settled the money part before I even sat down, a hundred dollars cash in an envelope he'd already handed me, which he did partly because he's decent and partly because he knows I'm a writer with no money and he doesn't want it hanging over the food. I was there to do a piece for a blog about the restaurant's legendary festival night, the kind of place where the marinara has been going since morning and the family booths have paper tablecloths and crayons. Trevor and I have known each other five years through a writers' group that meets on Tuesdays and mostly drinks wine, so when he asked I couldn't really say no, even though I'd spent the whole ride over thinking about Colin and the apartment we'd shared for six years and how I now owned one fork I actually liked.

"Just stay out of the line," Trevor said, pointing at the floor like it was marked with lasers. "The servers come through here at about forty miles an hour. And whatever you do, don't stand near the dish pit, it's a splash zone, it's a war zone, it's worse than both."

He said that and then he got called away by a man yelling about a table of twelve that had become a table of fifteen, and I sat on my stool and opened the notebook and watched the kitchen do its thing.

The first hour was pure chaos in the best sense, if you like chaos, and I've decided since that night that I do. Servers screamed numbers at the line cook, who screamed them back in a voice like a foghorn, and plates of chicken parmesan and huge wet bowls of pasta flew past my head close enough to fog my glasses. I wrote things like the kitchen sounds like a dial tone made of yelling and the garlic smell is a physical object you could lean against, which I stand by. Around six, a busboy came ripping through the narrow gap between the prep station and my stool with a full tub of dirty plates, and he clipped the corner of a bus bin full of ice water and the whole thing tipped, all of it, every ounce, directly onto my lap and my notebook.

I sat there soaked from the waist down, paper disintegrating under my fingers, and the busboy, a young guy with a mustache he was clearly proud of, said "oh no" in the flattest voice I've ever heard and kept walking, because there was no time for anything else on a night like that.

That's when Cody appeared. He was the dishwasher, I'd noticed him earlier, twenty-five years old and always smiling as if the whole thing was a joke he was in on, and he came over with the mop and started working the puddle around my feet without a word at first, just this little grin at my ruined pants.

"Rough night for the notebook, huh," he said, mopping around my shoe like it was a dance move. "That's the third splash casualty tonight. You're the first one with homework, though."

"The notebook's dead," I said, holding up the pulpy mess. "Three pages of genius, gone."

"I'll say a prayer," he said, completely straight-faced, and crossed himself with the hand holding the mop, which got a laugh out of me so big and sudden that it hurt, because I hadn't laughed like that in three months, not since before Colin and I called it quits. "There's a spare table by the office you could dry off at, boss won't mind, it's the worst seat in the house anyway."

I moved to the little table by the office door, wrung out my notebook as best I could and started over on fresh pages, writing faster this time, and every so often Cody came back through with a rack of clean glasses or a bin of plates and slowed down just enough to say something. He told me the man at table six had sent back the same pasta three times for three different reasons. He told me a woman had tried to pay with a coupon for a different restaurant entirely. He told me that if I wanted the real story of Festival Friday I needed to hang out by the dish pit, and I told him I'd take his word for it.

By eight the second seating was in and the noise had gone from chaos to something like weather, a constant roar you stopped hearing as noise, and I had six new pages and wet shoes and a mood I hadn't had in a while, something close to enjoying myself.

The lull came around nine thirty, that strange dead spot between the second seating clearing and the late walk-ins, when the whole kitchen seemed to exhale at once. Servers leaned on the pass drinking water. The line cook sat down for the first time all night. And Cody slipped out the back screen door with a pack of cigarettes and a look over his shoulder, and I got up and followed him.

The alley behind the place was loud with the festival two blocks over, bass thumping off the brick, and Cody was leaning against the dumpster in his apron, already lighting up. He saw me and held out the lighter without a word, and I patted my pockets and realized I'd left my cigarettes in my other jacket.

"Here," he said, shaking the pack at me. "Take one. You look like you need it more than me, you've been writing with your whole body, it's exhausting to watch."

I took one and he lit it for me, cupping his hands around the flame, and we stood there in the warm garbage-scented dark while the bass thumped and I felt, for the first time in weeks, actually okay.

"So what's the story you're writing," he asked, exhaling at the sky. "Is it about the food or the drama? Because I've got drama if you want it, I've got a server who cries every Friday and a cook who's in love with her and nobody will say it out loud."

"That's better than anything I had," I said. "Mine was all about the sauce."

"The sauce is good but it's not a story," he said. "Hey, you're the guy who got soaked earlier, right? Mustache kid took out a writer. He felt terrible, he told me, well, he said one word about it, but it was a sorry word."

"He kept walking, I respect it."

"There's no stopping on Festival Friday," Cody said, and he laughed, and it was an easy laugh, and up close in that alley light I noticed he had a nice face, all crooked front teeth and eyebrows, and I noticed that I was noticing, which was new for me and which I decided not to be sad about. The last three months had been all sad noticing, noticing Colin's coffee mug still on the shelf, noticing the other side of the bed, and here was this dish guy passing me a cigarette in an alley and I felt something in my chest unclench one notch.

"Bad night, or just a bad month?" he asked, and he said it casually, the way you'd ask about the weather, and I guess my face had been doing something.

"Bad three months," I said. "Breakup. Six years, done in April."

"Ah, hell," he said, and handed me the whole pack. "Keep those. Consider it hazard pay for the soaking."

Trevor found me at ten thirty, when the third seating had finally thinned out to a couple of tables of drunks who'd run out of things to say to each other, and he had his clipboard tucked under his arm and the look of a man who'd survived something. "That's it, we're done, kitchen's closing, everybody get out," he called into the pass, and then he came over to where I was sitting and dropped a fresh napkin on my table like he was dealing cards. "Ezra. You survived. How's the piece coming?"

"It's coming," I said, which was true in the way that a wet notebook is technically a notebook. "I've got pages. Most of them are legible."

"Good enough. Listen, I've got to go, my sister-in-law is waiting on me at some thing across town. Cody's got the keys and does the lockup, so just head out whenever you're done, don't rush." He glanced at the envelope sticking out of my notebook pocket and waved the whole subject away, because Trevor is decent about money the way some people are decent about weather, just quietly and all the time. "The hundred covers the night, and if it doesn't, come find me Tuesday and we'll argue about it over wine."

"It covers it," I said, and he clapped me on the shoulder and went out the front, and I heard the front door chime behind him, which meant I was now alone in a restaurant with a kitchen crew that was, table by table, vanishing.

The servers left in twos and threes, the crying one had stopped crying and was laughing about something on her phone, the foghorn-voiced cook untied his apron and said goodnight to nobody in particular, and then it was quiet in a way that restaurants never are, that hollow post-rush quiet where the fluorescent light hum sounds like a machine for thinking about your ex. I gathered my notebook and my free pack of cigarettes and went to the staff bathroom to wash my hands, because they had marinara on them from four different sources and I'd stopped caring