The Second Time Around (Kitchen Shift)

My name is Sergio Dunbar, I'm 24, and I've been a plumber for six years. I'll say right up front that I'm not the kind of guy who gets distracted on the job. I show up, I fix the thing, I bill the person, I leave. But when Franklin Erickson called me about the leaking sink at Bella Notte, I said yes faster than I've ever said yes to anything, and that's because of Dom Crockett.

Dom works the line there. He's 25 now. The summer I turned twenty we both worked the docks at Lakeside Marina, and that August we had one night at a party where something almost happened. Almost. He got a phone call, I got cold feet, and we both pretended for the rest of the season that nothing was there. Then he moved to the city for culinary school and I didn't see him again until yesterday, when I walked into his kitchen with a toolbox.

Franklin met me at the back door. He's the owner, mid-forties, always looks like he's mid-sneeze. "The prep sink," he said, walking me past the line. "It's been dripping for a week. Arnie keeps putting a bucket under it and then forgetting the bucket."

"Sounds about right," I said.

"Dom says you two know each other?"

"Yeah, sorta. Worked a summer together."

"Well, don't take all day. We've got a hundred covers tonight." He said it friendly enough, but the message was clear. Fix it and go.

Dom was at the far end of the line, breaking down a case of tomatoes. He looked up when I came around the corner and just stopped. Knife flat on the board, both hands still, staring at me like I was a health inspector. Then he grinned, and the grin was exactly the same as it was at twenty-one.

"No way," he said. "Sergio Dunbar. You're the plumber?"

"That's me. They send the worst one they've got."

"Shut up. I heard Franklin on the phone yesterday and I thought, no chance it's the same guy. Sergio wasn't exactly a common name." He wiped his hands on his apron and didn't go back to the tomatoes. "How you been, man?"

"Good. Busy. You?"

"Good. Busy. Cooking, obviously." He gestured at the whole kitchen with one hand. "Been here like four years. It's a good spot. You still living over on Delmar?"

"Nah, moved out by the park. Rent's cheaper if you like hearing the highway."

He laughed at that, a real one, and I felt something in my chest do a thing it hadn't done in four years. I'm not a poet. I know how I felt and that's all I can tell you.

The prep sink was in the back corner by the dish pit, which is about as private as a kitchen gets, meaning not private at all but at least nobody looks at that corner. I got down on my back on the wet floor tile with a flashlight in my teeth and slid under the sink, which is how I've spent a good portion of my adult life.

"Loose compression fitting," I called up. "Somebody cranked it too hard and cracked the nut. Plus the trap's corroded. You want the whole thing redone, that's an hour."

"Take two," Dom said. He was crouched next to me, arms on his knees, watching me work. "Franklin's charging it to the budget anyway."

I came out from under there and sat up, and we were close, closer than two guys need to be on a kitchen floor. He didn't move back. Neither did I.

"So," he said, quiet, under the noise of the hood fans. "The party."

I knew which party. There was only one.

"Kyler's house," I said. "End of that summer."

"Yeah. You know I think about that night sometimes."

That's not what you expect a guy to say on a kitchen floor at 2:30 on a Tuesday. I looked at him and he looked back, steady, no joke in it.

"Me too," I said. "Probably more than I should admit."

"What happened there? Like actually. Because I've replayed it and I still don't know. We were out on the porch and you were telling me about your truck, this dumb thing, and I was leaning in, and then my phone rang and it was my mom yelling about my sister and I walked off to take it, and when I came back you were gone."

"I got spooked," I said. "You were gone twenty minutes and I talked myself into thinking I read the whole thing wrong. So I left."

"Sergio."

"I know."

"You coulda just waited. I was coming right back."

"I know that too. Now. Didn't know it then." I picked up the wrench and turned it in my hands for no reason. "For what it's worth, I thought about calling you about a hundred times after that."

"I would've picked up."

"Well. Yeah. Now you tell me!"

He laughed again, and this time he put his hand on my shoulder while he did it, and left it there. His hand was warm and a little damp from the tomatoes and I wanted to lean into it like a dog.

"Listen," he said, and his voice dropped even lower. "We're in the dead zone till like four. Arnie's doing inventory in the office, Franklin's at the bank. If you get to a stopping point on the sink, the walk-in's the quietest place in the building. I go back there when I need five minutes. You look like a guy who could use five minutes."

"Is this you asking me to take five minutes with you?"

"I guess I'm asking. Kinda. Are you gonna make me ask straight out?"

"I might," I said. "Since last time I didn't ask at all."

"Then I'm asking. Come take a break with me in the walk-in. I'll show you where we keep the good parm, that's all, I swear." He was smiling but his ears had gone red, and that detail did more to me than anything else had.

I did the fitting in about eight minutes, which is fast, then cleaned up my tools slow, which is slow. He watched me the whole time without pretending he wasn't. The new trap went in, the drip stopped, and I told myself the job was technically done and whatever happened next was on my own time.

The walk-in is exactly what you'd think. Steel door, shelves of produce, air that hits you like a wall. Dom pulled it shut behind us and the latch didn't lock from the inside, which he demonstrated by showing me the little tab. "Safety thing. So nobody gets buried in here with the romaine."

"Good to know. My cousin got locked in a freezer once. Whole fire department came out."

"Glad we're not gonna be that story." He was standing close, breath fogging a little. "It's cold in here, sorry. I didn't really think that part through."

"It's fine. I run warm."

"Yeah," he said. "I remember that. You were always warm. You'd sit next to me on the dock at night with no jacket on, even in September."

"You noticed that?"

"I noticed everything about you, man. That's kind of the whole problem."

I reached out to steady myself on a shelf because the floor was slick with condensation, and my hand came down on top of his. He'd put his hand on the shelf at the same time, same spot, and we both just left it there. His fingers were cold. I wrapped mine around them without thinking, and he made this small sound, not a word, just an acknowledgment that it had happened, that after four years something had finally happened.

"Well," he said. "Okay."

"Okay," I said.

Neither of us moved our hand.

His hand turned over under mine so we were palm to palm, and that was somehow worse, or better, I couldn't tell which.

"I'm gonna say something," I said, "and it's been sitting in my chest since that summer, so bear with me."

"Okay."

"I wanted this. Back then. I wanted it every day since, if I'm being honest, which is a stupid thing to say to a guy I haven't seen in four years."

"It's not stupid." His voice was rough. "I wanted it too. I used to sit in culinary school and think about what would've happened on that porch if my phone hadn't rang. I never came up with an ending I liked."

"I've got a few endings," I said.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. But none of them fit in a walk-in cooler."

He laughed, and then he stopped laughing and just looked at me, and I said, "There's a storage closet off the kitchen. Saw it when I was hauling my pipe bag through. There's no romaine in it either."

"Sergio."

"I'm asking straight out this time."

"God, yes. Okay. Yes!"

He cracked the walk-in door and looked both ways like we were twenty again, which, no, we were twenty-four and twenty-five, but the feeling was the same. The kitchen was dead. Arnie had the office door shut and somebody's podcast leaking out of it. Dom grabbed my sleeve and walked me past the dish pit to a gray door I'd already clocked, and he opened it and we went in and he pulled it shut.

It was a closet with a pull chain light, boxes of napkins, a mop sink, and a case of olive oil against the wall. Dom hit the chain and the bulb came up dim and yellow.