Truly(46)

After that, he maintained a running monologue as he gathered the day’s bounty, and May trailed along behind him, pleasantly surprised by how much she liked being up here. She remembered snatches of a song about city rooftops—how peaceful they were—but this wasn’t that sort of rooftop. They were only one story high. She heard every car go by and caught bits of conversations from the sidewalk.

But even so, she liked looking down on the Village. She liked the way her boots squished into the humus when she took a step into the bed to pull a weed at Ben’s direction. The coolness of her forearm after the carrot tops deposited their morning’s collection of dew on her skin.

She liked Ben’s dimple-crevasses and the easy way he moved up here.

After he’d finished, she followed him down to the empty kitchen.

“Do they serve breakfast?” she asked.

Ben smiled. “If they did breakfast, it would be a madhouse in here right now, and Cecily would kick us out so fast it’d make your head spin.”

“Just dinner?”

“Yeah.” He glanced at the clock. “The prep crew will get here soon, and the pastry chef. But this early in the morning is about the only time it’s quiet in here.”

Ben turned on the taps and dumped his harvest on the metal countertop next to the sink. While he sorted through the pile, snapping the tops off carrots then throwing what remained—as well as some tiny potatoes—under the water, May tried to imagine the kitchen with fifteen people bustling around it. Every galvanized surface covered with food, the burners all lit, the pasta cooker bubbling, the dishwasher letting off clouds of steam. She’d worked as a waitress once, so she had a sense of what it would feel like in here during the service.

Crazy.

“So can you cook?” Ben scrubbed a small blue potato with a brush and then added it to the collection of clean produce on the countertop beside the sink.

“A little.”

“You like potatoes and omelets?”

“Sure.”

“Good. You do the omelets, I’ll do the potatoes.”

“I thought you were making breakfast.”

“You need to earn your keep.”

“Since when?”

His eyebrows lifted. “You don’t know how to make an omelet?”

“Sure I do.” But despite her love of cooking shows, she didn’t know if her technique would pass muster with a real chef.

Ben diced the potatoes and began sautéing them, adding seasonings and what seemed like an obscene amount of butter while he cooked some vegetables for omelet filling on another burner.

On her first try, May got shells in the eggs, forgot the salt, and failed to get the pan hot enough. When she tried a bite from the edge, the eggs tasted rubbery and bland.

“How’s that coming?” Ben asked.

She carried the empty bowl, the whisk, and the container of eggs over to the countertop on his side of the stove. “You’re making them.”

“You sure?”

“I can’t take the heat, Master Chef.”

“Crack the eggs for me, at least.”

She picked four out and cracked the first one on the lip of the bowl.

“I like mine best without the crunchy shell bits in there,” he said.

“Shut up.”

He stirred the potatoes. She glanced over at him. “And quit smirking.”

“All right, princess.”

Two men came in and began setting up their workstations on a long galvanized steel table nearby. One brought a big tray of what looked like miniature chickens out of the refrigerator, and the other retrieved a vast quantity of onions and began chopping them at a speed that astonished her. Ben greeted them by name—Luis, Pedro—but they kept their heads down, their eyes on the flashing knives in their hands as they said hello. Deferential? Or else they just didn’t want to cut off their own fingers.

May kept her back to them and focused on Ben’s graceful economy as he moved from one pan to the other, stirring and seasoning and flipping eggs in a symphony of hotness.

How had she ever thought he was nothing more than a dishwasher who liked to cook, especially after watching him make French toast yesterday morning? He moved with fluid grace, as though cooking was a language he’d learned to speak at birth.

He loved it. Obvious as a neon sign.

At their station nearby, one prep cook chopped carrots into precise cubes while the other separated chickens into pieces. A freckle-faced redhead pushed backward through the kitchen doors on crutches—an awkward job that left her little room to maneuver in the kitchen, which wasn’t a large space. Ben finished sliding the second omelet onto a plate and said, “That’s Sam. Keep an eye on the potatoes, okay? I’ll be back in a minute.”