“Something to Drink”

by Casey Adrian

“All of our food is grown, raised, and caught Upstate,” Terrence said. He and his trainee walked out of the cooler — tubs of sliced lemons in their arms, stocking the dining room for dinner service. The heart of the kitchen was loud with the churning sounds of machinery, the fine chopping of parsley, deep sinks filling with ice and cold water. A chef scraped the grill with a bent spatula, digging up black soot and smelling of smoke. “The eggs and the beef are from local farms; the fish are caught in the lakes. Our produce is grown nearby.” They turned into the kitchen alley. Terrence emptied lemon wedges into a silver pan — seeds and juice splashing against stainless steel countertops and forming sour puddles. The sight of the yellow fruit made the trainee’s mouth jolt, bringing her tongue to life. “The shellfish are from New England,” he admitted. “But Chef can’t go without mussels.”

It was a Saturday night, the first of June, and it was humid. Terrence was sure that it was going to be busy. By seven o’clock, the bar would run out of fresh mint and they would have to start improvising; all of the lake trout would be gone by sunset and Chef would begin shouting and cursing in frustration, dripping sweat from her brow and onto the tile; the kitchen would become tense and booming and airless; the dining room would fill with patient bodies, breathing in each other’s heavy air, talking of trivial and faraway things. Terrence’s joints would stiffen by the end of the night. He would be dry-swallowing painkillers in any inconsequential moment of freetime.

But being busy was good. A busy Saturday meant that there would be lots of distractions to center his mind. The young servers, like ballerinas falling from their pointe shoes, would become flustered by their full sections and give a table to him. He would welcome six or seven parties at once — welcoming six or seven gratuities. A bounty of cash would grow in his pocket, allowing him to splurge on a bottle of post-shift rosé.

His life was full of these contradictions: he wanted Saturday to be both busy and slow; the grapefruit margarita was bitter and tart; he loved serving and he hated it; he missed Hudson and wanted him dead. Maybe these contradictions came with age. Maybe he was a contradictory person. Either way, he felt those busy nights in his bones.

At The Anchor, the first of June marked the resurrection of the summer menu. It was Terrence’s thirty-eighth June at the restaurant.

“I’m drowning.” One of the younger servers grabbed Terrence’s arm, churning the black sleeve of his dress shirt like a pepper grinder. He was standing at a P.O.S. in the dining room, sending drinks to the bar. His trainee loomed beside him like a shadow. “Can you greet table 14? Or take them? I don’t care. I’m going to kill that new hostess.”

As he expected, it would be his seventh table. He agreed.

In fleeting moments of tenderness, Terrence saw himself in the new servers. He saw himself when they came drifting into the restaurant in their clean, black clothes. He remembered fumbling with corkscrews — when a glass of water would slip from his hand and onto the tile. He was especially reminded of himself when they came as he had: in a pair.

“My boyfriend and I got hired together,” the trainee said. She was pretty and clear-skinned and went to one of the colleges in town. She couldn’t have been older than twenty-one, claiming to have service experience from a restaurant back home, wherever that was. “He’s training as a barback.”

Terrence was always amused when a couple got hired together. He watched how they engaged with each other, asking their partner for special favors and treating these tasks with a particular seriousness. He could always tell when they had been fighting or fucking before a shift — how they saw each other in the black uniforms of The Anchor versus the colorful clothes of the real world.

“Try to keep your work lives and personal lives separate,” he said to the trainee. He rolled the sentiment in a fine coat of sugar, not taking his eyes from the screen.

“We will. It helps that he’s behind the bar and I’m on the floor, I guess.” She took a sharp breath, matching the surrounding sounds of silverware. “It’s exciting to be here together, though. I never want to leave his side and now I don’t have to.”

“Just make sure that you know what you want.”

She nodded without knowing what he meant.

He finished at the P.O.S. and turned toward the bar.

“To work here, you’ll need to know how to eat seasonally.” Terrence and the trainee approached the service corner, scanning the counter for their drinks. He was always walking just a few steps in front of her. “For example, on the first of June — the first day of the summer menu — I would never recommend the mussels. It’s too early in the season and too close to their spawning.”

“Spawning?”

“When they release their eggs. It weakens them. They start to smell rancid.”

From across the counter, the new barback approached Terrence’s trainee. “How are you doing out there, babe?” He used tattooed forearms to pop the cap from a bottle of ale. It was the color of gold, crisp and malted, breathing citrus fumes.

“Trying my best.”

“I’m sure you’re doing great. You look gorgeous on the floor.”

She rolled her eyes, morphing into something playful and coy. “You look hot behind the bar.”

Terrence snatched the sweaty bottle from the boy’s hands. A fragmented memory of his youth dripped down his throat and he swallowed it away. “The galley needs ice,” he barked.

He looked back at the girl beside him. “Table 43 must be in the window. Let’s go.”

“Do you know the wine list?” They entered the kitchen alley. It was busy with backwaiters.

Intensity spilled from the line and engulfed the space in a steady hum. Seared fish and charcoal pierced through the watery air. They tucked themselves into a back corner, speaking quietly. The energy was too fragile and sanctified; it could easily have been thrown off by such conversations.

The trainee thought of the wine list. She tried to center herself in the strange sea of noise and scent. Her senses were being provoked and her synapses had trouble keeping up. She couldn’t overlook Terrence’s snarling. “More or less.”

“What would you pair with the blackened trout?”

She hung in the air, her mouth ajar.

From the window, the expo started shouting. “Runner, table 43!”

“A dry riesling,” Terrence answered for her. “The acid counteracts the spice. You don’t want anything with oak.” He swatted at the backwaiters so that he could grab the tray.

When Terrence and Hudson started at The Anchor — back when their skin was elastic, dotted with dimples and acne scars — they had been the same way. The wine list was not yet scripture. The grilled bass was not a glorious relic of the lake, but something to be chewed quickly and chased with beer. But Terrence stayed up at night to study. He laid cardstock pages and half-empty bottles on the bedroom floor, straining to distinguish one cabernet from another. He mapped the anatomy of the tongue. He dreamt of oysters and woke in a milky haze.

Hudson, on the other hand, was the kind of boy who ate fast food in the driver’s seat. He drank his coffee with three spoonfuls of sugar. He never cared for a hit of adrenaline or a complex taste. During the rush of service, Hudson longed for a corporate career, a tidy cubicle with a framed photo of his family.

“I just wish that you would take this place more seriously,” Terrence said once. “You need to learn this stuff.” They were standing in the same, private corner of the alley. Hudson, for the third time that week, had misplaced an order, and Chef screamed and threw a pan in response, calling him all kinds of names.

Hudson unrolled some noise from his throat. “And you need to lighten up.” He motioned around the kitchen, all of its cathedral glory. “This whole place,” he gestured, “is just a means to an end.”

“To me, it’s more than that.”

“It can’t last forever. You can’t work here for the rest of your life.” A backwaiter brushed past Hudson’s shoulder. He lowered his voice, but the sentiment stayed the same — his tone like the snapped sound of a rubber band. “How can you settle down in a place like this?”

Terrence and his trainee dropped the food at table 43. A filet mignon, tender and bloody and blue rare. Landlocked salmon, baked with brown sugar and served with steak fries. Angel hair pasta with steamed clams. 

When they left the table, the trainee turned over her shoulder, balancing a tray of bread plates in shaky hands. She was unpolished, Terrence knew, but she had potential. He could tell by the look in her eye. “How long have you been working here?”

“Almost forty years.”

She turned from the tray for just a second. “Wow.” She couldn’t have imagined the passing of four decades; it existed in her mind only as a hypothetical. “You must be happy here.”

It wasn’t as simple as that. There were parts of it that had never grown old: the fast and abundant money, the food, the mind-erasing stampede of service — all of the things which he loved at the beginning and continued to love until the end. It was a rush that he couldn’t have found anywhere else. It was an addiction that he had never seemed to shake. His old friends had pills and powders. Terrence had this.

Instead, he simply nodded, saying, “I am.”

Table 14 was occupied by four guests — a middle-aged couple and two teen boys. “I’ll get them drinks,” he told the girl. “Go empty your tray and check the kitchen for food.”

The trainee did as she was instructed. Terrence was certain that she would drop the tray, shove the dishes in front of a new, flat-lipped dishwasher, and meet her lover behind the bar. Maybe she would tell her boyfriend that Terrence scared her. Maybe they would sneak a shot of rum. Maybe, only under the dim, revealing light of the restaurant — a fantastical force that stripped all pretenses away — she would discover her lover’s first flaw. 

Terrence took a breath and approached the table of four. It was no different than any other night; he had done this dance a thousand times.

“Good evening, everyone.”

At one point in time, Terrence thought that he and Hudson could make it work. He lied to himself, saying that they could understand each other in spite of their differences — in spite of Hudson’s hatred of service, his immature palate, his lust for stability. But when Hudson gave his resignation from The Anchor, so too did he pack his bags and leave Terrence’s world altogether. “We want different things,” he said. “And you’ll always be loyal to that restaurant.”

In the sore and surreal years that followed their split, the boys grew in their own directions. They picked up the shattered pieces of their lives, stitching them together into different shapes, something new but vaguely familiar. Hudson got his desk job, his tie laced tightly around his neck each morning, returned to his new home at five o’clock each evening. Terrence heard through the grapevine — a vine of Concord, tart and strong — that he was doing well.

And Terrence, in those early years of his new life, did well also. He became the sounds and scents of The Anchor. He tasted subtle flavors that he’d always been told about but had never experienced for himself. “I get it now,” Terrence, one night, said to no one in particular — holding the stem of a wine glass between two fingers. A bead of chardonnay collected on his bottom lip. For the first time, he realized what it meant for a wine to be buttery. “I understand what they mean.”

From table 14, Hudson looked up at Terrence. The skin on his face had ripened, fine lines spreading around his lips. His hair sprouted gray like weeds in a garden. He wore the same cologne.

“Terrence,” he breathed.

A world of memories unleashed themselves from Terrence’s chest, banging against the surface of his skin. They showed themselves in the goosebumps on his neck.

“There’s no way that it’s really you.” Hudson was smiling. He looked like he may stand to hug Terrence, but he did not.

“It’s me.” Terrence became conscious of his hands. 

“How have you been?”

Some small and dormant part of Terrence, some sensitive spot on the back of his tongue, wanted to say all kinds of things. Wanted to shatter glass on the floor and stomp it into the carpet. Wanted to swing his arms and be dragged into the kitchen by the younger, more naive servers — ones with young hands and muscles and fantasies like he once had, who would reconvene in the beer cooler to snort white powder and mock his pain. He wanted to make a fist-shaped hole in the kitchen wall. He wanted to scream and sob and ask questions and demand answers.

But Terrence had grown up. Granted, he thought that he was grown back then — back when he knew the taste of Hudson’s mouth. Now, though, he was old enough to settle this leftover part of himself. “I’ve been good,” Terrence said. “Really good, actually.”

The man beside Hudson had clean fingernails and straight teeth. The boys at the opposite end of the table were scruffy-haired and fat-cheeked — the strong bones of someone raised on whole milk and full nights of sleep. “This is my family,” Hudson said. Terrence imagined that they lived in a three-bedroom house in the suburbs, a family dog that they took on walks each morning, a glass of boxed wine each night. He imagined that their family photo was framed on Hudson’s desk. “Everyone, this is Terrence.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” his husband said. His sons, in their adolescent shrill, said the same. The boys smiled at Terrence and Terrence smiled back. They were so young, unaware of Terrence’s mark on their father’s history. Maybe his husband was unaware also. 

“All these years and you’re still here.” Hudson’s smile was unwavering. It was like a song that Terrence had long forgotten. Terrence, though he always assumed the worst at times like this, knew that it was sincere. “I knew that you’d stick around.”

“It’s never grown old,” Terrence said. “I’m the head server now.”

In a few minutes, Hudson would order the fish and chips. He would ask for his water to be flat. Terrence would offer the oysters as an appetizer, thinking that something might have changed in him, and Hudson and his family would refuse. They would order the mussels, instead. Hudson knew nothing about their spawning. He would never learn these things, and that was okay.

It was not yet seven o’clock, but, around him, the restaurant was beginning to move at that pace. It was drippy and conniving in this way — the way a trickle transforms into a flash flood. A crowd of guests had begun gathering in the lobby. Soon, they’d be out of the lake trout. 

Terrence wondered if Hudson noticed the vertical line between his brows or the way that his knuckles had swollen — if Hudson could feel the constant, dull ache in the small of Terrence’s back.

“The head server,” Hudson echoed. “I’m happy for you.”

Terrence smiled. He and Hudson had made their choices. They found their loves, they ran to them, and they wound up in different places. “I’m happy for you, as well,” he said. He felt good knowing that he meant it.

He removed the black book from his apron pocket. Receipts and loose bills tried to pull themselves from the plastic binding. Terrence clicked the trigger of a pen. Around him, the restaurant was alive. “Can I show you the wine list?”

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