Security(27)
The four sous--chefs have settled at a table near the bandstand. One of them moves a place setting’s shrimp fork inside a wineglass, but his companions nag at him until he puts it back. The same sous--chef then takes a cell phone out of his pocket and fiddles with it. The other sous--chefs ignore this, eager to see him get in trouble. Delores departs the bandstand, holding her broom, and enters the storage area where, presumably, she is filling the mop bucket, as running water can be heard.
Henri is now sitting on a stool by the dishwasher. Tessa has gotten him crackers and cheese from the walk--in refrigerator. She keeps Tupperware full of snacks specifically for Henri, for times like these. Henri is diabetic; he ought not to skip meals. She pats his back and makes the sober suggestion that he apologize to his sous--chefs. Henri gets up, toting his Tupperware in both hands, his gait mildly unsteady, since notification of low blood sugar can make the effects more drastically felt.
Camera 34
Brian, Justin, and Jules all stand by the stove. They have all three tasted all four varieties of cherry coulis. They have each chosen a favorite, which they now eat. Actually, Brian let Jules and Justin pick their favorites first, and he took one of the two remaining. Brian asks, “When does Tess get a break?” Jules and Justin laugh. Jules says, “Sorry. Sorry, you didn’t mean that to be funny.” Justin says, “If you can get her to leave the hotel for five minutes, you’ll go down in the annals of myth.” Jules says, “Forgive him. He talks like that sometimes.” Their silverware scrapes the bottoms of the steel pots. Jules says, “Did you two ever . . . ?” Brian licks his spoon and frowns, perplexed. Justin says, “Sleep together. My wife is asking if you and Tessa ever slept together. Because that’s completely appropriate, honey.” Jules says, “Oh, what? I point out the elephant in the room and I’m a jerk?” Justin says, “No. You poke the elephant in the eye and you’re a jerk.” Brian says, “Yeah. We slept together.” He plugs his mouth with cherries and garbles, “She was eight and I was ten.”
Camera 33
Tessa guides Henri to the table where the sous-chefs sit, like she’s guiding a little boy into his first day of kindergarten. She confiscates the sous-chef’s cell phone without a word, leaves the cooks to talk, and walks toward the storage room. Tessa pushes the storage room door wider, as the doorstop for that room, according to Delores, “sucks.” Delores, looking up from steering the mop and bucket, yanks out her earbuds. Tessa shakes her head in what would be a bosslike manner, except she’s grinning, and then Delores is laughing, and then they’re both laughing. “It’s off,” Delores says, pulling her phone out of her apron pocket and touching the screen. “It’s—hey, wait a sec.” “No exceptions,” Tessa is saying, reaching for the phone but not taking it. Delores gives it willingly and says, “I got a text. Take a look.” Tessa reads, scrolling down with dabs of her index finger. Henri is apologizing between crackers, speaking mostly in French, but his sous-chefs are used to this. Most of them know “I’m sorry” by now, as well as “The flavor profile of cherries is a whore of shit, a whore of shit.”
Justin and Jules gawp at Brian as he laughs through a swallow. He seems to debate, to decide. He waves his spoon in the air like a silver flag of surrender and says, “She wouldn’t talk. That’s normal in the beginning, but people started getting weirded out about it after a few weeks. Me and Mitch, we didn’t—well, we faked like we didn’t care about her, but we did by then. She’d smile when she was playing with us. She’d even giggle, but get her around an adult and she’d clam right up.” Brian stirs his saucepan. “Her teacher at school called Lorraine in. And Lorraine told Tess—at the dinner table, in front of me and Mitch—‘If you don’t start talking, I’m not keeping you. I’m not gonna send you back—I’m gonna send you to an institution.’ ”
“God,” Jules says, “what a bitch!”
“You can’t imagine,” Brian says. “So after dinner, when me and Mitch and Tess go to the park like we always do, and I’m pushing her on the merry--go--round, I say to her, ‘Tess, you know, you can talk to me.’ ” Brian chuckles. “She looks at me, like—like, she still does it. A minute ago, when I wouldn’t drop that chef’s shirt so he could knock her over some more. It’s a look like, Do you think I’m the dumbest person alive or what?”
“Exactly!” Justin says, laughing.
Brian puts his saucepan back on the stove. “But that night—Mitch could sleep through anything. Identical twins aren’t—we were pretty damn close, but we weren’t identical in every way. A pin drop could wake me up. So that night, when my door opens, I sit up straight. It’s Tess at the door. She shuts it behind her, comes in the room, and she sits on the floor between my and Mitch’s bed, her back to this little wood dresser. Then she pats my mattress, like, Lie down, weirdo, what am I gonna do to you? So I do. And then she whispers to me, super--quiet, ‘Why did the rabbit cross the road?’ ” Brian crosses his arms, like he’s embracing the memory. He gives Justin and Jules a minute to guess, but they don’t. “I said, ‘To get to the other side?’ and Tess whispered, ‘Because he was stapled to the chicken!’ ”
It has been deniable, up until now, that Brian is good and decent and precisely what Tessa needs. But now he is smiling down at his folded arms, the boyishness in his grin set against—or amplified by—the crinkles his laughter cuts into his face, crinkles that are like a prophecy of a happy future. It is easy, undeniable, to imagine these crinkles beaming at Tessa over their joined hands. Gold bands on their joined hands.