When We Collided(11)

CHAPTER FOUR

Jonah

The restaurant is called Tony’s because that’s what it is—my dad’s. It feels as much like home as my own house does. I know every scar in the wood floors and baseboards. I know every ingredient in the kitchen. I know that you have to pull the freezer handle up and over at the same time if you ever want it to open. When my dad bought the building, it was a pizza kitchen. He and Felix redid most of it years ago, but the old brick oven remains. Both before and after my dad.

The menu consists of things my dad liked best when he opened the restaurant two decades ago. Most entrées are inspired by the Italian cuisine my dad learned at home or the French cuisine he learned in culinary school. Chicken piccata, steak au poivre, pesto tortellini, that kind of thing. He made the simple classics so well that they tasted brand-new again.

When working lunch prep, I have the same routine: wash and tear lettuce, dice tomatoes and onions, grate cheese. I like the ritual of it. But today I can’t focus. Bad news for someone wielding several types of knives. All I can think about is dinner. I scrubbed my hands in the industrial sink but didn’t touch the blue-paint phone number on my arm.

My shift is almost over by the time Felix busts in through the back door, carrying two cardboard boxes. I can’t see his face, just his tanned arms on either side. “Hola, amigos!”

Everyone grunts their hellos. In a kitchen, you call the chef “Chef.” It’s protocol. I mean, football players don’t call their coach “John” or “Eric.” They call him “Coach.” But my dad was Chef for almost twenty years. I thought it was his first name until I was four. Like, I thought he became a chef because he already had the name. There couldn’t be another Chef at Tony’s. Felix insists that we still call him Felix, even though he’s the head chef now.

Felix is my dad’s best friend. Was. No—is. I never know which tense is right. When someone dies, that person no longer is your best friend. He was your best friend. But when you’re the person left here, like Felix is, you’re still in the present tense. Like I am. Tony Daniels was my dad. But I am his son.

“Got yourself a tattoo, Maní?” Felix glances at my arm as he places the boxes on the counter near my work space. My dad called me Peanut when I was in elementary school. It embarrassed the hell out of me until I made him stop. Never thought I’d miss it—never in a hundred years. So I like that Felix still calls me that, but in Spanish.

“That a phone number?” Felix leans closer to see the marking. “A girl’s phone number?”

I try to sound all casual. “Oh. Yeah.”

“No way.” He waits for me to surrender, to admit that I’m lying. When I don’t, he punches my arm. “It is? You asked a girl for her number?”

Gabe, one of the prep cooks, overhears this. “Oooh, Daniels. Got yourself a lady?”

He dances a little, thrusting his hips as the other guys whoop. But I’m actually glad they razz me. After my dad died, they could barely look at me. The whole kitchen was so quiet.

“Nice moves,” I tell Gabe, who is still doing his stupid-ass dance. “Had plenty of practice humping nothing, huh?”

He flicks me off, grinning while the others start in on him. Even Felix laughs. It’s a big, round laugh like my dad’s. Their friendship spanned so many years that their personalities melded together. Felix uses a lot of the same words and phrases from inside jokes. Sometimes he inflects a word the way my dad would. Or maybe it’s that my dad sounded like Felix sometimes. On the good days, he makes me feel closer to my dad. On the bad days, he makes me miss my dad until it feels like my ribs are splitting apart.

“Get out of here, then, Maní,” Felix says as he heads into the office. The office is really a broom closet with a desk and shelf shoved in. My dad, tall as he was, always looked ridiculous in there. “Go call your girl.”

I return home with two grocery bags of supplies for my usual pizza menu. One pizza will be simple, for Silas, Bekah, and Isaac—the pepperoni purists. And for Vivi, if she’s a meat eater. If not, she can have some of the artichoke, spinach, and feta cheese pizza. My mom loves it, and so does Naomi, because she’s a vegetarian. I hope Vivi wants that one because it’s my most inventive pizza—the impressive one. I’ll also make a small cheese pizza for Leah. She hates any other toppings to even touch her pizza, and she barely likes tomato sauce. Basically, it’s round cheesy bread. I’ll eat whatever is left over because I like them all.

When I turn onto our street, I see Silas on the front lawn. He’s pitching a Wiffle ball to Isaac, who swings and hits nothing but summer air. Bekah laughs from the infield, and Leah doesn’t notice. I think she’s supposed to be playing outfield, but she’s dancing around in the grass instead. By the time I’m near them, Silas’s pitch connects with Isaac’s bat, and Silas misses the catch, pretending like he made an honest effort. Isaac stumbles toward first base, which appears to be a flattened cereal box.

They only ask Silas to play Wiffle ball these days, not me. When I stopped coming home in my uniform last spring, I told them I’d stopped liking baseball. That I hadn’t gone out for the team again because it wasn’t as fun as I thought. The truth was that I had to be home with them. Naomi was at college, my mom wouldn’t get out of bed, and Silas couldn’t do it on his own.