When We Collided(46)

I’m glad she’s staring down at her numbers and figures. She doesn’t see my jaw drop just enough to part my lips. My mom is seemingly functional and even—God—musing about life? I feel insane for reading into this. It’s a mirage, like when she tried to go to the grocery store. It looked like a good sign. It ended in public sobbing.

“You’re right,” I say dumbly. “Well, let me know if you need anything.”

I’m still shaking my head, stupefied, when my phone beeps. I expect Vivi. Come to think of it, I’m surprised she hasn’t shown up yet. At our front door, wearing a raincoat and boots and imploring us to dance outside with her. I assume she picked up a shift at the pottery shop. Still, it’s a rare morning that I don’t wake up to a series of dirty and imaginative text messages. She doesn’t sleep much.

But it’s Felix. Slammed. Come in?

The restaurant is almost never slammed during lunch, especially on summer weekdays. Most vacationers don’t even realize we’re open for lunch. But the morning beachgoers have to drive by Tony’s on their way back into town. They’re probably ducking in for lunch and hoping to wait out the storm.

Verona Cove’s tourist brochure calls the weather here “perfect.” It’s never sticky hot in the summer, and almost never freezing in the winter. But today I feel the cold front. I hurry through the rain with an old golf umbrella I found in the hallway closet. By the time I reach Main Street, the backs of my jeans are splattered.

The Tony’s sandwich board is out on the street. Someone wedged an umbrella handle in the space at the top where the two sides meet. From a distance, it looks like a very short, very squat person huddled under an umbrella. But the open umbrella protects careful chalk writing. I can read the bright white letters even through the rain. RAINY DAY SPECIAL: Hot Soups and Homemade Bread.

We’ve never offered homemade bread, and we only ever have one soup of the day. I pinch the skin on my forearm, hard, because this feels like a dream. One of those weird ones where it’s your life but the details are all messed up.

Inside, the kitchen is especially steamy, and the smell is overpowering and savory. More than that. Fragrant and yeasty and baked. Felix is chopping vegetables like a madman. Gabe is manning a stovetop full of deep soup pots.

“Jonah!” Ellie calls. “Hey!”

She’s at the prep station near the ovens, rubbing the tops of four loaves of bread dough with shiny olive oil. Her dark hair is tied back loosely beneath a too-big baseball cap that I recognize as Felix’s. She’s wearing a floral apron that she must have brought from home.

“Hey. You wanna catch me up here?”

Her hands move so fast it looks like she has four or six arms—a frantic cartoon character. Yet her voice is controlled, all business. “We’re doing six soups: classic tomato, minestrone, chicken noodle, hot and sour, tortilla, and a special Thai coconut that I thought was risky, but my dad nailed it—customers are obsessed. We also have four breads to choose from: French bread, corn bread, Asiago, and garlic rosemary.”

Ellie pauses, taking a breath. Her hands sprinkle loose herbs onto the bread loaves, which she then pats down expertly. “A bowl of soup and your choice of bread as a side for five dollars. Or, for three dollars extra, you can get a grilled cheese with your soup. Add more than one type of cheese for fifty cents each. The available cheeses are—”

“I know them.” I created the dairy organizational system in the fridge last year. I can recite the cheese alphabetically or by flavor, mild to sharp. I’ll have to put that on my college applications. Jonah Daniels: cheese arranger. I may have quit all my school activities to take care of my siblings, but, hey, I can keep a kitchen staff from mixing up provolone with mozzarella slices. Full-scholarship material.

“Oh, right.” She laughs at herself as she washes flecks of rosemary off her hands. “I’m sales-pitching you like you’re a customer. We need another person on the floor, so I’m going to take orders if you can handle the bread for me. Unless you want to wait tables.”

“No. Cooking, good.” My mind is already whipped up in the rush of the kitchen; my hands are on autopilot, tying my apron behind my back. The kitchen is best when we’re on the brink of chaos. Being understaffed is a total adrenaline rush. It doesn’t happen enough.

After Ellie explains the bread schedule and leaves, I stand there for a moment. It’s a lot to take in. Felix laughs at me as he slides a mound of vegetables from his cutting board to a huge pot. “She’s a girl with a plan.”

Okay, game time. I transfer the now perfectly crusted Asiago bread into the warming oven and move to the corn-bread batter. “How’d you come up with this?”

Another snort of laughter from Felix. “C’mon, Maní, you think I came up with this? It was all that kid of mine. She woke up early and smelled the rain like a basset hound. Next thing you know, she’s down here with her abuela’s bread recipes, talking me into her plan. All right, quick run to Patterson’s for more carrots and celery and . . . what else did we say?”

“Coconut milk!” Gabe calls from the stove. When Felix is out the back door, Jack, one of the prep cooks, looks up from plating the soups with the grilled cheeses. “How old is Ellie?”

“Sixteen. No, Jack.”

“Yes, Jack!” he says. “I’m only eighteen. What? I think I’ve got a shot. She’s a cool girl.”