Tonya pinched the bridge of her mask tighter as she watched the yellow bucket fill with fresh water. The acidic smell of urine still lingered in the air, despite her emptying the mop system’s dirty water tank and rinsing it with detergent. Tonya suspected that the scent came from the mop head itself. She unscrewed the microfiber cloth at the end of the pole and pivoted from the basin tucked in a nook near the kitchen entrance to the giant laundry bin where the restaurant tossed its used linens.
Before she pitched it inside, Tonya stopped herself. Without diners, it was doubtful that Philip was paying for laundry service. Most likely the mop head would be left to mold, its funk deepening until someone became aware of it and began to publicly wonder who the idiot was that had abandoned pee-soaked fabric in the kitchen—not to mention where the urine had come from.
She couldn’t have anyone wondering that.
Her nose wrinkled, creating a gap between her mask and mouth through which more of the smell entered. Tonya silently cursed as she brought the mop head back to the basin, holding it far out in front of her. She dropped it in the giant sink surrounding the mop bucket and redirected the spigot on top of it. Rather than dilute the stench, the water seemed to intensify the stink, beating the pee particles from the fabric into the air. She grabbed the bleach and poured it onto the cloth, stopping only when the smell of chlorine burned her sinuses.
Tonya turned off the water. She left the mop head to soak as she lifted the bucket out of the basin to the floor. Cold water splashed over its sides and onto her apron, making her shiver as she added the detergent. She was watching the bubbles form when a door slammed.
Tonya braced an arm against a wall, as if the noise were an earthquake’s rumble and the ground might begin shaking. Her heart seemed to explode in her chest. The sound didn’t make sense. The chefs had all departed hours ago—including Philip. He’d taken the garbage out and said good-bye twenty minutes earlier.
“Hello?”
She regretted calling out a nanosecond after she’d done so. Whoever had entered had likely been ignorant of her presence before. That was no longer the case.
Tonya grabbed the mop, which was little more than a stick without its cloth head. She stepped down the hall toward the doorway, wielding her weapon with both hands in front of her body, the way she’d seen in kung fu movies.
Philip emerged from the kitchen’s washroom. His face was red, as if he’d gone out for a run rather than emptied the trash. Sweat pasted down his hair. He looked at her stance with his head tilted to the side before shrugging and unbuttoning his military-style peacoat. Instead of hanging it on the hallway hooks installed for that very purpose, he folded it over his arm.
“You’re still here?” he asked.
“I thought you left,” she said.
Philip’s nose flared. “Yeah. I’d thought so too. But then I realized there’s still work to be done before tomorrow’s dinner shift.”
He strode past. Tonya listened to his footsteps fade before they disappeared behind a door’s clang. Philip had locked himself in his office, she supposed. She couldn’t blame him. Who would want anything to do with a jumpy nutcase practicing fake martial arts with a mop stick?
She shook her head as she reassembled the mop with a fresh pad and resumed her duties. A larger-than-usual number of pots and pans had been used during the evening’s dinner service. Washing them had taken most of her shift. She still had to mop the floors and wipe down all the food surfaces.
Tonya pushed the bucket into the kitchen and got to work, humming to create some sound besides the slosh of soapy water. She finished half the room before determining that the liquid in the bucket was too gray to continue. Mopping with dirty fluids would ruin everything.
Tonya dragged the bucket back to the basin area and heaved it into the sink. Gray soapy sludge splattered inside and slurped down the drain. She righted the pail and turned on the hose, watching the clear, fresh water pool into the cleaning contraption.
The bucket was near full when a metallic whirring pierced the air. Tonya winced at the noise, assuming that some kitchen device had gone haywire, no doubt because she’d erroneously left it plugged in while wetting its area. She rushed into the main kitchen, praying that her inadvertent damage would be of the inexpensive variety.
As she entered, she realized that she was hearing a blender of sorts, turned up to its highest setting. Philip stood at a counter beside a shiny, metallic device. A chunk of skinless pink flesh lay in his right palm. More pieces were spread on a cutting board in front of him. Tonya could see bands of white fat running through ropy red muscle. Philip dropped a piece into the machine, force-feeding it with the aid of a plunger. Pink and white ribbons spiraled from holes in a round plate at the grinder’s end.
Tonya gagged at the sight. Eating the proverbial sausage and knowing how it was made were different things. She wanted to enjoy one without the other.
She retreated to the basin, put a fresh head on the mop, and resumed working. She slapped the soapy water onto the still-dirty part of the floor and then drove it toward the baseboard. After, she swirled the mop in a figure eight, dancing with the dingy tiles, wishing for music. Her wireless headphones were somewhere in her storage closet, at least ninety minutes away by public transit. Tomorrow she’d venture out to Bushwick and try to find them, she told herself. The shift would pass faster with tunes.
At the moment, there was only the screech of the grinder. Philip worked with efficiency, feeding a new meat chunk into the machine before it could finish its prior morsel. As a result, the sound never stopped. It droned on, too loud for white noise yet too consistent to keep her attention.
Tonya was nearly finished with work when it finally stopped. In her peripheral vision, she watched Philip escort the pan of extruded meat to a counter. He covered it with plastic, labeled it with a Sharpie pulled from his jacket pocket, and then placed the pan inside the walk-in fridge.
As he turned from the door, they made eye contact. His unmasked expression was tight, as if he were annoyed that she was still there—or that she’d been watching.
She pointed to the meat grinder. “Do you want me to take that apart and wash it?”
Philip reached toward his ears. He removed two plugs and then brandished them, indicating that he hadn’t understood.
Again, she gestured to the machine. “Want me to handle that?”
“I got it,” he said, his face relaxing. The redness from earlier had faded into a graying pink, like expired beef. “Caribbean spiced meatballs are on the menu tomorrow. We’ve got a bunch of leftover flank steak from dinner service. Home diners don’t want to eat as decadently as they do when they go out.”
He approached the grinder. “I have to adjust my ordering.”
“I remember having those meatballs,” Tonya said. “Delicious.”
“Yeah, Dominic usually put them on the staff menu. They’ll be on the main menu now.” Philip didn’t look at her as he spoke, concentrating instead on twisting off the metal circle from the meat grinder’s main body. “As well as whatever dishes I can invent between now and tomorrow morning for the rest of the trimmings. Maybe I’ll make Jamaican beef patties. It has so many spices, scotch bonnet, onion, ginger, paprika, allspice. Doesn’t really matter what cut of meat’s being used.”
Philip’s lack of eye contact read as guilty to Tonya. He wasn’t simply talking; he was confessing how he cut corners and controlled costs, recycling the leftovers into staff meals and upscale street food. Tonya’s nose scrunched at the thought that all these years she’d been consuming parts of the cow perhaps better suited for dogs. Shank or tongue. The whole head, maybe.
“This is few-day-old flank steak,” Philip said, perhaps reading the expression visible above her mask. “Sometimes we use chuck or even sirloin in the meatballs, depending on what we have.” He snorted, returning his attention to disassembling the meat grinder. “Don’t worry. The parts that most people throw away end up as pâté. That’s where chefs hide all the livers, glands, and other sweetbreads.”
Tonya pointed a finger in Philip’s direction. “Good to know.”
She brought the mop over to where her boss had been working. Any meat left on the floor was sure to attract vermin.
“Hey, I wanted to ask you something.”
Tonya nearly dropped the stick in her hands. In her experience, men only wanted to “ask you something” when it was something inappropriate.
“Did you know Nate?”
The name set off her body’s alert system. Hairs stood up on the back of her neck and arms. Her heartbeat quickened. “Nate Walker, the one who was in the papers?”
“Yeah.” Philip stared at her, gas burner eyes on their highest setting.
Beneath her mask, Tonya’s upper lip grew damp. She could feel the sweat gathering at her ears. “Well, his daughter went to the school, so I knew of him.”
Philip’s eyes narrowed. He knew she was lying. How did he know?
“Um, why?”
“Imani thought you might know him.”
Tonya raised her eyebrows, performing surprise to cover her concern. Perhaps Nate had said something to Melissa over the years, and the woman had chosen not to confront her. Instead of causing a scene in front of the school community, Melissa could have decided to limit her reaction to crying to her best friend. She probably would have seen it as the mature thing to do. Taking the high road. Refusing to address the young tramp who’d tried to steal her husband.
“The school wants to say something nice about him, and she was looking up people he’d helped at St. Catherine’s over the years.” Philip dismantled another piece of the meat grinder. “She came across the scholarship that he’d endowed and the letter that he wrote in favor of Layla receiving it. Apparently, he said a lot of nice things about her and you. He mentioned you’d auditioned for him.”
Philip looked up at her, demanding confirmation.
Tonya wondered what he already knew—or suspected. Had Nate mentioned to Philip that he was seeing one of his waitresses on the side? Had Philip known all this time and kept quiet?
“I didn’t really know him.” Tonya spoke like she was testing a hot pan. “I went on so many auditions in my youth for directors, producers, casting agents. God knows I was always chatting. Trying to be memorable and get the part, right? The scholarship isn’t the Nate Walker scholarship—it’s just an academic and need-based thing. I wasn’t sure who was endowing it.”
Philip continued to stare. Did he know that the last part was a blatant lie? Was she failing this audition, trying too hard to make her story believable, keeping her voice too high to feign surprise? Should she have changed the dialogue to something that fit better?
Tonya lowered her tone, an effort to sound less flippant about a man who, as far as Philip likely knew, had supported her daughter’s education and then been murdered. She should sound sadder, she realized. More appreciative. “He was your friend, right?”
Philip’s lips pressed into a line on his unmasked face. “More the husband of my wife’s friend.”
Tonya exhaled, thankful that the mask was there to muffle the sound. If Philip and Nate hadn’t actually been close, then chances were that Nate hadn’t disclosed anything. Philip hadn’t been tactfully avoiding the subject all this time. He really didn’t know the deal.
“He came here a lot before the pandemic,” Tonya continued, shifting the conversation from her relationship with the director to Philip’s clearly complicated one. “I remember waiting on him in Coffre. I guess he really liked the food.”
Philip’s noncommittal expression morphed into a smirk. “I wish.”
“Well, I mean, if he was coming here, he had to like it.” She forced a laugh that only managed to sound nervous. “He certainly wasn’t scouting for actresses to put in a movie.”
Philip pulled the four-pronged blade from the meat grinder. In his hand, it looked like a throwing star. “He thought his presence would help publicize the place,” he said, carting the grinders’ parts to the sink. “He’d invested behind the scenes. I guess he thought it would give him cachet. De Niro co-owns restaurants, so Nate wanted to get in on the action. And, unfortunately, I couldn’t afford to fund Banque’s refresh and all Coffre’s start-up costs myself.”
There was a bitterness in Philip’s tone that Tonya hadn’t heard before. “It was a great addition,” she said, hoping to lighten the conversation.
Philip continued cleaning. “Yeah. But such is life, right? There are no guarantees. Sometimes you open up a restaurant to rave reviews and a pandemic forces its closure. There’s nothing to be done. You can’t take out the money you put in already. It’s gone.” Philip shut off the faucet and reached for a towel. “Nate could stomach the loss, though. The man had millions in the bank. And his partners weren’t poor.”
The reminder of Nate’s wealth worked like a match, rekindling all the hate Tonya had for him. The man had possessed money, fame, and power, and he’d abused it all, using his cash and cachet to make the problems that he’d created go away.
And she’d let him do it.
Tonya put away the mop and went for the other cleaning supplies. Karma had ultimately come for Nate Walker, she told herself. Though he might not have paid as much as she’d felt owed, life had turned out fair. He’d definitely paid in the end.