Hard Truths
A ringing telephone woke me from my fitful slumber in the recliner. I struggled to my feet and went to the kitchen to answer. I took the receiver from the hook and mumbled into it. “Hello?”
A female voice said my name.
“Yeah.” I cradled the receiver against my shoulder so I could rub my face to wake my expression. I dropped my hands and checked my wristwatch. It was almost six. I’d slept a long time, but I hadn’t slept well. Bad dreams about the night Walt had his heart attack disturbed my slumber and made me miserable.
The voice on the phone didn’t say anything. I prodded it to get to the point. “Who is this?”
“Uncle Law, it’s Julie. We need you downstairs.”
“Downstairs? Where are you?”
My niece explained. “I’m at the hostess’ station. I’ve been working since Walt got sick. Something has come up. We need you.”
I didn’t know Julie had been my replacement. The fact that she’d come back to work to help touched my heart. I’d barely thought about the day-to-day operation of the restaurant since Walt’s attack. The way everyone had closed ranks to make up for the missing men was wonderful. The staff really did care about Walt and me.
I wondered what she meant by ‘something has come up.’ I tried to get more information to gauge how quickly they needed me. “Are the boys alright? Do you need to get home?”
“They’re fine. I don’t need you to replace me. There’s trouble in the kitchen. Just come down and…and hurry.” Her voice trailed off as she began to speak to a customer who was at her station. She hung the phone up and the line went dead in my ear.
I returned the telephone receiver to the hook and rubbed my face again. The most important thing she said was the cryptic statement about ‘trouble in the kitchen.’ I didn’t know what trouble there could be. As long as Owen was there, he would handle any trouble. I wondered if Owen came down with a sudden cold and needed to be relieved. I supposed I could still manage to work one night in the kitchen. My hands would hurt the whole time, but I’d do my best.
That didn’t make any sense either. I hadn’t worked a shift in the kitchen in years, not since my arthritis got bad. Besides, there were people we could call if we needed help. Not every chef worked every night. There was always someone to call. The idea that Owen would have Julie call me for kitchen help was ridiculous. I set my speculation aside because my niece told me to hurry. I put myself in motion to do just that.
I threw my suit jacket back on and stepped into my shoes. As an afterthought, I went to the bedroom and got my short barrel .38 revolver from the drawer. The gun had gotten me out of a great deal of trouble over the years. I hoped whatever the trouble was in the kitchen wasn’t the kind to require a firearm to solve. Still, I’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it. I dropped the gun into the right front pocket of my jacket and hurried downstairs.
I was tempted to enter the restaurant through the front door, but a quick glance through the window told me the place was filled to capacity. I didn’t want to thread my way through the oasis of gentility while I was dressed like a bum with sleep on his face.
I hurried around the building to enter through the kitchen door. I paused in the alley to scrutinize a compact sedan which was parked behind the restaurant. The sedan had a ‘U-Drive’ emblem on the rear of the trunk lid. The emblem meant that the car was a rental. I wondered if Ted and Arthur had come to eat dinner in the kitchen. They did a ton of work for the U-Drive agency. I assumed they had driven one of the cars which was being worked on. Sometimes they did that when they needed to identify an intermittent problem.
Having Ted and Arthur in the kitchen didn’t qualify as ‘trouble.’ I wondered if Julie was being overly dramatic or if the message had gotten muddled between the kitchen and my niece. Either way was fine with me. I’d woken up hungry and looked forward to having dinner with my friends. It would be fun to bring them upstairs after the meal and we could all telephone Walt together. He would get a kick out of hearing from Ted and Arthur. With my worry about the trouble gone, I dragged the security door open and entered the kitchen.
Owen was in front of me in an instant. He placed himself between me and the rest of the kitchen. He’d done it so fast, my eyes hadn’t had time to adjust from the dim gloom of the alley. “Hey, Owen. Where’s Ted and Artie? I’m going to give them shit for not letting me know they were coming.” Owen squinted. His face was a grimace of strong emotion. It looked like worry. “What’s wrong?”
“Listen to me.” He said in a tight, quiet voice. “He just showed up like it was a regular night and went to work. I tried to get him to leave. Harold tried. He won’t listen to anyone. Did you know he was here?”
I didn’t understand. “What are you talking about? Who’s here?”
He stood to the side and pointed to where Walt was putting the finishing touches on a plate which was about to go out to a hungry customer. He looked like he always did, with his crisp white apron and hair net. He looked like he belonged. The trouble was that he didn’t belong in the kitchen of Walt’s Special. He belonged in his chair by the fire in Reading.
White-hot rage bloomed inside me. My hands clenched into tight fists. The joints hurt, but the pain sharpened my anger. I took a step forward, but Owen stopped me. He grabbed my arm and spoke to the side of my face. “Don’t blow your stack. It won’t look good.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. When I blew it out, my rage went from white to merely red. I opened my eyes. “Alright…alright, I’ll deal with this.”
“Do you want me to go with you?”
“No, he’s not going to like me after this, probably not for a while. You need him to like you because you want to buy this place. Stay clear and let me do what needs to be done.”
He released me and stepped back. One of the assistant chefs called out. He hurried away to see what was needed. I walked toward my husband.
Walt didn’t notice me until I was almost on top of him. He was too focused on the plates. When he finally did, his first comment was about my dress. “What are you doing in that suit? It looks awful on you. And where’s your hairnet?”
I sucked a breath because I planned to use it to scream with. In my mind, I planned to scream so loudly that my voice alone would blow Walt out of the kitchen and all the way back to Reading. Before I shouted, Owen’s words repeated themselves in the back of my mind. He didn’t want me to make a scene which would disturb the kitchen staff and maybe even the customers. I blew the breath out and spoke in a normal tone. “Come upstairs with me.”
“I can’t. I’m so glad I decided to drive down here. They’re lost without me. If I don’t stay, the reputation of Walt’s Special is going to go right down the tubes.”
“You drove?” As soon as I asked the question, I remembered the rented sedan in the alley. I realized the car had nothing to do with Ted and Arthur. Walt rented it to drive down from Reading. I was furious. “The doctors said you weren’t supposed to drive. They said the strain is bad for your heart.”
He tried to dismiss my concern. “The doctors are being too cautious. I feel fine. It’s better if I can get back to work. If I spend one more minute sitting by that fireplace while that nurse who you keep pretending is a housekeeper hovers over me, I’m going to lose my mind.”
He tried to bring the conversation to a close. He put on his ‘all-business voice’ and dismissed my worries. “We can talk about it later. I’ve got to get back to work, and you need a hairnet.”
My husband took two steps away and put his attention back on the plates. My temper caught fire again. “WALT!”
He looked up from his plates. I took two steps forward so I could whisper directly into his face. “I’ve got a gun in my pocket.”
He interrupted to challenge what I said. “What do you plan to do with it? You’ll shoot me if I don’t do what you want?”
“I will go into the dining room and empty this gun into the ceiling.”
He interrupted again. “You wouldn’t.”
I told him the same thing I told Owen that morning. “I’m still the same man I’ve always been, Love. I may be old and grey, but it’s still me. You can either do as I say, or I’ll make certain that no one ever comes into this restaurant again…ever. Don’t test me.”
He wasn’t convinced. “You’ll get arrested.”
I took the gun from my pocket and broke the cylinder from the frame to check the load. There were five rounds and one empty chamber. I shoved the cylinder back into the gun and held the weapon at my side. “They’ll arrest me, and I’ll go to jail, but you will be safe. Your safety is all that matters to me. Are you coming upstairs with me, or do I go into the dining room?”
He knew he was beaten. He untied his apron and tore his hairnet from his head. He strode to the kitchen door, head up, defiance in every step. He threw his apron and hairnet on the floor right before he walked through the security door and plunged into the alley.
I put my gun back in my pocket and followed behind. Owen met me just inside the door. “How’d it go?”
I barked at him even though what happened wasn’t his fault. “HOW THE FUCK DO YOU THINK IT WENT?”
He remained calm while I shouted. I remembered what he’d said that morning. He said I could shout at him as much as I needed to. I guessed I just had. I apologized. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do. That’s not true. I know exactly what I have to do, I just don’t want to do it. I’ve got to go upstairs and tell the man I love that his dream is over. I’ve got to take away the thing that he loves most. I’ve got to hurt him for his own good. If I could tear my heart out of my chest and give it to him, so he could keep what he loves, I would do it. Life doesn’t work that way. I’ve got to go upstairs and make him hate me so he can stay alive. I wish there was another way, but there isn’t.”
Owen frowned like I slapped his face. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Come up later. Come up when the rush dies down. I’m going to tell him how it has to be. We may as well rip the bandage off all in one go. Tomorrow, come hell or high water, he and I are going back to Reading. We’re going to stay there until he’s recovered. This bullshit tonight proves I can’t trust him to do what’s right for himself. I guess I’ll have to do what’s right for both of us.”
“I’m sorry it has to be this way.”
“Me too.” I shrugged and let my shoulders hang.
I went out the door into the alley. Walt was waiting with his suitcase in his hand. He must have gotten it from the trunk of the rented car. His rigid posture and his sour expression told me he was geared up for a fight. I had no intention of fighting. I didn’t have the energy. The emotional roller coaster I’d ridden ever since the ringing telephone disturbed my nap had left me even more tired than I’d been before I laid down.
I held my hand out. “Give me your suitcase.” He tightened his grip on the handle and refused. “The hard way it is.” I said to myself more than to him. “Give me your suitcase.”
He made no moves to hand it over. “Or what? You’ll shoot me?”
I took my outstretched hand back and used both hands to rub my sad face. I dropped my hands and looked directly at my husband. “I’m not going to fight with you. We have nothing to fight about. We’re going upstairs and we’re going to have this out. We’re going to do it calmly, because you’re supposed to be doing everything calmly. Your life has changed. It happened the moment the plaque in your arteries blocked the blood from getting to your heart. It’s not fair, but life is not fair. I may not seem like it, but I’m sympathetic. Your happiness means a lot to me. If I could do something to change it, I would, but I can’t. No one can. Like it or not, this is our new reality.”
“Says you.”
“Says your doctors. We’re both pushing seventy, love. From now on, our lives get harder. We’ve got two choices. We can draw closer to each other. We can rely on each other to deal with the changes as they come, which is what I would like to do. The other option seems to be the one you’ve chosen. You plan to fight against the aging process. You want to dig your heels in against the passage of time. You want to fight to hold onto every aspect of your current life. You haven’t even realized that life is already gone.
“If you choose that path, you will be miserable while time takes you apart. That path doesn’t work. It’s inevitable that everything you have, everything both of us has will be ripped away. The harder we hold on, the worse it will hurt when it happens. I’m too fucking tired, love. I fought my whole goddamned life. I don’t want to do it anymore. I certainly don’t want to fight with you. It would mean a lot to me if you would come upstairs and listen to what I have to say. Please.”
To my surprise and gratification, he held out his suitcase for me to take. He and I walked around to the front of the building. I unlocked the street door of the apartment while he stared into the dining room of Walt’s Special. I stepped through the door and waited on the landing. I planned to go up the stairs ahead of him to make certain he climbed slowly.
When he didn’t follow, I went back onto the sidewalk to find out why. He moved to lean against the fake marble column which divided the window from the apartment door. Tears streamed down his face. “This is all I ever wanted. I worked so hard. It’s not fair.”
I coaxed him into the stairwell and shut the door to close us off from the busy sidewalk. I wrapped my arms around him and held on as tightly as I could. “It’s not fair, love. I hate to watch you go through this. It hurts me to see you hurt.”
He sobbed on my shoulder. “What…what’s going to happen? I can’t close it. Please don’t make me close it. I’d rather be dead than to shut Walt’s Special.”
I patted his back with the hand which didn’t hold his suitcase. “You won’t have to close it. Walt’s Special will be here. Your dream doesn’t have to die. It just has to change.”
He pushed us apart to ask a question like a sad child might. “You promise?” He wiped his face on his sleeve.
“I promise. Come on, let’s go up and talk. I won’t lie and tell you that everything will be fine. It won’t be, not in the way you want it, but we’ll figure out a way to make it alright.”
He allowed himself to be led and we went slowly up the stairs.
* * * *
We talked for a couple of hours. At first, he refused to listen to anything. He shouted his lungs out and paced the kitchen while I ate a quick dinner. He yelled and waved his hands. I begged him to settle down, but that only excited him further. Just as his anger reached a crescendo, he grimaced in pain and flopped down at the table. “My heart.” He winced and held his chest.
I put my knife and fork down and waited to see if I should call the hospital. I prayed to God that the pain wasn’t another attack, that it was just the result of overexertion. Either out of sheer luck or in answer to my prayers, his expression softened as his pain subsided.
“Are you alright?”
He propped his elbows on the table and cradled his head in his hands. “I guess I’m as alright as I’m going to be.”
I waited a while longer to see what his mood would be once the pain left him. Several silent minutes passed. Eventually, he lifted his miserable head. “This is how it is now, isn’t it?”
I nodded that it was.
“And there’s not a thing I can do to change it?”
I shook my head that there wasn’t.
“Alright, love. Tell me how it has to be.”
I tried to start my speech on a positive note. “I don’t think it will be as bad as you’re imagining.” I went on to verbally sketch out an idyllic arrangement where Owen would run the restaurant, and Walt would remain the creative force. I explained how he could still cook and experiment. I promised he could remain involved, but that he must transfer the yoke of leadership to someone else’s shoulders.
When I reached the part about Owen buying in, he balked. “Absolutely not! Walt’s Special belongs to me.”
“That’s all well and good, except you’re wrong. It’s half mine. If you refuse to let Owen buy in as an equal partner, I’ll sell him my half.”
“You wouldn’t!”
“Yes, I would. There has to be something in it for him. You can’t tell him to own the responsibility without letting him own the benefits. He has a right to a slice of the pie.”
He stood firm. “But he didn’t bake the pie! I did!”
I tried to make him see reason. “Owen helped. He’s worked in the kitchen for fifteen years. He’s helped reinvent the menu over and over again. No one has worked harder, and no one cares about Walt’s Special more than Owen. Not even Harold cares as much as Owen does, and he’s been here since the very beginning. I’m sorry, love. I really am, but this is how it has to be. You can either close the place, or you can let Owen buy in.
“Even if you didn’t have your heart attack, how much longer did you plan to keep going like you have been? You’re sixty-six. Did you ever plan to retire, or did you think you’d just drop dead one day over a pot of Walt’s Special Farm Fresh Vegetable Soup? What about us? We’ve been talking about traveling for years. When were we going to do that? I want to go see David’s farm. He’s been inviting us every year since I saved Larry. We’ve got the money. We should live a little while we can.”
He sulked, which was uncharacteristic of him. “I don’t like it.”
“I don’t expect you to like it. I expect you to be open to listening. Owen is coming up here later to talk about things.”
“TONIGHT? I’m not ready to talk about selling a piece of my dream tonight.”
“It has to be tonight. This is the only night we’re staying here. Tomorrow morning, we’re going right back up to Reading. We’re both going to stay there until you’re completely recovered.”
“I won’t go with you.”
“Yes, you will.”
“You can’t make me go anywhere I don’t want to. I’m not a child and…”
I lost my temper. “THEN STOP ACTING LIKE ONE! You’ve been acting like a spoiled brat since they let you out of the hospital. Every time I turn around, you’re doing stuff that you know you shouldn’t. You drove down here and went back to work behind my back. What the fuck don’t you understand about your new situation?”
I pointed at the center of his chest. “A piece of your heart is DEAD! A piece of the muscle which keeps you alive is in the process of turning into scar tissue. Your life will NEVER be the same as it was. Your dream is FUCKING GONE! It ended the moment you grabbed your chest in pain. You have to make changes. If you don’t, you’ll die.”
“What if I’m prepared to die as long as it happens while I’m doing what I love?”
His words hurt me deeply. “If that’s the way you feel, then you are the most selfish man I’ve ever met. If you choose your restaurant over me, then…then, then I demand you take this back.” I twisted my gold wedding ring over my swollen and painful knuckle and slid it across the kitchen table.
He slapped his hand down on top of the ring. “You would leave me? Just like that, you’d leave?”
“I won’t stand by and watch you destroy yourself. I love you. I want to be with you. I want you to want to be with me. I will not be second in your affections. You either love me more than the restaurant and you’ll make the changes that you need to make, or you don’t and you won’t. If you don’t, if you love the restaurant first, then we’re done.”
He picked up my ring and held it in his palm to stare at it. “I can’t believe you would threaten to leave me right now when I need you the most.”
“DAMN YOU!” I sprang from the table, or at least I got up as quickly as an old man can. I checked my pockets for my wallet and car keys and headed for the stairs.
“Where are you going?”
I marched back to the kitchen to vent my anger. “FUCK YOU, IS WHERE! I’m going someplace where I don’t have to beg everyone to do what’s right for them!”
I turned on my heels and hurried across the living room and down the stairs. I barreled through the street door and onto the dark sidewalk. The sun was down, but it was the middle of winter, so the darkness didn’t tell me anything about the hour. The cold weather bit into my flesh. I paced the sidewalk because I didn’t know what else to do.
I damned myself for forgetting my overcoat. I damned Walt for being selfish. I damned myself for letting him talk me into coming back to the city. I damned myself for mouthing off to Doc and chasing him away. I paced and I damned everyone and everything. I was in the middle of damning the cold again when I ran headlong into Owen, who I damned for good measure. “DAMN YOU, OWEN!”
“I presume he didn’t take it well.” He said to state the obvious.
His wise-ass comment took all the wind out of my sails. I was all set to blast my anger at him. I was going to shout and make a huge scene on the sidewalk right in front of Walt’s Special. I couldn’t do it. His well-timed observation neutralized my anger like baking soda on battery acid. I almost laughed.
“No, Owen, he did not take it well at all. He still thinks he’s going to come back here and run the place like he used to.”
“I gathered that when he walked into the kitchen tonight. He just breezed in like it was a regular night. Scared the hell out of me. I don’t know how fragile he is. The first thing I did was tell Jules to call you, then I phoned my sister who’s a nurse. She told me to watch him like a hawk. If he looked like he was in pain, I was supposed to make him lay down.”
I rubbed my worn-down face in frustration. Everyone seemed to be worried about Walt except Walt. I was about to thank Owen for looking after my husband when he noticed a detail about me. “You forgot your ring.”
I held my left hand up to see that the gold band was gone from it. “I didn’t forget it. I gave it back to him.”
He stared in wide-eyed surprise. “My God, has it gotten that bad?”
I told him the bitter truth as I knew it. “He said he wants to keep working like he has been. He said he’s ready to die as long as he can do what he loves.”
Owen peered up at the second floor of the building like his sharp blue eyes would be able to see Walt through the concrete façade. “That’s how it is, huh?”
“Seems to be.”
“That’s a shame. Fear is an ugly thing. Walt never struck me as the type for it, but I guess it’s inside all of us.”
“What are you talking about? Who’s afraid? Not Walt. He doesn’t seem to give a damn.”
“That’s the fear. He’s afraid of change. He’s more afraid of change than he is of death. I watched my grandfather go through the same thing. He was a career fireman. He captained the 58th ladder company up in Kensington. The department rules forced him out when he was sixty-five.
“Grandpa Max didn’t want to retire. He loved the department, so he did all kinds of things to try to get back into a company, any company. He dyed his hair black and doctored up his driver’s license to show he was ten years younger. He applied to fire houses all over the city. He even went over to Jersey to try to get hired. Firefighting was the only thing he knew. It sounds like Walt is the same. He’s a chef. The only thing he knows how to be is a chef. He’s holding on with both hands because he doesn’t know what will be left of him if he gives that up.”
The explanation made sense. In the span of my life, I’d been many things; tailor, soldier, cop, detective, dishwasher, chef, host. I didn’t have a single profession to cling to. Walt had always been a chef. His work was central to his whole life. He went to culinary school when he was young, then he worked in kitchens until he could open Walt’s Special. From his perspective, the culmination of his entire life’s work was being ripped away from him.
I nodded to show that I understood and agreed. I also wrapped my arms around my body and shivered in the cold. As my anger calmed, the cold got colder. I needed my overcoat, but I’d be damned if I went back into the apartment to get it. Owen, kind soul, took his own coat off and draped it over my shoulders. I protested the kindness, but not too loudly.
“What happened to Grandpa Max?”
“He died.” Owen said with a sad lift of his shoulders. “He found a fire company to take him, just beyond the city limits. They didn’t look too hard at his license or his dyed hair. They needed men, so they took him. You remember when the Hatzel Hattery burned down about ten or eleven years ago?”
“Sure, the whole industrial block burned because of the chemicals the hattery used to soften the felt. The place went up like a match head.”
“Grandpa Max died on the scene. There was a ladder raised up from the back of a truck with a water cannon on top. Grandpa loved being up high, shooting water down on a blaze. He was in his full gear. Fireman’s gear weighs a lot. I don’t know how much, but it’s heavy. The extra weight is a big strain on the body, especially one that’s almost seventy years old. Anyway, Grandpa was on his way up the ladder. Three quarters of the way up, he collapsed and fell. They pronounced him dead at the scene. He never should have been up there at his age. That’s why they make fireman retire at sixty-five.”
“I’m sorry. He sounds like he was a great man.”
“He was. I miss him.”
Owen rubbed his hands together. He looked cold without his overcoat. “I’ll go up and talk to Walt. He’s bull-headed, but I’m even more bull-headed. I’ll make him see reason.”
“Thanks. Say whatever you think you need to. As far as I’m concerned, the gloves are off.”
“Where are you going?”
I shook my head because I didn’t know. “Somewhere that isn’t here. I’m hurt. He hurt me tonight. I can’t be around him right now.” Even though I was hurt and angry, I had a qualm about leaving Walt to spend a night alone. I worried what might happen if he needed help in the night. I remembered what Owen said about his sister, the nurse. “I know I’m out of line to ask you this, but do you think your sister would know someone who could stay here and keep an eye on him? If she can’t help, or you don’t want to call her, I understand. If I have to come back and sleep on the couch, I will, but after the things he said to me, I could really use some time to myself.”
“I’ll take care of it. I’ll get Jules to phone Karen. If she can’t help, then I’ll stay.”
“I can’t ask you to do that. You’ve got your own bed to go home to.”
“You didn’t ask. I offered. Go ahead. Find someplace to get some rest and don’t worry about Walt. He’ll be in good hands, I’ll make certain.”
I thanked Owen and went on my way.
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