Family Business

“Stillness Overcomes Heat” by Aaron Lelito

When Maude told me there was a problem with one of her tables, that she was about to curse them out if they were disrespectful to her one more time, I took a deep breath and approached the couple. The man was frowning, his arms crossed. The woman was eating her penne alla vodka, but she stopped and folded her arms as well when she saw me. “Good evening,” I said.

“Are you the manager?” asked the man.

“Yes,” I lied. I was not an employee of my brother’s restaurant. I wasn’t even properly dressed, wearing sneakers, jeans, and a pink polo.

“This steak is well-done, but I ordered it medium.”

I figured a little levity might help the situation. “I’m glad you’re enjoying it.”

“I’m not enjoying it. It’s like chewing charcoal.”

“But you just said the steak is well-done.”

The patron scowled. “Are you getting cute with me?”

“No,” I said, giving up on levity, removing the steak. “We will have the correct steak out momentarily. I apologize for the kitchen’s mistake.”

Back in the kitchen, I told my brother, “This steak is overcooked.”

“No, it’s not,” he said, without looking at it. He was helping the sauté cook plate for a large table. “It’s called a sear.”

“Well, they said it’s like chewing charcoal.”

“They can go fuck themselves.”

“Is that your motto?”

He ignored me, kept plating.

“How can you be so confident that this steak is right? You won’t even look at it.”

He stopped what he was doing, stomped over to me, looked at the outside and inside of the steak, and said, “It’s objectively perfect. Don’t make me come out there.” I didn’t appreciate that tone. Who did he think he was talking to? Here I was, helping him out, for free, and he was bossing me around. But now was not the time to fight. The dining room was full. The kitchen was in danger of backing up. And I suppose I was used to Dave treating people however he wanted and getting away with it. He always did whatever he wanted, however he wanted to do it. It bothered me, but it was nothing new. I swallowed my pride. Something in me couldn’t let him crash and burn—even if it was very unlikely that I knew enough about the restaurant business to save him.

I returned to the busy dining room. I smiled. “The chef says that this is called a ‘sear.’ The outside is blackened, but the inside is juicy and perfect.”

The man looked at me, furious. “If you won’t give me what I ordered, I’m leaving.”

I made something up, hoping to end this conflict. “I’m sorry, sir, but we are out of steak.”

He threw his napkin down on the table. “Alright, that’s it. I’m out of here. Come on, Carolyn. We’re leaving.”

I said, “Um, sir, it looks like your wife ate the vast majority of her penne alla vodka. I’m going to have to ask you to pay for that.”

He took out his wallet and dropped a dollar bill on the table. Then he and his wife stood up and left. I walked back in the kitchen. Dave said, “What happened with the steak?”

Fearing he’d chase them down and perhaps physically assault the man, I said, “Once I explained everything, he ate it.”

“Are you lying?”

“Yes.”

“What actually happened?”

“They left without paying.”

Dave anticipated this, and was running out the back kitchen entrance practically even before I said it.

***

Earlier that day, a few hours before opening night in early May, I thought I was merely visiting The Restaurant at Mashapaug, curious to get a behind-the-scenes look. It was my first day of summer vacation, home from graduate school. I had my camera ready, but when I walked through the door, I lowered the camera, took no pictures. Dave’s body was sprayed with blood because he was using a machete to chop up a full pig. The severed head was smiling.

Six cooks scrambled in the tight kitchen as the radio blasted Ozzy. I’m goin’ off the rails on a crazy train! Big pots steamed on the stoves, their vapor rolling up into the thunderous fan. One cook had to start helping the dishwasher because the dishes had piled up to the point where there was no more room to put anything dirty. Another cook had burned a sauce. Next to Dave, a cook was slicing potatoes and missed, the sharp knife cutting his finger. He yelled and ran for the first aid kit. Dave roared, “If we’re not ready to open by five o’clock, I will kill you all!” His eyes were murderous. Angry veins writhed in his temples like spaghetti. I’m goin’ off the rails on a crazy train!

I turned around to leave. Dave shouted, “Michael!”

“Hi.”

“Want to make yourself useful?”

“No.”

“Good. Set up my P.O.S.”

I said, “What’s a P.O.S.?”

“Christ. Didn’t you work at a restaurant?”

I reminded him that that was a long time ago and I was only a host. And I quit after a month.

“Please just plug the fucking thing in. It’ll take two seconds.”

“Fine. Where is the, um, U.P.S.?”

“It’s a P.O.S.,” he corrected me, incredulous. “P.O.S. Point-of-Sale. It’s in those boxes,” he said, pointing to six cardboard boxes resting on a steel table. Before I could again ask him to clarify what a P.O.S. was, something started to burn. “Eddy! What the fuck!” Dave chased a cook away from the stove. “Go pick some basil and come back when you don’t feel like ruining my life!”

 ***

Though I’m two-and-a-half years older, I haven’t been able to call Dave my “little” brother since I was in fourth grade. He’s six-feet, two inches tall, his arms bulging through whatever he wears. He’s worked out since he was ten. Before school he’d be pumping iron in our basement, blasting music at five o’clock, even though we were all trying to sleep just above him. When we complained, he didn’t care. And our parents let him get away with it. They were always afraid to discipline him. The only things they could threaten him with were taking his weights away or not allowing him to play in a sports game. But they didn’t want to do that because they hoped he’d be a professional athlete someday—which looked possible, actually, until his ACL disintegrated one high school Thanksgiving Day football game. Also, he could not be contained. If they locked him in his bedroom, he’d break down the door. He did it multiple times.

He’s a complicated guy, but I think, as is typical of brothers, I understand him better than anyone—and I admit I’m often entertained by him. He pisses me off, saddens me, offends me, disgusts me, all the same reactions I have to a reality TV show I can’t turn off. Hollywood agrees that he makes good TV; he’s been in several reality TV cooking competitions. When I was floundering in graduate school, trying to write some literary thesis, he was winning Chopped. I was the brother of a TV star. I couldn’t even be jealous—not to say I haven’t been jealous of him. I’ve been jealous all my life, but stronger than the jealousy is a need to please. A wish for the alpha’s approval.

We have an older sister, Melissa, but she just gets fed up with him and tries to avoid him. She couldn’t do that as a kid, living under the same roof as Dave, but now she lives up in Boston. (Not just because of Dave. Whereas I’m more of a homebody, she’s a traveler, and she got out of Connecticut as soon as she could.) She once called Dave, “a pool of toxic masculinity.” I don’t disagree with that assessment. I also don’t disagree with her decision to distance herself from him. They’re on speaking terms: the terms are that they speak to each other as little as possible.

That past Christmas, Melissa came to our parents’ house  with her dog, Delilah. As she and I sipped hot chocolate by the tree, she asked my mother if Dave knew not to bring his dogs. Dave's two pit mixes, Zeus and Athena, had attacked Delilah before and nearly eaten her, and Melissa wanted to make sure this wouldn't happen again. "I told him," our mother said.

However, when we opened the door to Dave later that evening, he had Zeus and Athena with him. "Merry Christmas," Dave said.

"Please take your dogs home," Melissa said, but the dogs barged in, straining at their leashes, Dave behind them.

"It's fine," our father said. "We'll keep them in the other room." He set up a table on its side to block the dogs in the kitchen, despite Melissa's protests that this wouldn't be enough. In the living room, we began exchanging gifts, Melissa clutching Delilah tight to her. And it didn't take long before the dogs did exactly as predicted, barging through the table to rush straight for Delilah, all of them barking wildly. Dave and I jumped up to hold the two pit mixes back as Melissa screamed and stood.

"What's the matter?" Dave asked Melissa. "They just want to say hello."

"Fuck this," Melissa said. "I'm leaving." And she did, drove all the way back to Boston.

I left too, went to spend the night with a friend, disgusted with the whole thing. Later that night, I got a family group text in which my father claimed that he was disappointed in, of all things, my sister's use of foul language.

Melissa believes that life is short, and you don’t want to waste time on people who don’t enrich it. I also don’t totally disagree with this, but the brother-relationship is a strange beast.

 ***

I Googled “P.O.S.” and found: “The point of sale system handles all of the transactions in the restaurant, managing everything from sending order tickets to the kitchen, to processing customer payments.” Great, so it was only the most important piece of technology in the entire building. I opened the boxes. I read the directions. I plugged in all the wires, from the router to the ticket printers to the receipt printer to the cash drawer, but nothing worked.

I spent the next hour on the phone with the P.O.S. company.

When I finally got the thing working, I told Dave, “I guess I’ll be leaving now.”

Dave said, “Did you program the menu?” He began transferring the pig parts into a pan.

“You didn’t say to.”

“Michael, I’m ready to go to jail if one more fucking thing…”  I had no confidence that I would be of any real use to him, but I had never before seen him so desperate. I’d never seen him look truly afraid, or if I had, I couldn’t remember. If Dave could be scared, actually perceive himself on the brink of something bad happening to him, all the things I took for granted were no longer guaranteed.

So I spent another half-hour programming the P.O.S. with Dave’s entire menu. Once all the menu items were entered, and I printed a sample ticket, I said, softer than before, “I think my time here is up.” Sure, I’d programmed the thing successfully, but I figured that was a fluke. Dumb luck. It was time to get out before I got too confident. The mayhem seemed to be increasing. Cooks appeared to be crumbling under stress so extreme it was almost visible, like a gas filling the kitchen. The actual smoke hanging in the air helped to create this impression. Dave was facing the stove, his back to me, fire flaring from a pan. I turned to leave.

“Michael!” Dave said. “Can you show the servers how to use the P.O.S.? They’ll be here any minute.” I wondered why none of this was done at least the day before, but then I remembered that Dave didn’t know what a consequence was. He only knew that things worked out for him. As a full-time rookie firefighter, should he have opened a restaurant? Probably not. But who was going to stop him once he got the idea? Not I. Not my parents. Certainly not Melissa. Just as he’d effortlessly won the TV competitions, just as he quickly climbed the ranks in other peoples’ restaurant kitchens, and just as he ran into burning buildings on a regular basis and emerged alive, he understood that life worked out in his favor.

I said, “Well, I did have a date.” This was a lie. And it didn’t matter because Dave ignored it, turning back to the mangled pig.

His first server walked through the swinging kitchen door. Maude was seventy, the tell-it-like-it-is type with a voice slow-roasted over cigarette smoke, her skin baked by the sun. Carcinogens did not scare her. Nothing scared her. She had two blonde pigtails, which somehow made her more intimidating. “Dave?” she asked me, with concerned surprise as she observed me from head to toe.

I said, “No, thank God.”

“Hi,” said Dave.

“Oh, there you are,” said Maude. “You must be brothers. I thought maybe you let yourself go since the interview.” She looked at Dave. “Did you just kill a man? It’s like Dexter in here.”

He wiped his bloody hands on his bloody apron, spreading red like a deranged finger painting. “This is my brother, Michael. He’ll train you on the P.O.S.”

“Hi,” I said. “Wait, I will? I told you I have a date.” Dave walked away. I said, “Maude, have you ever used a P.O.S.?”

“Since before you were born.”

Hallelujah.

I showed Maude how to use the P.O.S. system. Soon three more servers arrived. I decided this time I would sneak out. Did I want to stay and please the alpha brother? Of course. But the idea of staying and screwing things up filled me with dread. If everything fell apart, if opening night was a disaster, it could easily become known as my fault. Nothing was ever Dave’s fault. I asked Maude if she could show the rest of the servers and she grumbled, “It’d be a pleasure.”

“Excellent. Thank you.” I didn’t see Dave in the kitchen, so I figured he was either in the walk-in freezer or picking something from the garden out back. I left through the door to the dining room, to escape out the main entrance, but as soon as I emerged into the blue-carpeted, nautically themed dining room, Dave was walking toward me from the bathroom.

“Can you stick around for a while and oversee the P.O.S.? Just hang around for troubleshooting?”

“I think Maude has things under control.”

Right behind us through the swinging kitchen door, we heard Maude exclaim, “Oh for the love of Betsy!”

“I don’t think she does,” Dave said. We both went into the kitchen. The receipt printer was printing some sort of cryptic code, and it seemed to have no intention of stopping. The paper kept rolling up into a ball before falling onto the floor. I unplugged it to make it stop.

Dave looked at me sternly.

I said, “If I miss this date, and never find love, I’ll blame you forever.”

“I can live with that.” 

Soon the whole staff was there: two bussers, two hostesses, and all four servers. Dave pulled us into a meeting in the kitchen. He said, “I’m going to be in over my head with the food, so all of you are going to have to solve a lot of problems on your own.” Then he noticed me, though I was trying to stand outside the actual circle. “If you have any problems, see Michael first.”

The meeting ended, and people went off to their stations. Maude said, “I didn’t realize it was a family business.”

“I didn’t either,” I said.

“What?”

“I showed up to take a few pictures. Next thing I know, he’s got me doing all this.”

She said, “Well shit, tonight the circus is free.”

I moved closer to her and whispered, “I’ve never worked in a restaurant before. Well, I was a host once in college. But I wasn’t very good at it.”

“You mean to tell me you haven’t even been a server?”

“I’ve never so much as taken an order.”

“Jesus,” she said. “I need a cigarette. You smoke?”

“Not yet.”

 ***

At five o’clock, the dining room opened. There was a wait by five-thirty. After the first hour of constant troubleshooting, P.O.S. came to officially mean Piece-Of-Shit, since at turns throughout the night it would refuse to open the cash drawer, stop printing tickets, or freeze completely. The iPad that housed the P.O.S. software was also responsible for playing the ambient music in the dining room. It was hooked up through a Bluetooth speaker. At one point, Maude ran into the kitchen and said, “What the hell is going on with the music?”

I looked at the Spotify app. For some reason, it had decided to switch from Frank Sinatra to a heavy metal band called Slayer. And the volume had been cranked to max. Maude said, “If you don’t do something quick, those people are going to need hearing aids and exorcisms!”

Almost every time Maude entered the kitchen, it was with bad news. Around six o’clock, she burst in and said, “The line is out the door, and some of those folks are mad.”

Dave said, “Shit. That’s because they’re probably members and aren’t used to waiting here.” Dave’s restaurant was in a yacht club that rented him the space for a good price, the catch being that he wasn’t supposed to serve nonmembers, unless they were guests of members. Dave didn’t like this part of the arrangement, so he had gone around before the grand opening and advertised all over the place, in church bulletins, in diner placemats, and he’d even put fliers under windshield wipers. He looked at me. “Michael, fix it.”

“How?” I implored, but he was already jogging through the crowd of cooks to take something out of an oven.

I turned to Jesus. Not literally, but I had a sudden moment of inspiration, a memory of how Jesus solved a problem of biblical proportion. I grabbed a huge steel mixing bowl off of a shelf and filled it with fresh bread. Everyone loves bread. If Jesus could use it to make a crowd of five thousand happy, I could use it to calm a few cranky yacht club members.

I approached the host’s desk, where Amanda, the hostess, was overwhelmed. People were complaining to her. “We’re members here, and we’ve never had to wait. This is ridiculous.” She poured over her list, did her frantic math, looked around the room of full tables, and tried to come up with another apology.

“Hi, everyone,” I said, calmly. “I have bread.”

As I had hoped, this was a godsend. Faces brightened. Spirits lightened. Even the grumpy member harassing Amanda seemed to relax as he selected a hot piece of golden crust.  I said, “Thank you all for your patience,” and hurried back into the kitchen.

“Everything alright?” Dave asked.

“Let’s just say I’m a miracle worker,” I said, proud and relieved.

But Maude was right behind me, letting me know about the problem with the overcooked steak. She said, “They’re so rude, I’m ready to slap ‘em!”

When I returned from the unsuccessful interchange with the snobby bastard and his wife, and Dave learned that they’d left without paying, Dave ran out the back kitchen door.

Maude and I hurried to the window to watch. She said, “In my thirty-two years as a waitress, I’ve never seen a chef fight a customer.”

“You’ve never worked with Dave.” Though I had never worked with him in a kitchen, I’d worked plenty of other jobs with him over the years to know that he did not like getting any flak for what he considered a job well-done. Once when we were kids, shoveling driveways in the neighborhood, a woman told us we had not shoveled her sidewalk widely enough. We disagreed. I explained to the woman that grass was visible on both edges of the sidewalk. She said, “As long as I’m the customer, I think that’s up to me to decide.” As soon as she closed the door, Dave said, “Come on, Michael. Let’s widen her path,” and he proceeded to dig up a foot of lawn on both sides of the sidewalk, throwing the dirt clumps all over the snow.

From behind the door to the restaurant parking lot, the curious staff and I couldn’t hear the exchange between Dave and the yacht club member, but it looked like the man was getting nasty. Dave started shouting back and waving his fists in the man’s face. Just as the man took out his wallet and handed Dave money, one of the cooks started screaming behind us. We turned around to see huge flames pouring out of the oven, black smoke filling the air. Panic engulfed the kitchen. I grabbed the fire extinguisher and ran it over to the cook, Eddy, who unleashed a white winter wonderland of CO2 on the flames and then put the extinguisher down behind us.

Dave returned to the kitchen and beheld the catastrophe. Softly, he said, “Who did that?”

“I ain’t no snitch,” said Maude. “But I think you could call it a team effort.” She left the kitchen.

Dave glared at me. “Why are you near the oven?”

“There was a fire,” I explained.

“And someone put it out with the fire extinguisher?” Dave asked. “Even though all they would have had to do was close the oven door? Since that would cut off the oxygen and put the fire out?” He grew louder. “Do you realize that as soon as you use a fire extinguisher, it’s required by the health department to throw out all the food that was exposed in the kitchen, clean the entire kitchen, and start over?”

“I didn’t realize that,” I said, looking at all the pans on all the burners filled with a lot of food.

“Fuck!” Dave roared, throwing a plate of salmon against the wall, where it crashed and fell to the ground. The air was still thick with smoke. The smell surely had filled the dining room. “I don’t even want to know who put the fire out. I don’t want to spend my life in jail. Please, and I fucking mean it, nobody tell me.”

I made a conscious effort to not even look at the cook who’d pulled the trigger. I imagined I could hear him quaking only a few feet away from me. Or maybe that was the sound of my own heartbeat. Anything could happen. I pictured Dave beheading me like the poor pig he carved up that afternoon.

Maude quickly reappeared. “The devil music is blasting again.”

This gave me an excuse to run to the other side of the kitchen, back to the Piece-Of-Shit, and switch from Slayer to Frank Sinatra.

Dave said, “Fuck it. I am not having my opening night be a complete fuck up. Michael, in your honest opinion, did the CO2 go anywhere near the food on the stoves?”

I had no honest opinion about anything, just a wish to disappear. I told Dave what he wanted to hear. “It only went in the oven. I think the other food is fine.”

“You think, or you know?”

Again I had the image of Dave plunging his machete into my jugular. I said, “That food is fine. I guarantee it.”

“Excellent.” He surveyed the contents of the pans on all the stoves, and seeming to agree with my assessment, he said, “Everything is still working. Eddy, clean the oven. The rest of you, get this food out. If anyone asks, the extinguisher was never used. We had a little oven fire, and we starved it of oxygen. Nothing to see here. Move the fuck along.”

The remaining food went out, and then we were done. The kitchen was closed. A filthy mess but closed. Servers began helping the bussers clear tables. The two dishwashers worked at light speed. The cooks began storing food and cleaning the appliances. I was counting the money, making sure all tickets were closed out, that the servers were tipped. A steady stream of club members trespassed into the kitchen to rave about the food. The Commodore, who was in charge of all boating aspects of the club, was a tall, slender man with long gray hair and Fu Manchu. “Dave, wow, I tell you. You are a culinary genius.”

Dave thanked him, noticed me standing behind him, and said, “Actually,” and then he grew loud enough that the staff stopped to listen, understanding this to be an announcement. “Tonight’s success would not be possible without my brother.”

I received a round of applause. Everyone seemed surprised. No one expected any accolades to come from Dave after that hellish night. No one was more surprised than I. “Thanks, everyone,” I said. I felt rather proud, even if all I did was spend an evening in panicked troubleshooting mode, ultimately lying and breaking health code to avoid disaster.

When people went back to their stations to finish cleaning for the night, Dave pulled me aside. “I know you don’t know what you’re doing. But you can think on your feet, and I can trust you not to steal from me. This business is full of assholes. Will you be my front-of-house manager? I was hoping I wouldn’t need one, but clearly I do. At least for the first few months until I can trust the kitchen to leave it alone for one minute.”

I was flattered, even though the only thing that apparently qualified me was not being an asshole. I didn’t care that it would be more eventful than driving a town car one more summer. I didn’t care that I would learn about the restaurant business. And I stopped caring that Dave had bossed me around all night. I was high on the fact that Dave needed me, even if it was just dumb luck that I came through for him. I could not immediately point to a time when anything like this had happened before. Dave never needed anybody. He was the firefighter, the one busting down a door and coming to the rescue. He was the star of the show, the Chopped champion. But I could see the vulnerability in his eyes as he made his offer: he was not certain that he could run a good restaurant without me. He waited for my answer.

Back when I was a senior in college, Dave was nineteen, working eighty hours a week between two restaurants. He thought college was the biggest waste of money. He’d done a semester of community college but then decided to dive into kitchen life. He saw a kitchen as an authentic place, where people had to physically work hard, accomplish something big every night by satisfying waves of tough customers. To Dave, what I’d chosen to do with my life, study literature, was unimportant, something that got society nowhere. I didn’t agree, but I had always coveted his claim on “real, hard work.” And here he was, asking for me to join him, needing what I could offer.

I said, “I’m in.”

Michael Brelsford’s fiction has appeared in Post Road, and he recently finished writing a novel. Now he just needs some sucker to publish it. He holds an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and teaches at half the universities in Connecticut, including Sacred Heart University, the University of New Haven, Southern Connecticut State University, and the University of Bridgeport.