Burning beneath a decorative violet

Elena wraps the gift of chesterfield tweed from her latest promotion tight to her body. Thumbs, stained with burnt pads, move the strands of hair that had blown against her face, losing a battle against ghastly sea breeze.

There it was.

Wooden slants, two different shades of blue paint and a straw roof failing against gusts that removed it one stem at a time. Round stained glass rattles, working hard to remain together and retain the mystery of what inside.

It reached Elena before she reached the hut,

A citrus tangy smoke blew upwards out of the chimney chute and she’s thrown two decades back into the fire of a skillet. Into haddock being tossed through butter around the roar of twenty to thirty chefs, shouting broken French between the saucier and the sous chef.

It stank of nights before the millennium, a cracked bottle of merlot and halved grilled cheddar cheese between two hands who insisted,

This is a one time thing.

The door creaks beneath Elena’s palm, wind silencing as the hush of an open fire envelops its roar, blazing brightly enough Elena is shedding the sticky wool of her coast with more gusto than she’d put it on when the sun was high and clouds little.

A dozen patrons huddle around plastic folding tables as she hangs her jacket on the hook among polyester sport lightweights and umbrellas dipping with tacky orange salmons.

The citrus lingers even by the doorway, Elena can’t count the amount of times she’s stood in rooms where he halved slices of lemon. Instead of finding polished refinement in its fine bitter squeeze and a knife and fork, people eat with wide beaming faces and lemon slices that stick between their teeth.

She picks at a flimsy laminated menu, fresh with minute long grease stains, between her pointer finger and thumb. She scans it, finding Haddock with the same sauce that had earned him his spot at the Espionage and the one he cooked up for fun while Elena used to be draped in his burgundy sheets.

Michel Faulmon.

Who, twenty eight years ago on a Monday in winter, gave Elena the wrong timer for her poached eggs and watched as the head sous chef cut into hard yolk.

I don’t want you on my line for two weeks, either wash the dishes or get out of my face.

Michel had been easy to find later, at the local bar, to be furious at.

You could have cost me my job.

And then, furiously under.

Do that again, and I’ll lace your next Hollandaise with rat poison.

Again and again, the pull and push between two great cooks and two people that could only fully understand each other, all because of a wayward egg timer.

“Is he here?” She places the menu down on a grease shined counter, pointing at the name in bold across the bottom.

The young girl perched behind the till follows the finger, bored. “He doesn’t like to be away from the stove for too long.”

“I think he’ll make an exception for me.”

She laughs, “He hasn’t come out front in three weeks. Good luck.”

“Why don’t we give it a go?” Elena removes her hand from where it had started to stick.

The girl’s bored expression shifts like hot oil in a pan, “You are?”

“Elena Fauscher.”

“German?” The question bites into the chewing gum rattling around her mouth, something Elena remembered Michel throwing a pan of sauteed parsnips for, the dishwasher who’d chewed with too much vigour cowering as the kitchen’s lead line tossed the contents of family dinner against the wall.

Elena blinks, “Austrian.”

She blows a bubble, raising a fist and knocking twice on the steel silver of the door behind her shoulder.

Elena hasn’t flinched since her early twenties, when the head sous chef flung churned white sauce from her own pan across her whites she’d ironed out under the morning’s moon. She stays still as the door bangs open a moment later and sticks to an indent of wood, shallow but marked with years of the same movement.

A short crop tangled in salt and pepper curls peers out, a frown extending to etch lines of permanence in his cheeks.

Michel did enjoy frowning, quite often.

Elena glances over murky stains on his white shirt, navy checkered tablecloth draped over one shoulder and new wrinkles. “Now, there’s a sight for sore eyes.”

He frowns, looking from the rose patterned blouse down to wedged heels that belonged in fine dining, not a shack on the East coast. “I thought you’d crawled into hell and stayed there.”

“I don’t think the residents of California agree with that sentiment."

A frost unfurled in the corner of his eye, rivalling New York in deep winter, fighting against the Atlantic calm. Frost used to find him with ease, fists clenched, berating teenaged apprentices for dropping a cut of lean beef.

Frost found even with her.

I thought you were hired because you could chop a carrot evenly.

He’d flung uneven pieces in the staff meals, Elena standing still with a knife under her grip.

There's Mousseline below your breast pocket.

Frost, the only temperature a kitchen is survivable in when competing for the executive chef position. A cold that could only be shaken off in the privacy of burgundy sheets, under the heat of a garlic buttered pan and the promise of a grilled cheese.

Michel wipes battered hands through his tea towel, “So you crawled up from Hades himself to come find me?”

The twenty something server doesn’t hide how she watches them, eyes flitting between a tennis ball being hit back and forth.

“Not quite.” Elena says, finding the faded blue ink of a cod fish on his bicep with the practice of someone who watched shamelessly when he would dice an onion, racing against the timer in her hand.

Fifty five seconds was his record, Elena’s was fifty four.

“The association sent me.”

His frown shifts, “So you did put down the knife? Did they think it would make you less dull to me?”

“They thought you’d be less confrontational with an old friend.”

“An old friend who abandoned Espionage?”

“The kitchen was getting too crowded for the both of us.” Elena counters, holding the decision made by her thirty two year self out of his reach. “The offer was good, you would have taken it.”

Michel’s voice is low, “Good enough to forget six years?”

The door slides from its perch in the bruise of chipped wood and stops on the broad of his shoulder.

“Five and half.” She corrects.

Michel bristles. “I don’t think we counted the same way.”

Elena digs her heels in, the openness in his face rooting her to floors that she knew only got mopped every other night. “You know, I also had half a mind to see where you’d washed up to anyway.” She taunts.

“This is his home.” The young server interrupts, “There’s plenty of locals that like it here.”

“A touch small from the perch you used to stand on.” Elena says, unable to look anywhere but at a man who commanded a room full of forty staff every Sunday, now hunched in a doorway no bigger than his college worn coffee table.

The girl sweeps in again, “Home doesn’t need to be big, do you want the haddock you were looking at or not?”

Elena watches Michel, who’s caught in a net that he didn’t want to fish from, then swivels towards the girl, “I’m sorry, did I ask you a question?”

“I think you have some nerve barging in here like a –”

“Claudia, enough.” Michel cuts in, eyes shut, the kind that pinches with nightmares people wish for to never occur outside sleep. “Let’s go to my office Elena, I don’t need you drying up business.”

“I’m not so sure that’s my doing.”

The girl’s lip twitches, a flicker of similarity to the snarl the man next to her made infamous. One the staff at Espionage created myths for, reaching its boiling point the night Elena won their war.

Preparing ten dishes faster than Michel, and collecting her reward to serve her dinner for nameless, but shrouded in glory, guest who’d booked in for evening service.

Michel’s lip had mirrored the girls that night. Once when Elena snuck a handful of salt into his gravy.

Twice, when she’d placed her eight dish on the pass graded good enough to serve and he was still plating his seventh.

And a third time under the fluorescent track lights, watching her say done with the same smile he’d kissed twelve hours earlier, his time eaten away and with it? The chance to cook for the best chef on the East coast.

She turns quickly away from the resemblance that paints the entire face of the girl standing in front of the till. It was his snarl, worn by another but not in the way she’d used to dream it years after the beef bourguignon night, this one was plucked from a life Elena hadn’t read the fine print of.

Elena doesn’t look at the girl again, knowing the ghost of her flamed twenties in New York could now haunt her from a different place. Instead, ducks under the steel silver of the closing door.

“Is that–” She starts, chasing Michel halfway down a narrow hallway.

“My daughter?” He answers, not turning around.

The last part of her question stills, “–Your kid?”

“Glad to know your mind hasn’t dulled while touring and feasting around the underworld’s finest restaurants."

The disappearance in time, between Michel smiling down at her in his bed and an appearance of a child, hitting her squarely on the chest, “When?”

Kitchens? Are full of one word sentences, commands in a language hardly known to those who curse in them and a whole different one carved in how bodies move around each other. Constant with the slide of two backs that knew precisely where they’d been and where they were both moving.

Michel had always spoken that fluently, “Three years after New York.”

“So, you’re married?” She asks, already knowing the answer, had sighed a breath of relief at seeing it in his biography this morning.

His hand flattens before pushing the office door, “Divorced.” Smacking it against a cardboard box of junk discarded by the front.

Elena doesn’t quite follow him in, the Michel who’d smoked cigarettes on her balcony after a sixteen hour shift shimmers from the silver spoon she’d held him in. She stretches her fingers from where they’d clenched up in a ball, finding she never accounted for a life where he walked around with a baby stroller, handling separation papers and shaking a banana mushed formula.

“You find anyone lucky enough to stick around for?” He reaches for the box, throwing it on a shelf of mismatched binders and coffee stained certificates.

“Yes.” Elena breathes, hot in the way that used to transcend the steam from plates separating them on the pass and seeped into her relationships throughout her time in New York. The ones that never lasted, the ones claiming she never made time for them. She’d always end up back at Michel's. “For a bit.”

If Michel’s surprised he doesn’t show it, his index finger twitching as he grasps the envelope Elena’s come all the way to the windiest corner of the state for.

It’s his only tell.

Michel hadn’t risen to executive chef in the second highest rated restaurant in New York City with sloppy hand eye coordination and decorative violet too far left of the spring salad bed.

Elena’s hadn’t in twenty three years, not since Michel had lingered by the chef de partie station with something caught between a tease and a correction.

You lost because your hand slipped on the salt. Tighten it so I can beat you fair and square next time.

“Seems we both spent all our energy in New York.” Michel tilts his head, cracking a smirk similarly to how he used to favour his eggs.

Devilish.

The devil was a man who misplaced timers, flicked temperature dials to disrupt her prep and kissed her outside on smoke breaks with lingering red onion from the prep station mingling in their shared breath.

“It wasn’t a thing.”

“It wasn't not a thing.” He rises the envelope in toast towards her, years of shared charred toast crumbs in sheets wrapped up within it. “You didn’t like me much. I didn’t enjoy you most of the time either”

Elena shakes her head, hands searching for the jacket hung twenty minutes ago in a room she’d run out of. “You enjoyed the thrill of it, of having me in the kitchen and in your home.” Her nose turns as she stares at the seal of the envelope, “You were always better at separating it than me.”

“Then, you don’t remember me very well.”

“No, Michel, I remember you perfectly.” She steels, mask carved into a woman who’d fallen into his every trap. Mistook the fire that raised from pans next to each other in the kitchen for an attraction that didn’t lend itself to sharing a croissant from the bodega on seventh street.

“I only hated you after I came back for a meal and learnt you’d thrown it all away for a shack in the middle of nowhere.”

He purses his lips, “When?”

“Four years later.” Elena admits and gestures to the envelope. “You should open it.”

“I haven’t talked to any of them since.” He huffs, “Not since they killed my want to cook in that place.”

“You know better than anyone, that only you can kill your desire to cook. You were a good chef, don’t be an idiot– accept it.”

“Praise from you? Did I hit my head on the door earlier?” Michel taps his fingers against the seal.

“Part of the job.” She nips as she reaches for the envelope, tearing it cleanly open once it's handed over. Michel sits back in a leather recliner older than their tenuous half a decade together pretending they couldn’t stand one another.

She clears her throat, “Dear Mr. Faulmon. On behalf of the Jason Bird Foundation we’d like to congratulate you on your acceptance into the Hall of Fame. This comes after a decade and half long service–”

“You can stop.” Fingers reach to pinch his nose, “I know what it says.”

She folds the envelope. “Really? That it goes on to say how you ran away from a career that could have landed you five of these by now.”

“It wasn’t what I wanted.”

Wrong, he’d admitted it to her in the dark. Asleep, and partially snoring. Whispered it to her while she laid bare next to him.

She shakes her head, “Coward.”

“You don’t know–”

“Then explain it to me.” Elena seethes, venom that spiced the chamomile tea he used to brew for her after a long shift.

“Claudia was born on a Friday night, in the middle of dinner service, my name was off the roster the following Monday. ” Michel scrunches his nose, “That’s why I cook here now, that's all there is to it.”

“Sorry.” She says after a beat, scrunching the paper. “They would have needed to see a death certificate for you to miss a Saturday service.”

“Its clear you never got there.”

Elena had already spent years unpacking the years spent with worn feet on tiled kitchen floors that meant she could never have the ones spent on carpeted floors with small hands and feet crawling towards her. “I didn’t find the time, or the right person.”

He hums, “Or both?” And Elena finds a photoframe just above his shoulder, proudly showing a Michel she never stopped remembering. Sand stained curly hair sits behind his ears, his arms around a toddler with a similar head of its own curls.

He’s smiling, in a way she or the kitchen never earned.

“Maybe it was a blessing for you.” Elena admits, “That, there, is far more valuable than any perfect from a perfectly braised beef bourguignon. But, Michel?”

She finds him pinching his lips, “Doesn’t mean you have to turn down an impressive award.”

“I still enjoy perfectly braised beef.” He grunts, standing. “Let me show you, stay and eat at least Elena, old time sake?”

She pauses, one arm already in the jacket the room over, the other reaching for a meal that never left the contours of her cheeks. “It better not be a grilled cheese.”

Michel, clearly, never lost his flair for sauces. The citrus tang that had coated the outside air before she walked in simmers in the pan, a haddock basking in its richness. He tosses a fish with an arrogance he used to flip the grilled cheese with, just before sunrise, tossing it high for a cheering Elena at the breakfast counter. Fearing that they’re too old to be making grilled cheeses, and too young to realise believing that led to Elena taking that job in California.

Elena controls her face as she bites into the fish, letting the buttery inside sit on the tip of her tongue before swallowing, her eyes close to slipping shut.

“So?”

“Don’t be arrogant Michel.” She says, “It never suited you.”

“And yet, I found you in my bed most nights”

She sits back, poking her tongue into the bottom of her lip, and finds the shape of Claudia’s sandy hair through the crack in the door greeting an elderly couple with more warmth than she’d given Elena.

For a moment, she morphs into someone Elena wishes she could have known too.

“I still hate you.” She never had, Michel had lasted longer than the line of resentment she’d built up in her head,

“Come pick up the award in person.”

Michel sniffs, and pretends not to look pleased. “Fine.”

“And take me to dinner, while you’re there, a proper one.”