The Ninth Dish

Chapter 5: One Cut

Caleb waited for her to say something about the ticket on the rail, three old men at the last table and one cherry pork at the top of it and everything else waiting behind that.

What she did instead was set the knife down on the counter, quietly, and take the wide one off the strip over the sink.

"Ten," she said, and pulled the bowl of cherries toward her with the back of her hand.

He didn't move, so she took ten of them out of the bowl herself and laid them on the board shoulder to shoulder, and squared the ends of the row with two fingers.

"Watch. I'm doing this once."

She laid the blade down along the row — the knife was longer than the row was — and put the heel of her palm on the spine and pressed. One press. Her weight went down into it and stopped there, no rocking, no walking the edge from cherry to cherry, and when she lifted the knife every cherry in the row had opened along the same seam and ten pits sat on the board in a line, none of them crushed.

Caleb had pitted cherries every working day of his life. He had never once emptied ten of them in a single press.

She turned on the burner.

"That's their order," he said, with a tip of his head at the last table.

She poured oil into the big pan and let it come up.

"Dad never fried them," he said.

She watched the oil the way other people watch a pot of water, and when she put the cherries in they sank, came up, rolled, and the skin on every one of them went from dark to darker.

She took them out with the skimmer and dropped them straight into a bowl of ice water, and they went in with a sound like a coin dropped in a sink.

He had watched this dish get made for years. Nobody had ever done that to a cherry.

At the last table by the window, the three of them had finished the business of deciding where to sit.

"Cherry pork," Ray Ostrow had said on his way in, before he sat down, and now he added, "Two rice."

"One rice," Sid Feldman said. He hung his hat on the back of his chair, then took it off the chair again to fan himself with it. "I'm not eating rice."

"Two teas," Chester Bright said, from behind both of them.

"Two rice," Caleb said over his shoulder, and got the rice into two bowls and set the tea down, one cup and then the other, and he was in and out of the kitchen the whole time, stove to pass to tables and back, and every time he came past the stove she was standing at it exactly where he had left her, and he could not have said what she was doing.

They had moved into the same retirement community within a year of each other and had spent the years since looking for lunch. Ray found the places, which was either a talent or an affliction depending on which of the other two you asked, and he remembered them, and he did not consider either one a skill. Sid had been telling Ray he was wrong for forty years and considered it a public service. Chester, in a jacket with a crease down each sleeve, had learned early that if you let those two talk, you eventually got told something.

"One hundred and fifth," Chester said.

"What?"

"On the sign. One hundred and fifth on the must-eat list, and four generations, and authentic Hale family cooking, all of it on one piece of plastic."

"It's a small shop, Chester."

"It's a small shop with a number on it."

"You can print a number on anything," Ray said. "A number doesn't put a line at the door. I've eaten in this city since before either of you could drive, and I ate the pork here in October, twice, and I've thought about it every week since. That's not a number. That's a dish."

"You said the same thing about the Portuguese place," Sid said. "Also in October."

"It isn't the old place anyway," Chester said. "You know it isn't."

"Closest thing anybody's managed."

"Closest isn't the same."

Sid put the hat back on the chair and let it stay there.

"The old man stopped cooking years before the end," Ray said. "He put his son in front of that stove, and that was that."

"He slowed down," Sid said. "A man slows down. It isn't the same as stopping."

"At the end of it, it's the same."

"He was sick a year and a half," Chester said.

"Two years."

"You don't know it was two."

"Neither do you."

"Then don't say a year and a half."

"Anyway," Ray said. "He's been gone a long time. Nobody argues about that part."

"And then the son," Chester said.

"The son could cook," Ray said. "Not just hold the line. Cook."

"The son was the better of the two of them," Sid said.

"Nobody said better."

"You just did."

"I said he could cook. You're the one who put better on it."

"Because he was the better one."

"He went a few years after his father," Chester said, more quietly, into the middle of it. "A few years. Four, five."

"Six," Sid said.

"Who told you six?"

"Who told you four?"

"Nobody told me anything," Chester said, "and that's the point. They said it was an accident. Nobody ever said what kind."

At the stove, Caleb kept his eyes on the pan and did not turn around.

"The doors shut," Sid said, "and that was the end of the old place."

"The oldest one went out and put up his own sign," Chester said. "Hale's. Not Hale House. You'll notice which word he dropped."

"He's allowed to cook."

"He's allowed to cook whatever he likes. He isn't allowed that name."

"Whose is it, then?"

"Not his," Ray said. "You don't buy a name like that. You come up in that kitchen."

"It's a good restaurant," Chester said.

"It's a fine restaurant. It isn't the restaurant."

The room was small enough to give her every word of it. None of it belonged to her. There was oil on the fire and cherries going soft in the ice water, and she went back to the oil.

"Cherry pork was the whole of it, anyway," Chester said. "They could have taken anything else off that menu. Not that one."

Between the three of them they had eaten the old man's own cooking exactly once, one table, one night, arranged through somebody's cousin's boss back when the wait was a story people told, and all three of them had called it the best meal of their lives ever since, and no two of them could agree on what had been in it.

The pork in the pan was most of the way done. She had taken the small pieces out early and put them back at the end so they finished with the big ones. Nobody had taught her that. Caleb had never seen it done.

The cherries went back in when the pork was nearly there. The sauce went in with them, and she worked it with the flat of the spoon while the fire came up under the pan, and the sauce climbed the sides and came back down, and she turned the fire off and slid the whole thing out onto the plate.

Nothing ran. She tipped the plate an inch toward the light and set it down again, and the sauce stayed on the pork where it belonged, and every piece sat separate from every other piece.

"Where did you learn that?" Caleb said.

She didn't answer. She set the plate down on the counter in front of him, not on the pass, and took her hand back and left the plate alone.

There was no steam on it. He put two fingers on the rim to move it closer, and the plate was hot all the way through.

At the last table, the three old men had stopped talking. One of them had turned in his chair.

Caleb looked at the plate, and then at his sister.

He was afraid of her, and it was new to him. There was a cherry pork on the rail and three old men at the last table waiting for it, and he stood where he was.