Secret Recipe

My father works: sometimes construction; sometimes home repair; sometimes even for the uncles, though this kind of work is always mysterious and leaves him tense and short-tempered at the end of the day. His dream, he tells us sometimes—drinking beer and happy in the backyard on a summer evening, burned and tired from a day working in the sun, feet soaking in my little sister’s bug-spotted wading pool—his dream is to own his own restaurant. A pizza place, he says, like the ones he grew up on in Youngstown: a mom-and-pop place, secret recipe, no corporate franchise bullshit. The closest he ever comes, though, is the winter he works as a cook at an Italian restaurant near our house. It’s a nice restaurant, fancy, even: red-and-white checkered tablecloths, cloth napkins. A tealight candle in a jar on every table and three types of wine on the menu.

We’ve only been there once, when there was a coupon in the Valu-Saver, but then my father gets hired nights and my sister and I get to go along with him every so often, when our mother is off someplace and our grandmother has one of her bridge games and can’t watch us. He settles us into a back booth with a stack of paper and some stubby crayons. He leans in close. Stay here, he whispers, his breath thick with smoke and garlic. I don’t care if you have to pee. I don’t care if the place is burning down around you. You go right ahead and pee your goddamned pants, you hear me, because you are not getting up from this seat.

We stay put. Not because we are afraid of our father—his empty threats as meaningless here as they are at home—but because of the attention we are always sure to receive if we behave ourselves. Most of the girls who work as waitresses are teenagers, or in college, and they take a shine to my sister and me, particularly to Lucy, who has our father’s blue eyes and dark curls. They sit with us on their smoke breaks, whispering secrets about the restaurant and the customers.

Don’t eat the clam sauce, someone just dropped a paper clip in it!

That woman comes in every Tuesday night for the buffet, stuffs herself, then throws it all up in the restroom before she leaves.

The girls bring us things: warm slices of garlic bread and fresh-baked cookies, Cokes in tall, slippery glasses. Their names like flowers: Jasmine, Lily, Rosemarie. They cross their legs and tap cigarette ash onto a napkin with long, perfectly-painted fingernails, and I sit as close to them as I can, to breathe in the smell of smoke and perfume and cooking oil. To pretend, if only to myself, that I am one of them.

Whenever our father emerges from the kitchen, red-faced and sweating, his white floor-length apron stained red like a butcher’s, the girls don’t stand up or stub out their cigarettes or try to look busy, the way they do with the managers and the other cooks besides my father. Instead, they smile cat-eyed smiles at him, touch his wrist with their long, cool fingers. Your girls, they say. They’re beautiful. They have your hair, your eyes.

He never sits down with them, though I get the feeling that he would if Lucy and I weren’t there. Once, when Lucy and I are killing time at the restaurant, playing truth or dare, I tiptoe up to the kitchen’s swinging door and push it open just a thin crack and peek inside. My father stands behind one of the waitresses as she refills a huge vat of salad, his chin resting on her shoulder, his right hand cupping her breast. She’s smiling, swatting at his hand, trying to get away but not trying too hard, like my sister and me when he tickles us. I let the door swing gently closed and go back to the table. I don’t tell Lucy, or my mother, or anyone else what I’ve seen.

But they call the house sometimes, the girls. Hey, darling, they purr when I answer the phone. Your daddy around? When my mother answers, they say nothing or fake confusion or a thick accent, until my mother gets frustrated and hangs up. Wrong number, she says, though her eyes slide each time to Lucy and me, like she’s trying to figure out just how much we know.

Some nights—nights when she isn’t out someplace, or in bed with a headache, or camped out in front of the television with a glass or two of wine—some nights, we put on our pajamas and she makes us hot chocolate on the stove and we get in the car and drive past the other frosty, sleepy houses to the restaurant. I need to ask your father something, she says each time, though she never gets out, never even stops the car. We just drive in a slow circle around the block, past the fire station and the flower shop and a place that takes senior pictures and finally the restaurant. Through the windows we can see couples eating dinner: high school kids on date, but also couples like my parents, there with a coupon, gray and tired in the eyes and mouths and shoulders. Couples no more or less happy than my parents, leaning toward each other in the candlelight. And somewhere past all of that, invisible to us, past the swinging doors and into the hot, steaming center of the place, is our father, living the next best thing to his dream.