I didn't get his name

Two-eighty covers on a Saturday in a forty-seat room, and two of our burners have been dead since May.

By eleven I'm scraping the flattop and my hands are shaking. That's not nerves. That's nine hours on tongs. Ten, whatever it was.

Everybody goes to Stanley's after. There's no Stanley. Nadia's behind the bar and she'll have a Tecate open before you're all the way through the door, and she doesn't ring it in.

Dom's three stools down with his hood still up. He's on my lease.

There's a guy at the end eating fries off a plate at one in the morning and he's got blue tape wrapped around his thumb. It's blue so if it comes off in the food you can find it. Everybody in a kitchen's got that tape on them somewhere.

He sees me looking at his thumb and holds it up. Mandoline, he says.

I say the mandoline gets everybody eventually. He says he's got the guard for it somewhere, in a drawer, and I say yeah mine's in a drawer, and that's it.

Then we're just two guys at a bar not talking, which is fine. He's got the radio station on his phone going in one ear. I'm eating the pickles out of a jar Nadia leaves out.

She puts the lights up at two like she's mad at us.

Outside he's rolling a cigarette with his hands down inside his jacket for the wind and he offers me the first one. I don't smoke. I took it.

He says he's four blocks. I say okay.

Dom was in the bathroom, or he was gone already. I didn't check.

Four blocks is the laundromat that never closes with the one guy asleep sitting straight up in a chair in there, and then it's the block where the sidewalk's all cracked from the tree roots so you walk in the street. Neither of us is saying anything the whole way. He's ahead of me by about a step and he keeps looking back. Not at me. Just checking I'm still back there.

Third floor. There's a bike in the hallway with no front wheel. Somebody on two is cooking onions at two-thirty in the morning. Who does that.

He's got a rice cooker with the lid propped and a box fan in the window instead of an AC. The sheets were clean.

It happened. Afterward he got up and brought back water in a jar with half the label still on it.

Then we're lying there with the fan going and we talk about nothing for like an hour. He says his old chef threw a sauté pan at a dishwasher and the dishwasher caught it, actually caught it, and everybody stopped. I tell him about my knees. He says get the mats at home too, get them for your own kitchen, it sounds stupid but do it. I never did. I mean I bought one. It's still in the bag by the door.

He's got mail on the radiator. I read the top line of the top one, some bank, and then I put my eyes on the ceiling. I didn't ask him his name and he didn't ask me mine.

I left at five-forty. It was light out. He walked me to the door in his shorts and said take it easy and I said yeah you too, man.

I didn't get the train. I walked the whole way back, forty minutes, with the fry smell coming off my clothes worse in the cold air. The deli on Wyckoff, the older guy, he hands me the coffee light and sweet before I open my mouth. Been doing that for two years.

Slept till two. Back in at four for a five. That's July.

August we got a new sous who's actually fine. She's fast and she doesn't yell. Dom asked me who I left with that night at Stanley's and I said nobody, I walked. I sat at the end of the bar a few times that fall. That's not where I sit. Some nights I'd be on my phone till four not looking at anything.

Then it's February, and I'm up on the platform at Seneca waiting for the M with my clogs in a grocery bag because I'd taken them home to wash them, which you're not supposed to be able to do, but you can if you let them dry two days.

And he's up the platform. Maybe forty feet. Carhartt, hands pulled up inside the sleeves the way everybody does in February.

He sees me. Neither of us does anything.

The clock says four minutes and then it says four minutes for a long time. There's a woman between us with a folding cart. A train goes the other way. He's looking down the track.

I'm not going down there. He's not coming up here.

I could see the tape on him from there, same thumb. Forty feet. You can't see tape from forty feet, in February, with everybody's hands up in their sleeves. But I could see it.

The M comes. I get in the car that stops in front of me and I don't look down the platform to see which one he got in, and I stand the whole way even though it's empty because I'd been sitting on the couch all morning. There's a kid across from me asleep against his mother with his mouth open.

I got to work eleven minutes early. I'm never early. I went in the walk-in for the cambro of stock and then I just stood in there with the door pulled shut behind me. It's thirty-eight degrees in there and the fan never stops. The cambro I came in for was by my knee on the bottom shelf and I didn't pick it up. My hands got that red they get.