Aftertaste - Meredith Mileti [173]
“Hello, Mira? I was, ah, wondering if you’re busy tonight. I would love to take you out to dinner. Anywhere you like. You pick the place. I’ll even wear a tie. Call me back, okay? Oh, this is Ben, by the way.”
Yes, Ben, who I can’t even imagine owning a jacket and tie, much less wearing one. I’m not completely sure how I feel about our backwards relationship, where the dinner invitation is issued after the fact—and with all the formality and forced cheerfulness of a date to the prom. Now that I’ve committed to the idea of a Pittsburgh restaurant, I’m committing to staying here, which means that any sane and reasonable person would proceed with extreme caution. Which is why, I suppose, I let the machine pick up when he called.
As soon as Enid gave me a list of the four properties she and her contact at Northwest Bank determined we could afford, I knew, sight unseen, the one we’d lease. Still, I’ve done my due diligence, trekking along with Chloe, Enid, and the real estate agent to look at the first three, paying about as much attention as my eighteen-month-old daughter and politely pretending to listen as they discussed the details of financing, offers, and contingencies.
The fourth space belonged to Bruno. He bought the building next to the bakery years ago, intending to expand his business, but somehow had never gotten around to it. He offered us a good deal on the building, but it was the location that had me sold—a long narrow space sandwiched in between Bruno’s and the Pennsylvania Macaroni Company. It isn’t big, but the ceilings are high, and there are two eight-foot double-paned windows that open onto the street in front. There’s even a small courtyard separating the space from the bakery, just enough room for a couple of tables, a few plants, and maybe a whimsical iron fountain.
Before we’d even signed the papers, Bruno gave me the key, wrapped my fingers around it with his own trembling hands, and told me to keep it. Since then, I’ve been coming here in the early mornings with Chloe, the two of us getting up just as the sun begins to rise over the city, walking slowly, hand in hand, across Smallman Street to Penn Avenue, watching our neighborhood come to life.
This morning, outside Nordic Fisheries a couple of delivery guys are unloading lobsters and crabs by the case, pausing in between loads to sip coffee from Styrofoam cups. Across the street, on Penn Avenue, the green grocers are busy stacking crates of vegetables and fruits, arranging them into a still life to showcase their most beautiful produce: heads of red romaine, their tender spines heavy with the weight of lush, purple-tinged leaves; a basket of delicate mâche, dark green, almost black, and smelling like a hothouse garden; sugar pumpkins of burnished gold; new Brussels sprouts, their tender petals open like flowers.
At this hour the world belongs to those noble souls who devote their lives to food. Cook, grocer, butcher, baker, sunrises are ours. It’s a time to gather your materials, to prepare your mise en place, to breathe uninterrupted before the day begins. Chloe and I enter the restaurant from the alley, which shares a loading dock with Penn Mac. A large truck is already backed up to a delivery bay where a man is unloading fifty-pound sacks of fine grain semolina onto the floor of the storeroom. He piles the sacks, one on top of the other, sending clouds of flour into the air. Judging from the number of sacks on the floor, he’s been at it a while, and the entire alley is white with flour, hanging in the air like snow. It’s come to rest on his bare forearms, on his hair and eyebrows. He nods to us and smiles at Chloe, who holds out her hands and watches, fascinated, as particles of flour settle into her small palms. I catch a few grains and rub them in between my fingers, all at once remembering what it feels like to coax a pasta dough to life, the precise moment when you feel its first breath as it relaxes and expands in one long