Charlotte au Chocolat by Charlotte Silver

line. When she banged a butcher knife against the bottle top, the top flew up in the air; I hoped it hadn’t landed in the tins of prep garnishes. But Carla didn’t bother to look; she just lit another cigarette.
    â€œDon’t make yourself too comfortable, kiddo,” she said. “I’ll need another beer soon.”
    What was she talking about?
Nobody
could be too comfortable in a kitchen. There was no place to sit. Oh, for the days when I could crawl underneath the bar and get away from it all! Now there was no place for me, and especially on Saturday nights. Saturday nights were
the worst
.
    â€œHere, kiddo.”
    Carla always called me
kiddo
, not
sweetie
or
honey
like the waiters did. She scraped a piece of tenderloin off the pan and flicked it onto a brown paper towel. The meat reddened the paper.
    â€œThat’s for you.”
    On Saturday nights, I didn’t order dinner. Instead, I ate whatever snippets the chefs doled out to me: lopsided zucchini blossoms or clams casino swiped off private-party platters. There were always plenty of samples of food to eat in the kitchen, and chefs love feeding people. Carla used to save the most rare meat for me. She knew I liked it—one of my favorite foods was steak tartare on buttered toast points—and the customers would have sent back meat as rare as this tenderloin.
    â€œThank you, Carla,” I said.
    â€œYou and your
thank-you
s—would you give it up? I’m not one of those pansies in the front room who’s just dying to freshen your . . . your . . . What are those things called?”
    â€œShirley Temples?”
    â€œYeah, yeah, those.”
    I picked the piece of tenderloin off the paper towel. In the front room, I had good table manners, but you couldn’t feel graceful if you had no knife or fork. I hoped the juice wouldn’t splatter my new party dress, a garden-party dress: white muslin printed with cabbage roses and a white petticoat underneath that puffed out like one of the meringues on the trays in the cold station. It also had a trailing rose-chiffon sash that reminded me of my mother’s cocktail dresses with the small waists; I loved that sash the most.
    â€œHere.” She handed me another napkin; the tenderloin had stained my fingertips red. “I know how you hate to be messy.”
    I wondered when we would go home. It must have been eight o’clock now, rush time. Customers’ conversation roared through the doors, and I heard my mother’s voice, her kitchen voice. “Buck up!” she told the waiters. “Can’t you see the kitchen’s in the weeds?” I supposed she was out on the floor now, fluttering from table to table, planting Coco Pink kisses on cheek after cheek, and swerving away on the tips of the stilettos.
    â€œWatch out!” said Carla. I looked and saw flames spouting off the stove. “Go . . . go somewhere.”
    I pranced off the rubber mat onto the bare floor between the rows of the stoves and the pastry station. My patent leather Mary Janes slid on a sprig of buttered parsley. Meanwhile, the waiters charged down the aisle and grabbed the desserts waiting on the top of the shelf.
    â€œWhere’s the lemon budino for C-3?” one of them asked. “Hurry it up, they’re the table from hell . . .”
    I hid in the cold room. I yanked open the steel door and stepped up to the sawdust floor. The gust of air from the freezer prickled my bare legs underneath the petticoat. I stood very still in the center of the cold room. If I moved, I thought one of the Cornish game hens swinging from the ceiling might fall off its string.
    â€œComing through,” said Charlie, opening the door. He was lugging a crate full of lobsters for the lobster salad entree my mother put on the menu every summer. “Well, hello, Miss Charlotte.”
    Charlie was one of the black guys my mother had hired from the