Page 1 of Sparked By the Mountain Man Hotshot

1

REAGAN

The tasting menu is going out to eight firefighters in the next four minutes, and I’ve already decided this is the most important night of my life. Not because of them. Because of the clipboard.

Chef Marchetti carries a clipboard during soft-open service the way other men carry a grudge. On it is a single line item that will decide whether I still have a job, and he has not once let me see what he writes next to my name.

“Sous.” He doesn’t look up. “Table four wants the trout early. Fire it.”

“On the trout,” I say, which is my whole personality now. I am a woman who says “on the trout” and means it with her entire soul.

I plate. I wipe the rim. I check the microgreens for the little guy who always tries to fall off the edge and ruin my life, then I send four plates through the pass into the dining room. That’s where Prospect House is having its very first pretend dinner for people who won’t be charged, in a restaurant that smells like new paint and other people’s opportunity.

Here’s the thing I know about myself. When something good is about to happen to someone, it isn’t going to be me. It’s a track record, not a mood. I’ve been the bridesmaid, the understudy, the second choice for a job, the girl whose brother got the car because he “needed it for work.” My turn is a bus that stops one block early, every single time, and lets everybody else off.

So when Marchetti announces there is one permanent sous position and it goes to whoever “owns the room” during soft-open week, I hear it correctly. I hear, Someone else is going to own the room.

“Reagan.” Devon, the expo, leans in. “Firefighter table. They’re asking who did the trout.”

My breath catches. “Asking bad or asking good?”

“Asking. I’m not a translator.”

I look through the pass. Prospect House put its kitchen half-open to the dining room, which is a design choice made by someone who has never had a bad hair day mid-service. The firefighter table is eight men who look like they were carved out of the same tree and then left outside for a season. And one of them is looking straight back at me.

Not at the pass. At me.

He has tousled dark hair, forearms on the table like it works for him, and a stillness the rest of them don’t have. They’re loud, he isn’t. He’s watching me the way you watch a pot you actually want to boil.

I look away first, because I’m a professional. Then I look back, because I’m a liar.

“Chef,” I tell Marchetti. “I’m going to run four out. The patio table.”

“Runners run food.”

“The runners are drowning.”

He waves the clipboard at me, which I choose to interpret as a blessing.

I carry the plates out through the swinging door, past the bar that isn’t pouring yet, onto the heated patio that faces the whole decorated length of Prospect Street. Hay bales, string lights, pumpkins stacked like somebody’s showing off.

It’s pretty. I don’t have time to find it pretty. I have four plates and a man watching me cross a room.

“Trout for the table,” I say, setting them down. “Chef sends the⁠—”

“You did this?”

It’s him. Up close, he’s worse. Or better. He’s a category of person I don’t have a permit for.

“I did the trout, yeah.”

“The brown butter.” He says it like a verdict. “There’s something in it.”

“Sage. And a little apple, because I have feelings about this time of year.”

That gets me the first crack in the stillness. Not a smile. The suggestion of one, filed under maybe.

“Feelings about September,” he says.