Chapter Text
Things are changing. Not all at once, but not slowly, either.
Carmy’s never been wild about change. His mother, red-faced with mortification, had to collect him off the school bus once because the route switched up and nobody warned him. He still cringes at the memory of his six-year-old self with vomit on his sneakers, snotty-nosed, tearfully explaining to Donna that the bus had never gone that way before as his classmates stared. He hadn’t been able to put into words what he really meant: how chilling his helplessness felt in that moment. He still can’t. There’s something soothing about predictability, even if the thing coming next is shit. It’s what kept him in New York so long.
Right now feels liminal. Things are consistent in their inconsistency.
The menu changes. It’s a necessity while he’s working out the kinks, but he still doesn’t like it. A hell of his own making. Every time he’s feeling ready to solidify it, his suppliers get flakey; import delays so no cacuicavallo podolico this week, but there’s Pule if he wants it. Carmy sucks his pen and thinks about how to upsell so they can break even. Crumbled over chanterelle and arugula crostini - $30 per order and they sell out every night, and it’s not too much extra work for Tina and Marcus.
Then the temperature spikes and it rains for a week. His produce guy is deeply apologetic - all the local farmers are dealing with flooding in their cold frames, so no more fresh arugula or mizuna, but there’s kale if he wants it. Chard. More fucking sweet potatoes than he knows what to do with. Carmy grinds his teeth, and drinks his pepto, and the menu changes again. The Pule goes to Marcus who does a savory cheesecake with a rosemary and lemon glaze, and it sells okay, but it means Marcus has to come in a couple hours earlier. He’s been looking run down on a good day ever since his mom’s funeral, and Carmy tries not to feel guilty. Drinks more pepto. Tries not to lose his shit if Marcus naps on his break and sleeps through the alarm he sets on his cellphone.
Then Richie starts bellyaching about the wine list. The Reisling they paired with Marcus’s Copenhagen sundae is too sweet for the savory cheesecake and customers are complaining. Carmy snarls at him that it’s his job to make them happy. Richie shouts that he’s a manager, not a fucking magician. Ebra and Tina look uncomfortable, and Syd looks disappointed, and Carmy’s stomach roils, and it’s easier all around to just order a crate of Zinfandel.
Only he budgeted wrong - still can’t do math for shit, can’t remember to carry the remainder to save his fucking life, and Sugar’s up his ass every morning talking about how they’re 5k over for the month. She pulls up some Excel sheet he’s never seen before and makes him look at a pivot chart, asks him why he didn’t check it before ordering the Zinfandel because wine sales have been down. Richie, who’s been listening from the doorway like a fucking creep, starts in on how selection is directly correlated to sales. Their voices echo off the office walls in a sharp staccato.
Carmy ducks his head and pushes past Richie in the doorway, leaving them to go at it. Vomiting in the new bathroom is nicer than the old bathroom, but still unpleasant. It comes out the familiar aggressive orange of pepto bismol mixed with bile: a reminder of the lull between New York pre-shift meetings and actual service. Carmy looks at it, liquid neon suspended in the water of a comedically fancy toilet that set him back $500 because Richie knew a guy with a few that fell off the back of a truck. He should probably start eating breakfast. Habit stacking. His esophagus burns at the thought.
His phone dings while he’s rinsing out his mouth. It’s Sugar - three exclamation points and the link to a new Mayo Clinic article about the health risks linked to tannins. He locks his phone without bothering to open it.
They get their shit rocked as usual that night, too many misfired tickets that the servers gleefully eat on their breaks. Carmy does his best not to resent their obvious pleasure. Not their fault. At least the food gets eaten and they can better describe it to customers. They muddle through three seatings somehow, which offsets the cost of food waste.
He listens from the office as the staff close up, straggling off into the night in twos and threes. He tries to give them space after close - doesn’t want to be That Guy who hovers, watching them clean, noticing a spot they missed. They really are doing their best now. He knows he can’t keep himself from double-checking, but he can at least do it after they’ve gone home. Micromanage the end result instead of them.
He rubs the crust out of his eyelashes to keep himself busy. Watches the screen saver. Someone managed to set an old one from the 90s, a trippy rainbow labyrinth of ever-expanding pipes. Richie, probably. He’s old enough for it to be nostalgic.
For something else to do, he pulls open the desk cabinet. The three of them have each taken a shelf. Sugar’s is carefully segmented by little wire baskets of office supplies: page markers, binder clips, the V7 pens she’s been obsessed with since grade school. Richie’s is a jumble of Monsters, spare ties, a stick of Old Spice. There’s an unmarked spray bottle of something. Carmy takes it out and smells it, and it’s the new shit Richie started wearing last month. It’s nice - foresty and smoky, probably bespoke. Carmy thinks about stealing a spritz, but he’s self aware enough to know that he’s definitely not showering tonight and the idea of falling asleep bathed in another guy’s cologne feels uncomfortably transgressive. He puts it back.
His shelf is almost empty. A couple old notebooks he plumbs for ideas occasionally, and a plastic pharmacy bag he doesn’t remember putting there. He takes it out. Armitage Pharmacy, down by Tiff and Ritchie’s old place. Probably from Ritchie, then. Sugar never ends up in that neighborhood. Inside are three bottles of pepto, a roll of tums, mouthwash, a bottle of soda water, and a box of saltines.
Carmy hates him reflexively for a moment, a hard to kick habit that flares hot in his chest before fizzling out. No receipt, so no timeline. No way to know if they were feuding when Ritchie left it. Then again, when aren’t they feuding? Things between them simmer, boil over, go back down to a simmer, but the heat is never gone. It could be a fuck you, you sour-stomached rotten-mouthed little pussy, leaving this place to you was the last mistake he ever made. It could be a take care of yourself, Bear. It could be an I see you struggling. Carmy isn’t sure which option is worse.
In the end, he jams one of the bottles in his pocket and shoves the bag back into the cabinet before ducking out of the office. Front and back of house are empty, dimly lit. Closing seems to have gone smoothly for once: only mistake he can find is broccoli florets under one of the new line cook’s stations. Keven. Kenneth, maybe. It’s whatever, they can work on it. He’s a pretty solid guy otherwise.
He forgets about the bag until the next night when he’s sitting in the office again. Ritchie goes home whistling a little after midnight - insufferably cheery after one of the customers had proposed earlier - and Carmy remembers suddenly. He opens the cabinet to look at it again, more for the weirdness factor than anything else. An artifact of this new Richie who creates proposal playlists for gay dudes, and seems to occasionally have space for people other than himself.
The plastic bag is gone, and its contents are lined up neatly beside Carmy’s notebooks. There are three bottles of pepto again and a roll of breath mints, like the fucking GI fairy stopped by. Carmy takes a breath mint and irritably realizes that a fresh-tasting mouth does feel nice at the end of a long shift. He closes the cabinet door with a touch more force than necessary.
The next morning, he leaves a pack of Richie’s brand of smokes beside the cologne bottle. It’s a fuck you, I can pay attention, too, he tells himself. And if he picks a fight with Richie later over napkin colors to restore the equilibrium, it’s nobody’s business but his own.