My Stepbrother Banned My Fish Fry, So I Made Him Beg novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Banned
Karl wipes Basia's special off the board in front of ninety regulars, she carries the plate to the old man at table four herself, and she pulls Karl into the dry store and throws the latch.
My stepbrother wiped my name off the specials board with his bare palm, in front of ninety people.
He did it at ten to nine on a Friday, in the middle of the second seating.
I had written it an hour earlier in my best capitals.
The board had said Basia's Cod, two pieces, rye and kraut, seventeen dollars.
Now it was a gray smear and a hand with chalk dust on it.
I was standing at the pass window with a basket of fries in my fist and a plate under the heat lamp.
The plate was for table four.
Karl turned his back on the dining room and leaned in at the window until his face was a foot from mine.
He was twenty-eight and six foot two, with a bar towel on his shoulder and a jaw I had wanted to hit since June.
"The fish fry doesn't change," he said.
"It's cod, Hartmann. It's the same cod."
"It's the same board, the same card and the same batter it's been since 1958."
He pointed his chin at the index card taped over my fryer.
The ink was brown with age and the corners were soft with grease.
I had cooked off that card for two Fridays, exactly as written.
Tonight I had added pickle brine and cold seltzer and fried the fish twice.
The first plate had come off the line gold and crackling.
"The card is why people come," Karl said.
"People come because it's Friday and there's a bar," I said. "The fish is the part I'm paid for."
"You're paid because my father's wife asked."
That was my mother he meant.
I had cooked in four Chicago kitchens, and I had never been told I was somebody's favor.
He raised his voice just enough for the server beside him.
"Pull table four's plate. Put the regular cod on it."
The server looked at me.
She was twenty and she was terrified, and she did not move.
Table four was the old man in the corner booth who had eaten at Hartmann's every Friday since 1971.
He had asked for my special by name.
I took the plate off the shelf with a dish towel and pushed the swinging door open with my hip.
"Chicago," Karl said behind me, low and warning.
I walked out into the dining room in my apron, with my braid coming loose and both forearms bare.
The scars from four years on a line showed up white under the lights.
Ninety people stopped chewing.
I could hear the Brewers game on the television over the bar and nothing else.
I set the plate down in front of the old man and put a fork in his hand.
"Eat it," I said. "Then tell him."
The old man looked at the fish for a long time.
He cut a corner off with the side of the fork and put it in his mouth.
He chewed slowly, with his eyes on the ceiling.
Karl had come around the end of the bar, and he stopped six feet from the booth.
"Well?" Karl said.
"That's your mother's batter," the old man said. "With something better in it."
Nobody in the dining room moved.
Karl's face went flat and white.
His mother had been dead nine years, and I had known that when I picked up the brine.
I had not known what it would cost him to hear it from a man who had eaten her fish for thirty-eight years.
A bowler at the bar started clapping.
Then the nurse at table nine joined him, and then the two teachers.
"Team Basia," somebody shouted, and somebody else shouted, "Team Karl," and the room broke into noise.
Karl crossed the six feet in two steps.
His hand closed around my wrist, over the oldest burn, and he pulled me through the swinging door and into the back hall.
His grip was warm and hard and it did not hurt.
Heat went straight up my arm and into my chest, and it was not temper.
I had come out of that dining room ready to take a swing at him.
I found out in the hall that it was not what my body wanted at all.
He opened the door to the dry store with his shoulder and pulled me in after him.
The room smelled of flour and cardboard.
Fifty-pound sacks stood along one wall, and the shelves were stacked to the ceiling with cans.
He let go of my wrist and turned to face me in the narrow space between the shelves.
"You humiliated me in front of every regular my father has," he said.
"You wiped my name off a board with your hand."
"It was my family's board," he said.
"It's my mother's family now too, Hartmann," I said.
I reached past him, and I pushed the dry-store door shut.
I threw the latch.
It dropped with a hard metal clack, and we both heard it.
Karl looked at the latch, and then he looked at me.
I put my palm flat on his chest and felt his heart going hard under his shirt.
"Say it to my face," I said.
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