Bread and Butter

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Michelle Wildgen

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Cover design by Emily Mahon

  Cover photographs by Andrew Purcell

  Food styling by Carrie Purcell

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Wildgen, Michelle.

  Bread and Butter : a novel / Michelle Wildgen. — First Edition.

  pages cm

  1. Brothers—Fiction. 2. Restaurateurs—Fiction. 3. Competition (Psychology)—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. gsafd I. Title.

  PS3623.I542B73 2013

  813'.6—dc23

  2013005474

  ISBN 9780385537438

  EBOOK ISBN: 9780385537445

  ep_v4.0

  For Holly

  After a good dinner one can forgive anybody,

  even one’s own relations.

  —OSCAR WILDE

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part 2

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Also by Michelle Wildgen

  PROLOGUE

  EVERY FEW MONTHS, IN THE GRIPS of their parents’ civic and vicarious ethnic pride, Leo, Britt, and Harry went on a forced excursion to the last Italian market in town. Most people in Linden would make a day of it and drive ninety minutes east into Philadelphia, to hit 9th Street or Reading Terminal, but Leo’s parents were diehards. As long as Moretti’s was open, they would insist it was the best.

  Inside a butcher’s case, denuded rabbits curled pink and trusting in white bins, while the sheep’s heads appeared chagrined and surprised by the depth of their eyeballs, the narrow clamp of their own teeth. The display of calves’ brains and kidneys, livers and tripe, repulsed Britt, struck Leo as regrettable but unavoidable, and entranced Harry, who was six. He stood with his hands on the glass, chewed-looking mittens dangling from his sleeves.

  Britt and Leo, who were twelve and thirteen, were supposed to be watching their brother but were primarily lurking several feet away near the bulk section, peering over patrons’ shoulders at the hooves and teeth.

  Their father appeared beside them, holding a pink slice of prosciutto, which he did not offer. These Saturdays sometimes left their parents flushed and high-spirited in a slightly confrontational way.

  “We’re not even Italian,” Britt pointed out.

  “Since when are you purists?” their father asked. “Would you be happier if we were in a haggis store?”

  “I was happy playing basketball,” Leo said wanly. But the store was an invigorating riot of noise and meaty fragrance, and he found it difficult not to join in the hollering and sampling as his parents did with such mortifying enthusiasm.

  “It smells like death in here,” Britt said. “Death and spices.”

  “That’s fennel seed,” their father said.

  Eventually their parents completed their tasting and shopping and returned, each holding a large brown paper bag.

  “Where’s Harry?” their mother asked. She craned her neck, peering through the crowd. Her red hair was coming out of its ponytail. “Boys? Where’d Harry go?”

  “He was here,” said Britt, and he and his brother both looked down to where Harry had been. The last they had seen of him, Harry was storming off into the sea of bodies, miffed that Leo and Britt refused to emote over the case of organ meat. They had not followed.

  “Well, look,” their father said. Their parents began working their way through the crowd.

  The street was gray and quiet, cars rumbling past Leo on the pitted asphalt. What a terrible place for Harry to be wandering around, his vividness like a target. Why did their parents bring them here? Leo jogged up the block and around the corner, fruitlessly, before returning to the store, where he stood in the mass of people, sweating, his heart pounding, realizing that he had ruined his family.

  And then the crowd shifted and Leo glimpsed them all: a cluster of ginger-colored heads back by the meat counter, his father’s darker head in its Eagles cap. Harry was holding something wrapped in white paper. His parents’ faces were a volatile blend of anger and relief.

  As they left the store Leo glanced at Britt, who rolled his eyes in a way that conveyed complicity and gladness, the latter something Britt was clearly embarrassed to feel.

  Harry refused to hold either parent’s hand and was clutching his white package. Leo took in the oblivious bounce of Harry’s shoulders, the round curve of his cheek, and the cowlick on one side of his forehead. He probably hadn’t even gotten scolded. Leo took one lengthy stride, long enough to catch the heel of Harry’s shoe, a punk-ass little gesture that almost made him feel better.

  “Thanks for scaring everybody,” Britt said.

  “I was talking to the meat guy,” Harry said. “He has all the good stuff.”

  “It’s a lamb’s tongue, by the way,” Britt said to Leo, nodding at the white package. “He got a lamb’s tongue.”

  “To eat?” Leo said to his parents. “You bought him a lamb’s tongue?”

  Their mother set her bag down on the sidewalk, pulled a stocking cap out of her pocket, and tugged it down over Harry’s head. Then she straightened up and said, “We didn’t buy it for him.” Her eyelids lowered just slightly, slyly, because Harry hated to be laughed at, and she added, “He used his allowance.”

  Part 1

  CHAPTER 1

  LEO HAD IMAGINED A CAVERNOUS SPACE filled with sunlight and flaking pillars, but as he explored his brother’s future restaurant, he feared he had overestimated Harry’s ambition.

  Britt trailed behind them as Leo followed Harry into the long, narrow room. Harry’s shaggy red hair and his blue-and-green shirt were the only spots of color in the dusky room as he gestured, all lanky arms and skinny wrists, toward where he planned to put the bar, the tables, and the server station. Harry’s forearms and wrists bore short faded purplish scars from hot pans and oven edges and errant knife blades, just like the arms on the cooks in Leo’s restaurant.

  Leo glanced behind him; Britt was not paying attention but was swiping at the screen of his phone and swearing under his breath about the linen service. Periodically Britt swatted his blazer, making Leo realize that he too was smeared with pale washes of dust at his knee, elbow, and shoulder, but he merely whacked perfunctorily at his clothes. This was why Britt ran the dining ro
om while Leo ran the back of the house. Britt could sense a flaw from yards away—a spotty wineglass or a tablecloth scattered with pollen dropped from a centerpiece—and correct it almost without realizing he’d done so.

  “What’s the name?” Leo asked. His restaurant was called Winesap, the name a nod to the apple variety that grew in their parents’ backyard.

  “71 King. Same as the address,” Harry said. He pointed up at fat ducts grown minty with age. “That’s copper piping. And I think this wall is, like, three feet thick.” He demonstrated the wall’s soundness with a flick of his hand against the brick, a gesture that looked as if it hurt. But Harry shook it off and looked back over his shoulder. “You don’t like the name?”

  Leo chewed the inside of his lip. “It doesn’t say a lot,” he said gently. “It might be hard for people to picture what they’ll get here just from the name.”

  “I guess it doesn’t really fit,” Harry admitted, looking thoughtful. “Although what does Winesap convey, exactly?”

  “Well, for a while, not much,” Leo admitted. “Heirloom apple varieties didn’t evoke much in an old mill town. But now that we have more Philadelphia transplants I think it says farmers’ markets and rarity and quality.”

  “Plus it’s just a great word,” said Britt. “Maybe it lets people forget for a second that they even got priced out of the suburbs.”

  “And anyway, now it evokes you, right? See, that’s the thing,” Harry said. “I’m hoping that soon this address will say something, something totally different from what it does now. I’m trying to get ahead of the curve. Or to set the curve. Call it what you will.” He looked behind Leo. “Britt. 71 King. What’s it say to you?”

  Britt looked up from his phone. Whereas Harry’s long, lean face was softened by his red beard and Leo bore a coarser nose and darker, down-turned eyes, Britt’s face was elegant and spare, high-cheekboned and fine-lipped. “I picture a pit bull,” he said apologetically. “Like a fighting dog named King.”

  Leo winced. Now that Britt had said it, he couldn’t picture anything else.

  Harry sighed.

  “Listen,” said Britt, “you haven’t made any huge announcements, you haven’t paid for any signs. You can still think about it.”

  “Okay,” Harry said, but he’d lost a little of his spring as he continued the tour.

  It was September now, and Harry had been back in Pennsylvania since April. He’d allowed only bits and pieces about his nascent restaurant to emerge during the basketball games the three played a couple of times a month, until the build-out began and Harry was too busy to play. He’d been secretive and cheerful on these Sunday mornings in the park, reluctant to lay bare the details until the whole thing came together. Leo had the feeling that Harry both hoped to surprise them and somewhat dreaded the opinions of two brothers who’d already logged ten years—more in Leo’s case—in the restaurant business. Harry was still quite new to it.

  Leo had worked hard not to pry. He understood how fragile these early ideas could feel, how easily you could get off track if you got input too soon. Instead he had contented himself with coaxing along his own creakily returning jump shot. Britt, who in their teens had painstakingly honed a swooping outside shot until it seemed effortless, tended to lope easily around the court, more concerned with form than points, while Harry had never lost the wiry zeal that could have carried him into an athletic scholarship instead of an academic one. Neither of his brothers would ever admit this. What they said aloud was that Harry could have gone as far as second string on an emerging semipro team in Iceland.

  Now they finally got to see the restaurant space and to see Harry, who’d been out of communication for several weeks. To Leo, the entire space seemed more like a hallway than a dining room, and the farther into the building they went, the darker and more forbidding it became. The ceiling seemed to descend as they walked. The west wall was brick, the east wall flaking plaster, and the wall facing the street was three-quarters glass. At the back of the rectangular space was a thick steel door painted a military green.

  “That was carpeted,” Harry said, glancing down at the floor.

  “That’s maple,” said Britt. “Refinish it.”

  Harry looked to Leo, who shrugged. “It’s probably maple,” he said.

  Britt said, “What was this space before, anyway? A bar? Apartments? If you found carpet in here, you’ve got to assume that food and crumbs were ground into it for a while before you tore it out. Could mean mice.”

  Leo watched Harry gaze doubtfully at the floor for as long as he could stand it, then clapped Harry on the back. “I’ll give you the number of the exterminator we use, Hare,” he heard himself say heartily. “This is an easy decision, trust me.” Around his youngest brother he became bluff and jocular, issuing definitive statements he only occasionally believed in. Somehow he never affected the same persona with Britt; they were too close in age, had grown up playing on too many of the same baseball teams and going to the same parties.

  Harry nodded. “You may be right.” It was clear he was deciding which way to go—to allocate money to a potentially mythical rodent problem, to laugh it off, or to argue. He settled for shaking his head, and then took a sip from Britt’s coffee, which had been left on top of a stepladder, and considered the mouthful. Then he said, “See, this is why I need partners, Leo. You guys know all this stuff already.”

  “And I’ll tell you for free,” Leo said, deliberately keeping his tone light, “you don’t need me.”

  “When this place gets huge, you’re going to wish you were in on it,” Harry said, almost matching the playful tone. “Besides, how’s it going to look if I open a restaurant without you? People will think we’re feuding. They’ll think you have no faith in me.”

  “I do have faith in you,” Leo said. “You just jumped in really fast. You’ve set yourself a real climb.” This was as far as Leo would go in expressing his fears. Leo himself had worked for years in the restaurant business before he’d finally gathered financing and opened his own place. He hadn’t put together a few years in the food industry in between graduate degrees and other endeavors and then decided to start a business.

  “I think it seems faster than it is,” Harry said, unperturbed. “Besides, an industry needs new blood. Britt didn’t have any experience when he started working with you.”

  “I had spite,” said Britt. “That’ll carry you further than you’d think. I got to quit a job I hated and I was upset with Frances for walking out on Leo.”

  Leo was circling the room, only half listening to his brothers. The conversation made him realize how long it had been since Harry had come home.

  Their parents still lived in the house where all three had grown up, a three-bedroom white Colonial with red trim perched on a sloping hillside. His father used the steep side yard as a terraced garden, green beans, tomatoes, squash, carrots, onions, and herbs all fenced in with grapevines. At the top of the yard were the two eponymous apple trees. The neighborhood was a tightly packed grid of older houses kept in careful though elderly repair, beginning to age out and turn over once again, and there would come a day when the next wave would mean renovation instead of mere upkeep. But for now their father patrolled his yard and garden and made wine in his basement. Their mother hauled out a giant wooden jack-o’-lantern sign in the fall and red and green Christmas lights in December.

  They’d been older parents for their generation. Their father had retired years earlier from engineering and their mother from being the principal of a local junior high school, but well into their seventies they remained bustling and flustered, talking at one another about different topics at once and lamenting their lack of free time. The house alone seemed to require all their attention. Every time Leo spoke to his father, he was on his way to the hardware store for some minuscule item: a hinge, a flange, a yard of weather stripping.

  Leo and Britt were eleven months apart, a lingering intimation of their parents’ sexuality that neve
r ceased to cause both men some embarrassment, and perhaps because of the closeness in age their parents were forever conflating their two older sons, forgetting that Britt had not put in years of restaurant work in high school and college, thinking that Leo was alert to sales on good suits. Only Harry, six years younger than Britt and seven younger than Leo, seemed entirely distinct to them. They kept careful track of his many endeavors, enumerating his degrees, years later still talking about the goat he had served them when he was working on a farm in upstate New York. (“Gin!” their father would exclaim. “He added gin to give it a piney flavor. Who thinks of such a thing?”)

  Leo noted how the sun poured into the restaurant space behind Britt and pooled on the brick before them. Britt’s closely clipped reddish blond hair was alight with it; the lines around his eyes had taken on a powdery fineness. The room was tight, but the space was not all wrong. Harry would be able to fit three rows of tables if he turned them diagonally to allow servers to swivel through. There was little room for a bar, much less the great zinc J that was currently propped up against the east wall awaiting its moment, and what Leo assumed would be the kitchen, back behind that mossy-looking door, was too cramped for more than two cooks or three at the very most, who would be elbow to elbow, knife handles knocking over each other’s prep dishes. Yet the dining room was not appalling. The length offset the width—you had the feeling of journeying deep into the old building toward a cache of ’66 Bordeaux and a scattering of dusty jewels—and the wood floors would look good refinished. There would be patched corners and spaces between some of the floorboards—try getting crumbs out of there—but it would feel welcomingly worn and intimate. This place would be more casual and rough-edged than Winesap, but Leo felt that for Harry, this made sense.