Steve brought the unopened box of shirts to the truck to show Bick and Jessica.
“Hey guys! My custom-designed t-shirts are here! Wait ‘til you see the catchy slogan I came up with.” Steve opened the box and proudly held up a shirt.
Bick stared at it. He read aloud the slogan printed across the front of the shirt, enunciating each word. GET FRIED UP WITH MR. AND MR. ON WHEELS!
“What?” Steve exclaimed. “No! ‘Get fired up’ …”
“Well, I hate to break it to you, mister, but the shirt says fried.” Bick grabbed the offending garment from Steve and threw it back in the box. “So-o-o typical!”
“Oh, Stevie!” Jessica convulsed with laughter. She held up the shirt and hugged it to her chest. “I love it! I’m going to wear mine every day!”
“At least it’ll be something new in your closet,” Bick said with a sniffy head toss. “You can have mine.”
* * *
Bick and Steve continued to squabble during their long hours together in the truck. Steve worried that Jessica’s anecdotes—she had an endless supply of stories to tell—were getting to be annoying in their confined workspace.
Steve also thought about his phone call to Nestor, wondering how Bick was going to react to his visit.
Bick often came to work with a sullen demeanor.
One morning, clearly feeling stressed, he was particularly sarcastic. “Here we are again. Another day in paradise.”
Steve was at the serving counter setting up the display stand with Gracie and Jerard’s business cards.
“How is the dog therapy business going, Steve?” Bick asked.
“Not bad.” Steve’s canine enterprise was actually off to a great start. “Liberty Nursing Home put us on their schedule for regular Sunday morning visits.”
“Sounds absolutely splendid,” Bick said, without a hint of sincerity.
Jessica took off her apron and headed for the door.
“I’m stepping outside for a quick minute,” she said.
Away from the truck, she texted her brother who was still inside the truck:
HE’S GOT A BUG UP HIS BUTT. SOOOO SNARKY. HARD TO BE AROUND!
Steve texted her back:
I KNOW I KNOW. THAT’S THE WAY HE IS. JUST IGNORE HIM. THAT’S WHAT I DO.
* * *
Late in the afternoon, Bick and Steve closed up the truck and drove to the commissary yard. Steve had started cleaning the sinks when he noticed Bick heading toward the door with the box of Get Fried t-shirts.
“What are you doing with those?” Steve asked.
“I’m taking them to the trash,” Bick said. “You should be embarrassed.”
“No!” Steve yanked the box away from him. “I’m not embarrassed. And if you were at all interested, I would show you photos of some customers wearing them. Jessica sold a couple.”
“Oh, how wonderful.” Bick’s sour face was not lost on Steve.
In silence, they cleaned and prepped for the next day.
* * *
After working in the truck for twelve hours, Bick and Steve were eager to get home. Bick headed straight to the bathroom to take a long shower.
After almost thirty minutes, Steve rapped his knuckles on the door.
“Are you planning to come out at some point tonight so we can make dinner?”
“Yes,” Bick called out. “Be there in a minute.”
Steve pulled the salad spinner and cutting board from the cupboard and set to work slicing mushrooms. He chopped some lettuce and sliced a cucumber, scraping it all into a wooden salad bowl. He threw in a handful of cherry tomatoes.
“While you were in the bathroom doing whatever it is you do in there, I ran out and got these tomatoes and mushrooms from the street vendor downstairs,” Steve said. “Sometimes I wonder if that guy ever goes home.”
Bick wasn’t saying much. He filled the pasta pot with water. He threw some salt and two large bundles of dried spaghetti into the boiling water. He set the timer for twelve minutes.
“I’m making cacio e pepe,” he announced.
“Perfect,” Steve said. “My favorite pasta dish. There has to be some Italian somewhere in my DNA,” he laughed.
Bick found the grater in a drawer and a chunk of pecorino-romano in the fridge. When Oliver saw Bick holding the cheese, he yipped in anticipation from his comfy chair in the corner of the kitchen. Although the dogs were already fed, Oliver was never shy about begging for food at any time of the day or night.
Bick glanced at Steve tossing the salad. “What are the odds you could convince Jessica to use a hairbrush before she comes to work?” he asked casually.
Steve wondered why Bick felt the need to take a potshot at Jessica at that particular moment. He was in the habit of mentally assessing which of their daily skirmishes were worth fighting and which ones to let go. Steve decided to quickly slide past this one.
“I’ll ask her,” Steve said calmly. “By the way, Nestor is coming over tonight to look at my desktop.”
“Nestor? Who the hell is Nestor?” Bick stopped grating.
“I told you before that my computer is acting up. I’m hoping Nestor can fix it.”
“Where did you meet this Nestor dude?” Bick pretended to focus on the cheese.
Steve pulled a business card from his pocket and casually tossed it on the kitchen table.
“Nestor saw me taking pictures in the park one day. He’s a tech repair guy. He gave me his card and said ‘Call me if you need me.’”
“Hmm,” Bick said after studying the front and back of the card. “He has an unusual name.”
* * *
After dinner, the doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it,” Steve said. “That’ll be Nestor.”
When he opened the door, Steve was mesmerized by a Greek god wearing an exquisitely pressed pastel linen shirt. The slim-fit style accentuated his large pectoral muscles that flexed, causing a ripple beneath the fabric. Steve stared at the man’s black tech bag and imagined Apollo with a golden lyre strumming melodic notes of peace and harmony.
“Hi! It’s Steve, right? Thanks for getting in touch. Good to see you again.”
“Hello, Nestor. Please do come in.” Steve motioned him inside with a sweep of his arm, surprising himself with his sudden formality. “My broken machine awaits you.”
Steve led Nestor to his computer in the extra bedroom which also served as Steve and Bick’s office.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Steve said. “Please let me know if you need me. For anything.”
* * *
The long, sweaty hours of July were oppressive.
Bick, Steve, and Jessica arrived at the truck in the morning, not feeling rested enough from the day before. A stillness of heat and humidity confronted them. Leftover aromas from the previous day’s frying, baking, and cleaning hovered in the air.
Bick switched on the ceiling fan. The slow swish of the blades barely pushed the air around.
“That figures,” Bick said. “Stuck in slow mode. I suppose now we’ll need to replace the fan.”
“Every original thing in the truck will probably have to be replaced at some point,” Jessica offered.
“Well not anytime soon, I hope,” Bick said. “We can’t afford any extra expenses until we pay off our loan.”
Bick’s entrepreneurial enthusiasm had cooled during the heat of summer. The reality of life as a food truck owner had smacked him in the face. And he was getting more annoyed at the amount of time Steve devoted to his photography, his blog, and the volunteer work with his dogs.
“Your mindless chitchat to customers about your therapy dogs is not selling more meatloaf,” he told Steve. He continued to be on the lookout for hygiene infractions committed by Steve and Jessica. He sulked and complained.
“Neither of you project professionalism to our customers. And certainly not by wearing those damn Get Fried t-shirts.”
That morning, Bick’s mood see-sawed between a quiet simmer and a frothing boil. The temperature inside the truck rose, literally and figuratively.
To lighten things up, Jessica decided to regale her coworkers with a story while she cleaned and refilled the condiment bottles.
“A couple of idiots on the 5 train this morning almost came to blows arguing about water. About whether it’s a universal solvent. The first guy says, ‘Water dissolves everything.’ And the second guy says, ‘No, it doesn’t!’And they go back and forth, ‘Yes it does! No, it doesn’t! Well, what about oil and water?’ This went on for three stops. They got louder and louder, getting worked up.
“I got fed up listening to them yelling and went to find another place to sit. I had to point out to some dude, ‘You’re man-spreading.’ He was taking up two seats. It was like an oven on the subway and I wanted to scream at everyone on the train to shut up.”
Steve pointed out the irony of yelling at people to be quiet.
Bick chimed in. “Jessica, you’re just like your brother. You don’t know how to chill.”
“Oh, that’s rich coming from you, Bickford, of all people,” Jessica snorted. “You’re about as chill as Times Square on New Year’s Eve.”
She took a clean apron from the cupboard and raised the serving window.
“Hello, hungry people!”
Already, the line of customers stretched along the sidewalk.
“Good morning, miss, what would you like today?” Jessica asked the first customer, a large, perspiring woman.
“I’ll have four cheese empanadas with extra carrot salsa. Make it a lot of carrot salsa,” the woman ordered. “Say, haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” she asked Jessica.
Jessica wrote up the order and handed it to Steve. She returned to the window.
“No, I don’t think we’ve met. You don’t look familiar.”
“Don’t you work at the Duane Reade over there?” The customer pointed across the street.
“No, I work here,” Jessica smiled. “I must have a doppelgänger.”
“Or, maybe you just have a generic look.” The woman took her food and left.
Jessica turned to Steve, working at the fryer.
“I think I was just insulted.”
“What happened?” Steve asked.
“That woman told me I have a generic look,” Jessica said.
Bick, at the meatloaf station, overheard and smirked.
“What I have been telling you? Your clothes do you no favors. You do have an unkempt, generic look. That goes for your brother, too.”
Jessica turned away, rolled her eyes, and served the next customers in line—all of whom ordered empanadas with carrot salsa.
A professional-looking woman dressed for the office stepped up to the window.
“Hello miss. What would you like?” Jessica noticed the woman carried an expensive-looking leather case.
“Give me a regular meatloaf sandwich. With the barbecue ketchup. No sides.”
“Coming right up.”
Jessica handed her the order from the stack Bick kept replenished at his station.
“The ketchup is in that bottle,” Jessica said, pointing. “Help yourself.”
As the next customer stepped forward to place an order, the woman with the ketchup screamed.
“Shiiit! My new Anne Fontaine!” Splattered ketchup streaked down the front of the woman’s immaculate white blouse.
“Oh, nooo!” Jessica shrieked when she saw the red stains seeping into the fabric. She grabbed a roll of paper towels from behind the counter, ripped off an arm’s length and thrust the wad of paper towards the woman’s chest. The customer, swearing, wiped aggressively at her blouse, causing separate stains to merge into one large tomato-red field spread across the white cotton cloth.
She looked like the victim of a violent crime.
“Look at me!” she shouted. “I have to go back to work now!”
Still cursing, she grabbed her sandwich and more paper towels. Producing a business card from her brief case, she threw it at Bick who now stood at attention next to Jessica at the serving window.
“I will be in touch, you can be sure about that!” she shouted and fled.
By closing time that afternoon, Bick was ready to spit tacks.
“Her business card says she’s a prosecutor,” Bick said. “I bet when she walked into court today, she got everyone’s attention.” He was not trying to be funny.
“One squeeze bottle holds a lot of ketchup,” Jessica said quietly to no one in particular. “I guess I didn’t screw the cap on tight. I’m sorry, guys. I’m really sorry.”
Steve gave his sister a quick hug.
“Things happen, Jess. It’s not the end of the world.”
Bick scowled. “You could have offered her a free Get Fried t-shirt.”
No one laughed. Jessica looked stricken.
“Anyway,“ Bick said, “we’ll be getting a bill to reimburse her for something. I hope it’s just for dry cleaning. She made sure I knew that her designer blouse cost 300 dollars.”
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