Passing Through

Iris Calloway had a rule about towns, and the rule was that you never let one get its hooks in. She had been keeping the rule for eleven years, since she was twenty-two and had first understood that the restless thing inside her was not going to settle and that she could either fight it forever or learn to travel light. So she travelled light. She had never owned a piece of furniture she couldn't carry. She had worked in nineteen kitchens in eleven years — line cook, prep, pastry, whatever the season needed — and she had never stayed in one town longer than two years, and most of the time she left well before that, the moment a place started to feel like it knew her name. Greywater was supposed to be a town she passed straight through. It was January, and her car had developed a noise somewhere north of honest, and Greywater was where the noise became a problem rather than a worry — a small grey huddle of a town in a fold of the hills, one main street, the kind of place that did not appear on the front of anything. The mechanic, an unhurried man named Pell, looked under the bonnet and made the sucking-teeth sound that mechanics make and said it would be four days, maybe five, for the part to come in. Four or five days. Iris could do four or five days. Four or five days was barely time for a town to learn your face. She got a room above the pub and she set about waiting the way she always waited, lightly, touching nothing — and on the second day, walking the length of the short main street simply to have something to do with her legs, she saw the sign in the window of the bistro. The bistro was called the Mistletoe, which was a foolish name for a restaurant that was clearly open all year, and the sign in its window said, in honest unhopeful handwriting, KITCHEN HELP WANTED. SHORT TERM CONSIDERED. *Short term considered.* Iris stood on the cold pavement and read those three words and felt the small specific tug she had spent eleven years learning to ignore. She had four or five days and no money to waste having them. A kitchen was a kitchen. It would be something to do with her hands. She went in. The Mistletoe was warm and shabby and almost empty, two tables occupied on a January lunchtime, and the man who came out of the kitchen wiping his hands had the particular grey tiredness of someone running a place that was losing. He was perhaps forty, dark-haired, unsmiling — not unkind, she'd learn the difference soon enough, but unsmiling, a man who had run out of the energy required to perform welcome. "You're here about the sign," he said. "I can work a line, I can prep, I can do pastry if I have to," Iris said. "I'm passing through. My car's at Pell's, I've got four or five days before the part comes, and I'd rather spend them earning than not. I'm not looking for permanent. Your sign said short term considered." The chef looked at her for a long moment. He had flour on one forearm and a burn scar, old and silvered, along the back of his hand, and Iris, who read kitchens and the people in them the way other people read weather, understood several things about him at once: that he was good, that he was tired, that the Mistletoe was closer to the edge than its warm shabby front let on, and that he had written *short term considered* on that sign because he had reached the point where any help at all was better than none. "Adam Frost," he said. "It's my place. Or it's the bank's place and I cook in it, depending how the month's going." He said it flatly, no self-pity, just a fact set on the counter. "Short term's all anyone gives Greywater. I've stopped expecting otherwise. Can you start now? Lunch is small but the prep for tonight isn't going to do itself, and I let my last help go before Christmas because I couldn't pay two of us." It should have been easy to say yes to. Four or five days, a warm kitchen, a wage, and then the part would come in and the car would be fixed and Iris Calloway would drive out of Greywater the way she had driven out of nineteen towns before it, light, hooked into nothing. That was the plan. She held onto the plan. "I can start now," she said. And she followed Adam Frost into the warm, struggling kitchen of the Mistletoe, and tied on a borrowed apron, and did not yet know — could not have known, standing there at the start of it — that Greywater was not going to be a town she passed through, and that the noise her car had made north of honest was going to turn out to be the single most useful breakdown of her restless, light-travelling life.