What the son discovers, however, is that he can “contact” the dead cook’s spirit by cooking up a storm in the nighttime kitchen-but only after the restaurant is closed. There, long after hours, the son secretly slaves to teach himself his dad’s recipes-everything the sous chef failed to learn from his father when the great cook was alive. And when the former sous chef masters a recipe to his dad’s satisfaction, the spirit of the deceased cook advises his son on more practical matters-where to buy his clothes, what bills to pay first, how often and by whom the car should be serviced. (His father’s ghost, the son soon realizes, has forgotten a few things-such as the fact that his somewhat retarded son never learned to drive a car.)
“Gamba is a ghost?” Carmella cried.
“I suppose I could have called the novel The Retarded Sous Chef,” Danny said sarcastically, “but I thought In the After-Hours Restaurant was a better title.”
“Secondo, someone might think it’s a cookbook,” Carmella cautioned him.
Well, what could he say? Surely no one would think a new novel by Danny Angel was a cookbook! Danny stopped talking about the story; to placate Carmella, he told her what the dedication was. “My father, Dominic Baciagalupo-in memoriam.” This would be his second dedication to his dad, bringing the number of dedications “in memoriam” up to four. Predictably, Carmella burst into tears. There was a certain safety, a familiar kind of comfort, in her tears; Carmella seemed almost happy when she was crying, or at least her disapproval of Danny was somewhat abated by her sorrow.
As he lay awake in bed now, with little confidence that he would fall asleep, Danny wondered why he’d tried so hard to make Carmella understand what he was writing. Why had he bothered? Okay, so she’d asked what he was writing-she had even said she was dying to know what was next! But he’d been a storyteller forever; Danny had always known how to change the subject.
As he drifted-ever so lightly-to sleep, Danny imagined the son (the tentative sous chef) in the after-hours kitchen, where his father’s ghost instructs him. Similar to Ketchum before the logger learned to read, the son makes lists of words he is struggling to recognize and remember; this night, the son is obsessed with pasta. “Orecchiette,” he writes, “means ‘little ears.’ They are small and disk-shaped.” Bit by bit, the sous chef is becoming a cook-if it isn’t too late, if his dead father’s restaurant will only give him more time to learn! “Farfalle,” the somewhat retarded son writes, “means ‘butterflies,’ but my dad also called them bow ties.”
In his half-sleep, Danny was up to the chapter where the cook’s ghost speaks very personally to his son. “I had so wanted for you to be married, with children of your own. You would be a wonderful father! But you like the kind of woman who is-”
Is what? Danny was thinking. A new waitress has been added to the waitstaff in the haunted restaurant; she is precisely “the kind of woman” the cook’s ghost is trying to warn his son about. But at last the writer fell asleep; only then did the story stop.
THE POLICE BUSINESS concerning the double shooting in Toronto was finished; even the most egregious morons in the media had finally backed off. After all, the bloodbath had happened almost nine months ago-not quite the duration of a pregnancy. Only Danny’s mail had continued to discuss it-the sympathy letters, and whatever their opposite was.
That mail about the cook’s murder and the subsequent shooting of his killer had persisted-condolences, for the most part, though not all the letters were kind. Danny read every word of them, but he’d not yet received the letter he was looking for-nor did he seriously expect that he would ever hear from Lady Sky again. This didn’t stop Danny from dreaming about her-that vertical strip of the strawberry blonde’s pubic hair, the bright white scar from her cesarean section, the imagined histories of her unexplained tattoos. Little Joe had given her a superhero’s name, but was Lady Sky an actual warrior-or, in a previous life, had she been one? Danny could only imagine that Amy’s life had been different once. Doesn’t something have to happen to you before you jump naked out of an airplane? And after you’ve jumped, what more can happen to you? Danny would wonder.
That Amy had written him once, after Joe died, and that she’d also lost a child-well, that was one of life’s missed connections, wasn’t it? Since he’d not written her back, why would she write him again? But Danny read his mail, all of it-answering not a single letter-in the diminishing hope that he would hear from Amy. Danny didn’t even know why he wanted to hear from her, but he couldn’t forget her.
“If you’re ever in trouble, I’ll be back,” Lady Sky had told little Joe, kissing the two-year-old’s forehead. “Meanwhile, you take care of your daddy.” So much for the promises of angels who drop naked out of the sky, though-to be fair-Amy had told them she was only an angel “sometimes.” Indeed, most persistently in Danny’s dreams, Lady Sky didn’t always make herself available as an angel-obviously, not on that snowy night when Joe and the wild blow-job girl met the blue Mustang going over Berthoud Pass.
“I would like to see you again, Amy,” Danny Angel said aloud, in the writer’s fragile sleep, but there was no one to hear him in the dark-only his father’s silent ashes. Evidently, in the drama enacted that night in that hotel room, the cook’s ashes-at rest in the jar of Amos’ New York Steak Spice-had been given a nonspeaking part.
DANNY AWOKE WITH A START; the early-morning light seemed too bright. He thought he was already late for his meeting with Ketchum, but he wasn’t. Danny called Carmella in her hotel room. He was surprised at how wide awake she sounded, as if she’d been anticipating his call. “The bathtub is much too small, Secondo, but I managed somehow,” Carmella told him. She was waiting for him in the vast and almost empty dining hall when he went downstairs for breakfast.
Ketchum had been right about visiting in September; it was going to be quite a beautiful day in the northeastern United States. Even as Danny and Carmella drove away from The Balsams at that early-morning hour, the sun was bright, the sky a vivid and cloudless blue. A few fallen maple leaves dotted Akers Pond Road with reds and yellows. Danny and Carmella had told the resort hotel that they would be staying a second night in Dixville Notch. “Maybe Mr. Ketchum will join us for dinner tonight,” Carmella said to Danny in the car.
“Maybe,” Danny answered her; he doubted that The Balsams was Ketchum’s kind of place. The hotel had an oversize appearance, an ambience that possibly catered to conventions; Ketchum wasn’t the conventioneer type.
They quickly came upon the sign that said SMALL ENGINE REPAIRS, with an arrow pointing down an innocuous dirt road. “I’m at the end of the road,” was all Ketchum had told Danny, though there was no sign saying this road was a dead end. Next came the sign that said (with the same neat lettering) BEWARE OF THE DOG. But there was no dog-no house or cars, either. Perhaps the sign was preparing them for an eventuality-namely, if they continued farther down the road, there would almost certainly be a dog, but by then it would be too late to warn them.
“I think I know the dog,” Danny said, chiefly to reassure Carmella. “His name is Hero, and he’s not really a bad dog-not that I’ve seen.”
The road went on, growing narrower-till it was too narrow to turn around. Of course it could have been the wrong road, Danny was thinking. Maybe there still was a Lost Nation Road, and the crazy old salesman in the sporting-goods store had deliberately misled them; he’d definitely been hostile about Ketchum, but the old logger had always drawn hostility out of even the most normal-seeming people.