You, Again(99)

“The Waiting” plays a tick too loud over the radio. It’s fitting. Danny Kestenberg was the human embodiment of a Tom Petty song. This kitchen still feels haunted by his stubborn ghost. Sometimes Josh swears he can feel Danny looking over his shoulder, muttering as Josh pickles shallots or braises red cabbage.

Something catches his attention on the other side of the front windows: a specific cadence of heels clicking on pavement.

The bell over the door jingles as Abby walks past the tables and behind the counter, opens the beverage fridge, and pulls out a can of Dr. Brown’s Diet Black Cherry. She fills a glass with ice and pours the soda just up to the rim with the practiced hand of someone who’s done this a thousand times.

Without a word, she marches into the walk-in cooler and returns with a 128-ounce jar of mayonnaise and a case of eggs. Josh had hardboiled them to prep for Radhya’s egg kheema.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

Abby pulls a stack of bowls down from an overhead shelf. Her heels sink into the kitchen mat. “I told you I was bringing the offers. We need to make a decision.”

“No. What are you doing with my prep bowls?” At some point in the last few months, he’d started thinking of the kitchen equipment as his.

“Making lunch,” she says, setting up a familiar assembly line on the prep table. “Since when do we sit around a table without a nosh?”

Egg salad wasn’t Josh’s plan for this afternoon. But the clatter of two giant metal bowls on the stainless-steel prep table, the sound of shells gently crunching against the counter, the whip of them being tossed into the compost bin—it’s all a familiar, undeniable tune. It seems to bring his dad back to life for a fleeting moment.

Danny used a dead simple recipe (hardboiled eggs, mayo, salt, pepper) with one distinction: extra yolks for a creamier consistency. “Other places use too much mayonnaise,” he’d insist. Josh isn’t much of an egg salad connoisseur, but he’s inclined to agree. That said, he’d spent twenty years trying to convince his father to add some fucking dill.

Josh reaches for a hardboiled egg from the carton, cracks the shell, and peels it, depositing the white in the bowl on the left and the yolk in the bowl on the right. He pushes his feet into the kitchen mat. He crumbles the “flaky-dry” texture of the yolks in his fingers. The whites are slippery and tender. Crack. Peel. Separate.

It’s the closest he’s come to anchoring in months.

Abby says nothing but cracks an egg against the counter in four short bursts.

“Just the Way You Are” drifts into the kitchen from the radio and rips him out of the present. It worms its way into Josh’s brain with sap, easy sentimentality, and obvious allusions to Ari. Every lyric seems to have been designed by a time-traveling 1977 Billy Joel to inflict maximum damage on a defenseless 2023 Josh Kestenberg.

“Have you heard from her?” His mother is terrible at affecting a nonchalant tone.

“Harper?” he asks, just to be difficult. There’s no reason things shouldn’t have clicked with Harper. She works at the U.N. She’s an associate-level donor to the Roundabout Theatre Company. She keeps kosher salt next to her gas stove. She has a schnauzer named Pee Wee, for fuck’s sake. He’d ended it over the phone—well before the holidays, which was Briar’s advice. But how do you explain to someone that you just want your conversations to spark? That you want to laugh because you can’t help it, not force a chuckle out of politeness? That instead of just listening to the anecdotes you’ve told six other dates, you need them to hear the parts you’re not saying? To know you better than anyone else?

“I think you know who I’m talking about.”

“Why? Do you have another professional opportunity lined up for her?” He picks up another egg, going through the motions, cracking it too hard on the counter, letting shell pieces fly like shrapnel. “Is one of your clients launching a comedy club in Argentina or something?”

There’s a brief pause in the crush of eggshell from her end of the counter.

Josh continues cracking, peeling, separating. Trying and failing to ignore the emotional grenades threatening to go off in his head: How he feels Ari’s absence every single day. How she’s taken root in some deep, inaccessible place that can’t be edited or overwritten—just managed. Like a chronic illness.

There’s an unmistakable lump in his throat now. Anchor, dammit.

“We danced to this at our wedding,” Abby says after another quick series of thwacks. “I wanted Fleetwood Mac. This one was your dad’s idea.” Obviously. The lyrics start with his mantra: Don’t go changing. “We even took dance lessons at a studio on Sixth Ave. He still stepped all over my feet.”

With the memory of Ari in that black dress, awkwardly dancing to a song from forty years ago permeating his brain, Josh makes it as far as the song’s second mention of “clever conversation” before the anchor gives way, sweeping him out past the point of no return. He spends the last forty-five seconds of the saxophone solo quietly sobbing into his sleeve, being careful not to touch his face with his yolk-covered hands.

This shirt will be forever associated with the time a maudlin Billy Joel hit grabbed him by the throat as he cried in front of his mother into a bowl of egg whites.

Thankfully, Abby doesn’t turn her head to look at him. When the song ends, she hands Josh a clean bar towel off the pass. “It gets easier.”