Archive of Our Own ^beta

Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
MAGGIE SMITH, "Good Bones"

The moment Sydney walks into the kitchen with all these ideas, Richie knows that it's a bad fit. Miss Culinary Institute of America will never understand that The Beef's charm rests on the patrons depending on it to be low-brow and under-achieving. Hell, Carmy barely understands this and he's a Berzatto – not living up to their potential might as well be the family credo. What outsiders don't get is that no one wants a bunch of Zagat Guide touting tourists rolling through the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall and asking for their finest sparkling water while the rest of them are drinking tap.

If Richie was naïve, he'd turn to Carmy and say, "It's me or her, cousin," and then wait for Carmen to tell Sydney to stop unpacking because it wasn't going to work out after all. But Richie knows that it would be a long wait, maybe even bordering on forever. Richie wants to say, "It was nice of you to drop by, sweetheart, but we have a system," and let the lingering implication that she'll never understand it do the rest. Unfortunately, the stack of past due notices on Carmy's, née Michael's, desk proves that their system hasn't been working for quite some time.

Since Richie no longer issues ultimatums and doesn't have a leg to stand on about maintaining the status quo, he calls Sydney sweetheart, blames it on the Italian heritage that he does not possess, and then barely pauses for the door to swing shut behind her before ripping into Carmy for not knowing How Things Are Supposed To Be because he has Not Been Here.

*

Once when Mike was still alive and things were getting bad – hindsight replays everything in high-definition so Richie recognizes now that he knew nothing about bad and even less about worse back then – Mike recruited Richie to drive him to a sketchy part of town because he was already half in the bag and one more traffic stop meant they'd revoke his driver's license indefinitely. He needed his fix so badly that Mikey couldn't even wait the half hour it would take for his blood alcohol level to drop down to the legal limit again. He had long ago stopped pretending this wasn't where he went when he asked Richie to mind the shop for a bit so he could "grab some air."

Mike used to hit up their neighborhood dealer for a few Oxy to have a good time and it wasn't a problem until it became a problem, until his recreational drug use skyrocketed to the point where Jared from high school could no longer meet his demands. Mike worked his way through the small-time guys until he reached a level that could only be achieved through a shady referral system – one that now led them to the kind of place that HBO recreated on Warner Brothers lots when they wanted to play up South Side stereotypes on their prestige shows, Bad News Bears in surround sound. Mikey didn't look worried, but Mikey's leg was also shaking like they were in an earthquake and he couldn't keep his hand still as the anticipation for more painkillers built. Richie imagined that even a gang war breaking out in front of them wouldn't be able to keep him away. This was what those afterschool specials meant when they talked about a cry for help.

Well, Richie was going to answer and finally tell Michael what was what. He'd gone through it in his head already because there was no way he was going to confront Mike without some semblance of a plan. The plan, in this case, was to stay breezy. Short, but hopefully effective. Richie was already proud of himself for how casual and not at all premeditated it felt when he cut the engine a block away from where Mike was going to meet his guy and said, "Cousin, you keep popping pills like this and it's going to kill you."

"Says the guy huffing on a death stick of his very own," Mikey laughed.

It wasn't the clever rebuttal Mike thought it was – he was just a little less sharp on the stuff – since they'd both chain-smoked through a fresh pack of Sapphire Lights on the drive to Washington Park, but Richie wouldn't deny that Michael had a point. He needed to cut back to something a little more acceptable, if for no other reason than to stop Tiff from sending him weekly articles that popped up on her google alert about the detrimental effects of secondhand smoke on young brains. He knew he had a problem, which is more than he could say about Mikey's powers of self-reflection. Richie plucked the cigarette from his mouth and let the filter paper burn down as he held up his smoking gun in the space between them.

"I'll quit this if you quit that."

He nodded towards the darkness at the end of the block where most of the streetlights were out to create the optimal ambience for a drug deal gone wrong. Mike looked down at his watch. The window of opportunity was rapidly dwindling and soon his dealer's mobile pharmacy would be closed for the evening.

"Shut up and start the fucking car, Nancy Reagan."

Mike's voice was unnervingly even the way it got before he exploded. Richie had never heard it aimed at him – he was tempted to pretend like he hadn't brought this up and start driving like any of this was normal, but he couldn't tell his best friend from the drugs anymore. If anything happened to Michael on Richie's watch, he'd lose the only family he'd ever known. Even though his reasons for this intervention weren't purely altruistic, Richie squared his shoulders and declared, "It's me or the drugs, Mike."

"Fine," Mike huffed as his hand reached through the open window to pull at the perpetually jammed driver's side door handle from the outside. "I choose the drugs."

It hurt. Watching Michael jog down the block without so much as a glance back at him felt like getting kicked in the 'nads while learning that The American Dream was a crock of shit. Here was the truth: best friends didn't mean forever and rags to riches was invented by billionaires to get poor people to work harder so billionaires could stay rich. The smart move would have been to drive away right then – Mike had made his choice; it wasn't Richie's job to live with it – but like those suckers who continued to kill themselves grasping for a tax bracket they could never reach, Richie eased the car towards the end of the block and waited for Mike to come out.

Mike would be so high that he'd forget all about abandoning Richie by tomorrow morning and Richie would let him keep believing that he was a ride or die friend because that's what they did for each other: Michael fucked up and Richie minimized it; Richie fucked up and Michael convinced him that it was the smallest hiccup he'd ever heard.

So Richie waited half an hour and smoked two more cigarettes before Michael finally came back with pinpoint pupils and the goofy smile of someone still riding his buzz. He nudged Richie's shoulder like he had a million times in the past after they'd done something spectacularly stupid as if to say that the failed intervention was water under the bridge, no harm no foul. But Richie found it more difficult to let Mikey's conditional loyalty roll off his back.

*

When Syd calls everyone to family meal, it takes Richie a comically long time to realize what is happening. It isn't until Marcus innocently mentions that this is better than their usual pasta that Richie puts two and two together to create a four-alarm fire in his brain. After that, he can't really hear what anyone else is saying because he's too busy wondering who the hell Sydney thinks she is to change Mike's spaghetti recipe like this. Glancing at his left, Richie expects Carmy to be on his side this one time at least, but instead of being outraged, Carmy is slamming down the shooter of sauce, smacking his lips together, and telling Syd that it's fire. Before they can start geeking out over Syd's thyme-infused brown butter, Richie jumps out of his seat so fast that Gary ducks when the chair clatters onto its side behind him.

"Is nothing sacred anymore?" Richie yells as he eyes the Dutch oven in the middle of the table with betrayal. "And you! You're going to let her piss all over Michael's memory like a fucking Judas?"

It's an unfair thing to say given that Sydney didn't know Mike from the junkie next door, but Carmy did. Carmy knew Mike and he knew better than to do this.

"Relax, cousin. It's a plate of spaghetti."

"It's more than that, asshole," Richie shouts, thumb and index finger pressed against his forehead like the weight of being the only one to hold up Michael's memory is finally taking its toll. "Please at least try to give a shit about what your brother meant to this place."

There's a chorus of not cool (Marcus, wincing like he sliced his hand open with a bread lame) and too far, man (Fak, who is inexplicably at Family despite being neither family nor an employee) and Papi, take a breath (Tina, looking extremely uncomfortable at being forced to play peacekeeper).

"Sydney didn't know, cousin," Carmy says too calmly for Richie's liking while Syd looks around the room and asks if she's missing something. Turning to her, Carmy sighs before explaining, "Richie is upset that I don't spend every waking moment asking myself what my dead brother would do."

He's so glib about it that Richie's hand curls into a fist before he knows it. He's about to leap across the table to cold-cock Carm when there's a bang from the back. Despite his age, Ebra's reflexes are still on point because he zips through the double doors to the kitchen like he's one of those firefighters in Backdraft running into burning buildings for a heartfelt montage they'll play later when they all inevitably die. Everyone else looks disappointed that they couldn't beat him to the punch to avoid this awkwardness, but before it can get even more awkward, Ebra shouts from the back that there's smoke coming out of their janky secondhand ice cream maker again.

It's just the excuse Richie needs to get out of this room before he really loses his cool and makes it so that the only way he'll get to see Eva is behind six inches of double reinforced glass. Richie stomps into the kitchen like a petulant child and Ebra looks at him with so much pity that you'd think Richie was the one who was forced to leave his country to escape a civil war.

"Richard, you are hard on Carmen," Ebra says matter-of-factly and lets it linger between them like a crispy red leaf floating down to the ground.

"Someone needs to be, E."

Ebra shakes his head. "He punishes himself too much already."

The ice cream machine groans under the weight of its failure as if to remind Richie that one-time Food & Wine Rising New Chef Carmen Berzatto does not need to work at this particular shithole unless he's doing it as some sort of penance because self-flagellation isn't painful enough. Richie pushes past Ebra to get his "tools" because he's unwilling to think of Carmy's sacrifices right now, but thankfully Ebra has already left to rejoin everyone else by the time he comes back.

Richie squeezes his body onto a bed of dust bunnies to get under the ice cream machine that is being held together by a wad of gum and six thumbtacks at this point. It is rare that Carmy is right about anything having to do with the restaurant, but he might have a point about how disgusting this place is. They'd have an easier time firebombing the building than cleaning off five years' worth of grime.

Richie should have called time of death on the machine months ago, but he couldn't bear to call it quits on something else so he kept tinkering with wires and putting band-aids on broken pieces and letting the stupid thing churn away on borrowed time. Now as he wedges a binder clip between two coils, there's a spark followed by the smell of ozone and he wonders if maybe it would have been wise to ask Ebra to unplug the machine before he left.

"Come on, baby," Richie coaxes under his breath, "we both know you've got a few more left in you."

He hears Sydney's chortle long before her white Tokios come into view. If he closes his eyes, he can picture her standing there with her hands on her hips like she's the Wonder Woman of the culinary world, mind undoubtedly spinning with ideas on how best to frame the five-sentence write-up on her deconstructed ossobuco and risotto alla milanese from today's Chicago Sun-Times. There is a comically large shadow box housing a four-by-four square of newspaper print in her future. Richie imagines that Sydney looks infuriatingly smug right now when she snickers, "Are you trying to fix it or fuck it, Richie?"

If Richie had any sense of shame, he'd be mortified, but he has said far more embarrassing things in her presence this week alone so if she's hoping that he'll dart out like he has been electrocuted and start stammering about how that's not what he meant at all, Sydney has seriously underestimated his willingness to double down.

"Why? Got some pipes in need of some special attention, Syd?"

"You really are like HR's worst nightmare, you know that?" she exclaims with the vocal equivalent of a full body shudder.

"Good thing HR is just everyone trying to FaceTime Sug while she declines their calls." Eventually even the most patient among them have given up in favor of texting her a novella. Sugar's reply is always the same: the shrug emoji followed by STILL DON'T WORK THERE!!!

"God, what do you actually do here, Richie?" Syd asks a little meanly. "Like what is your official job title?"

Richie rolls his eyes. Is she moonlighting as a census taker now? Poking his head out from under the ice cream machine, he huffs, "The fuck you mean? I'm doing it right now!" before waving two wooden spoons and a fish spatula at her.

"This is what Fak—"

"Neil Fak does not work here," Richie insists even though Fak has spent more time at The Beef lately than he has in his van peddling whatever get rich quick scheme The Brothers Fak have latched onto this month. In fact, he's almost positive that Fak could fix this stupid thing in twenty minutes, or at least make it so that it would break down for good, but Richie will hand churn ice cream with salt and a bag of ice sooner than he'll ask Fak to look at it.

Ducking his head back under, Richie hits the metal box one last time with a meat tenderizer, which prompts the machine to gurgle with new life. After crossing himself and thanking a God that he's not sure he believes in anymore, Richie is riding high because he didn't have to look like a pathetic dillhole in front of Sydney – not that he cares about her opinions; he really doesn't – and pushes himself out from under the machine to flash a huge shit-eating grin at her.

"Don't gloat. I give it a week before that thing catches on fire."

That's more optimistic than Richie feels about it, but she doesn't need to know that. Snidely, he counters, "It'll be just the excuse you need to serve another critic some elevated Rocky Road panna cotta that is also not on the menu."

Syd leans against the refrigerator and smirks. "Dude, does your back hurt from carrying around all that unnecessary baggage? Good press is good press. Get over it already."

But Richie has never gotten over a single thing in his entire life so why would he start now?

*

They'd had a vision once, him and Mikey, about a place designed to look like a railroad dining car where there was always warm pie in the display case out front and they had the same daily specials every week. Mike called it nostalgia, but Richie knew what he really craved was consistency.

They were sitting on the hood of his car, taking an extended smoke break from the chaos at the Berzatto house. Donna had been caught cheating at poker, which was never a surprise, but this time Lee was being a real prick about repercussions like this was being filmed for The People's Court. Richie knew that if he didn't get Mike out of that house, he'd deck him so he said something about needing a Chicago dog and dragged Mike to Jimmy's Red Hots.

"Americana sells, buddy," Michael said as he scribbled LUNCH CAR with a Bic onto the back of Richie's last unused napkin.

"What would we do for, like, actual food?" Richie asked around a bite of hot dog, already on board because Mike was on board. That's the way it worked with all of Michael's half-baked plans – he could always count on Richie to talk it through with the seriousness of someone who was getting ready to build computer chips with Steve Jobs in his garage.

"Patty melts," Mike answered after a long minute.

Richie shook his head. "Everyone's gluten-free now, cousin."

Michael tapped his chin, deep in thought. "Homemade ice cream in those vintage malt glasses. The flavor would complement whatever special we had that day, but they'd all be just a little weird, you know? Sunday meatloaf with a side of tomato ice cream and candied basil. The hipsters would eat it up."

Richie considered it before sighing. "I could really go for some apple pie a la mode right now."

"Sug hid some Larabars in the kitchen earlier in case Ma burned the roast."

Richie made a face like that was physically painful for him to hear. "Write down ice cream maker on the list of shit we gotta sweet talk Sugar into putting in the budget later."

*

The truce they reach after Syd demonstrates a keen knowledge of the different types of caulk and Richie stops being an ass long enough to admit that he's still trying to figure out how to exist in a world that has already moved on from his best friend splattering his brains into the November sky is extremely short-lived. All it takes is three days and a change to shoestring Parmesan fries as the included side in the Italian Beef combo to upend their détente. Once that fragile understanding is destroyed, it escalates so quickly that Fak starts taking bets on who the customers think will win their shouting matches during the lunch rush and makes enough by the end of the week to buy a previously owned dough hook for Marcus' wonky mixer.

Carmy summons them to his closet-sized office when it becomes clear that this thing won't work itself out. It feels a lot like being called out by the principal for going too hard during recess, but Richie used to have Mike to keep him company for those conversations. Now as Richie and Syd turn the corner at the same time, rather than trying to ram each other off the path like they're driving bumper cars, Richie makes an exaggerated gesture for her to enter first and Syd responds by flashing him the middle finger with flourish.

"I need you two to learn how to get along with each other," Carmy says when they're all crammed in like sardines, "so I'm giving you both tomorrow off to figure it out."

"What about the lunch rush?" Sydney asks, her voice an octave higher than usual like the prospect of PTO is terrifying.

"Thursdays are light. I've got it covered."

"She might be redundant, but I need to be out front to fire the orders," Richie says.

"Gary can handle that."

Richie likes Sweeps, but it's a little offensive that Carmy thinks a washed-up little leaguer can do his job without the proper training (trial and error while Syd rode his ass like El Toro during the lunch service for two days because Richie kept messing up the count – "Tap the item, hit pound, and then the number of orders! It's not goddamn quantum physics, Jerimovich!").

"The regulars depend on me! Besides, Gary doesn't understand the system!"

"Neither do you," Syd mutters under her breath. Catching Richie's frown, she says louder, "At least Gary will make an effort to figure out how to use the iPad."

"Some of us are not slaves to technology—"

Before they can get into another argument, Carmy interrupts with, "See what I mean? I can't keep refereeing this. It's exhausting."

God knows the guy doesn't need more dark circles under his eyes, but it is not in Richie's nature to take these things easily. "And your solution is – what exactly? We tell each other fun facts about ourselves? Do trust falls and some other New Age bullshit you learned at Eleven Madison Park?"

"Whatever you want to get to know each other better. Grab lunch, go to the movies—"

"You want us to get to know each other by silently sitting together in a dark movie theater for three hours?"

Sydney is doing that thing where she talks really slowly so that the other person figures out how idiotic their suggestion is about halfway through the sentence and then has to suffer through the rest of the mortifying thought at half speed. Richie must admit – not to her, obviously – that it is highly effective, but Richie has never had the patience to be anything other than a blunt instrument so he couldn't adopt the technique even if he wanted to. 

"Or whatever," Carmy says, face going red. Bingo! Another gold star on Sydney's Sticker Chart of Emotional Devastation! Carmen's embarrassment is replaced by the lightbulb flickering on in his brain. He slams his palm against the desk with excitement and suggests, "Jimmy still has that Cubs hook up, right cousin?"

Richie's head snaps up to look at Carmy like he just asked him to club a baby seal. Surely, he's not serious. Not when the Red Sox are in town. But when Carmy looks excited, Richie is horrified to realize that Carmy might be a sadist. Blinking so slowly that it must look like the gas fumes have gone to his head, Richie finally finds his voice long enough to say, "That is Mikey's team."

All three pairs of eyes go to the poster of Fenway next to the door at the same time.

"Michael only told you that so you wouldn't root for the Yankees, cousin."

*

One night, Michael called from Rossi's at 2 am to tell Richie that whatever happened, whenever it happened, Richie was a better friend than a jadrool like him deserved. Richie sped through more red lights than he knew existed in Chicago only to find Mike sitting outside the dive bar with his legs crossed like he was meditating. Mike leaned his head against the brick as he took sips from the forty in his hand and the very-much-still-there breath puffed out in front of him.

"Hey cocksucker, you can't just call in the middle of the night and say melodramatic shit like that!" Richie shouted against the wind before plopping down next to Michael, his hazards blinking ten feet away from them. "If I had woken up the baby trying to find my keys, Tiff would have eviscerated me."

"Just telling you that I love you, man," Mike said with an enigmatic smile.

"At two in the morning? Cousin, that's what we call a booty call."

*

Richie assumes when Syd suggests grabbing a bite to get Carmy off their backs that she means going to a tasting menu at some douchey hipster restaurant purporting a sensual experience with every gastronomic offering. But he has learned that Sydney is unassumingly slippery so whenever Richie expects her to juke right, she spins and goes straight down the middle until he's left looking like an idiot who can't keep up.

Instead of parking in front of some blowhard's passion project, Sydney leads them to a pop-up at Gage Park to order a couple of fish tacos and enough varieties of gorditas to feed everyone on a field trip to Adler Planetarium. As they snag the last empty picnic table, Richie has half a mind to lie about a deadly seafood allergy just so Syd will feel guilty about nearly killing him because she couldn't give up the reigns long enough to let him choose for himself, but he finds that he doesn't have the heart for it. She looks so excited when talking about how the chef is constantly switching up the IPAs in the batter so the fish tacos feel like a completely different dish every time.

"That's what I was trying to do with the spaghetti during Family. Respect the past but build off it to create a new future." It's a logline so good that she could sell it for a mint to Disney and spend the rest of her life doing fuck all with her millions. Richie must be stupid enough to say that last bit out loud because she glares at him and mumbles, "Glad we could get real for a second."

Richie feels bad. He really does. Her idea almost sounds nice if he's being honest with himself. Richie knows that Syd didn't mean any disrespect by presenting them with her own spin on the pasta dish they couldn't stop ribbing Carmy about when she first met them. How was she supposed to know that there were years of resentment soaked into that greasy recipe card? Richie apologetically offers, "I'm not trying to bust your lady balls here, Syd."

"Ew."

"I don't know if you've ever lost someone…" Richie's voice trails off to give her an opportunity to fill in the blanks or not. She stays silent so he continues, "But the hardest part is knowing that there are never going to be any more moments. You've met your quota, it's done, limited run over."

"Sure," she says quietly. "I get that."

"So you can appreciate that since there's a finite amount of Mikey remaining in this world, when someone comes in and starts messing with what little we have left of his memory, I can become a little…heated."

Syd is saved from having to point out that there is a difference between heated and homicidal because the guy ferrying plates from the food truck to the different benches has made his way over to them to put down two cups of something called Abuelita's Cocoa and an order of apology chips for the wait being at least another ten minutes.

"In the interest of keeping the peace," Sydney asks once the man has moved away, "what other sacred memories should I steer clear of?"

Richie doesn't know how to answer that. Half a dozen things, big and small, remind him of Mike every day. On Friday, Richie had to slam his fist into the side of a dumpster to keep from having a breakdown after he found a VHS of Caddyshack from middle school in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. Two weeks before that, he almost got into a car crash when the radio station played a Temple of the Dog song and all he could think about was Mikey with long hair crooning into Sugar's hairbrush like he was Eddie Vedder.

At a loss for what to say for the first time since they've met, Richie prolongs the silence by taking a drink from the steaming cup of hot chocolate. It is decent enough, but it could use a little zing so he fishes a silver flask full of whiskey from the inside pocket of his leather jacket and tips two fingers worth into the cup. When Syd raises a perfect eyebrow at his burgeoning alcoholism, Richie quips that he remembered who he was having lunch with and brought reinforcements just in case. "Always be prepared."

"Funny," she scowls as Richie jiggles the flask between them. With an eye roll, she gestures for him to pass it over. Syd whisks the booze into her drink with a stirrer like she's tempering a custard before taking the daintiest of sips as if to let Richie know that she can't even trust his taste on this minor thing and she is sure the combination will be disgusting. It isn't, of course, because there is no conceivable way to mess up the tried-and-true marriage of booze and chocolate so Syd raises her hand to catch the taco guy's attention and motions for him to bring them another round.

"I told you that I'm never wrong."

"You're almost always wrong, Richie, but you know what they say about broken clocks," she counters. "Still, your batting average is terrible."

"And what do you know about baseball, Master Chef?" At least Sydney is sort of grinning now so maybe she has finally learned to find him charming. That or she's really a lightweight when it comes to alcohol. "Can't hit it out of the park without taking a big swing, babe."

Syd is about to say something else – probably that if he calls her babe one more time, she's going to drive his car into a ditch on the way home – when their food is brought out. Richie is fully prepared to be a hater, but the beer-battered fish tacos are so amazing that even he is a little embarrassed at the sounds that come out of his mouth after that first bite. It's so good that he doesn't even roll his eyes when Syd revels, "See? I, on the other hand, am always right."

*

Before the pills and the needles and the coke, there was Mikey and Richie and an Xbox that had "fallen off the back of a Target van during Black Friday." Jimmy told them that he wasn't going to "bankroll this stupid restaurant unless some other sucker was on the hook for at least part of it," but instead of working on their small business loan application so that it didn't look like it was written by a bunch of cafones, Michael and Richie spent three hours paying Halo online with a bunch of jag offs across the country who were probably skipping out on doing their trig homework to lead their unit to victory. They were just about to hand those idiots their asses when Mike pushed his controller away at a very inconvenient moment in the game and immediately got them both killed in an ambush that Richie had seen coming five minutes ago. Before Richie could bitch about what a terrible wingman he was, Mike announced like the king of non-sequiturs that "Carmy doesn't work at the restaurant."

"Not yet anyway."

"Not ever," Mike clarified.

"Didn't you ship him off to the Culinary Institute of America?" Richie asked. According to Carmy, the obvious next step was to bring all his fancy CIA knowledge to The Beef so that they'd have people talking about their flavor profile and the way they revitalized old classics. That had always been the plan so Richie wondered if they'd spent too long hotboxing in Mike's tiny apartment and he needed to crack open a window before they lost any more brain cells. "You think he won't want to grace us lowly peasants with his presence once he graduates and they give him a fancy new chef's hat?"

"I think he'll waste his whole life doing that if we don't stop him." Richie must have looked very confused because for once Michael tried to explain his thought process instead of expecting Richie to follow along blindly. "He shouldn't get stuck here. He deserves to have a good life and do great things."

"What's that say about us?"

Richie could be something if he wanted to be, but all he'd ever wanted to be was a Berzatto.

Mike shook his head. "We are lifers, cousin."

Richie would've argued the point because, God, was there anything more depressing than being a lifer at a struggling sandwich shop? Prison, probably, but at least those lifers got free cable. What was worse was that he had brought this on himself. He had embedded himself so deeply in Mike's family tree that he had managed to inherit all the Berzatto troubles without any of the Berzatto name.

To others, Richie insisted that he only worked at The Beef because he'd heard that babies were expensive and he needed to start saving now before his daughter burst out of Tiff's belly like the creature in Alien. To his best friend, he said that he stuck around because they both knew that without Richie to keep him company, all The Beef's earnings would go to bailing Michael out of jail for putting his fist through someone's face because he was bored. To himself, Richie admitted that he didn't mind going home smelling of roast beef and onions every night if it meant hanging out with his best friend all day.

"Promise me we'll never let him work here, cousin," Mikey begged like he was afraid he'd forget this Kush-inspired vow later.

"Carm's going to be a little bitch about it."

"He'll get over it."

Richie raised his hands in concession. "Your circus, your clowns."

And then five years later, Michael put The Beef in Carmy's name before shooting himself in the head; you'd think that by then Richie would have stopped taking him at his word, but his inability to stop believing in Mikey took Richie out at the knees every time.

*

On the six-month anniversary, Carmy comes to work with his hand wrapped in a makeshift bandage. He's no good to anyone with just one hand so he and Richie spend the morning out back, passing a bottle of Jack between them and avoiding talking about Mikey until they are too drunk to care.

"I should have been here," Carmy says, the combination of grief and booze-before-breakfast turning him loose-lipped and honest. "Maybe things would have been different…"

Richie shakes his head. "I was here and it didn't make any difference, Carm."

"But I was his brother," Carmy insists and it should sting more than it does. "I should have been here. Why didn't he want me here?"

Richie doesn't know what to say to make Carmy feel better so he doesn't say anything at all.

*

The first officer on the scene was this guy named Kevin who was in the same bowling league as Mike and Richie. They weren't exactly friends – because Kevin was a cop and Richie rarely found himself on the right side of the law – but they were friendly enough that after Kevin got through dry heaving from the sight of all that blood near the sign for the State Street Bridge, he dialed the last number on Michael's phone and told Richie that he had some bad news.

The first thing Richie did afterwards was ask, "Do you need me to make a positive identification?" like some nerd who spent too much time watching Law & Order. He was grasping onto the thought that maybe Kevin had gotten it wrong and it wasn't Michael at all, even though he'd had a bad feeling all night that he kept chalking up to the anxiety he felt whenever he and Mike fought.

"Not necessary, Rich. In fact, it would be best if you didn't come here," Kevin said in the most professional voice he could muster. After what felt like too many beats for the line to still be connected, he added, "I'm really sorry, man. Is there someone else I should call or…?"

"No, no. That's fine," Richie said, hanging up before Kevin could tell him to come by the station tomorrow to take care of paperwork. He sat on the couch and stared at his phone screen like he was waiting for Mike to call back laughing at Richie's gullibility, how all it took was promising Kevin Who Couldn't Bowl a Strike to Save His Life that he'd give him free Italian Beef sandwiches for a month if he helped him with this one prank. Richie waited and waited and waited for a call that did not come.

*

Sydney has been on a tear all day like the only thing on her vision board is to make Richie feel like shit – "Good luck with that, sweetheart. I've had a lifetime of living with my feelings of inadequacy" – but Richie's not taking it too personally because Syd has been in a bad mood ever since Carmy stressed how much they needed today to go well for survival.

There's something off in the air, an eerie calm before a tsunami. When twenty pre-order slips spit out from the printer in the span of three minutes and Carmy has a meltdown so gnarly that the aftershocks can probably be felt in Des Moines, no one is really surprised. Carmy has taken on so much that it was only a matter of time before adding one more mistake would topple his precarious balancing act completely. It could've happened at a better time, but it makes karmic sense that all their calamities would hit at once.

Carmy is in the middle of shrieking this is not happening and fire everything we have and fuck fuck FUCKING GODDAMMIT when Syd does the mature millennial thing and storms into the back room before she is tempted to throw a meat cleaver at Carmy's head for his extreme reaction to what is probably a design flaw on the DoorDash website. Carmy, in turn, does the Berzatto thing of stomping after the person walking away from him while shouting that they do not need this right now and he'd said – he'd fucking said – that it was too early to get into the online food ordering sphere, but of course she had to push her Jerry Maguire mission statement and tempt him with pie charts in color that showed how quickly they could get out of the red with a few simple improvements like they weren't so deep in it that the restaurant was practically a hotel from a Stephen King novel.

The door slams shut behind them so Richie only hears apologetic mumbles (from her) and muffled screaming (from him) until Syd, tired of falling on her sword, starts giving it right back to Carmy. The staff stands around the kitchen trying to look busy, but they're all kids wondering if they will need to choose teams in the impending divorce. Sydney bursts out of the office with Carmy still hot on heels like they're a shuttle with faulty solid rocket boosters that refuse to separate. He nearly bangs into her when she stops suddenly to whip around and explode, "When are you going to figure out that fixing this place will not fix you?" 

The only sound in the aftermath of that truth bomb is the au jus simmering away on the stove. As the silence stretches on, Tina and Marcus simultaneously look to Richie to fix this because by then Carmy is so red and breathing so fast that he is dangerously close to hyperventilating. Richie's not really a fixer so he does the first thing he can think of: he looks at the clock again, claps his hands together, and says, "Ten minutes 'til open, chefs!"

However they might feel about each other, this is a language that restaurant people understand. Once the countdown begins, everyone is back at their stations to shout out finished dishes and call for hands to start packing. It goes about as well as can be expected when everything is an absolute clusterfuck, but never let it be said that shit can't get so much worse at any given moment. Richie's just trying to be helpful with the stupid vegetables like Carmy wants, like Syd probably wants too if she'd take her head out of her ass long enough to acknowledge that he's doing A Nice Thing. But those two Noma Kool-Aid drinking assholes are too busy taking everything personally while Richie is trying to run a goddamn business so of course it figures that when Richie tries to be a team player and clean up someone else's colossal fuck up, he gets stabbed for his troubles.

"This will need stitches," Ebraheim says seriously as he presses a gauze pad against the small of Richie's back, right above his ass. Richie doesn't do great with blood and he's really trying not to freak out that Ebra the war vet with triage experience thinks he needs to go to the hospital for this.

"We don't have time for stitches. Anyone got super glue?"

"This isn't a hardware store," Fak squeaks out because he's the one who used up the last of the super glue.

"Maybe we can seal it together with simple syrup," Marcus suggests like Richie's body is a fucking gingerbread house.

"Ay cabron, don't give him ideas!" Tina wipes her hands on the front of her apron just to piss off Carmy before peeking at Richie's injury. He's bleeding out while everyone gawks at him like a zoo animal. Is it hot in here or is Richie going into shock? If he dies, does he trust any of these idiots to come up with a cooler sounding injury to tell his daughter about than that her dad got stabbed almost in the ass because his co-worker was feeling spiteful and didn't call out behind?

"Sydney!" Carmy is so loud that the silverware rattles in their crocks. 

Sydney's got her arms raised when she perp walks out to the front of the house like she hasn't already stabbed a dude and disposed of the murder weapon. Richie gives her what he hopes is a positively withering glare, but he can't be sure because his vision is swimming.

"It was an accident."

Richie's still got enough energy to shout, "That's bullshit!" at her. Call it a second wind.

"Enough!" Carmy shouts. Taking a deep breath, he finally finds his inside voice and tells Sydney, "Chef, please drive Richie to the hospital."

"That's a very bad idea," Gary says from where he's been spinning on one of the counter stools.

"So she can finish the job?" Richie yelps before looking at Carmy like he just stabbed Richie through the heart. "Et tu, Brute?"

"Stop being dramatic," Carmy says. "Syd's the only one who can drive stick, remember?"

Sydney rolls her eyes when Marcus mentions that it's like asking Laurie Strode to go on a road trip with Michael Myers. She lifts her right fist in the air and brings it down a few times in a stabbing motion, which everyone finds so funny even though Richie is probably dying in front of their eyes.

"Why can't we call an ambulance?"

"With what health insurance, cousin?" Carmy shoots back. "Syd, take care of this mess. The rest of you, get back to work. We still have a restaurant to run."

And it's not like Sydney can exactly argue that this is not her mess to clean up so she sighs like someone just sprung a Doctors Without Borders stint on her and leaves to get her jacket while Richie hobbles out back with Ebra's help. He's about to ask the older man for some pointers on what to do if someone's coming at him with a mandoline blade, but Syd is already walking to the car by then. She tosses Richie his jacket – "Everyone knows your combination is 420, douchebag," she snaps just as he's about to ask how she got into his locker – and jiggles the gear shift before peeling out of the parking lot.

On the radio, the DJ is commemorating the anniversary of the Dave Matthews Band's tour bus dumping eight hundred pounds of shit on the passengers of a Chicago River Cruise by playing Crash from start to finish this hour. Richie turns down the volume as Dave starts wailing about balls and chains. He tilts, somewhat painfully, so that he can get a good look at Syd's side profile when he says, "So you're not even going to apologize?"

"It's superficial."

"The dude who fought in a Somalian war doesn't seem to think so!"

"Maybe he didn't want to get up close and personal with your ass, Richie."

"Fucking unbelievable," he mutters under his breath.

Sydney rolls her eyes. "Okay, here's your apology: I am so sorry that I didn't hit anything vital, Richie. Next time I promise to do better."

"What the fuck, Syd? That didn't make me feel better at all!"

Sydney jerks the wheel to make the most illegal right turn he's ever seen. Now in addition to worrying about sepsis, he's got to be on the lookout to make sure that she doesn't kill them while auditioning for the new Fast & Furious movie. Richie should've taken his chance with the debt collectors.

"I do not exist to make you and Carmy feel better about the empty husks of your lives!" Sydney exclaims angrily, punctuating every other word with a honk that sends the cars in front of them scattering into different lanes. By the time she pulls up in front of the main entrance at Northwestern Memorial and tosses his keys to the valet ("Damn it, Syd, you got valet money?"), Richie is just thankful to be alive to be honest.

*

Richie used to be terrible with needles until Mike graduated from pills to heroin and Richie had to keep Narcan in his locker at work. After that, the thought of a professional sticking him for bloodwork was a lot less scary. When Tiff asked Richie to take Eva to her four-year-old well child check, he was very good about holding his toddler while those vampiric motherfuckers took so much blood to make sure she wasn't anemic that Richie was sure she developed an iron deficiency immediately afterwards.

Tiff was surprised when they came home from the pediatrician's office without any meltdown stories (by him or by Eva), especially since Richie had almost passed out when she was in labor and they'd asked him if he wanted to stay while the anesthesiologist put in the epidural. Richie almost told her that she had Mikey to thank for his newfound chill, but then he'd have to explain why that was and some elephants in the room were better left unaddressed.

*

Before it happens, there is a distinct possibility that he'll pass out when the nurse injects lidocaine into the muscle around his stab wound to numb the area. Thankfully he doesn't because if Sydney saw that, he'd have to beg the doctor coming in to stitch him up to accidentally nick a vital artery since the notion that Syd wouldn't bring it up in every future argument that they had was preposterous.

"Can I get something for the pain?" Richie asks his nurse.

"I'll get you a Tylenol," Nurse Not Carol Hathaway informs him, which is not at all what he was asking for. The state of healthcare today is a travesty. She's about to leave the curtained off area – probably to offer a gunshot victim some Bengay – when Sydney asks how long this will take.

"Am I not dying fast enough for you, Sydney?" Richie asks, rolling his eyes.

"No one is dying, sir," Not Carol replies dryly. To Sydney, she elaborates, "This is not very deep. It'll probably be fifteen minutes and then you can take your boyfriend home."

"Oh Christ, no!" Syd exclaims in horror. "Is that the vibe I give off?"

"We're not dating," Richie pipes up from the bed far less rudely. "She's the one who stabbed me."

Nurse Not Carol looks back and forth between them as if contemplating how much worse her night is going to get if she needs to get a social worker and the cops involved. But before she can launch into asking a series of questions to make sure this will be a safe discharge, Sydney clarifies that they work in a kitchen and Richie is short on skill and even shorter on etiquette. It really shouldn't be enough, but one look at Richie and Not Carol believes it immediately.

"I have time to go take care of something, right?" Sydney asks, all sugar and spice and everything nice to Nurse Ratched, who looks like she is more than willing to be a co-conspirator in Syd's next crime.

"Take care of something?" Richie repeats, flabbergasted. He didn't exactly expect Sydney to be Florence Nightingale, but he thought she'd at least hold his hand or something. Now, he's beginning to think that she only agreed to fit his post-knifing care into her schedule because she wanted to borrow his wheels to run errands.

"Of course, sweetheart," Not Carol says, squeezing Sydney's hand like she's the victim before leaving them.

"I'll be back in twenty," Syd tells him.

"Are you shitting me?"

"You'll be fine," she says, already picking up her tote from the lone chair in the room so she can make her fast getaway.

That's not the point, is it? As his hospital paperwork appointed support person, shouldn't she be present to support him when the time comes? Sydney doesn't pay that tiny detail any mind as she calls over her shoulder that Richie should behave so they don't run his name through the system and slap the cuffs on him for unpaid parking tickets. Richie didn't even know that was a possibility until she mentioned it, so he crosses his arms over his chest and sulks that she is the absolute worst.

Unsurprisingly, it does turn out to be fine. They give him a Xanax to take the edge off and the ER intern is green enough to be gentle as she sews him up, even going so far as to talk him through the highlights of this afternoon's Cubs game to take his mind off the situation. Sydney shows up just as he's signing the discharge paperwork and congratulates him on surviving.

"No thanks to you," he grumbles before lifting the right corner of his shirt to show her a piece of dressing covered by clear Tegaderm that has been taped to his lower back near his hip.

"I thought you got stabbed in the butt."

The neutral wording of that statement does not go unnoticed by Richie. Like Sydney had nothing to do with it. Like she wouldn't have stabbed him again if she couldn't go touch grass while Richie was getting patched up.

"Turns out the pain in my ass has less to do with a chef's knife and more to do with the chef wielding it."

"Clever," she faux coos as the transport orderly pushes Richie's wheelchair through a series of elaborate shortcuts to lead them to an elevator that deposits them closest to the lobby exit. Much to the annoyance of the security guards outside, Sydney has left Richie's car on idle right at the pick-up entrance so they're eager to shove him in the passenger's seat and wave at Syd to get the hell out of the lane so the cars honking behind them can move up in the queue. For her part, Sydney is all too happy to cooperate without paying for parking – maybe she fits in perfectly at The Beef, Richie thinks – as she guns it down the winding pavement to leave the hospital in their dust.

Richie nods off for a bit – he had convinced the intern to give him at least a one-time dose of Tylenol with Codeine – and when he wakes up to look at the clock on the dash, he realizes two things: Syd's been driving for twenty minutes longer than she should have in order to get to his place from Northwestern Memorial and Syd probably has no idea where he lives unless she texted Carmy for the address, which seems highly unlikely.

"This is not the way to my apartment."

"I know. It's the way to mine."

Richie groans as they drive down a block of row houses. "Are you going to get your dad to beat me up or something?"

"Welcome to the twenty-first century, dickhead! If I wanted you to get beaten up, I would do it myself!"

"Oh snap! Move over, Don Corleone!"

"Besides, my father is a pacifist. Thankfully, he's out of town at an architecture conference so there will be no witnesses to your demise."

Richie raises an eyebrow. Normally if a woman offers to take him back to hers where there's no one around to bother them, it's promising. But this is Sydney and she has already shivved him once today so it feels a lot more like he's in Gone Girl.

"Before you get any ideas," Richie starts nervously, "I have it on good authority that double jeopardy does not work the way Ashley Judd wants you to think it does."

Syd rolls her eyes.

"Soup," she finally says before jerking her thumb in the direction of the backseat where there's a brown paper bag full of groceries on the floor. "You seem like the kind of guy who only has Lucky Charms and expired milk in his house."

Richie resents that comment and reminds Syd that he does have a kid that he feeds three days a week and, actually, if she must know, Eva's going through an Apple Jacks phase right now and they switched to soy when he realized it had a longer best-by date. None of that helps Richie's case, of course, but she has already parked in front of her house before they have time to get into which tier of loser she thinks he occupies.

The Adamu house is a nice Chicago-style bungalow with olive green shingles and a row of hydrangeas planted along the front. Richie limps up the stairs and barely has time to reach the front porch before she's shoving the bag of groceries into his chest so she can dig through her gigantic tote bag for the house keys. Once inside, Sydney shrugs off her jacket and throws down all her stuff on the recliner in the living room like Eva after soccer practice.

"Oh hey, are those your folks?" Richie says, peering at a picture in front of Cinderella Castle with Syd in an oversized Belle t-shirt flashing a toothy smile at the camera while her parents hold up bunny ears on top of her Mickey ears in the background. He tilts his head in her direction and then leans over to get a better look. "You look like her."

"Yeah, that's how genetics works, Darwin," Syd shoots back before pushing him towards the kitchen.

It's exactly like what he'd expect her kitchen to look like – functional but oft-used, organized in a way that only makes sense to a neurotic chef. Her potholders look well-loved and there's a hastily scribbled list of pantry staples she's running low on stuck to the refrigerator door with a Chicago skyline magnet.

"I don't like chicken noodle," Richie says just to have something to say as Syd starts taking produce out of the bag.

"Oh fuck off, I wasn't asking for requests!" she laughs. "Go watch Blue's Clues or something."

Richie narrows his eyes at her. "That's very '50s housewife of you, Syd, but I think I'll just stay and help with your apology soup."

Now it's Sydney's turn to arch her eyebrows as she teases, "You think I'm going to poison you, Richie?"

"I don't…not think you're going to poison me."

Sydney beams. It is concerning how that seems to have made her night. Richie isn't a skittish guy by nature, but he insists that Syd let him dice the vegetables, which only seems to amuse her even more when she takes out a butcher knife and starts butterflying the chicken breasts. He supposes it's some kind of progress that Syd lets Richie park himself on a breakfast stool and get to work chopping celery while she pops a quart container of homemade stock into a pot. Richie has finished the onions and carrots and is mincing a knob of garlic with the flat of his blade when he finally thinks she is deep enough in the cooking zone that she won't freak out if he asks what the hell happened today.

"Just Carmy being," and here she waves her hands haphazardly as if searching for a word that is not yet part of the English language, "Carmy."

If he thinks she's going to elaborate, he's lucky not to be holding his breath for it. The curry chicken sizzles on the cast iron pan while Sydney absently shakes a box of Israeli couscous in her hands like it's a maraca. It's so rare for Richie to be the better communicator in any given situation that he almost doesn't know what to do with his newfound power.

"He wasn't always so…Carmy, you know?" Richie says. They might have their issues, but he'd hate for anyone else to think less of Carmy because they don't understand that the amount of dysfunction infused into his childhood was enough to color in the rings of a sequoia tree. He doesn't want to lie so Richie has to reach back pretty far to find a counterexample before adding, "He was a pretty laid-back baby."

"He's a very tightly wound adult," Sydney counters, clearly not in the mood for forgiveness just yet. "It's all or nothing with him all the time. Everything means something other than what it's supposed to mean and we're all just supposed to, I don't know, read his mind?"

Ah, the Michael shaped elephant in the room – in every room. Richie knows it well. He'd try to explain this to Sydney, but his brain shuts down whenever they get anywhere near it so the best he can offer is that Michael cast a long shadow.

Michael was Michael and Carmy is Carmy and Richie has no idea who the hell he's supposed to be, but it's doubtful that he's going to figure it out in Sydney's kitchen right now. He doesn't even really want to, but suddenly the idea that he might be this aimless forever feels like too much and he excuses himself to go barf in the bathroom. Richie takes the stairs two at a time and practically tumbles through the first door on the right.

There are so many money plants dangling from planters attached to the bathroom ceiling that Richie feels like he's Max trying unsuccessfully to find happiness among the Wild Things. He splashes his face with water and stares at his reflection in the mirror for so long that it becomes blurry. When he finally snaps out of it, Richie has been up there for a good half hour and is sitting in the dry bathtub with his head in his hands.

"I wasn't snooping!" Richie announces as soon as he walks back into the kitchen. "I fell asleep!"

"On the can?"

"In the tub." Syd raises an eyebrow. "Or, okay, I zoned out. Don't ask."

"I'm asking."

"It was like a fugue state." Syd sounds slightly alarmed so Richie waves off her concern by telling her that he might have been having a panic attack. It is not lost on him that every bit of clarifying information he adds makes this sound worse than it is. "It happens sometimes when I'm thinking of Michael."

"You were thinking about Michael?"

"When am I not thinking about Michael?" Richie chuckles. Sydney looks sad for him, which is exactly the direction he did not want this evening to take. His brain searches for something less pathetic to say – something like "it's because Mike would have loved the Romancing the Stone jungle aesthetic going on in your bathroom" or maybe something unrelated to his dead best friend like "did you mean for it to feel like Jumanji every time someone went to take a piss?" – but what he settles on is "I miss him a lot."

"Of course," Syd allows because what else is she supposed to say?

The energy in the room is dropping exponentially so Richie does his best to shake it off by telling her that Michael only knew how to heat up soup from a can so it's time to see what's she got. Sydney perks up as she pushes a bowl towards Richie. He can feel her eyes on him the moment he picks up the soup spoon that she laid out. This is the part that Richie hates about being around chefs – they're always watching as he eats their dishes. It's like hearing that it's good is not enough; they've got to scrutinize all his micro-expressions to really believe his review.

Richie has a spoonful. And then another. And then another. He really wasn't lying when he told Syd that he hated chicken noodle soup, but this is in a league of its own – the couscous thickens the soup while the zing of garam masala and curry powder in the chicken elevates it to another level entirely. It is a soup with the essence of a stew and Richie would fake any number of illnesses if it meant getting to eat this all the time. But he doesn't say any of that to Syd as she waits for his assessment because he can't let her start getting a big head now.

"The vegetables are expertly diced," he finally offers with a grin.

"Oh, you're such an asshole," Syd laughs, throwing a kitchen towel at his face.

"It's good."

"But…?"

Richie limps over to her spice cabinet and runs his index finger along the labels until he finds a repurposed salsa jar labeled red chili flakes. Grabbing a four-finger pinch from the container, his hand hovers over the pot as Sydney warns him not to fucking dare.

"Needs a little Polish pizzazz," Richie laughs as she rushes over to try to knock the chili flakes out of his hand. He's got at least six inches on her though so Richie holds his right hand out of reach and laughs, a surefire way to piss off the vertically challenged in any given situation.

Richie goes over her head to sprinkle at least some of the flakes in the general vicinity of the soup pot, but she blocks the stove like a seasoned goalie. He's not sure how someone so small can take up so much of his visual field at once, but Richie's arm has almost snuck into heavily guarded airspace when Syd's hand curls against the side of his neck like she's about to throttle him. There's a split second when he thinks that she's going to finish the job before her head tilts up and she drags his face down. She must be on her tiptoes because there's not much distance to cover before he's kissing her in no time, the chili flakes falling from his open fingers like autumn leaves. Richie doesn't really know what's happening at first and then he doesn't really care once she kisses him back, her teeth applying just enough pressure on his bottom lip to make it sting. It's not until her hand is sliding under his shirt to press them even closer to each other that Richie feels the piercing pain shoot up from where she catches his bandage and he exclaims, "Ow, fuck."

With those two words, whatever frozen bubble of time they were in where this wasn't an extremely bad idea pops and it's like they can't jump away from each other fast enough. 

"Sorry! That was…" Sydney is doing her best to look anywhere except at his face, which makes it terribly convenient that he has a sudden newfound interest in the backsplash. "I've been in a weird headspace all day and—"

"I'm on drugs," Richie blurts out. It's so ridiculous that it diffuses some of the awkward tension between them while Richie moves back a step so gigantic that he knocks his freshly sutured side right against the breakfast nook. Sydney almost reaches out like she thinks Richie will fall when he winces, but then thinks better of it at the last minute. Her hand awkwardly lingers between them for a split second before unceremoniously dropping to her side. "I should go."

"I'll grab my coat."

"It's cool," he says, waving off her offer. "I can drive myself."

"You're on drugs."

"Tylenol," he lies. "Hardly the gateway to an opium den. Thanks for the company and, uh, soup."

Neither one of them mentions that he had three sips before they were shoving their tongues down each other's throats. That hardly feels like the point when Richie is busy setting a record for how quickly he can whip towards the exit. He's almost across the threshold to the living room when Sydney calls for him to wait a second. Richie squeezes his eyes shut and wonders what level of hell he's currently in that she wants to do a debrief on what just happened without the aid of any booze. With a heavy sigh, he turns around only to find her shoving a quart container of soup into his hands.

"I can't eat all of it."

"Right. Great. Thanks." It's so awkward that Richie can't leave it like this if his brain has any hope of replaying anything else for the rest of the evening so he forces himself to crack a grin and add, "It'll keep my carton of expired milk company."

Syd snickers. For a second, it almost seems like she's going to tell him to text her that he's alive when he makes it home, but then she snaps her mouth closed at the last moment.

*

The night that Mikey died, Richie called six times before Carmy finally answered at three in the morning, New York time, and even then, it was only after Richie did it from Mikey's phone because he got tired of waiting for Carmy to return his increasingly frustrated texts.

Expecting to hear Michael's gruff voice on the other end when he picked up on the second ring, Carmy answered with, "So you're the only one who gets to average two weeks to return a text these days, asshole?"

Richie had been with Michael enough to know the familiar beats of this conversation. Mike never paid attention to time zones or work hours when he called. They could be getting wontons in the middle of the night from the only place that was still open after the bars closed or driving over to Lou's at the crack of dawn to renegotiate their beef order pricing when Michael hit Carmy's contact card while turning on West Ontario, popped his phone into the cup holder, and laughed as the kid grumbled that he had just fallen asleep.

"Hear that, Rich?" Michael would say with the speaker on. "Baby brother's too fancy to shoot the shit with us meat-and-potatoes guys."

"You're the one who wanted me to become cultured, moron," Carmy always replied, the joy in his voice evident through the shitty reception and static.

Michael would immediately ignore his complicity in their time difference to tell him that one of the Faks got arrested for indecent exposure at a Blackhawks game last night ("Jesus fuck, please tell me it wasn't Neil," Carmy groaned) or how he'd heard from Cicero that Claire was going to med school now so maybe they could be cultured assholes together ("You could be Mister Doctor Claire Bear, Carm," Richie offered with a laugh to which Carmy replied, "That's not even remotely how that works, dipshit!") and on and on it went with Michael filling eight hundred miles of distance with mundane details until it felt like Carmy was in the car with them.

But on the night that Michael died and Richie called to break the news, he didn't have any words to occupy that hole he was about to create in Carmy's heart. All he could do was clear his throat and say, "Carmen, we need to talk."

"Richie?" Carmy asked, confused at the change up in their normal routine. "Hey man, I know you tried to call earlier, but we had a packed house tonight—"

"Are you at work?" He didn't need Carmy to slice his hand open while sharpening his knives or jump in front of a train when Richie told him the news. "You sitting down?"

"Sitting down?" Carmy laughed. "When have you ever known anyone to sit down in a kitchen, cousin?"

"Where are you?"

"I'm walking home."

Richie imagined a dazed Carmy not looking where he was going and stepping into traffic on Broadway, the yellow cabs playing hacky sack with his body while spectators watched like they were transfixed by a new performance piece.

"Okay, call me when you get home," Richie asked like a coward. By then Michael had already been dead three hours, what was another twenty minutes?

"You tryin' to build up anticipation for something?"

Maybe Richie just didn't want to tell him. He'd done this so many times already that night that it should've been easy by this time, but Richie couldn't get his mouth to form around the words "Michael is dead" when talking to Carmy. He had to get it right – this is what Carmy was going to remember years from now. But Richie couldn't get enough air into his lungs, couldn't figure out the right combination of words to make this less horrible.

"Cousin, just call me—"

But Carmy's joking tone had vanished when insisted, "Quit the foreplay and tell me what's going on."

"I really think it's better if—"

Carmy's voice had gone tiny when he finally asked, "Cousin, why do you have Michael's phone?"

*

Sydney is never late to work, but she is late to work the day after her attempted homicide. Carmy thinks it's about his freakout, but Richie spends the entire morning worried that he has fucked it up and now she has decided that leaving without any notice is better than dealing with the aftermath of whatever that was. Since Richie can't pace to get his mind off things, he does the next best thing by regaling everyone with the brave story of how he got six stitches without any pain meds. Syd walks in two hours late mumbling about a signal issue on the L when Tina says, "Sydney, Richie was just telling us about what happened last night."

Syd's eyes are as big as flying saucers when they snap to his face in horror but he can't exactly tell her to chill out because that is not the story that he's telling so Richie does the next best thing and cuts off her "It's not at all what it sounds like" by booming, "So they call in the doctor and by now Syd has, like, fully dipped."

"Harsh," Fak says.

"Well, she thought they'd called the cops about a mysterious knife wound."

Syd seems to catch on because she interrupts him with an "It is entirely understandable if you remember that Richie is an idiot." Everyone laughs and, for a second, it feels like Richie's back to volleying long-winded stories about Bill Murray with Michael. He pushes down the pang in his chest and continues his tall tale.

"So now I'm thinking that she's getting me the best vending machine snack this hospital has to offer, right? Wrong! She shows up twenty minutes later with a cup of cranberry juice and a packet of stale saltines that she stole from the nursing station! And I'm like, 'Where are the Oreos, sweetheart? Where's my chicken noodle soup?'"

He sneaks a glance at Syd to see a faint blush color her cheeks. Clearing her throat, she interrupts his photo finish ending by telling them, "As we were leaving, the nurse told Richie to buy a pack of band-aids because it would've been much cheaper."

While the rest of them argue about Ebra's triaging skills, Richie watches Sydney bump her shoulder against Carmy's and guiltily ask how lunch service went yesterday.

"It was fucked, but most of the customers blamed DoorDash for the problem so I think we might be okay," Carmy tells her with a shrug. "We are, right? Okay?"

"Yeah, we're good."

Carmy is so relieved that he actually smiles. Richie had forgotten what that looked like. It figures that Syd would be the one to bring it out of him. There's something disarming about her that reminds him of Mikey back when he still thought things could work out if he wanted it enough.

"Cousin, I'm glad you're okay," Carmy says to snap him out of his revere. "Now maybe we can all get back to work so we have food to serve people at lunchtime?"

There are a couple of groans as everyone starts to file into the kitchen. Sydney hangs back until it's just her and Richie before observing, "Well, now I know to take your stories with a grain of salt."

"Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction," he answers pointedly.

Sydney takes a deep breath like she has been practicing for this all morning. "Look, can we just—"

"Yes, definitely," Richie agrees with an emphatic nod of the head. "Let's definitely just…"

Richie mimes closing an imaginary zipper on his mouth, securing the lock, and throwing the key into the ocean. Syd looks relieved, which is both hurtful and accurate, but it's better this way. She might just be the glue to keep this place together a little longer and Richie's not going to be the one to fuck it up. Even if he wants to know what was going through her head when she kissed him, the price of having that knowledge is too steep.

*

They were smoking behind the restaurant before closing when Mike told Richie that he'd figured out the solution to his cash flow problem.

"By taking care of your drug problem?" Richie asked hopefully.

The only response he got was Mikey laughing it off and assuring him that he had it handled. Richie was skeptical.

"I've got a plan," Mike said. Richie trusted his toddler to take better care of herself than Mike these days so this did not feel promising. After playing a quick drum beat on the top of his thighs, Mike announced, "We're playing Firestarter with the restaurant."

"For God's sake," Richie muttered under his breath. "That's your big plan, Mike? They don't give out insurance money to people who haven't paid their premiums in four months!"

"Well, fuck," Mike said before flicking his cigarette butt to the ground and pulling Richie towards the building. "Our fire extinguishers work, right?"

As they ran back into the restaurant, Richie felt like he was one of those assholes playing the violin as the Titanic took on water.

*

Richie Jerimovich is no stranger to avoiding things – the seriousness of Tiff's whatever with that idiot Frank; Mikey; the bills for his divorce attorney that are dangerously close to going to collections; Mikey; the fact that his kid is at an age now where she's starting to understand that he might be a loser and the only way to stave it off for a little bit longer is to convince Cicero to score him Taylor Swift tickets; Mikey; how intensely awkward it is when the vendors ask to talk to Richie like this hell hole is his; MikeyMikeyMikey – so he knows when someone else is going to great lengths to avoid something, namely him. It's not like things with Sydney are weirder in any appreciable way where it is obvious to others around them, especially since those around them would all agree that it is a double rainbow kind of day whenever Richie and Syd don't interact with each other.

But it's weird enough that it's throwing him off balance. Even Carmy, who is not exactly the most perceptive dude on the planet, asks Richie what he did to piss off Syd and then, before Richie even has time to be offended, tells him, "You know what? I don't want to know. Just fix it please?" Richie's not one to play the victim card, but in this case, he is the victim so he doesn't know why the onus is on him.

Carmy has the best intentions when he lets everyone else go home early before snapping his fingers like he forgot that the way a kitchen functions is that everyone helps with the cleanup before fucking off to go do whatever.

"I gotta go to a meeting," he says because it's not like they're going to tell him to put his mental health on the backburner to help scrub burnt tomato sauce out of the pots. "You're good, right?"

Richie flashes two thumbs up and immediately hates himself for it. He really needs to get those Taylor Swift tickets for Eva before he starts wearing chinos and making dad jokes. The moment Carmy is gone, Syd points to a stack of pans and says, "I got this," which is ridiculous because that's going to take at least an hour of elbow grease to get through, but she has already grabbed Bar Keepers Friend and a frying pan that has seen better days so Richie's not exactly going to fight her on it. Rolling his eyes, he fills a square Cambro container with soapy water and grabs a dishtowel to get to work on the stoves. The sound is too tiny for Richie to be able to make out what's playing through Syd's earphones but knowing her it's probably a Bon Appetit podcast about exciting Halibut dishes for every season.

Richie knows it's petty when he saunters over to gloat that since the counters are all now spotless, would she like his assistance to get through the Leaning Tower of Dirty Pans?

"I'm good," Syd says with a quick smile that is as infuriating as it is fake.

Richie tugs on the wire to pluck the headphones out of her ears before asking, "Yo, why are you being weird?"

It is comical the way Sydney looks around the empty kitchen as if to ask who, me? like they are not the only two idiots left doing scut work on a Friday night. "I'll close up, okay? You can go."

"I'm not leaving you here to close alone," Richie scoffs. He's an asshole, but he's not that much of an asshole. "Just let me help you clean this—"

"Please don't try to be a gentleman now."

"What is this trying bullshit? I'm always a gentleman." Richie pauses to see if lightning will strike him down on the spot while Sydney honest-to-God cackles. Narrowing his eyes, Richie points his index finger and says, "You're the one who stabbed me, Edward Scissorhands?"

"Are you telling me that was the first time you've gotten stabbed?"

That's not the point. "You stabbed me and I didn't make a big deal out of it, right? I let bygones be bygones—"

"You bring it up every day!"

"It was fucking traumatic!" he shouts. "But, you know, water under the bridge. And I didn't tell anyone about you kissing me—"

"I kissed you because you were sad and I felt sad for you," Sydney says, which does not do great things for Richie's ego, that's for sure. She ignores his wince to continue, "And you kissed me back so let's not even pretend like—"

"It was the gentlemanly thing to do!" he asserts, not paying attention to the space around him when he throws his hands up in the air and knocks over the mountain of stock pots Syd has left to clean.

"Fucking wonderful!" With a glare, Sydney shouts, "Move!" before pushing him out of the way so she can start to pick up his mess.

"So fucking hostile," Richie mumbles as he ducks around her to finish washing the braiser she was working on.

"What the fuck are you doing?"

Syd springs up from the floor like a whack-a-mole. Her eyes shoot fireballs at Richie.

"Helping," he says cheekily, now fully committed to seeing how far he can push her before she loses it completely. "You gonna stab me again?"

"Don't tempt me," she snaps before taking a gigantic step into Richie's personal space.

He knows it'll infuriate her so Richie doesn't even glance at her as he slowly puts the pan on the drying rack, surveying the nearby counters for sharp objects before deeming that it's safe to turn the ninety degrees to finally get face to face with her. They're warring generals in an extremely intense game of Battleship. Sydney looks like a volcano that is about to erupt when Richie quirks his mouth up in a smirk and whistles, "You've got a real problem with teamwork, you know that?"

"Get out of my face, Richie," she grits out like she'd murder him right now if she thought she could get away with it – maybe even if she didn't think she could get away with it.

For such a small person, she is quite intimidating. Richie is tempted to save himself the hospital bill by stepping aside and letting Syd continue her insane quest to spend another hour cleaning while he goes out for a smoke, but then at the last moment a dangerous flash flickers across Syd's eyes before her gaze lands on his lips for the briefest of moments.

Richie lifts his eyebrows in surprise. "Huh."

"What?" Syd bites back with performative fury.

Richie feels the buzz of static electricity going up his neck as he grins infuriatingly at her. "What are you so mad about, Sydney?"

"Your existence in general."

"Basic," Richie snorts. "I think you want me to kiss you again and that makes you furious."

"You're delusional," Sydney derides.

"I'm pretty lucid right now."

Richie steps close enough that they could do the tango if she wanted to. But somehow, Richie doesn't think Syd's got ballroom dancing on her mind. She looks like she's rip-roaring mad, breath coming out in furious little huffs as she stares at him like they're in a blinking contest. Richie waits and waits until there it is, that darting glance to follow his Adam's apple as he swallows before dragging her gaze back up to his mouth. If Syd's weighing her options, it doesn't take her long because Richie's barely got a chance to flash a megawatt smile at her before she's grabbing a fistful of his t-shirt to pull him down so she can hiss in his ear, "You're such a fucking asshole."

"Actually, I think we've already established that I'm a gentleman," Richie corrects before breaching that last bit of space to kiss her. As far as second first kisses go, it feels like a war in which neither party is willing to concede an inch, frantic in a way that Richie always feels and Sydney almost never is.

Everything is the right kind of bruising pressure, all tongue and teeth. Richie doesn't know if they're going to fuck each other or kill each other, but he finds that he doesn't care when he stops kissing her for one moment to take a breath and it pulls a cracked, needy whimper from Syd that she is undoubtedly going to be incensed about tomorrow. He doesn't even have time to be smug about it before she's wrapping her hands around his face, fingertips firmly meeting at the back of his neck to pull him down for another kiss.

Richie walks her backwards until the back of her legs hit the opposite counter and then he's lifting her up so they're on more of a level playing field that won't be hell on his back. Richie kisses up her neck like he's got all the time in the world, tonguing at the hollow where Syd's jaw meets her ear before he tugs on her earlobe with his teeth. Syd can't stop whispering oh God, oh God, oh God until Richie finally grins against the shell of her ear and jokes, "If I'm about to see you naked, sweetheart, you might as well call me Richie." 

Syd groans like she can't believe this is happening to her, that this is something she is letting happen at all, before hissing, "I hate you and you aren't."

But for someone who is protesting so much, Syd is also the one who drags his mouth back to hers so she can make him stop talking. As far as messages to shut up go, it's the best one Richie's ever gotten. He puts his hands on the small of her back and slides her closer to the edge of the steel counter so he doesn't have to reach forward so much to kiss her back.

"You're so fucking lazy," Sydney hisses.

"Resourceful," he corrects as he laughs against her mouth.

Sydney takes the benefit of proximity to slip her hand between the white cotton of Richie's restaurant t-shirt and his heated skin. Her fingers are so close to Richie's belt buckle that he thinks he might die if she doesn't make moves soon so he licks along the sharp cut of her salty jaw until Sydney is holding his chin between her thumb and index finger and pulling her face back to tell him that they absolutely are not doing this in the prep kitchen.

"I refuse to be that much of a cliche," she says adamantly. Richie is embarrassingly out of breath when he suggests they go out back then. Syd narrows her eyes and asks, "To make out among literal bags of garbage, Richie?"

He makes a face. "What? No, I meant to my car." Before Syd can reject any suggestion that evokes the memory of being horny high school seniors, Richie clarifies, "My apartment is twenty minutes away. Fifteen if I speed."

Sydney frowns. "But you're late to work every day."

"Because I make it a point to wake up half an hour after my alarm," he says like his logic should be obvious. "I feel like we're focusing on the wrong thing right now."

"Your shitty work ethic?" she asks with smirk. Is it Richie's imagination or does she sound a little flirty? With his hand on her thigh, he's about to reassure her that it doesn't translate to all facets of his life when sighs that she cannot believe she's about to say what she's about to say before saying it anyway. "Okay."

"Okay?"

"I am not repeating myself."

"Didn't seem to have a problem with that a few minutes ago," he says with a Cheshire Cat grin.

"Oh, fuck off," she snaps.

It would have more bite if she didn't sneak in one more kiss before shoving him away to hop off the counter. Richie stands there dumbfounded as Syd crosses to the locker area and toes off her clogs before kicking them into her open locker like she's Pelé. He watches her hang up her apron, toss her bandana on the top shelf, and take off her chef's coat to reveal a t-shirt with I'M NEVER WRONG emblazoned across the front.

"Richie?"

"Hmm?" How is he this mesmerized already?

"Are you going to get the lights," she asks, "or do you want to creepily stare at me some more?"

Richie shakes his head of the cobwebs and mumbles right, lights before speed walking to complete his only task. By the time, he has made sure the front door is locked and all the lights are off, Syd's already at the back door with his jacket.

"Impatient, huh?"

"Don't make me change my mind."

Richie decides that it's probably best for him to shut up for the rest of the drive. The moment he starts his car, the SiriusXM station devoted to Rush blasts through his speakers. Sydney gives him a look like she cannot believe how low her standards have dropped.

"Hey, 'Tom Sawyer' is—"

Syd holds up her hand. "Please stop." She spends the rest of ride playing radio commando, scrolling through stations at such a breakneck speed that at the end of the journey they've either listened to two entire songs or thirty partial ones.

Richie breaks his previous record by making it home in twelve minutes flat. The elevator ride up is awkward because Mrs. Simpson from the floor above his feels compelled to make small talk. Richie's not sure what's wrong with him that he gives her a two-finger salute once the elevator dings to a stop on his floor, but even Syd gives him a look like she's about to start calling him Major Dumbass when he maneuvers her out of the elevator and to his apartment at the end of the hall.

Richie has never been more thankful that Tiff came to pick up Eva yesterday than he is when he holds the door open for Syd to enter. He'd done a deep clean of the apartment while Eva was at her afterschool drama club so Tiff wouldn't think that their daughter spent half the week in a slum and now he's getting double the dividends from his labor because Syd looks shocked that it doesn't look like a frat house.

She drops her bag on his couch before shrugging off her jacket and tossing it at him while she starts to wander the living room. Her eyes sweep over the set of three oil on canvas paintings hung up next to each other to display the Chicago skyline before crossing over to the framed picture of Richie and Eva on her first day of pre-school.

"Surprisingly understated," Syd comments. "I was expecting Mötley Crüe posters and a Cubs shrine."

"I'll be sure to pass on your approval to my interior designer," Richie says before trying to reach for Sydney. But she steps out of his reach to walk over to the bookshelf on the other wall, her eyes roaming the spines curiously.

"You read all these?" she asks, I didn't know you knew how to read dancing on the tip of her tongue. She reaches her hand into the shelf and tilts forward a book with a weathered brown jacket. Turning back to Richie, she holds up the hardcover and asks, "Les Halles Cookbook?"

"We can start a book club later," he groans impatiently. Richie plucks the book out of her hands and tosses it in the general vicinity of the couch before settling his hands on Sydney's hips. Syd smirks as she asks Richie who's impatient now.

What's the use in denying it? Is he going to start playing hard to get now? He answers Sydney by crowding her space until her back hits the bookshelf. He looks into her big brown eyes as if to confirm that they're both aware of what a colossally terrible idea this is and that they could still walk away right now with this just being a minor embarrassing thing that almost happened. But Richie is the king of bad decisions and Syd seems like she's jockeying to dethrone him when she gets on her tiptoes to get her mouth back on his.

"I'm really going to need you to take off those stupid track pants, Richie."

"Yes, chef."

*

If Richie had to cherry-pick pleasant memories about Michael, he'd think about this: the time Mike and Richie convinced the Faks to steal Jimmy's car keys at church so they could drive to Milwaukee to tailgate at a Brewers game only for the Mustang to run out of gas in Waukegan and then get broken into while they were walking to the nearest gas station; the year Mike shot up seven inches and then surprised Sugar by pretending to be Ron Berzatto at the father-daughter school dance; that year when they couldn't afford to send Carmy to sleep away camp so Mike spent the whole summer building a treehouse with Carmy that ultimately proved to be structurally unsound when it fell apart the following spring after a severe thunderstorm.

*

"Are you hungry? I'm hungry."

"I'm not making you a snack, asshole," Sydney bristles.

Richie cocks his head to the left to peer at her. The bite to her righteous indignation has been sanded down quite a bit given that he just made her come three times—

"No, wait. It was four," he says with a lopsided grin.

Syd rolls her eyes and exclaims, "I didn't know you could count that high."

—and he was going to have to send a fruit basket to his neighbors for disrupting their REM sleep like this. He's looking at her like someone who has seen her naked, which he knows pisses her off because she grabs the pillow under her head and lunges at his face with it.

"Always with the violence," he laughs as he blocks his face with his other arm.

"I'll tell them it was SIDS that did you in."

"Clever!" Richie yanks the pillow out of her grasp and throws it to the other end of the bed so that Syd has no choice but to rest her forearms on his chest and her chin on her forearms. He lifts his head so he can watch her do the mental gymnastics it takes to make sense of whatever this is.

Finally, she says, "This was a one-time thing, okay?"

"Four-time thing," he corrects. Syd groans. "But yes, I get your point. This will never happen again until you give me do-me eyes across the beef braciole station and then it's game over."

"Please, please, please hold your breath for that day to come," she says evilly.

"So are you hungry or what?"

"I told you I'm not—"

Richie groans. "Relax, Gloria Steinem. I'll cook. It is my house. Jesus, what kind of boneheads have you been banging?" Sydney arches one perfect eyebrow at him. "Okay, don't answer that."

"You can cook?"

"A great many things."

"Is that so?"

"Not to toot my own horn, but you're going to be so impressed." He waits a beat before asking, "How do you feel about Cocoa Puffs?"

*

The problem with knowing a guy like Michael Berzatto was that there was no way to adequately describe his billboard-sized presence in their lives if you'd never met him. Michael went through the world instead of the other way around. Richie didn't have the words to explain how he loomed bigger and brighter than anyone else he'd ever known. Even when Mike tried to diminish his reach and dull his light, it was an impossible task. Everything that Michael touched became his, if not literally than at least figuratively.

It wasn't spaghetti and meatballs; it was Mikey's spaghetti and meatballs.

The Beef wasn't just another neighborhood family joint; it was Michael's house with Michael's system and Michael's charm that kept people coming back for more.

Richie wasn't just this guy who had worked his way into the Berzatto family until they had no choice but to accept him as one of their own; he was Mikey's best friend and he should've looked out for him better.

*

Sydney is the one who walks away first, which feels like an important distinction to make since this whole expansion thing was her idea, but maybe it's not pertinent at all. If this were a courtroom drama, any good lawyer would say that it is coloring the facts to even mention it because now everyone is biased. If the restaurant is a child, then Syd is Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer and everyone is already thinking about how they'd be monsters to root against single dad Dustin Hoffman as he tries to figure out how to build a menu to scale without a working gas line, right?

But the truth is that if Sydney is the one who walks away first, it's only because Carmy is the one who lets her, in as much as anyone can let Sydney do anything. He doesn't even try to stop her as she packs up her knife and tells him to fuck right off, Chef with a venom-tipped tongue. Tina nudges Carm's side like rupturing his spleen with her knobby elbow will inspire him to give it one last heartfelt speech, but Richie knows that Sydney's too smart for that sentimental bullshit anyway. Personally speaking, he is relieved. No one wants to root against Meryl Streep.

"She'll be back, cousin," Richie reassures cheerfully, clapping Carmy on the back while Tina shoots them both death glares from her station.

He's not sure what the blow out was about this time. All he knows is that for once in his life, this is not Richie's fault. Sometimes, he waggled his eyebrows at her over family when no one was paying attention, but other than that, Richie and Syd have been pretty good about sticking to the one-and-done aspect of their relationship. He thought it would be extremely awkward at first, but it turns out that Syd is a hell of lot better at compartmentalizing than he gave her credit for. She's just as much of a dick to him now as she was before he knew what she looked like the exact moment before she lost all control and screamed his name like someone was pulling it out of her soul.

No, this is on Carmy. Probably about his lack of focus or his pinpoint focus? How it's too much pressure to use The Beef's successes and failures as a proxy for the fate of the broken Berzatto family? How Carmy can't seem to recognize that it is at odds to want everyone to stay when his first inclination is always to push them away? Or maybe it was something as simple as how they cannot afford Oxford Bone China dining sets from Lenox, no matter how much it would fulfill Syd's childhood dreams?

Richie doesn't need to know the details to be sure that it's nothing some time apart from each other and buying that bottle of truffle oil Syd hasn't shut up about since Monday won't solve.

"How do you know that, Richard?" Tina asks skeptically.

"Syd just needs some time to cool off," Richie insists with a hell of a lot of authority for a guy who has never cooled off about anything in his entire life. Richie prefers to ping-pong from one conflict to another with minimal introspection; he's like a sizzling cast iron pan that someone keeps shocking in cold water despite the cracks that have started to form along the base.

"She looked pissed, Jeff." Tina sounds worried, which is hilarious because a few months ago Tina would've been the first to leave Syd on the side of the road without any further consideration.

Richie rolls his eyes. "She didn't run off to Alaska, T. Her place is three stops away on the L." Tina's eyebrows lift skyward as if to ask the same follow up question with far more curiosity this time. With a shrug, Richie mumbles, "Payroll."

"Hold up!" Fak shouts, his head popping out from behind the oven like a jackass in the box. "Y'all have been getting paid for this?"

*

"What do you mean Carmy's not coming to the funeral, Sug?"

Richie and Sugar were smoking Parliaments on the front porch even though it was twenty degrees outside and neither one of them had thought to bring their coats. The terrible snow had given way to even more terrible freezing rain. Richie kept stamping his feet on the ground because he'd worn the wrong socks and his toes were freezing through his sneakers. But frostbite was preferrable to getting in Donna Berzatto's way when she was baking the triple layered strawberry shortcake she thought had been Michael's favorite. It wasn't. Mikey liked cannoli, Nat liked pizzelles, and Carmy liked strawberry shortcake. But no one was about to tell Donna that.

"I don't know. He says he can't get away."

"For his fucking brother's fucking funeral?" Richie asked incredulously, mumbling a handful of Italian curses under his breath.

"I think he's a little lost right now."

"Which is why he needs to be here," Richie insisted. He wasn't trying to shout at Natalie – it wasn't her fault that her brother was a shithead – but Richie didn't have the arm span to hold Carmy's family together by himself. 

"He can't process it yet," Sugar suggested diplomatically. "Bear doesn't know how bad it got for Mike so this feels unreal for him. Hell, we saw it and we can't process it."

Richie appreciated the we even though Sug was doing a better job at processing than him. Clearly. But maybe she had always been better at faking it.

"You know," Richie started to say before he stopped his train of thought. He rubbed the side of his head with his palm like the static energy would fire up the necessary synapses to make this conversation easier. "Natalie, if I knew…if I had thought that he wasn't going to come out the other end of this, you know that I would've…"

"I know," Natalie said with the smallest of nods. "No one blames you, Richie. You know that, right?"

"He was just…Mike, you know? Life of the party, the dude everyone wanted as a friend. I didn't realize how unhappy he was."

"We're Berzattos, my love. We don't know how to make happiness stick."

He started to ask if she was all right. Was it Pete? Richie would happily kick his ass if he wasn't there for her in a manner that was expected of him at a time like this. Nat forced a laugh and told Richie that he didn't have to worry about her. She was the only one of them with marginally healthy coping mechanisms.

*

Even with Sydney gone, things are okay for the first few days. Or as okay as they can be when everyone is pretending that it's possible to stay dry in a rainstorm without an umbrella. But then there's a restaurant review in a local nothing paper about The Beef that sends everything to shit. In it, the critic mentions that they've made great strides since ownership changed hands after the previous owner Michael Berzatto took his own life nine months ago with a Colt .38 and it's like Carmy's brain can't move on from that sentence once he reads it.

Whatever newfound Zen he discovered when things had finally started turning a corner – when Sydney was still here to bounce ideas off of and level him out when he was getting a little manic – disappears in an instant and suddenly it's like Carmen is on the knife's edge of a nervous breakdown again and all they can do is wait for it to happen. Carmy throws tantrums and he throws forks and he throws himself into overhauling things that were never problems in the first place just so he can look at one thing and say that he has made it better.

When Richie confesses that he's worried, Sugar tells him that Carmy will figure it out with a staggering amount of faith. Richie knows that he doesn't have to remind Natalie that he thought the same thing about Mike and look at how well that turned out because she knows. Sugar knows better than anyone that there's no helping someone who is hell bent on destroying themselves. And even though that's not Carmy – not completely anyway – it still makes Richie feel like he's watching a plane lose altitude in slow-motion.

Maybe she thinks that it'll be okay because Carmy doesn't have an addictive personality, but that's not true either. The vices may be different, but they all have addictive personalities. Maybe Nat thinks texting him the numbers for therapists and dropping off flyers for meetings will make the difference. Maybe she needs to believe that Carmy is strong enough to be around the ghost of Michael because she's not. Everyone has little lies that they tell themselves so who is Richie to deny Nat hers?

Richie is still thinking about how to snap Carmy out of it when Tina says, "We gotta get Syd back," as if that is the magic elixir that will cure Carmy's kitchen madness. But Carmy and Sydney are both proud in the same way – he won't ask her to come back even though he wants to ("For God's sake, Marcus, if she wanted to be here, she would be here!") and she won't return without a guarantee that things will be different even though she knows better than to believe in empty promises.

Richie doesn't know when it became his responsibility to figure this stuff out – he was always the one to create wrinkles, not smooth them out – but he does try. He messages Sydney a few times, but all the enjoying your vacation, slacker? texts go largely ignored. A few days later, he sends her a picture of his newly stocked refrigerator and she leaves him on read. Whenever he calls, it goes straight to voicemail until he is forced to leave her a somewhat-drunk message that involves Richie saying yooooooo a lot and rambling about how stupid it is to leave voicemail for someone who is such a bad communicator. He says that he wishes she'd block his number already if she was so desperate for a clean break, but then threatens to send a carrier pigeon to her house in the same breath. But the carrier pigeon market in Chicago is nonexistent so Richie pawns off the iPad on Gary and leaves work early so he doesn't have to see the hangdog expression on Tina's face one more time when she glances over at Syd's empty station without wanting to kill himself too.

"What?" Sydney asks with a hand on her hip when she opens the door to find him on her porch in the middle of the workday.

"Nice manners, Sydney. Did your phone stop working or have you become Amish?"

Sydney smiles with faux sweetness. "Only when you call."

"Don't I feel special?" he deadpans. "Are you going to invite me in?"

"I wasn't planning on it."

He must win the staring contest though because Sydney finally relents and holds the door open a little wider so he can squeeze past her. In the living room, there's a mountain of pillows and a scrunched up open weave blanket on the couch. The coffee table is littered with at least three empty bags of Cool Ranch Doritos and a half empty Oxo pop container with candied pecans. When Richie shifts his gaze to the flat screen, it is frozen on Aaron Eckhart's face as he flips a pancake.

"Isn't this like a surgeon watching Grey's Anatomy?"

"Sue me for buying into the fantasy that not all kitchens have to be dysfunctional."

"Where's the fun in that?" Richie jokes. It falls flat. Rubbing his beard, he decides to just go for broke. "When are you coming back to work, Sydney?"

"I don't work there anymore, Richie."

"Come on, that wasn't real!"

She raises an eyebrow. "Felt pretty real when I said fuck you, I quit."

"Okay, but like…really?"

Syd rolls her eyes and points toward the front door. "Goodbye, Richie."

"Playing hardball, right? That's cool. I respect that, sweetheart."

"Stop calling me that."

"Got it. Chef Sydney, what will it take for you to come back?"

Richie might be the worst negotiator in the world judging by how this is going. He has already shown all his cards (desperation, desperation, and so much more desperation) even though Sydney hasn't even come to the bargaining table yet. 

"A fundamentally different experience than what The Beef—"

"You want an apology? Fine." Richie groans as he gets down on his knees and clasps his hands together like he's at Mass. To say that Sydney looks alarmed when she asks what the hell is happening right now would be an understatement, but Richie pushes ahead. "If you come back, I promise that you will get the respect you deserve moving forward—"

"Can you get off my floor please?"

"And I'll stop giving you a hard time about everything—"

"Seriously, man, this is weird," Sydney interrupts like she's never seen a grown man grovel before. This happened, like, once a month when Richie was married to Tiff.  

"And you can make all the obnoxiously complicated dishes you want. Wait, sorry, that was disrespectful, right? See, I'm already getting better at considering your feelings!"

"Richie!" she shouts. "Get off my fucking floor!"

Richie rolls his eyes and uses the coffee table as leverage when he pushes himself up to stand. He misses being young and agile. There is no way the Richie of today would have been able to keep up with half the trouble that he and Mikey had gotten into when they were younger. He misses that Michael too because he would've known what to say to make Sydney come back – hell, she never would've left. But Richie doesn't know half the things that Michael did so all he can say is, "From the bottom of my heart, Sydney, I am truly, truly sorry."

"What are you sorry for?" she asks with her arms crossed in front of her.

"For whatever the fuck you need me to be sorry for in order to come back."

"That's not good enough."

Richie presses the heels of his palms against his closed eyelids and groans, "Cut the bullshit, Syd. It's a mess, I'll grant you that, and we're always one disaster away from imploding—"

"Really selling it."

"I can't do this without your infuriating levelheadedness in the face of all that bullshit, all right?"

"Sounds like you've got a problem then."

"He's a pain in the ass, but you know that Carmy is brilliant and—"

"He's a fucking disaster, Richie."

"Not anymore."

"Marcus said he started throwing cutlery."

"Once. And it didn't hit anyone!"

"Oh, then I guess that makes it all right," she says sarcastically.

"I'll take care of all that. It won't be a problem," he lies.

"Oh yeah? You plan on lobotomizing him?"

"This is not about Carmy. This is about you." His pitch must be getting better because Syd raises her eyebrows and doesn't tell Richie that he doesn't know the first thing about her. It feels promising. "I'm not asking you to come back for either one of us."

"That was never a possibility. I'm not about to sell my soul just because we fucked once when I was going through a dry spell."

"So come back because deep down you love it."

Now she laughs. "That's some Stockholm Syndrome shit. Why would I love—"

"After Mike died," Richie starts, proud of the way his voice doesn't shake for once, "I asked Carmy why he wanted to work here so badly when he could be a hotshot chef anywhere else. He said that it was because amidst all the chaos, sometimes he got to create something so close to perfect in that kitchen that it sliced through the white noise and gave him hope that things could be right again."

"Yeah, well. They can't." Syd trails off like she's thinking about it though. Off Richie's hopeful shrug, she straightens her shoulders and declares, "I don't cart around the guilt that you all do. I can do this anywhere."

"But you don't want to do it just anywhere. You want to do it there." Richie lifts the back of his jacket, pulls out a bound report that has become creased with how often it has been thumbed through, and tosses it onto Sydney's coffee table. "You wouldn't write a thirty-two-page business plan unprompted if you didn't think that place could be great, Syd. If you didn't want it to be."

*

When Mike died, Richie was alone at home. Tiff had taken Eva with her to her mother's in Evanston for the weekend after she and Richie had round twelve of the same argument they'd been having for the past three months. Richie was adamant that just because her mother forgave her deadbeat dad didn't mean she had to and that a cancer diagnosis didn't mean that she owed it to her father to be there for him when he'd spent the last fifteen years not being there for her.

"So we only blindly support assholes named Berzatto in this household?" she'd said cruelly even though Richie knew that Tiff loved Mike as much as she loved her own brother. He knew that the fissures in his marriage were on him – they had a kid now; he couldn't keep letting himself get involved in every stupid idea Mike had. His marriage was going up in flames faster than Dante's Peak because he spent all his time worrying about how Mike was fucking up his life to recognize that his own was becoming unmoored. But unlike Tiff's father, Mike had always been there for him so he didn't think it was a fair comparison to make at all.

Richie kept thinking about that when he called Tiff from the driveway. He expected her to let it go to voicemail, but she picked up on the fourth ring and before she could even say hello, Richie blurted out that Mikey killed himself.

"I'm putting Eva in the car seat right now and I'll be home in forty minutes," Tiff said because she was always so good about taking charge. It would be easy to wait for her to come home, delay doing what needed to be done (he had to tell Sugar, he had to call a funeral home, there were arrangements to be made, what hymn did Mike want at his funeral, fuck, could they even have an open casket) until she could be there to pick up the pieces. But Mike was dead and Richie had to be the responsible one now.

"It's not safe to drive this late with a kid, Tiff. Just come home tomorrow. Please, I want you to be safe," he said all in one breath. "I'm okay."

"Honey, you're not," she said. "You shouldn't be alone. Just wait for me to get there."

"I'm not even here," Richie said and did he mean here like at home or here in the world? Mike was his person and he was gone. "I have to go tell Sugar anyway. I just wanted to let you know, okay? I love you. I have to go."

Richie called Carmy on the way to Sugar's and got his voicemail. It made him irrationally angry that Carmy was so removed that he couldn't feel this massive shift in the universe. There was a void in the center of the world and Richie couldn't find his balance while Carmy was plating lobster bisque and matcha biscuits with white chocolate mousse.

But whereas he couldn't count on Carmy to sense that something was very, very wrong, Sugar knew right away. Her body crumpled like cheap tissue paper in a gift bag the moment she opened the door and Richie whispered, "Nat, something happened with Michael." He could barely get the words out before she was crying, before Pete was running down the stairs to find out what was wrong and Richie was passing her over to him because he wasn't sure if he was strong enough to hold them both up. Before Richie excused himself to the kitchen to make more calls – "I got this, Sug. I'll take care of it" – but really because it was too painful to listen to someone's heart break in real time.

Richie called Tina, who cursed God before mumbling a prayer in Spanish. She asked how Richie was holding up and then immediately recognized that it was a stupid question because she didn't even bother waiting for an answer before telling him she'd take care of informing the employees. She told him to take care of himself like the mother he'd never had, but Richie didn't really know how to do that without Mike around so he cut the call and moved down the list.

He called Jimmy, who wanted details, the how and when and why of it all, but Richie kept telling him that he didn't know – would he have let this happen if he had known? – until Jimmy gave up trying to be Hercule Poirot and told Richie and Sugar to stay put, that he'd get Lee and they'd go to Donna's together to break the news.

He called the funeral home and was in the middle of leaving a message – "My best friend is dead and the body, fuck, Michael – Michael is in the morgue and, uh, I don't really know what the next steps are. I don't even know what kind of casket he wanted…it didn't seem relevant until now. Anyway, I, uh, would appreciate a call back at…" – when Tiff appeared in the doorway in pajamas and a pair of Uggs.

"Hi."

"Tiff, what are you—"

"The baby's with Mom. I ran three stoplights and cut off a trucker but…"

"You're here," he said, the words jumbling up in one long exhale as Richie pressed his forehead against the crook of her neck. His body felt like a claw grasping onto Tiff as tightly as he could without crushing her as she whispered, "I'm here. I love you. You'll get through this. Baby, I promise that you'll get through this."

*

When Sydney returns to the kitchen after a week away, Tina hugs her like they were separated by war. Sydney seems to be surprised to learn that she has grown on Tina even though God knows Tina has taken her side in enough squabbles in the kitchen that they could be considered friends.

"Too many dicks in the kitchen," Tina laughs when she finally lets Sydney go. "I'm glad you're back, chef."

"You're back?" Carmy asks from the walk-in. It's obvious to everyone that he's trying not to sound hopeful, but his poker game has always been weak. No one buys it. While everyone else looks between them like they're picking sides in a Mexican standoff, Carmy does that thing where he runs his hands through his hair a million times like the repetitive movement will make him less nervous.

After what feels like forever, Sydney finally shrugs. "Richie said he needed me."

"To stop marathoning Chopped and rejoin the workforce like a productive member of society," Richie quickly adds so no one thinks he's getting soft. Tina glances at him like she's never been prouder and it's…kind of nice, actually. Richie makes a mental note to tell Louie to go easier on his mother the next time he runs into the little shit.

Marcus talks about a new donut he wants Syd to try while Ebra asks if this means that he can stop doing triple prep for every shift. The air sparks with a burst of excited energy that they've seriously been missing, but it is not lost on Richie that Syd hasn't committed to anything yet. She might've stopped by to pick up her last check or grab some pretentious cooking bible she left behind in her mad dash to get the hell out of here last time. Richie looks at Carmy as if to say do something, cousin, because he didn't put all his pride aside to get Sydney to walk through the door only for Carmy to mess it up by standing there like an asshole engaged in a staring contest when he should be apologizing.

"I've been thinking about those short ribs, chef," Carmy finally says. "If you added pomegranate molasses…"

"It would bring much-needed acidity," Syd finishes, the light bulb going off in her mind like she's Thomas Edison at Menlo Park.

Carmy nods. "And wouldn't that be a spectacular dish to build a tasting menu around?"

"Seems a little highbrow for a place like this," she replies cautiously even though she can't help the smile that spreads across her face. "It's a delicate ecosystem, you know?"

"Sometimes you gotta build off the past to create a new future, Syd," Richie says cheekily.

"What's that, cousin? You get that from a fortune cookie?" Carmy asks with a raised eyebrow like he can't believe his ears at Richie's progressive take on anything have to do with the restaurant. Richie can't exactly blame him for that – he knows what he likes and he likes what he knows – but if the choice is between making a few concessions or watching Carmy implode until he can't hold it together anymore, there's only one option that Richie can live with.

Standing tall, Richie declares, "Screw it. Let's fuck some shit up, cousin."

*

Carmy didn't come home for four months after because he had things to wrap up back east. It sounded like a garbage excuse to Richie, but he was tired of arguing against the hall pass that everyone else in the family had issued Carmen. When he finally returned, it scared Richie to see so much of Mike in Carmy. Had it always been like that or was he just missing his friend? Richie wanted to convince himself that it was the latter, but there was an intensity in Carmy's eyes that Richie remembered well, this will of spirit that if they could just put one thing right, and then another, and then another, and then another, eventually their lives would be right and the things they were running from wouldn't be able to catch up with them. It was the kind of magical thinking that always got the Berzattos in trouble and Carmy was no different.

But Richie knew even less about how to help Carmy than he had with Michael. He'd learned all the wrong lessons. This time there was no vice to rehab, no gun to lock away in a safe with a forgotten combination. Richie thought that if he could get Carmy away from the restaurant, it would be okay but it was the only place Carmy wanted to be now that there was no one left to stop him. The Beef was where three things broke for every one thing he put back together so there was never a shortage of stuff to repair. Richie imagined that it was an intoxicating feeling for Carmy to make and unmake Michael's world when his brother had spent so long keeping him out of it.

*

Sugar gets Carmy to agree to see a therapist if she'll stop by the restaurant occasionally – "You idiots want me to do the budget again, huh?" she asks, her eyes throwing daggers in Richie's direction like it's his fault she's good at math – and the change is that when Carmy gets that far off look in his eyes, it's not because he's fantasizing about burning the place down with himself in it. Carmy starts talking about Mike more. He tells Syd about an idea for deconstructed school pizza that they'd brainstormed a decade ago while watching the lunch lady skit on SNL and inspires Marcus to make a caramelized rainbow donut when he walks down memory lane with Tina about the time Mike nearly gave himself third degree burns by melting down Skittles to make Dippin' Dots.

Richie's not jealous that Carmy has figured out how to think about Michael without getting that crushing feeling in his chest like his heart has forgotten how to beat. It's great, but it's not really in the cards for Richie. The good and the bad are mixed in his memories and he can't really think about one without feeling the weight of the other, but that's why his coping strategy is never to talk about it. It's not healthy, but it works until it doesn't, and Richie feels like he's in a never ending existential crisis.

"So what do you think?" Syd asks as Richie blinks back to the present. They're in the basement of The Beef surrounded by boxes with dinnerware samples and Syd has been talking about heft and style and longevity for the past fifteen minutes but fuck if Richie has heard a single word she's said. Now Syd's holding up two plates that look the same and all Richie can think is that he feels like he's in a Highlights Spot the Difference game where they forgot to make anything different.

"Uh, the white one?"

"Off-white or eggshell?" she presses.

"Eggshell?"

"That's not an option," Syd says.

"Then why'd you fucking ask?" he asks, annoyed. The only reason Syd keeps dragging him into these strategy sessions is because they're too poor to lose out on the discounts and Carmy can't make a timely decision to save his life. Richie's not stupid – he knows she's probably going with the one he didn't choose every single time, but if Carmy bitches about it later, she has leeway to say that it was a majority decision. Richie takes a deep breath and apologizes; Syd keeps saying that she's back on a trial basis like it hasn't been a month and a half already and she isn't fully invested in this reno-turned-demo that they can't afford. But Richie isn't going to risk it by being a dick now when Carmy's doing good and everyone's staying late of their own accord to help and the normally prevalent air of manic desperation that hangs around the restaurant is gone. With a sigh, he asks, "Which do you like?"

"Chantilly lace, obviously," Syd deadpans, only able to hold her humorless expression for five seconds before she bursts out laughing. "I don't know, man. They all look the same to me. We should just get black."

"Vastness of space black or bottomless pit of despair black?" Richie asks with a grin before pulling a cigarette out of the pack. He spins it between his index and middle fingers but doesn't light it. Syd has started to casually mention how much it would suck for them if Carmy and Richie dropped dead from lung cancer after spending all this time revamping the restaurant.

"You good?" Syd asks. She's looking at him like he's a Sunday crossword she can't quite figure out.

"Just thinking."

He expects her quip that she can get ice for his head if it's too much for him, but instead she puts the plates on the chair next to her and says, "Penny for your thoughts?"

"I don't know, they're pretty heavy," he chuckles. Syd pulls a quarter out of her pocket and slides it across the table to him. Richie dabs the tip of his unlit cigarette on the table to buy time before finally saying, "Eva made me watch Coco with her over the weekend."

"I want my quarter back," Syd starts to say.

Richie presses his index finger against the quarter before she can reach for it. "There's this thing about how the dead are alive as long as they're remembered by the people who loved them. And that got me thinking about Mike and how the only things I ever seem to remember about him are the things that I wish I could forget. And it feels unfair to who he was to think about him like that."

"Is that why you don't talk about him?"

Richie shrugs. "At least when we still had this place," and here he waves his hand ambiguously in the air, "there was something solid to remember him by."

"I thought you were on board with this."

"I am," he insists. "Or, I don't know, I'm trying to be. I get that this is going to happen and I'm not trying to stop it or anything, but one day all the people who knew Michael will be gone and that'll be it. There will be nothing left of him because we spent all this time taking everything apart bit by bit to replace with something off-white and meaningless."

"Richie…"

Syd looks sad in a way that he hasn't seen her look before. It makes him feel guilty for laying all his shit at her feet when she's just trying to figure out which napkins to order and if their plates will clash with the décor. She didn't ask to be his therapist.

"Sorry," he says before quickly grabbing the catalogue at her elbow. "Should we move on to wine glasses next—"

"I get wanting to encase everything in a snow globe, but that's not going to bring him back, you know?"

"I know."

"It has always been stuff, Richie."

Sydney reaches into her shirt for a small pendant before lifting the silver chain it is attached to over her head. She lets the necklace settle into the center of her palm before placing the nickel-sized circle gently on top of it. Sydney pushes her hand towards Richie so he can get a better look the tiny Saint Barnabas etched inside the oval.

"Patron saint of…"

"Encouragement, I think?"

"I didn't realize you were religious."

"I'm really not." She pushes the pendant to rest on the tips of her index and middle fingers and runs the pad of her thumb over it in a motion so practiced that she must have done it hundreds of times before. "My mom gave it to me before she died."

"Your mom is dead?" Richie asks like an idiot. God, it's like he was raised in a barn. Frantically, he backtracks, "Sorry, I didn't know. You never said—"

"Yeah. People get weird and apologetic."

"Sorry."

"Proving my point spectacularly," she chuckles. Syd looks down at the necklace again. "My mom told me that whenever I felt alone, I could look at this and know that she was watching over me. That she was rooting for me. I think she was just trying to give me something to hold onto, you know? Something tangible in between all the thoughts and prayers and she's in a better place bullshit."

"That's very kind."

"It has become like a totem now, but if I lost it tomorrow, would it mean that my mother had suddenly given up on me? That I was no longer worth rooting for? No. Because it's just a thing, Richie. Just like this place is just a place." Sydney reaches across the table to press two fingers against his heart. "The meaning is in here."

*

The ink wasn't dry on the contract and already Richie knew this was a bad idea. What did either one of them know about running a successful restaurant? They needed a new oven, one of the Southies had already caught a piece of the front door when he tried capping Little John earlier, and Richie was pretty sure they were going to inadvertently commit tax fraud because he and Mike were both too distracted to read the directions clearly and too stubborn to hire some Northwestern educated fuck to do it for them. There were a million ways this could go wrong and very few where it would go right.

But then Mikey tossed Richie a t-shirt that read The Original Beef of Chicagoland and asked, "You ready to do this, cousin?" like he had done a thousand times before and he would do a thousand times after.

It was rhetorical at this point, but Richie rolled his eyes and called back, "All right, Mike. Let it rip."