The Last Coin by James P. Blaylock

Author:James P. Blaylock [Blaylock, James P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780575117600
Publisher: Hachette Littlehampton
Published: 2011-09-29T06:00:00+00:00

The cafe, finally, was almost put right. It seemed to Andrew as if there were merit in the mere bulk of kitchen apparatus—all the stuff that Aunt Naomi had sprung for six weeks back and was only now being delivered and installed. He sat at the bar polishing years of dust from old salt and pepper shakers and taking notes in his spiral binder as three men in blue jeans and shrunken T-shirts hooked up a Wolf stove. It was enormous—six broad burners, a griddle the size of a playing field, and two ovens, each of which could accommodate a Thanksgiving turkey. Alongside it was a vast warming oven, and next to that was a cupboard with a cutting board top. Andrew had designed the cutting board himself, and was moderately proud of it. It was as big as would fit comfortably into the relatively small cooking area, and it had stainless steel bowls mortised in, so that a chef could sweep chopped odds and ends off into the bowls, pluck the bowls out, and dump the odds and ends into pans on the stove.

He was itching to mess with it all, to make it work. It was impossible that the equipment could produce anything in the food line that wasn’t first-rate. A friend of Pickett’s had built the cabinetry and the bar—had done all the woodwork, in fact, under Andrew’s supervision, and it all looked just right. Andrew had bought the half-dozen draw-leaf tables for ninety dollars apiece from an importer of English antiques, and had searched out three dozen oak chairs at thrift shops in downtown Long Beach. He’d paid out ten or fifteen dollars for each of them, and so he had no sets of chairs to speak of, just a random lot of them that Pickett’s friend had worked over, regluing joints and replacing missing spindles and shimming up short legs.

Andrew admired the general mess of old furniture and had decided to continue the theme. He’d bought up random silverware and cups and saucers and odd bits of china and porcelain and napkin rings. He’d found no end of old tablecloths of mid-fifties vintage, with deep pastel flowers and rectilinear designs. And he had collected pairs of salt and pepper shakers: comical ducks and head-bobbing dogs and painted clowns riding on happy-go-lucky pigs.

Every table would be a mish-mash of shapes and colors, would remind you of a carnival, of a kaleidoscope, of a wooden box full of marbles, of the kitchen and pantry in Mr. Badger’s house. It would be a comfortable place, with a cheerful fire in the winter and the casement windows thrown open in the summer. There wouldn’t be two forks the same, or two wine glasses either, and serious, frowning businessmen, talking about updating supplies and finalizing documents and impacting infrastructures, would suddenly find themselves salting their potatoes out of the end of an elephant’s nose. He saw it as an experiment in the principles of Ruskin and Morris. It wouldn’t just

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