Marco Gattini's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Marco Gattini pulled the walk-in cooler door open and counted six basil leaves where a hundred should have been. The Seattle heatwave had cooked his rooftop garden for the fourth day running. He was a lynx who had trained seventeen years to earn a single line cook's apron, and now he owned a forty-seat trattoria three blocks from the glowing spire that tourists photographed all summer. Tonight was Friday. Tonight the dining room would be full, and he had no basil, no arugula, and half a crate of tomatoes going soft in the heat. He climbed the service stairs to check the roof anyway. The soil in his raised beds had split into a map of dry plates, pale and curling at the edges. He crouched and pushed a finger through the cracks. Dust. His grandmother had grown tomatoes on a balcony in Palermo with less water than this, but she had shade, and she had time. He had neither. The dinner rush started in six hours. His usual farm supplier had stopped answering the phone yesterday. Marco tried again from the roof and got a voicemail. He tried three more farms. Two were sold out. The third quoted him a price that would eat a week of profit for one night of service. He went back down and stared at the prep board. Twelve dishes needed greens. He could pull eight. That left a menu his grandmother would have spat at. He thought about the chain place across the water, the one that shipped frozen produce in from four states, and how their line never stopped no matter the weather. He was not going to become that. Marco called the last number in his contacts, a Jamaican grower named Delroy who sold herbs at the Saturday market from woven palm baskets stacked in red, yellow, and green. Delroy answered on the second ring. He had a greenhouse in Kent, shaded and misted, and he had basil, arugula, and three kinds of chili. He also had a condition. He wanted a standing weekly order, cash up front for the first month, and his name on the menu. Marco agreed before Delroy finished the sentence. He drove the van south, loaded the baskets himself, and paid from the envelope he had been saving for the patio lights he wanted strung between the two posts out front. The greens came back cold and clean. Service started at five. By seven the dining room was full and the tickets were moving. At closing Marco sat at the bar with the empty envelope in his hand. He had saved the night. He had also spent the money meant for the holiday push, the season he needed to win if the restaurant was going to become what he had promised his grandmother it would.