Adam Felts
Chicken Bones

At work the chef calls Adrienne over first thing to tell her about this chicken he bought.

He's a big guy in a cuddly sort of way with a serious lumberjack beard. He wears flannel during dinner service and talks about food all the time. Not the way a fat guy would—he talks about food the way musicians talk about their instruments, lovingly, using secret words she doesn't understand. He cares about food more than Adrienne cares about anything in her entire life. When they happen to be in the cooler alone together she always has a funny thought: she'd fuck him if he asked. He's not her type at all, but she would. Never going to happen. He's in his thirties, married, and Adrienne has her own thing she's wrapped up in; that thing happens to be behind the bar right outside the kitchen.

The chef is showing her a chicken thigh. There is a significance to it that she must discover. The chef looks at the chicken instead of Adrienne as he talks. "The birds are from a range about a hundred miles upstate." He tells her the name of some farm. "Have you heard of it?"

"No," she says attentively.

"We're doing these as the special today. Braised, served with slow-roasted carrots and salt potatoes. Thirty-two dollars."

"Thirty-two dollars?" she says. "For chicken?"

"Try it."

Adrienne takes a bite of the meat and feels something akin to climax. Juices burst forth into her mouth. She is overwhelmed by the salty tang of skin. The left side of her face begins to twitch uncontrollably.

"I need you to sell as many of these as you can," the chef says. "These chickens are a vanity project of mine. We're not really making a profit from them."

"This is really good chicken," she mutters.

"I guess the chicken is a publicity stunt. That's what Kevin is calling it." Kevin is the owner of the restaurant. He suffers proudly from alcoholism and is a decrepit capitalist. "But calling it that grosses me out. I just want people to be able to try this chicken."

"What farm did they come from, did you say?"

*

The Capital City Gastropub boasts high quality dining (local ingredients from local farms sold by local etc.!) in a casual and intimate atmosphere, which means the dining room only has ten tables, everybody gets to wear jeans, and there is a grand total of three servers on the floor: Adrienne, Bob-the-waiter, and Jake, the bartender, who Adrienne has been hate-fucking for the last six months.

The Pub is always slow in the early evenings, and so Adrienne finds herself standing next to the bar talking to Jake, even as everything out of his mouth is bound to infuriate her. Sure enough, the first thing he says: "Just three more weeks, AIDS, until I'm off to Cally-four-nee-ya."

Jake's nickname for Adrienne is AIDS, which at some point in ancient history she must have thought was funny. She says tiredly, "Is that an Arnold Schwarzenegger impression? Is that what you're doing right now?"

"What on Earth are you going to do without me?" Last fall Jake was accepted into Stanford University Law School (four thousand miles away, as he would have her know), and for the last three weeks Cally-four-nee-ya has been the only subject he is capable of taking interest in for more than five seconds. Sure: for six months, Adrienne has been fucking him. There's that tousled brown hair of his, for one, plus he has a wonderful nose. And for a while she honestly thought the law school thing was pretty cool. Not anymore. And really, who else is she going to sleep with? Bob? Bob-the-waiter? "He gets weirder and weirder every day," Jake says. He happens to be looking across the dining room at Bob, who is folding napkins at the server station and muttering what very well could be obscenities under his breath. Bob is in his fifties and has been working in food service since he was fifteen years old. Bob-the-waiter has been a waiter for way too long. The job has twisted his sanity in unmistakable ways. Adrienne secretly sort of enjoys diagnosing him with mental illnesses. He definitely has a dissociative identity thing going on, from being forced to smile so many times while his brain is storming with rage. "You be careful, AIDS, or you'll wind up just like him one day. Ranting about stabbing the customers with the forks."

"Shut up," Adrienne says. "Shut up, shut up, shut up."

"The diploma is still on the refrigerator, isn't it?" Adrienne made the mistake of telling Jake that she'd hung her University of Albany undergraduate diploma (Bachelor of Science in—drumroll—psychology!) on the fridge in her kitchen, in a quirky joking sort of way but also to motivate her to start looking into graduate programs, internships, jobs, anything that isn't the Pub. But Jake is right: the diploma remains guarding the ice cream in the freezer. What she'd like to do is fuck Jake to death. Just get him underneath her, put her hands on his throat, and then—

"Look," Jake says. "First customers of the night." A couple of pleasant-looking Jewish ladies, the pub's main clientele, mill in the doorway. "Is chef trying to get you to sell his ridiculous chicken?"

"That chicken is wonderful," Adrienne says, offended. She smiles at the ladies as they come in. "Sit wherever you're comfortable."

"You know it's not going to sell. The burger goes for less than half that price."

Jake has a point. The Pub has trouble getting customers to break the twenty-dollar entree barrier, plus everything on the menu has to compete with the Pub's fourteen-dollar half-pound burger, bestseller by a long shot and constant target of the chef's enmity. He spends weeks dreaming up wild (maybe a little deranged) menu ideas, then watches with helpless fury as the customers order burger after burger. "Have these idiots even tried fried rabbit before?" the chef fumes to Adrienne. "I guess they're afraid of everything that isn't cut out of a cow's ass." If he had his way the burger would have been axed long ago. But profit-minded Kevin would never allow it. "We might as well just call this place Kevin's Fabulous Burger Palace," the chef likes to say.

"Chef's crazy," Jake says. "Nobody's gonna pay that much for chicken."

"We'll see," Adrienne says. She makes her way over to the ladies' table, past the server station and Bob-the-waiter, who she already knows is going to stop her—

"Hey. That table is mine," he says. "Back off." The chef prefers Adrienne despite Bob's overwhelming amount of experience, and so Bob compensates by imposing himself all over the dining room. But Adrienne knows how to reason with him.

"Bob, trust me, you don't want that table. I'm doing you a favor here."

"No, Adrienne, I need it."

"That little two-top? Can't you see I'm taking a bullet for you? You'll get the next table that walks in the door. Look at those ladies. Do they look like people who are going to tip well?"

Bob looks at them. He breaks into a grin. "You're right," he says. "Jews."

She decides to test out the chicken on these women. They smile at Adrienne as she approaches. "Gosh," one of the ladies says to the other, "she's so pretty, don't you think?"

The other lady gazes admiringly at her. "What a lovely blouse!" Something about Adrienne impels middle-aged women to make flattering and maybe sort-of weird comments about her appearance. She's used to it, though sometimes it worries her for reasons she can't really explain. It is a nice blouse.

"Tonight," Adrienne says, "our special is—" The chicken: how can Adrienne possibly convey to these people the wonder of the bird being cooked in the adjacent kitchen? She puts emphasis on the word braised, because people seem to like that word. She makes up the name of some farm, because she can't remember for the life of her where the chef said the chickens hailed from. And she tries to communicate—without sounding deranged—that this chicken is the best thing to have touched her lips in veritable years.

The ladies regard her earnestly. "How much is it?"

"Thirty-two," she chokes.

One of the women smiles up at her. "I'll have the burger, please," she says.

"Me too." They snap their menus closed.

Adrienne goes to the server station and inputs the ladies' order. She hears very faintly from within the kitchen, "Kevin's fuckin' Burger Palace!" Failure curdles in the depths of her stomach. Even the most trivial missteps at her job have been cutting straight through her lately—since graduating college, now that she thinks of it. Four years at the University of Albany have taught Adrienne the names and symptoms of numerous common psychological disorders. Some of them she has down by heart. She can rattle off the DSM-V checklist for clinical depression faster than the names of all the boys she's slept with (six of them, to be exact, including Jake). And she can't help but notice, she really can't, that she's begun to fit the bill for a good handful of the symptoms. Persistent fatigue. Agitation. Loss of concentration. Feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness. She never used to think about these things. She finds herself blaming college for putting all this shit in her head. She can't stop diagnosing herself.

"You sell them the chicken, AIDS?"

"Go to hell, Jake," Adrienne says.

Customers trickle in: pairs of requisite Jewish ladies, some nerdy twenty-somethings who've fallen for the Pub's craft beer selection, and a really surprising number of sharp-dressed starry-eyed couples. "My food gets dudes laid," the chef likes to say. To all of them Adrienne pitches the thirty-two-dollar chicken—God, if only one person ordered it, she would stop feeling so horrible. But nobody takes the bait, and Adrienne takes a look around the dining room and realizes she can't even blame the chicken: Bob's sold it to three tables already. Bob, who insults the customers if they order their burgers cooked medium-well! Bob, who once sweetly asked an old woman how her chemotherapy (she did not have cancer) was going!

"I can't sell the chicken," Adrienne says, bursting into the kitchen. "I can't do it." The chef is busy. He ignores her. The line cooks, the chef's slaves, hunch over burgers and salads.

"Chica," Miguel, the Pub's one-armed dishwasher says. "Guapiloca. Respira." He's standing at the dish table and eating a chicken leg. The law of the Pub says that Miguel gets to eat whatever he wants regardless of menu price, in order to compensate for Kevin refusing to ever pay him more than minimum wage.

"Be quiet, Miguel. And don't call me pretty," Adrienne says. He grins at her. Thirty-two-dollar chicken is stuck in his teeth. Miguel is a mystery to Adrienne, first because of his ability to do the dishes using only his right arm (with occasional help from the weird little nub on his left). Second: his perpetual good nature despite working as the Pub's dishwasher—six days a week!—for the last decade. Unbelievable. The person who works on Sundays quits almost monthly.

"You try this chicken, guapiloca? My God! Like nothing in my life!" Miguel says.

"Yes, yes," Adrienne says. Maybe it's because he has one arm. His expectations have been lowered. If only Adrienne were missing appendages. Self-actualization would come easy then.

"What is your problem?" the chef says. He whips around from the range, a pair of tongs in his hand.

"Nobody wants the chicken from me," Adrienne whines.

"You haven't sold any?" the chef says. His tongs click like insect pincers. "Are you telling them the name of the farm? You're not. I know you're not."

"They're not gonna know what that place is."

"It doesn't matter. They don't know anything. But if you tell it to them and you think it's important, they'll think it's important."

"But nobody's gonna pay that much for chicken."

"Have you been talking to Shitstain out there behind the bar? Because that same garbage has been spewing out of him all night." The chef is not a fan of Jake. "Listen. The fact that it's so expensive is a selling point. You gotta lead with the price. I bet you're muttering it to people like you're ashamed of it. These people should be paying thirty-two dollars for this chicken. You have to believe in it. Go and take a bite from Miguel's leg."

"No toque!" Miguel cries. He hides his chicken behind his back.

"Touch his nub, too. It's good luck."

She sighs. "What's the name of the farm again?"

*

What Adrienne knows is that she's a good server—better than unhinged Bob and definitely better than Jake, who manages to do everything with a practiced laziness that she once found incredibly sexy but now drives her insane. Maybe she's a better waitress than she ever was a psychology major at UAlbany, where she earned a 2.6 GPA and rationalized it by noting that she worked thirty hours per week all through school. If the Pub gave out grades she's pretty sure she'd have a solid 3.8.

Yes: she's so good she can sell this chicken. She can make people believe in it. She does what the chef told her to do: she tells them the price first, as though the fact that the chicken is absurdly expensive is its main selling point. This catches them off guard. Then she tells them where the chicken is from. The farm. She says the name of the farm as though every human being with a pulse should know its name as easily as one knows the name of the President of the United States. Then she tells them that it's the best chicken she's ever eaten, and this is always what sells them because when she says it she believes it.

She sells one, then another, and she watches the faces of the customers as they put their teeth into it. They emanate the heat of happiness. Then they leave Adrienne gigantic tips. Every time she sells one of the chickens the chef gives her a high five. "Fuck yeah!" he says, and the impact of flesh on flesh sounds throughout the kitchen. The superhuman feat of the night is when she cajoles a four-top into ordering four chickens, running them up to a $165 tab, and in their wake they leave behind a crisp fifty-dollar tip.

"Look at this," Adrienne says. She waves the fifty-dollar bill in front of Jake's face. "I just made a week's worth of beer money off a single table."

"Wow," Jake says. He is putting together an Old Fashioned for a gross-looking fedora-wearing man, his lone customer, at the corner of the bar. He always screws up his Old Fashioneds. "You're a winner, AIDS."

"How many chickens have you sold?"

"None. Because I haven't been trying." He dumps the Old Fashioned into the sink and starts on a new one. "Because I don't fucking care." The fedora man is tapping his fingers loudly on the bar. "Two more weeks," he mutters to himself.

Jake gets into these moods lately where he acts like everything in the immediate universe, Adrienne included, is nothing but a problem that is on the verge of being solved. And whenever he gets this way Adrienne kind of wants to blast his brains all over the shiny beer taps behind him. She slides the fifty-dollar bill into her pocket. She grits her teeth. She wonders if this is how Bob feels all the time. "You know," she says at length, "just because you're leaving doesn't mean you get to be a complete piece of—"

But Jake is no longer paying any attention to Adrienne, or to the Old Fashioned, or to the impatient greasy man at the end of the bar. He is looking toward the doorway as a lone woman comes into the Pub. She is hugged tightly by a little black dress; her left knee is cocked; she looks around the place and smiles with every last one of her teeth. She is horrifyingly beautiful. She is beautiful in a way that practically doesn't exist in the little city of Albany.

Adrienne remembers a joke that Jake said once to her drunk, off-hand, that later that night had resulted in a horrendous fight between them. It went like this: "You know there's two kinds of pretty in the world, AIDS," he said with that lazy fucking smile. "There's regular pretty, right? And then there's Albany pretty." The woman keeps staring around the Pub, gauging it, as if at any moment she might turn around and walk right back outside. The other customers are beginning to notice her.

"Psst. Psst!" Adrienne looks and sees Bob poking his head out of the kitchen, waving her towards him. She goes over just as the woman sits down at the bar, as Jake says, "How are you doing this lovely evening?"

*

"Silvia fuckin' Silverstein," the chef says. The kitchen has dissolved into panic. "Did Kevin know she was coming? Where the hell is he?"

"Who's Silvia Silverstein?" Adrienne says.

"Haven't you seen her show on the Food Network?" Bob says.

"No," Adrienne says. She doesn't watch the Food Network.

"Where is she sitting?" the chef says.

"She went to the bar," Adrienne says.

The chef groans. "You've got Shitstain out there with her? No way. That is not happening. I need to talk to Kevin right fucking now."

Miguel sneaks over to the door and takes a peek at Silvia. He lets out a blood-curdling scream. "La muchacha es la luz del cielo!"

Kevin comes out of his office into the kitchen, an incredibly rare appearance. His lips are stained with red wine taken direct from the Pub's stock. "Where is she?" he says.

"At the bar," the chef says.

"With that moron we've got working out there?" He sees Miguel staring into the dining room. "Get out of the doorway, Juan. Get back to work." Miguel shuffles back to the dish pit. He swivels his nub murderously at Kevin.

"You didn't know she was coming?" the chef says.

"No. She must be scouting locations for her show."

"By herself?"

"This is huge," Kevin says. "Huge, huge, huge. This could put us on the map. We've got to feed her one of our burgers."

"I'd just as soon fucking die," the chef says.

"Hey," Bob says to Adrienne. "You know what I heard? Silvia Silverstein is a cougar." Adrienne looks at him. "That means she hunts for younger men."

"I know what a cougar is, Bob. A woman can't be a cougar if she's not old."

"Silvia," Bob says wickedly, "is in her forties."

"Looks like Shitstain's about to get eaten alive," the chef says, and the whole kitchen—with the sole exception of Adrienne—erupts into laughter.

"Adrienne," the chef says. "I want you to cover Silvia."

"But she's at the bar."

"And?"

"What about Jake?"

"I don't trust him. Not with this."

"Hold on, hold on, hold on," Bob says, "what about me? You're not putting me on Silvia?"

"No, Bob, I'm not."

"Why not?"

"Because you insult the customers."

"I won't insult Silvia—"

"Come here, Adrienne," the chef says. Bob stamps his foot. Adrienne moves closer to the chef. He says to her quietly, "She's just a customer, okay? She's got a TV show. So what. Treat her like any other customer."

"But what about Jake?" Adrienne says. Her mouth is dry.

"Push him out of the way," the chef says.

"Don't fuck it up," Bob says, filled with malice.

Adrienne turns to go out into the dining room. "Adrienne," the chef says. "Sell her the chicken."

"And seriously," Kevin says before returning to his office. "Don't fuck it up."

*

The chef is right. So what if she's a food critic? So what if she happens to be toe-curlingly beautiful? Adrienne wonders how that can be, incidentally: how a person can make her living stuffing food into her face and still look that way in a little black dress. And so what if Jake isn't even pretending not to be staring down the impressive length of Silvia Silverstein's cleavage? And—and so what if she's baring her teeth at him and laughing at one of his incredibly bad jokes? She sidles behind the bar to where Jake is blabbering at Silvia. "You know at first I thought they weren't going to let me in." There is no doubt about what he's talking about. A pause. "But then they let me in."

Adrienne thrusts herself between them. "Hi," she says. "I'm Adrienne. I'm going to be taking care of you tonight."

"Two servers? Just for me?" Silvia says, looking at both of them. "How unexpected. How delightful." She has an accent, but Adrienne has no idea where it is from.

"AIDS," Jake says quietly. "I'm doing fine here."

"It looks like Jake has already poured you a drink," Adrienne says. "I'll come back around for when you're ready to order food." She squeezes her way out from behind the bar. She knows Jake is going to follow her, that he's going to put his hand on her shoulder—

"What the hell was that about?" he says. "What are you doing behind my bar?"

"Chef wants me to take care of her," Adrienne says. "I'm just doing what chef says."

"Chef wants you to take care of her. Do you think I buy that? You can't come barging behind my bar just because you happen to be jealous."

He never used to be this much of an asshole. Was he? She can't remember. Suddenly she can't recall a single reason why she likes him, why she ever started sleeping with him in the first place. "Okay," she breathes. "Do you know who that woman is? That's Silvia Silverstein. Haven't you ever seen her show on the Food Network?"

"I don't watch the Food Network." He glances back at Silvia. His eyes widen. "Are you saying this woman is on television?"

"That's right," she says. "And chef wants me to take her order. If you have a problem with that, you can go talk to him." Which she knows he won't. Instead he returns to flirting with Silvia, and Adrienne smiles as she goes to attend to her tables. But she can still hear Jake giving his little routine about how grimy Albany is, which Adrienne has heard countless times. She can hear Silvia eating it up. And as Adrienne glides around the dining room her anger heats up and threatens to split her smile in half. What she can't believe is that this woman is giving Jake the time of day, stupid, immature, lazy Jake!

But she isn't surprised, not really, because everything comes easy to Jake. He has a way about him that makes the world fall beneath his feet. And Adrienne knows the reason why she was attracted to him in the first place is that everything in her own life seems to be so difficult, and the absolute most foolish part of her always wondered if maybe, just maybe, a bit of Jake's ease might rub off on her... Her diploma! Her diploma is on the refrigerator! How fucking horrifying! And Jake knows! He knows it's there!

She goes back behind the bar to get Silvia's order.

"Adrienne!" Jake says to her, as if she's a friend he hasn't seen in years. "Do you know what Silvia just told me?" Apparently they're on a first-name basis now. "She wants to profile the Pub on her show. Can you believe that? She came all the way here by herself—"

"Wow, jeez," Adrienne says.

"I like to scout out locations on my own," Silvia says. "To get a sense of the place and the people. It's always my hope I can step into a restaurant and not be recognized. I like to try to be a regular person."

"She says she's leaning toward yes on us," Jake says, bunny-eyed.

Silvia laughs. "Well," she says. "I have not even tried the food yet." That smile makes her look like a gorgeous sociopath. "But it helps that you have such a charismatic bartender."

"It's too bad he'll be gone forever in two weeks, huh."

Jake laughs far too loudly.

"But perhaps you can fly back from California for when we film the show, yes?"

"I don't see why not," Jake says.

"But you must understand it is the food that is important," Silvia says. "It is the soul of any home, of any restaurant, of any culture. That is what I care about."

"What do you want," Adrienne says.

"I have heard that your half-pound burger is rather famous—"

She remembers something that now seems very far away. "No," she blurts. "I mean. Tonight we're offering a special. A chicken special."

"I have to say I'm not much for chicken."

"This chicken is the best thing I've ever eaten in my entire life," Adrienne says. Jake looks at her like she's insane. "It's wonderful."

"Where does it come from?"

She blinks. "The kitchen. It's from the kitchen."

"I mean where were the chickens raised." The farm. She's forgotten the name of the farm. She looks to Jake for help. Nothing. The smile leaves Silvia's face. "Go ask the chef where the chicken is from, honey."

She shuffles back into the kitchen. She can feel her own dead expression. She tells the chef that she's forgotten where the chicken is from. "Oh my God," he says. He steps away from the line. He runs out of the kitchen into the dining room.

"You don't look so good, guapiloca," Miguel says. He studies her, holding his left nub in his right hand, then he picks out a fork that had been thrown in the garbage can standing next to the dish table.

Adrienne finds herself staring into the trash. The bones of the thirty-two-dollar chicken are in there. She finds it amusing to think that the bones are worth nothing even as the chicken is worth so much. One would think that after paying thirty-two-dollars a person would pack up the bones and take them home with them. But nope. Then a shiver of dread courses through her. She can't stop looking at the chicken bones. Those used to be a chicken! A chicken that lived on a range and ran around or whatever. Normally she would be amused by the image of a chicken running. But instead she is just afraid. Suddenly four years of undergraduate education are going to work. Symptoms listed in the DSM-V fly through her head: she sees her trembling hands; she feels the pounding of her heart. And there is something else, something sinister, that threatens to rise up from the pit of her stomach and wrap itself around her throat and, and—

The chef comes back into the kitchen. "Listen," he says. "Stay right here. I'm going to make this fucking chicken as fast as I can and then you're going to take it out."

All she has to do is bring this plate out to those people at the bar. Afterward she can ask the chef if she can go home. She needs to go home. But first she's got to get this chicken out. She feels something in her throat that feels like a bone and she can barely breathe.

"Okay," he says. He practically flings the food at her. "Go." The chef has never been angry at her before.

She is shaking so badly that the chicken rattles against the porcelain plate. She comes across the dining room as though wading through a freezing lake. Far away she can see Jake making an ass of himself in front of Silvia, leaping around and gesticulating behind the bar. A painful remembrance surfaces: how funny she used to think he was, the way he constantly tried to make her laugh. He'll be gone soon. And Adrienne will still be here, probably having an affair with the chef or something awful like that, her diploma taken off the fridge and thrown into the trash—

As she reaches the bar she recognizes exactly what Jake is doing: he's enacting his atrocious Arnold Schwarzenegger impression, and Silvia is doubled over laughing. "Cally-four-nee-ya," he bellows, and when he says it his arms go up into the air as if he's flapping enormous wings. "Cally-FOUR-nee-ya." Then when he extends his arms one of them comes up and smacks the chicken, the carrots, and the potatoes out of Adrienne's trembling hands. The whole entree flies above their heads. The plate shatters on the floor. The vegetables shower Adrienne. The thirty-two-dollar chicken plops in front of her shoes. She stares at Jake and Silvia, who stare back at her, dumbstruck. Jake makes a noise. She peers down and notices that a carrot has infiltrated the front of her blouse. It feels warm between her breasts, and as she picks it out with two fingers Jake and Silvia explode into laughter, and Adrienne runs into the kitchen.

She remembers trying to breathe. She remembers the sting of tears in her eyes and she remembers seeing Bob-the-waiter bare his teeth at her in a psychopath's grin because he has been working in food service for three decades and so probably medically is a psychopath, Jesus. She doesn't truly remember making it into the cooler. She registers the cold and the smell of raw thawing meat and these things comfort her. She can hear her own sobbing. The cooler door swings open and she sees the chef. "Hey," he says. "Hey. Calm down." He hugs her and keeps her there. He is soft, it turns out. His beard smells a little funny. She wants to tell him right now that she wants to be a psychologist. She doesn't want to be a waitress anymore. Why can't they just let her be a psychologist?

But the chicken, the chicken.

"It's okay," he says. "It happens. It's just food, okay? It's just chicken."

But it isn't though, it isn't.

_ _

Adam Felts grew up in Utica, New York. He is currently in the Master of Fine Arts program in fiction writing at Boston University. He is working on a novel called Thirteen Different Girls. "Chicken Bones" was awarded the 2014 Clarion Short Story Prize.

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