Love and Sous Vide

The early morning Charleston air had an other worldly feel to it. The smell of the sea and the ancient aroma of the buildings filled each inhale. The uneven cobblestones gave way to pavers placed besides each other in a pattern only know to the mason. The pineapple fountain was asleep. At 4am, the city was still asleep.

Br walked from The Battery up East Bay Street. Her cool blue eyes darting from side to side, her reflection mutated in the dark windows of the restaurants and shops. She had an ear bud in, listening to a playlist she was sure her mother would have listened to on this same journey years prior. A mixture of Mumford and Sons, X Ambassadors, and Bastille, slow lonely songs peppered with empowering songs, and songs of unrequited love. Everything this walk embodied.

Every time she passed a window Br expected to see her mother walking beside her, but she wasn’t, she hadn’t walked with her mother in a long time. She half expected an apparition of a soldier or a sailor to saunter up to her drunkenly and ask her for a light, or where all the loose women were.

Br stopped in front of S.N.O.B., one of the only Hall’s family restaurants her mother hadn’t worked at during her tenure with their restaurant group. She eyed High Cotton across the street with both apprehension and curiosity. She unconsciously clenched her fists at her sides, mentally driving herself forward. She had heard on the radio a few weeks prior a local radio personality interviewing a local expert on the ghosts inhabiting Charleston, and she had to see for herself, could her mother the newest addition to Charleston’s supernatural population?

Br fidgeted with the ear bud, now playing a melancholy song from Vance Joy.

“I was coasting before I met you,” He crooned, as Br crossed the street diagonally, the street light flashing yellow down East Bay Street. “I’m with you.”

Br slowly walked closely along the side of the building, focusing on the uneven stones under her feet.  She allowed her imagination run wild, she would see everything, she would see nothing.

"I'm with you," Vance testified, as Br walked past the entrance to High Cotton towards the Main Diningroom. "I'm with you..." She cautiously looked up.

There she was.  There they were.  Just as the ghost expert had said. Dancing in the kitchen.  Br could see them, across the diningroom, behind the wine case. There was a tiny sliver were they were visible. Her mouth dropped open, and she could feel the tears falling from her eyes silently. He spun her mother around, and Br could see she was smiling. Her mother was smiling like she had never seen her smiling before, except maybe in pictures when her mother was a child.  They danced out of view behind the wine case and Br bolted to the other side of the wine case to get a better view.

They danced back over to the saute station, where her mother used to prep for the kitchen in early morning hours, because she liked to watch the sunlight stream in through the front windows. Br ran back to the other corner, and watched her mother get spun again.  Her long auburn braid swinging between her shoulders.  He pulled her close, and Br imagined his hand on her mother's lower back.  He leaned in closely and said something that made her smile again, and she placed her cheek to his.  Their High Cotton ball cap brims touching.  Then he abruptly spun her out to arms length, the whiteness of their chefs jackets seemed to swallow the entire kitchen, and they were gone.  The kitchen empty and dark, save the dim hood lights.

Br ran to the far side of the main dining room, trying to see behind the wine case, that's when she saw him. He was standing on the Cumberland Street side of the restaurant, looking in the other set of windows. It was her father.

Br looked back and forth between where her mother had been and where her father now stood, neither aware she was there.  Her mother obviously unaware of her father's presence.  He stood for a moment still watching after the dancers vanished, his face expressionless, then slowly turned and began to cross Cumberland Street, then he vanished.

"I'm with you...I'm with you..."