Today's Reading

CALLING ORDERS

Holly Knox, host of Wherewithall, a fifty-seat restaurant of steel, glass, blond wood, and exposed brick, leans in its doorway, eyes trained skyward at clouds, dark as doom, gathering over Chicago, eclipsing the sun. The forecast failed to predict it, but at 4:30 p.m., this midsummer day has apocalyptically become night, and there's no question a storm is going to—

Fuck!'The aerial dam has burst, and here it is already. Just like that, the city is under hydra-assault: Strangers huddle close under awnings. Cars decelerate to a wary crawl. Raindrops splatter like water balloons against Wherewithall's rectangular bank of dining-room windows, turning the view from within impressionistic. Inside, in anticipation of the night's first guests, a handful of servers costumed in crisp white dress shirts and blue aprons zhoosh the dining room. In the open kitchen, a trio of cooks load for bear, stocking lowboys* with trays of butchered fish and meat, their stations with extra side towels. Everyone presses ahead in denial of the deluge, until a leak in the kitchen ceiling forces the issue. A team member races upstairs to the gutted vacant apartment above and secures a linoleum square over a breach in the floorboards, impeding the flow—a stopgap in an age of stopgaps.

* small refrigerators positioned beneath kitchen work counters

It's Saturday, July 24, 2021, and Wherewithall—like most surviving restaurants—could use a break. The COVID-19 pandemic has plagued (literally) society for more than a year, forcing a nationwide industry shutdown that began in March 2020, and to date has claimed close to 100,000 American restaurants and bars, along with more than four million lives worldwide. In recent months, vaccines have been making their way into arms (especially in liberal strongholds like Chicago) and, with worrying variants yet to materialize, life has been lurching toward normal, including a guarded revival of indoor restaurant dining. Johnny Clark and Beverly Kim, the married couple who are the restaurant's co-chefs and own both the restaurant and the building that houses it, recently stopped requiring staff to wear microbe-impeding surgical-style masks. Still, on pleasant evenings they keep the back door, which leads to a cozy concrete courtyard and a private event space and office on its far side, open for the reassurance of ventilation, which now won't be possible for hours.

Wherewithall has reservations for ninety-two customers in the system tonight, the most since reopening four weeks earlier—an opportunity for the staff to continue reconditioning and for the restaurant to inhale life-sustaining revenue. But furious weather prompts cancellations even in sturdier times, so that's all suddenly tentative until five-fifty, ten minutes ahead of opening, when the last, lingering drizzle tapers off and the sun makes a steamy encore before true evening falls. Around the corner on residential North Albany Avenue, toddlers and stoop sitters reemerge from modest houses packed into overgrown subdivided lots, and somewhere down there a lone songbird chirps, marking itself safe. For now things have taken a beneficent turn, and Wherewithall and its team have all anyone could ask or expect of the summer of '21: a chance.


An hour later and the storm has receded like a bad dream. Or was the storm the reality, and is this the dream? It sure seems illusory: the long-dormant dining room reanimated with unselfconscious human interaction; the barroom, where Holly checks guests in on a touchscreen tablet fixed to a freestanding podium, flowering into a pageant of reunion and celebration:

"Let's have a drink here before we sit down."

"Frank! How long has it been?" "Since the pandemic, at least." "Give us a hug...if it feels safe."

"Happy birthday, you!"


The two adjacent rooms, joined by a doorless passageway lined with slatted wood in imitation of a wine cask's interior, thrum with music. Each night, general manager Jessica Line (mid-thirties, frizzy auburn hair) selects a "radio station"* on Spotify based on the distinguishing characteristics of a different artist. Tonight, in homage to co-chef-owner Johnny's hometown, it's Heartless Bastards, a Cincinnati, Ohio, rock band whose honky-tonk sound is deconstructed and extrapolated to a hodgepodge of rock, bluegrass, country, and soul. Right now, Nashville's Lilly Hiatt trills of love and devotion in "Brightest Star."

* an arch way of referring to a playlist generated by an algorithm or third party
...

Join the Library's Online Book Clubs and start receiving chapters from popular books in your daily email. Every day, Monday through Friday, we'll send you a portion of a book that takes only five minutes to read. Each Monday we begin a new book and by Friday you will have the chance to read 2 or 3 chapters, enough to know if it's a book you want to finish. You can read a wide variety of books including fiction, nonfiction, romance, business, teen and mystery books. Just give us your email address and five minutes a day, and we'll give you an exciting world of reading.

What our readers think...