Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales by Melissa Marr and Tim Pratt Page A

those old patterns, put up with the teasing and sympathy for my televised failure for a few days, then slunk back to California … would I have ever truly found my way home again?
    I tell people the only thing I miss about home is the food, and that much is true. I got to town at lunchtime, more or less, and thought I’d be able to face the prospect of Jimmy, Mom,Dad, and the extended F if I got a bite to eat first. After a week of greased-up fast food and limp pizza delivered to motel rooms, I was hungry for something real—being picky is an occupational hazard of being a chef—and the prospect of Eastern Carolina barbecue sounded like a gateway to heaven.
    You can’t get it on the West Coast. Oh, there are places that serve “Carolina-style” barbecue, butat best it’s an approximation, carob when you want chocolate. In North Carolina alone, there are two distinct styles of barbecue, though both start with slow-cooking a pig in a pit full of burning hickory chips: there’s the One True Barbecue, with vinegar-and-red-pepper sauce, favored in Eastern North Carolina, and the heretical Lexington-style barbecue more common in the western half of the state,with its hideous gloppy tomato-based sauce.
    I pulled up in the weedy gravel parking lot outside Willard’s B-B-Q, a Cold Corners institution renowned far and wide for the lightness and perfection of its hush puppies and the skill of itspitmaster. What a great title for a cook—the best I’ve ever had is “executive chef,” and that doesn’t come close. (Of course, just then, I didn’t have any jobtitle at all, unless you count “recently fired for trying to punch a customer.”)
    There were no cars or pickups in the lot, which was beyond bizarre—it should have been packed, even on a Tuesday. For a heart-stopping moment I looked up at the faded sign (depicting the inevitable smiling pig wearing a chef’s toque) and worried that Willard’s had closed … but then I saw movement inside the greasywindows and climbed out of my car.
    Summer in North Carolina. Stepping out of the air-conditioning was like having a sheet sopping with warm water wrapped around my face. A sudden, brutal pang of homesickness for the East Bay hit me. I remembered the place in the hills where David and I used to sit and watch the cool fog roll in over the bay below, but I couldn’t see a way back there that endedin anything but pity or pain.
    I hit the button on my key chain to lock the car, then felt stupid. When I was a kid, people barely locked their houses here, let alone their cars. Then I remembered some of my brother’s recent e-mails complaining about tweakers and thieves, and left it locked. My friends in Oakland used to joke about how I was a simple country boy too trusting to make it in thebig city, but I bet meth heads made up a bigger percentage of the population in my hometown than they did in the East Bay. I’d lost at least two of my innumerable second cousins in home meth-lab accidents.
    I pushed through the front door of Willard’s into a dim space full of empty square tables draped in red-and-white-checked plastic tablecloths. A couple of ceiling fans whirred away like thepropellers of ancient planes, swirling the hot air around.
    “You driving one of them hybrids?” the brassy blonde leaning on the counter said, and I braced myself for contempt and sneers as I nodded, but she just said, “The way gas prices are going, I oughta get one of those myself. The pitmaster drives a van rigged to run on biodiesel, and he ain’t bought gas in years—just strains out the hushpuppy and french fry oil and uses that. What can I getcha?”
    The menu was chalked up on a board behind the counter, and looked like it hadn’t been changed since the last time I’d been there, at least half a decade before. “I’ll take the number two plate and an iced tea.” No need to specify sweet tea; that was the only way they did it at Willard’s.
    “Sit down anywhere. It’ll be