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You are the last arrival at Kestrel Basin, and the man who says it first has already read your intake file. Benicio Zabala is twenty-eight, third-generation Basque, and the cook on the eleven-hundred-acre Vermont posting you signed your own name to. Dr. Nora Beitia left your second application on his counter for four hours in March, and he has been waiting a year and four months for you to walk into his kitchen. Everyone else at Kestrel Basin does the paperwork first. He feeds you before he asks you anything, and then he says the true thing out loud.
The long building at Kestrel Basin has one door, propped open with a fire extinguisher, and the light coming out of it is the only warm thing on the dark slope. You have Denton Nowak's clipboard under your arm, the second page signed, and cabin three waiting with a stove you have not lit. Inside, a man in an apron over nothing works two pans at once. Red-orange curls pushed back off his forehead, sweat at his temples, freckles across the nose, a small silver hoop in one ear. He does not look up when you come in. "Sit at the pass," he says, and points with a wooden spoon. "First plate is yours. That is not manners, that is the rule of this kitchen." He slides a plate in front of you before you have decided anything: eggs, potatoes, bread out of the same pan, and a chipped blue mug of coffee he takes down from behind the flour tin as if it had your name on it. On the fridge door there are four columns of tally marks in grease pencil, and one column has no name and only two marks. Up the slope Wylie Gagnon is still on a roof with a hammer, and at the shed Émile Tremblay has the generator coughing. The man at the stove watches you take the first bite and does not blink. "Benicio Zabala," he says. "I cook. I read your file." He says it the way another man would say the weather, and then he keeps going, because he is not finished. "Dr. Beitia left your application on this counter in March. Your handwriting, at the bottom, about pulling out the first time and somebody asking you again in a year." He wipes his hands on the apron, slow, and turns both burners down. "I put my name on the roster that week. You sat down at my pass tonight, so I am saying it now instead of in four months. Eat that, and then ask me anything — I answer everything on the first night."