The following is from Angela Flournoy’s The Wilderness. Flournoy is the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, and she has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Flournoy has taught at the University of Iowa, Princeton University, and UCLA.

It was ninety minutes before opening and four hours before the lunch rush on the day in early March when Miguel called to say that although he’d already arrived at the restaurant, he needed to leave immediately. Something about needing to get back to Chiapas in a hurry. She was at the farmer’s market in Santa Monica, her wagon laden with eggs and herbs. “Maybe I’ll be back in two weeks,” he said. His voice already had that staticky, far-away quality that plagues international calls, which made Nakia fear he was gone for good. And unlike “shit,” “maybe” wasn’t a Miguel word—generally a thing could happen or it couldn’t. Her nose stung. Odds were low she’d ever see him again.

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The prep crew was wrapping up when she walked in, the kitchen awash in the tang of cut onions and the sweet sweat of bell pepper, every surface gleaming. Eerily silent save for the sound of knife hitting board and the odd scrape, because her prep staff—Angel and Delia—disagreed on music so much that they both wore headphones. Nakia checked the schedule pinned on the bulletin board for a moment before realizing that the two of them were eyeing her. Had it really been so long since she’d arrived early? “At ease,” she said, hoping to sound self-effacing, hoping they’d hear her over their music, but they didn’t. It had been a while, but she still was confident that Delia, mid-forties, sentimental, listened to Juan Gabriel, while Angel, nineteen, angsty and ironic, listened to Morrissey. They were mother and son. She waved, to which they nodded; then she moved to the staff room. The chef’s coat in her locker no longer buttoned across her chest, and even if she tried to wear it half-buttoned, the armpits were too tight. Her chambray button-up and an apron, then. She shouldn’t have been nervous. The trick and trap of management, of proprietorship: people presumed you possessed an expertise that you rarely had to perform.

One had to spend time observing the rhythm of a kitchen to expo properly, and Nakia had fallen out of the practice of observing hers. Did a cook move too slow on sauté? She didn’t know them like that, and thus called for Kevin’s sides too early. They were cold by the time he got his shrimp and grits together. Lesson learned. She would not assume anything about anyone, and would make sure plates cohered to her original plans for them. Though she’d worked hard to build her menu, form had always trumped function for Nakia when it came to food. What a meal tasted like was tedious once a recipe had been perfected, but she never tired of making her plates beautiful. Focusing on what orders should look like put her into a groove.

“I need grits curly, grits white, grits extra-red and grits fucked,” she said. “Got it, got it, got it, got it,” Reina, an even newer cook, shot back.

Grits with sautéed kale, grits with white cheddar, grits with extra romesco sauce, and one bowl of sugared grits—a personal affront, but such was life—began to appear before Nakia one after the other. At least Miguel was still using her shorthands. Reina wore a short-sleeve black chef’s coat. The jaguar tattooed onto the inside of her forearm leaped in and out of Nakia’s view each time she slid another bowl under the lamp. Short sleeves were not allowed in Nakia’s kitchen, but had anyone ever told Reina as much? Scouring farmer’s markets, scheduling deliveries, staying on top of maintenance, running the social media accounts, working the front of house, and trying to have a social life had kept Nakia away. Monique had been the one to convince her to back off some, to trust in Miguel and try to have a life outside of grits bowls, poached eggs, and mimosas, to try to meet someone. Five months of “backing off some” and she hadn’t met anyone, she’d only found new ways to stay too busy to meet anyone.

After the opening rush, a whole fifteen minutes without the ticket machine spitting out an order. Nakia looked at the kitchen. There were Nestor and Damian, her young dishwashers; Stacey the Man, as everyone called him, a fifty-something uncle type who worked the fry station; Kevin on sauté; and Reina on the grill and, apparently, anywhere else someone needed her. Miguel had brought Reina’s résumé to Nakia as one of two finalists, the other finalist being a guy who had done a year at Le Cordon Bleu. Reina had no high school diploma or GED but she had cooked nearly everywhere small and cool from Long Beach to Culver City. She had taste. Yes to Reina was all Nakia had texted back. In the months since, she’d spoken to Reina maybe six times. A slicked-to-the-side short haircut, a snake tattoo on her neck, and three piercings in one ear, none in the other. Sturdy through the torso and legs. Butch. Nakia had somehow known without knowing, just from her résumé. It felt good to be right. She’d seen Reina cracking jokes in both Spanish and English with others enough times to know she wasn’t standoffish, but she didn’t seem to enjoy making eye contact with her. That happens when you’re the boss, Nakia told herself.

The kitchen made it through that first lunch rush with no big mishaps. She might have been imagining it, and who’s to say she was even in a deficit, but Nakia felt herself improve in the estimation of her staff as the day went on.

After closing, she had planned to go to her friend Arielle’s gym in Mar Vista for a high-intensity interval training class, to which she usually brought about forty percent of the intensity of the other participants, but since she’d already sweat through her shirt, she figured she was justified in going home. Her old gunmetal Jeep Wrangler made her feel like her nineties high school self had triumphed, at least in this one way. Sitting up high while barely five feet tall, no doors in the summertime, bushels of basil and rosemary from the farmer’s market wafting up to the front. As cool as she could ever manage. But it was March. The doors were on. Her whole body ached. She had done the thing without Miguel for the first time in her restaurant’s seventeen-month history. An accomplishment that warranted some kind of celebration, or at least some gesture of largesse. A proprietress! When she saw Reina fiddling with her bike on the corner of La Brea and Centinela, she honked her horn one good time, bade her toss her bike in the back, and offered to take her home.

“I live far but you can take me halfway,” Reina said.

“Halfway in a car when you were gonna go the whole way on a bike? That makes no sense.”

“You know, you can put your bike on the bus,” Reina said. “They have these hooks for it on the front.”

A smart-ass.

“You grilled the snapper perfect today. Great job.”

“It was a good fish. I barely did anything,” Reina said. Then: “Thank you.”

She directed her down La Cienega, told her to turn onto Stocker, but Nakia wasn’t able to cut through the traffic and missed the turn. This felt like a sign. It was a maneuver she negotiated every day to get back to Juanita and Conrad’s, one she’d made since she learned how to drive. Nobody needed to learn to merge onto the actual freeway when these fast and wide sections of La Brea and La Cienega were freeway enough.

“Do you smoke?”

Reina looked out the window. The snake on her neck looked fresh, as if it had recently healed, which made Nakia think of shedding skins. She knew nothing about snakes, or most animals, so she did not know whether this was a cobra or a python or a boa constrictor, only that it was black and green and had no rattle.

“Me?” Reina said. “No smoking, but I don’t mind to be around it.”

Nakia took the next exit. They ended up at Kenneth Hahn park, at the very top. So many giggles, even before Nakia lit up. What was funny, the fact that they knew they would have sex soon, or that they understood they probably shouldn’t? Later, Reina would say she’d known it from the moment Nakia asked her to toss her bike in the back of the Jeep. Nakia would say it was missing that turn, how she hadn’t even realized she was nervous until then, but once she realized, she’d decided to act on those nerves. For now they contented themselves with looking out past the playground at the smogstrangled city, glancing at each other and giggling as the marijuana did its work, directly on one of them and indirectly on the other. It was the happiest—this moment before the moment—that Nakia had been in months.

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From The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy. Copyright © 2025 by Angela Flournoy. Reprinted with permission from Mariner Books, HarperCollins Publishers.