Soup Du Jour

Dori woke up when she was good and ready. She’d stopped bothering with an alarm clock years ago, and elected to start her mornings slowly. The sun streamed in through the smeared, nicotine-stained window at the opposite end of her pathetic bedroom. She could still hear her father snoring across the flat, and finally dragged herself out of bed and into the kitchen in search of coffee. 

Her bones seemed to get stiffer every day, and each morning she awoke with a new ache, a new soreness in her feet or shoulders. Some days, usually days which followed nights spent drinking her way through a soon-to-expire keg of watery lager, she woke up with a throbbing headache or a churning gut, or both. 

Once properly caffeinated and having thoroughly sulked over her aging, crumbling body, Dori let out an exasperated sigh before pulling on the same pair of saggy, ill-fitted jeans that she wore yesterday and the twenty year old Smiling Spoon t-shirt that barely contained any notion of the bar’s logo after thousands of cycles through the wash. 

The Smiling Spoon used to really be something. Dori’s father had purchased the old Shell gas station and turned it into a bar. He’d plastered the walls with newspaper clippings from the paper announcing his grand-opening in 1958. He’d named the bar in honor of Dori’s mother, an avid collector of antique spoons. She was dead, a fact Dori had spent a great deal of time feeling too conflicted about. 

Dori passed a few of the many wall displays containing her mother’s spoons as she traipsed down the narrow, creaking stairs. She was careful to step lightly on the 4th step from the bottom. She’d let a leak in the ceiling go unchecked for about a year, and every time it rained the rusty, tainted water dripped from the ceiling onto the fourth step, rendering the wood soggy and weak. 

Dori was a lot like that fourth step. So was the Smiling Spoon. Soggy and weak. 

She rounded the corner and came into the kitchen, flicking on the lightswitches as she entered. The room was lit up in nauseating fluorescent light, illuminating the grease-covered pots and pans pilled in the deep sink. The refrigerator made a clunking noise she didn’t care enough about to have checked out or fixed. The oil in the deep fryer was the color of blacktop, and smelled like the aftermath of a county fair. She looked around for her pack of cigarettes and found them on the counter next to the deep fryer, sitting under a heat lamp that she was sure had never actually worked. 

Her first task was to start the soup, so she trudged over to the walk-in with her coffee in hand and heaved open the rusty door in search of ingredients. A plastic tub of raw meat sat on the top shelf. She pulled it down and gave it a whiff. The liquid the meat was swimming in was bubbly and bloody. But it didn’t smell that bad. She finished off the last of her tar-flavored coffee and set the mug down before balancing the tub of meat on her hip. Perusing the rest of the shelves for other ingredients needing to be used up and produced a bundle of too-bendy carrots, stalks of celery with browned leaves, and a few onions with green roots growing out of them. 

The health inspector had told her that onions shouldn’t be kept in the fridge. But his name was Seymour, and she refused to take the advice of a man with such a ridiculous name. 

Once she’d tossed the less than fresh vegetables into the tub with the raw meat, she set off for the stove, where the pot containing the remnants of yesterday’s soup du jour sat cold and coagulated. The ancient range took a few tries to light, but once the flame flickered she cranked it up before dumping the contents of the tub into the soup. 

She didn’t owe Whitebridge good food. She nearly laughed at the thought. The town had changed since the Spoon’s opening in the 50s. But it was the 1980s now, and the decade had brought with it a collective desire for more lively establishments, bars and restaurants with TVs where patrons could watch the news or sports instead of interacting with other humans. People had, at some point, started wanting gourmet food. At a bar. Dori scoffed. The town as a whole could go fuck itself, in her opinion. She’d keep serving her frugal creations until she finally worked up the nerve to close the place. And everyone who whispered about the bar going downhill since Dori’s father got sick would just have to deal with it. 

The soup would be fine to simmer for a few hours, though Dori would likely forget about it and let it roil on the stove until the rancid meat became tough shards and the carrots disintegrated into the sludgy liquid. She left the dirty kitchen behind her, swearing at the pile of dishes and half-promising herself that today would be the day she finally washed them. The front of the bar greeted her with its usual aromas of musty upholstery and the sourness of spilled beer. When she got to the front door, she groaned.

A pile of vomit sat right in front of the door, and the chilliness of late November in Massachusetts had rendered the pile frozen solid. She left to fetch a pitcher of hot tap water from the faucet behind the bar and a spatula from the pile of dirty dishes in the kitchen. She dumped the steaming water over the vomit, the smell immediately wafting into her nostrils and making her stomach lurch. She pushed the pile into the bush next to the Spoon’s entrance and admired her resourcefulness. 

She continued her list of tasks for opening the bar, a feat which entailed very little work as there was very little work done at closing time. Dori sat on her stool at the end of the bar and finally lit a cigarette, inhaling the earthy taste deeply before blowing the smoke across the bar. She watched it swirl and dance as it caught the light streaming in through the window above the gumball machine. When was the last time she’d emptied that? Kids hardly came into the Spoon, but the ones that did were ungrateful, complaining that the gumballs they’d begged their parents to give them a quarter for were stale and hurt their teeth.

Little brats, Dori thought. 

After procrastinating long enough, she pulled herself away from her stool and trudged back through the kitchen and up the stairs to retrieve her father.

Ruben Forde used to be a huling man with broad shoulders and a thick neck. He’d loved drifting around his bar, serving guests and slinging drinks. Looking at him now, sitting at table 14 and gumming the over-medium eggs she’s made him, he looked less like the man who’d taught her how to properly pour a beer than he ever had. His jowls sagged, his teeth were rotten and becoming scarcer with every visit to the dentist. He was seventy-five now, but he looked ninety. 

Dori turned from him and took another drag from her cigarette. They’d been open for an hour, and no one had come in yet. She was just starting to remember the soup bubbling on the stove when the bell at the front entrance tinkled. An auburn-haired woman wearing a long tan trench coat glided into the bar through the door held open by a man in a smart blazer and well-fitted trousers. She didn’t recognize them as locals. And she knew all the locals.

The couple settled into stools at the bar, and looked expectantly at Dori. She sighed and stubbed out her cigarette before leaning on the bar in front of the patrons. 

“Hello!” the woman said, greeting Dori warmly. 

Too warmly.

Dori offered a curt nod. “What’ll it be?”

The couple shared a knowing glance, an exchange that made Dori’s face get hot and her skin flush.

“We are actually looking for the owner. A Mr. Forde. Ruben Forde,” the man said. “Is he in?”

Dori pointed to table 14, a booth set into the back wall of the room, where her father shakily brought a forkful of eggs to his dribbling mouth. 

“Might we speak with him?” the woman asked, her voice gentle and lilting. She tilted her head as she smiled at Dori. 

“Talk to him all you like,” Dori told her. “He won’t remember anything you say anyways.”

The woman’s expression fell into one of pity, and Dori rolled her eyes. “Is he…”

“Dementia,” Dori deadpanned. 

“Oh, I am so sorry to hear that,” the man said.

No you’re not, Dori thought. You don’t even know him.

“Surely someone has taken over operations in his… absence. Might we speak to them?” The man produced a legal pad from the smart briefcase that matched his smart jacket and looked up at Dori expectantly.

“You’re speaking to her now,” Dori said. “I suggest you get on with it. I’m very busy.”

The woman laughed, and the sound was full of mockery and haughtiness. Dori balled her hands into tight fists below the bar. 

“It does not seem that way, miss…”

“Dori.”

“Miss Dori,” the woman offered another pretentious nod and pompous smile. 

“That’s right. And who exactly are you?” Besides a pain in my side at the present moment.

The man extended his hand. It was smooth, his cuticles perfectly shaped and his knuckles unmarred and uncalloused. Dori didn’t trust anyone, especially men with manicured hands. Men who had never known a hard day’s work. She scoffed and ignored the attempt at a handshake as the man introduced himself. Mylo Cook and his partner Emily Saunders. 

They both produced shiny gold badges, marking them as federal investigators. Dori’s heart clenched in her chest, but she kept that same unamused, disinterested expression firm on her wrinkled face. 

“We came to speak with the owner, you see, because there have been a string of disappearances as of late,” the man said, flipping through his legal pad until he landed on a page containing a list of names. 

Dori didn’t have to count the number of names on the list. Seventeen. There would be seventeen names on Mylo’s list. 

“It’s strange, Miss Forde,” the woman said, her tone still high and mighty and feigning a lack of worry. Dori knew better. She knew why they were at the Spoon the moment she’d seen their badges. “The victims came from all over. One from Wisconsin, another from Vermont. One was even from as far away as Arizona. Do you know what they all had in common?”

“How could I? This is the first I’m hearing of these disappearances,” Dori lied.

She lied so, so easily.

“Of course, Miss Forde,” the man had recovered from the blow Dori’s refusal of his handshake had had on his ego, and was stroking his clean-shaven chin. “They were all visiting Whitebridge when they disappeared. And do you know where local witnesses report having last seen them? All of them?”

The woman didn’t give Dori a chance to answer. “Here, Miss Forde. At the Smiling Spoon. You can imagine why that has brought us to you.”

“I can imagine,” Dori said, her fists still balled at her sides.

“Now, we’d hoped Mr. Forde would be cooperative and allow us a little look around. Would you extend us that courtesy?” the man asked. Suddenly, the investigators were both standing, eyeing Dori up like she was a piece of meat. 

A fact Dori thought was quite ironic. Almost laughable. 

Without a word, Dori ushered them into the kitchen. She didn’t bother getting angry at the way Mylo and Emily turned their noses up at the filthy kitchen, the pile of molding dishes, and the smell of the soup boiling over and burning on the stove. 

“The soup du jour?” Mylo asked when they passed by the rattling pot of soup on their way to the walk-in cooler.

Dori nodded. “It’s famous, you know. The Smiling Spoon’s famous soup of the day. The locals we’ve spoken to have told us of its… infamy.” Emily smiled, her expression fake and forced. “What kind of soup is it?”

“It’s famous because it’s a secret,” Dori told her, the corner of her lip twitching into the suggestion of a smile. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you.”

Emily pouted. “Pity.”

“I can show you though.”

The investigators shared a look before wordlessly following Dori to the walk-in. She opened the door for them, chuckling to herself when Emily flinched at the rusty, metallic creak of the hinges. She gestured for them to enter. 

Then she closed the door, securing the broken handle of an old mop between the latch and the handle, locking the investigators inside. She ignored the pounding of their fists on the inside of the door and smiled to herself more widely now that no one could see. She went to the panel adjacent to the walk-in’s door which housed the temperature controls. The buttons were faded and difficult to press, but Dori managed to lower the temperature to a balmy zero degrees. 

And just as she had seventeen times before, she meandered back up to the bar and lit a cigarette, waiting until the sounds of the investigators pleading and screaming and dying finally quieted. Then, she would open the cooler and get to work preparing the meat for the next batch of the Smiling Spoon’s infamous soup du jour.