By Scott Lax

The slate patio built in May by the recently indicted contractor is cracked on this hazy mid-July morning. A fracture winds through it like a dried-up Amazon River, looking to Jeremy as if Cleveland is about to swallow up what’s left of the near west side: its desanctified churches and abandoned factories; its fragrant boutiques filled with jewelry and sugary treats; its randomly inhabited houses of multi-hued gangbangers; of widowed babushkas; of Viking-stove-owning couples who take toddlers for walks around Lincoln Park before they’re old enough to be driven east toward one of the private schools for a few years until Westlake or Solon seem not-so-boring again.

            Jeremy only noticed the crack today because he’s been busy patching the crumbling brick walls surrounding the patio, which he opens tonight. Seeing the crack jars him and shakes out every doubt he’s shelved away in his mind over the past few years of courting investor by positioning Cleveland as a major food town, selling himself and waiting out the Crash. Perhaps most difficult for Jeremy was surviving the oxygen-sucking heat of the handful of nationally renowned chefs in a city that turned a sow’s ear into a silk perogie.

            Yet Jeremy did it – he raised a quarter of a million dollars and opened his restaurant, his dream, his baby, the sacrifice of his thirty-seven years on the planet, just two months ago. But…this crack. 

            He sits on a chair he bought at a fire sale at a grand old hotel in West Virginia; a chair like his food: solid, simple, classic. He shifts in his seat that’s still wet from the overnight rain. The chair legs rock and forth on the crack. His stomach twists into a double-you-over knot when he realizes that the crack runs all the way over to the still-flaking brick wall that shields the patio from the street. 

            Oh, god…please no, Jeremy thinks, looking down at the crack, because he knows what it means: there will be more cracks, and no one to honor the warranty. He’s tapped out and the crack will stay unrepaired. The slate patio – la touche finale – will grow old before its time.

• • •

Jeremy’s restaurant survived a disastrous soft opening in May. A cop from Washington, D.C., the boyfriend of one of Jeremy’s best customers from his now- closed downtown restaurant, got into an argument with a scarf-wearing defense attorney from Cleveland Heights. The lawyer and his wife – a friend of Jeremy’s mother – waited at the bar for their table for two and a half hours drinking Tanqueray and tonics. Hunger dropped the lawyer’s blood sugar and mood faster than National City Bank’s stock. The D.C. cop and his boyfriend from Ohio City were the objects of the lawyer’s physiological fissure.

            “Excuse me. You two have been sitting for three hours,” the lawyer said, his crotch inches from the head of the cop’s boyfriend. He flipped his scarf over his right shoulder. “That’s simply rude. My wife and I need to eat, too. This isn’t one of your….”

            The cop leaned back in his chair, his arms behind his head. “This isn’t one of our…?” he said, and smiled. “One of our what?”

            The cop’s boyfriend said, “No, Brendan, don’t. We’re finished eating.” He looked at the scarf-wearing lawyer, whom he recognized from the society pages, and gave him a civilized smile. “We’ll just pay up and leave. Sorry to make you wait.”

            The lawyer seemed satisfied and began to turn to his wife at the bar. “It’ll just be a minute,” he stage-whispered.

            Then the lawyer felt a hand on his shoulder. The six-foot three-inch D.C. cop stood in front of him. The lawyer smelled a mix of men’s cologne and women’s perfume, of spices and meats and other scents of a fine restaurant. But he smelled something else that he knew from representing criminals: rage.

            “I’m sorry?” the lawyer said to the cop. He stood his ground. “May I help you?”

            The cop smiled again. “You said this isn’t one of our….” He shrugged.

            The cop moved closer and continued, “When you interrupted my partner’s and my supper and said this one of ‘your’ something…I’m just wondering what that something is. It’s an easy question. Isn’t it?”

            The cop had seen a fourteen-year old female rape victim, an eighty-six-year-old man who’d been robbed and beaten, and a dry-cleaning store owner whose face was shot-gunned beyond recognition – in the past month alone. His dinner was just interrupted by a guy wearing a scarf who smelled of gin.

            The lawyer, who lately had seen his own fair share of society’s dregs and their miseries and listened to the excuses of its privileged, could not remember what he had meant.

            “This isn’t one of your…” the lawyer said, smiling weakly. “I’m not sure. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

            A few people on either side of the lawyer and the cop began to move away. Elena, a veteran of the Flats, Warehouse District, Tremont and Ohio City nightlife scene since the mid-1980s, instinctively left her station behind the bar to get Jeremy, who was in the kitchen, pleading with his sous chef to please, please deal with his cheating wife tomorrow. “I will do anything to help you through this,” Jeremy said. “Just not tonight. Please make food, Anthony. I’m begging you.”

            Anthony went back to chopping onions. Tandem tributaries of tears trickled down his face from mixed emotional and chemical reactions. Jeremy sensed Elena behind him.

            “There’s a nasty fight about to go down,” she said calmly to his back as she illegally lit a cigarette. “Get your ass out there, boss. I’ll call the cops.”

             Back in the bar, the lawyer turned away from the cop and shouted out an order for another Tanqueray and tonic, but no one was behind the bar, as Elena was on the phone with dispatch, and Frankie, the other bartender, had his car repossessed that morning and was stuck in Stow. The lawyer’s drink order was a decoy; he pivoted to sucker punch the D.C. cop, who, anticipating the lawyer’s move, flashed his right elbow upwards like the wing of a leathery prehistoric bird, crushing the nose and left eye socket of the lawyer, whose left nostril sprayed blood on a half dozen diners before he hit the ground.

            The police arrived and took statements. The D.C. cop was questioned and released to his boyfriend, who had clout with a few Cleveland pols. The lawyer and his hysterical wife were taken to Metro Hospital. Jeremy’s restaurant slowly cleared out, but a few of the faithful stayed, so Jeremy locked the doors and made mushroom, tomato, Italian sausage and goat cheese pizza with ingredients he’d gotten that very morning from the West Side Market. Jeremy and fourteen others – including Anthony, who had decided to try to fix his marriage tomorrow – stayed until the sun rose over the silent steel mills in the valley. They went through twenty-seven bottles of wine, including eight bottles of a two hundred eighty five dollar 1996 Meursault that Jeremy had laid in for one Hunting Valley customer’s private use, and a thousand dollar bottle of Cristal that Jeremy had been saving for the rumored arrival of a certain rock star in the coming autumn.

            At seven-thirty in the morning, Jeremy, who had gone from very drunk to very sober, said, “Hell of a soft opening, huh?”

            Everyone laughed, but Jeremy was crushed. It wasn’t a good omen, no matter how many gallows jokes his old friends made, no matter how often they said, “Think of it this way: It can’t get any worse.”

• • •

Jeremy opened officially a week later – this time with two, off-duty Cleveland cops that stood at opposite ends of the restaurant.

             A bearded food writer and his editor, who wore a black cocktail dress, finally arrived along with a gaggle of the daily paper’s columnists. Preceding them were the usual p.r. flacks and advertising hacks; a pork pie-hatted celebrity blogger; a tweedy author of mystery novels; a visiting New York music critic with horned-rimmed glasses; a scrum of arts patrons; and a depleted platoon of Cleveland’s corporate chieftains. To Jeremy’s relief, a few respect-paying chefs, as well as his close friends and family from Parma Heights – some who had invested in the restaurant – had been the first to arrive.

             The hard opening went well, and Jeremy, ignoring his feeling of foreboding from the soft-opening night fight, kept his hopes up.

             But this was all before he saw the crack.

• • •

This morning, two months after the successful hard opening, on the day the patio is to open, Jeremy continues to rock in the chair that sits on the crack, as if probing for a leak in a nuclear power plant. He thinks he senses radiation seeping through the ground. He absently thinks about calling the contractor, and then remembers again that he’s out of business and is about to be incarcerated for paying bribes to local government officials.

             Elena arrives at work. She doesn’t find Jeremy in the kitchen so she walks outside and takes out a new pack of cigarettes and begins to tap it. The slate patio, wet from the rain, gleams in the sun, giving it a blinding sheen. The honey locust trees overhead are deep green, the sky is clear and bright and pollution free. Jeremy rocks gently in one of his lovely old chairs from the closed down hotel in West Virginia that he hauled up himself in his 1995 Ford Bronco.

             Elena sees him rocking in the chair. Then she, too, sees the crack upon which he rocks, and she stops. She puts her unopened pack of cigarettes back in her unpressed white Oxford shirt pocket. Jeremy has closed his eyes, as if in prayer, and sings to himself in a barely perceptible voice.

Born in Cleveland, Scott Lax is a novelist, short story writer, nonfiction writer and playwright. After graduating from Hiram College, he spent 15 years as a salesman and drummer. The Denver Post called his first novel, The Year That Trembled, “powerful” and one of 1998’s “milestones in fiction.” The recipient of numerous awards from the Ohio Professional Writers and Cleveland Press Club, and the MUSE magazine Literary Competition (fiction), Lax is a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Nonfiction Scholar, Sewanee Writers’ Conference Fiction Fellow and 2002 Midwest Filmmaker of the Year. Lax has completed a novel, Village Triangle, which is awaiting publication, and is writing a book of short stories, of which “The Crack” is one. He founded The Chagrin Valley Writers’ Workshop, where he teaches. He also teaches for The Lit: Cleveland’s Literary Center.