"I've woken up with my ulcer chewing on my gut at four in the morning for the past three nights in a row because I know Jan's going to throw a fit when these fucking limbs sag to the ground," I told Elaine as she lit a second cigarette, sitting on the bumper of the catering van. We are spending this Friday evening, like almost every Friday evening, throwing together someone else's overpriced wedding banquet. Today is cool April, the setting sun veiled in a mist that would burn if it the day had been warm.

Our boss, Jan, told the bride we could illuminate the banquet table by hanging fruit jars filled with candles from the branches of the 200-year-old oak tree. Elaine and I spent the afternoon draping wires over branches, hearing them groan under the weight of the jars. Jan had envisioned a Tuscan wedding feast, so Elaine and I replicated the hills of Tuscany beside a barely sprouted Missouri soybean field. Only Jan could devise this crap.

I sat down last night with a calculator and figured out how much money I'd have if I quit this job and cashed in my vacation days. A little over $1000, enough to keep me alive for a month, maybe. If I haven't found another chef position by then, there's always Wal-Mart. Four and a half years of culinary school, two years as souse chef for Jan, just so I can ring up cheese doodles, jock itch cream, and Barbie dolls for six dollars an hour.

The dark clouds have cleared away, leaving only a colorless gray sunset. It softly glows with buried sun and humidity, dappling the green buds of the soybean plants. The oak, ancient and gnarled, droops its lushly leafed branches over the table. They capture the last hints of sun, which danced with candle flames, a glow escaping.

Cheap white linen draped the buffet table, forming pools of white in the grass below. A garland of dusty green olive leaves swagged in waves over the table's front, Elaine's elegantly twisted giant bread bows attached at the top of each wave.

Narrow green flutes of Italian wine dot the table, mingled among voluptuous cravats of olive oil. Beige stoneware crocks of breadsticks, an old pink basket filled with fat loaves of bread, china bowls brimming with deep Kalamata olives rest among plates of whole roasted chickens, crusted black and tawny with bright lemon slices wedged in the cavities between their legs. A whole leg of San Daniele prosciutto ham bigger than most pigs waits on the spinner beside the feast. Champagne grapes and figs tumbled over the edges of chipped white pillars. The meal glows golden in the gray haze of dusk.

"I love my job, Elaine."

"Are you being a smart ass?"

I shook my head, staring at the feast as I buried my hands in my hair, absently massaging my scalp. "I could live a happy life, creating such meals, if it wasn't for dealing with idiots like Jan. I mean, cooking's sensual in that life-giving way that lets you know that eating is to live, and it can make life bliss, you know? We have the power to make these people happy to be alive, even if it's just for the moment when they bite into that chicken..."

That's when the first branch broke.

It landed dead center on the table, shattering candle jars and china bowls. Candle wax spilled, running rivers on the linen that swallowed stray olives and grapes. A candle jar had landed on a bottle of wine, and they fell together, the flames popping and growing under the power of the alcohol. Elaine and I ran to the bar, grabbed a shiny silver tub of ice, but before we could make it, the alcohol fire boomed, sending sparks over the front edge of the table. We doused the nearest end, Elaine screaming and babbling as the dried olive leaves at the opposite end ignited, sending a trail of flame along the loops of the garland, swallowing the linen.

The bartenders and servers ran to the table with more ice and bottles of Italian water, throwing them into the blaze. A water bottle struck another wine bottle, which was already engulfed and metal-hot. It shattered, exploded, its flames licking skyward, lashing the two lowest branches of the tree.

The bride's father bolted from the Porta-Potty, shirttail sticking out of his fly. "What the fuck happened? Don't think for a second that I'm paying for this! And I want my goddamn deposit back!" I didn't even look at him. His daughter and new son-in-law were in the gazebo across the way, as oblivious as the other guests.

"You'll have to talk to Jan about the deposit." The charred smell of food and burnt ham made my stomach crawl. I turned to Elaine. "Do you know if anyone's called 911?" She shrugged, staring into the blaze, mouth agape as another charred branch cracked and tumbled to the ground. I patted her shoulder and walked to the bar. I grabbed the cell phone that was stashed in a spare apron.

My face felt sunburned as I dialed. "Hi, Jan? It's Thalia. The table's on fire. So is the tree. I quit." I didn't even push the disconnect button. I just dropped the phone in the grass and walked away.

****

So, I just drove until it had been dark for I don't know how long, and I had to stop for gas. I hadn't gone anywhere, just circled Columbia, filled up, and started circling again. Even with the windows down and the air conditioner blowing, I couldn't get rid of the smoke. I kept sticking my head out the window, gasping for air.

I remember when it used to be easy, finding things to do with my time. Things I loved. Things I missed because I spent all of my time at work. Now, suddenly, I have every minute, and I don't know how to spend the first night, other than circling. I used to exasperatedly announce that I didn't have time to breathe. Now I have the time, and I feel like I'm choking.

I've always been afraid of suffocating, never have been able to sleep with the covers over my head because it's too close, too tight. I remember childhood nights where asthma rocked through my body and I was blue, swimming in hot airlessness until I could get the oxygen to click into my lungs, like it finally managed to kick down a trap door. I haven't had one of those spells in years, until now. When I finally breathe, it's clean, shuddery. It takes time for my lungs to recognize the oxygen.

I loop over the east end of town for a fourth time, on the outskirts where the highway and the interstate cross, a new crop of chain restaurants, motels, and gas stations casting their glow on the road like it's daytime. This area was dark when I came here seven years ago, but the rest of the town was bright, brighter than I'd ever seen in my hometown on the other side of Missouri. I didn't sleep that first year, when I was living in the dorms. The four lanes of Providence Road was a deafening growl compared to the country lane I'd come from. I'd lay awake, listening to the cars and the drunken sorority girls who lived across the hall, trying to will my brain to snap onto anything that would speak to me, anything that would keep me from getting lost in noise.

At then end of my first semester, I had a horrifying moment while trying to find a topic for a research paper. I realized that I wasn't interested in anything. I'd just changed my major from journalism to anything-but-journalism, and I realized that everything in my life had revolved around journalism or home. I'd surrendered journalism, and I'd left home. Now, what?

I can't remember a time when I truly knew what I wanted to be. People seem to think that every chef has dreamt of being a chef since birth. Not me. I didn't learn to cook until my sophomore year of college, and then it was out of necessity. Too poor to afford eating out, and sick to death of canned soup, I started tinkering in the kitchen. The next semester I took a class in the food science department and, while it was still novel and fun, declared it my major. I just as easily could have taken a horticulture class and become a florist.

Everything I've ever done has been transitory, something to keep me busy until The Real Thing came along and announced, "Here I am! Pick me!" Cooking was fun. It was more than fun - it was soulful, as melodic as it was methodic. It was creating life and joy and pleasure. That's what sparked it, the happy moans after a meal, knowing the fulfillment I'd made. In feeding someone, I'd made him alive for another day.

Jan's Wedding Creations and Catering didn't even have to pay me for the first four months I worked. I interned for free during my junior year, setting up buffet tables at weddings, clearing away scraps and plates afterwards. The next semester they paid me to chop vegetables and mix batters under Elaine's supervision. She'd owned the catering company for ten years. To keep her husband from getting it in their divorce settlement, she'd sold it to Jan's Wedding Creations, keeping only her position as Head Chef. This was less than a year after Elaine had sold it, before Jan started tightening her grip.

Before long I was happily working forty hours a week, ignoring my classes. I was flunking, but I'd never learned more than I was learning from Elaine. When the school suggested that I remove myself from their institution, lacking five classes towards my degree, Elaine persuaded Jan to hire me as a full-time chef.

I couldn't have been happier that first year. I could finally pay my bills on time, but I spent so much time working that I usually forgot all about them. I still managed to get my phone service shut off every few months. I'd work seventy hours a week, happy to be there, looking forward to some rapid career advancement.

It didn't happen. When raise time rolled around a year later, Jan coughed up a three- percent pittance for Elaine and me. Elaine and I quit putting in so many extra hours in protest. To pick up our slack, Jan took the wedding planning duties away from us. That's when the weird shit started happening: Hawaiian weddings, Mardi Gras weddings, even a Gothic Vampire wedding. Granted, Elaine really got into that, since it gave her a chance to wear her black velvet cape. Jan didn't see the irony when I suggested roasted garlic for the appetizer platters.

It grew old after a while, pandering to Jan' ill-planned goofy themes, too busy building theatrical sets for wedding banquets instead of having the time and energy to concentrate on the food. But we still did an excellent job, and even the most fickle clients would hug us after the meal.

That didn't make a difference to Jan. She constantly questioned our activities when she'd come into the kitchen to find Elaine and me visiting while waiting for soufflé's to rise. We joked that Jan was afraid that we were going to stage a bloody coup and take over the company. The day after Jan saw Elaine and I having lunch on our day off, she started requiring time logs, documenting our on-duty activities every fifteen minutes. Then the surveillance cameras appeared in the kitchen. Then I started crying before work every day.

This whole Tuscan feast bullshit was it. Jan had seen it in a magazine, and didn't consider the implications, or the details on how to do it properly. There's a tree. Here's the jars. Just shut up and do it.

I got home at two a.m., having driven in circles for nearly six hours. In that time I could have almost driven to Chicago, Minneapolis, Memphis, Nashville, Kansas City, or St. Louis, starting my life over with what I had on my back.

I went straight to bed, my hair still smelling like smoke. I never fully fell asleep, my night filled with waking dreams that I knew I wouldn't remember.