Chapter_16

From bed that night, Rosie opened YouTube and searched how to break down a chicken. A man in a crisp chef’s coat stood before a raw chicken. Rosie watched closely as he lifted the chicken by its leg and moved his knife cleanly along the skin at the base of the thigh. The leg separated from the rest of the bird until it was only connected at the joint, which he cracked open and exposed to the camera. He flipped the chicken over. “Oyster,” he said with a thick French accent, running a hand over a small, bulbous area on the chicken’s back.

Oyster?She knew even less than she’d realized. She typed the word in her Notes app.

“Sinew,” the chef said, holding out the leg, pointing the tip of his knife at its red, fleshy joint. He ran the blade across the joint and in one clean movement pulled off the leg. “Repeat,” he said, turning his attention to the other leg. He moved as if he were unfolding an origami bird, then rested the chicken breast-side-up on the workbench, separating the flesh from the bone in two strokes, then the drumsticks from the thighs. He lined up the cuts on his bench and said, “Merci, thank you for watching.” Rosie hastily pressed Replay. She watched it a third time, and then a fourth.

“Babe?” Jordan said, turning off his light. “Do you really need to be watching this, like, right now?”

Rosie buried her face in her hands. “I don’t want to make a fool of myself tomorrow. I don’t know what I was thinking. I should have told him I have no experience with raw chicken. I was just really excited.”

“To be honest,” Jordan said gently, “I don’t know what you were thinking either. I don’t see why you didn’t just tell him the truth.”

Rosie gave him a pained look. “I wish it wasn’t too late to buy a practice chicken. All the supermarkets are closed.”

She played the tutorial again, going through the motions with an imaginary bird, her hands conducting air. She had already spent an hour locating the farm on Google Maps, then checking it against the farm’s website, then transcribing the directions from their house to the farm, in case she lost service.

Jordan took her hands and held them. “You’re overthinking it,” he said. “I’m sure he’ll train you. I carve a chicken, like, twice a month. I could show you how to do it.”

“I wonder how many of them I’ll have to do tomorrow,” Rosie said. “I mean, assuming I can fake my way through it. What should I wear?”

“Babe,” Jordan pleaded. “Let’s go to sleep. Everybody knows that nobody gets any work done on the first day.”

Her sleep had been thin and fraught; the chicken tutorial had replayed itself against her closed eyelids. Now it was four in the morning and she felt like a brick. Outside the window, the sky was coal black, still crowded with stars. She groped her way to the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face before pulling on a sweatshirt and starchy overalls. She leaned over Jordan and kissed him on the cheek.

“Thank you,” he murmured, drawing the covers over his shoulders.

There were no other cars on the road. The morning was full of layered, rhythmic noise. Insects, frogs, owls, wind. The darkness had started to soften. Wind beat against the windows. Quickly she lost service and had to reference her Notes app to find the entrance to the farm, which led to a small parking lot where the Tesla was dwarfed by machinery. Her headlights lit up a screened chicken coop. In the distance was a barn, a silo, and an enormous black field.

Hank emerged from the side of the coop, every part of him covered except his pale, serious face. He barely acknowledged her. She cut her lights and stepped out of the car. The air smelled like sawdust and manure. She met him at the entrance of the coop, where he flipped on a floodlight and worked a combination lock. “This is to keep raccoons and bears out,” he said. “They’re relentless.”

The floodlight allowed Rosie to get a good look at him while he twisted the knob on the lock. His nose was crooked and he had a narrow, angular jaw. A short scar ran through one of his eyebrows, interrupting the arch. Up close, she could see the faint beginnings of a mustache. He wore the same sweatshirt she’d seen on him at the general store—plain black, the brim of a baseball cap jutting from beneath the hood—and over the sweatshirt, a waxed black jacket. She had spent years lobbying on the street for the rights of transgender people, and yet she had never before met a transgender person—not to her knowledge. Urgently, she tried to recall tips from one of the various Rainbow Futures trainings. There is not just one way to be transgender, she remembered. To be a good ally, respect the terminology a transgender person uses. Don’t ask a transgender person about their former name. It was easy enough to absorb these instructions when they were listed in bullet points on a projector screen. But to put them to use was a different matter entirely; she felt like an insect headed directly for a web.

“Hank is a cool name,” she tried, too quietly, a tremor in her voice.

“What?” Hank said, turning to her. Had he not heard her? She didn’t know whether to repeat herself. He relieved her of the decision by unhooking the lock and pulling open the door. “All right,” he said. “These are the broilers.”

The chickens streamed out of the coop urgently, as though late to work. They spilled onto the expanse of dirt, white feathers, red beaks, like cartoon chickens, and hurried to an empty trough.

Rosie had worn the wrong shoes. In the canvas of her sneakers, her toes felt like blocks of ice. One chicken charged a smaller one and started attacking its wing. “Oh,” Rosie said, alarmed. “Should I—”

Hank broke up the confrontation with his boot. “They’re just hangry,” he said. “They’ve been fasting.” He looked up at Rosie. “Makes for a cleaner slaughter.”

A chicken tapped its beak noisily against the empty trough.

Hank adjusted his cap. “So, take your pick.”

“Me?” Rosie said. Only now did she notice the knife on his belt. She tried to understand the situation objectively, but she couldn’t push away the many thoughts that were starting to crowd her mind. Would Hank kill it right there, in front of her? How much blood would there be? How long afterward would it continue to move? How could she possibly choose? Was there a wrong answer? She was unaccustomed to this kind of power.

“It’s not really rocket science,” Hank said impatiently. He grabbed a chicken pulling at his shoelace.

Rosie did not want to watch the chicken die. In fact, she was starting to wonder if she should be eating chicken at all. Hank turned the bird upside down in his arms, cradling it, its feet sticking straight up. He pushed it headfirst into a shiny silver cone the length of its body. The chicken’s head peeked out through a hole in the bottom of the cone. Hank removed the knife from his belt and, to Rosie’s horror, handed it to her.

“I—”

He looked at her. “You good?” The hood of his sweatshirt had loosened. She could see the end of a tattoo on his throat: an ice skate.

“Um—” Rosie said, taking the knife. The chicken’s head bobbed in and out of the hole. Her thoughts skipped from one inexplicable memory to the next. Eating fresh mango on Coney Island. Watching a squirrel steal a Shake Shack french fry in Madison Square Park. Watching a child throw her baby doll in front of an oncoming G train. Her job at Rainbow Futures had not been to kill anything, but pedestrians often looked like they wanted to die as she approached them, and she’d found that approaching with an open palm helped. She tried it with the chicken in front of her. She stepped forward, a palm outstretched, and the bird’s small movements inside the cone intensified. Rosie, too, was panicking. “No,” she said. “I can’t do this. I’m sorry. I wasn’t totally honest yesterday. I’ve never done this, and I just don’t think I can.”

Hank took the knife back from her, approached the chicken, and slid the blade across its neck, leaving its head hanging, blood pumping onto the ground in short intervals. He wiped the knife against his pants and muttered something to himself.

“I could try—”

“No, no, no,” Hank said. “You have to learn the right way. Otherwise it’s inhumane.” He sighed. “I have something else for you. My delivery guy just moved to Maine. I’m assuming you can drive.”

“I can drive,” Rosie said. The chicken jerked in the cone.

“It’s gone,” Hank said. “That’s just the nerves.”

Rosie averted her eyes. “OK.”

Hank looked at her for a long moment. “Are you going to flee the second winter hits and it actually gets cold?”

“No!” Rosie said. “Of course not.” She was freezing, and it was only November. She wondered how much colder it could get. Hank squinted up at the sky for a moment as if anticipating rain. Then he led her into a structure that housed an enormous trunk-like fridge with eggs, vacuum-sealed chickens, and jars of brown stock. “Here’s the route.” He pulled out a handwritten list of shops. “Everyone’s already paid, so just get them to sign. Simple. Should only take a couple of hours. Take the truck.” He pointed to a small white truck parked in the yard.

Together they loaded the large coolers into the truck bed. Hank tossed Rosie the keys, and she climbed into the driver’s seat. The truck smelled like hay and wet leather. “Try not to fuck this up,” she said to her reflection. She adjusted the mirrors and buckled her seat belt. When she went to put the truck in Drive, her stomach dropped. It was a stick shift. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said. Her breath came out in a white cloud.

She waited until Hank had disappeared inside the barn and, finding one bar of service, called Jordan.

“Rosie?” Jordan said groggily. “You OK?”

“I need you to tell me how to drive a stick shift.”

“What?”

“I have to drive Hank’s truck to make these deliveries. I have, like, no service.”

“Hank...”

“The farmer!”

“I thought you were butchering chickens.”

“The job is actually slaughtering chickens,” Rosie whispered.

Jordan laughed on the other end of the line, and Rosie started laughing, too.

“What the fuck,” Jordan said. “I’d come rescue you if you didn’t have the car. Why can’t you use the Tesla?”

“There’s no way the coolers could fit. They’re, like—they’re huge.”

Jordan hooted. “Honestly, I’m relieved. I really didn’t want chicken guts in my car. Can you just come home? Quit on your first day?”

“No,” Rosie said. “I have to do this or I’ll never live down the embarrassment. I need you to tell me how.”

“I don’t know how to drive stick,” Jordan said. “I never learned. Hold on.”

He had put her on speaker. She heard the sound of typing. “OK, Rosie? It says you need to press on the gas as you let out the clutch.”

“Which one is the clutch?”

“Um... it’s the far-left pedal. It says to press it down, then to let it out slowly as you step on the gas.”

Rosie followed his instructions, which elicited no response from the truck. “Nothing’s happening.”

“Nothing at all?” She could hear more typing. She searched for Hank in the rearview mirror.

“I don’t know, are you in first gear?”

She shined her phone’s flashlight at the gearshift. She wasn’t sure. She realized then that in her panic she’d forgotten to start the engine. When she told Jordan this, both their laughter was so forceful that it was silent.

“OK, I finished the wikiHow,” Jordan said, recovering. “I think I can get you through this. Start the engine.”

“I got that far.”

“OK. Now press down on the clutch.”

“Yep.”

“Move the gearshift to the top left position.”

“OK.”

“Now let the clutch out slowly and give it some gas.”

Rosie held her breath. The engine revved, and for a beautiful moment, the truck inched forward. She released the clutch and the truck lurched violently before turning off, rattling Rosie so much that she let out a small yelp. “Fuck!”

“You got it!” Jordan said. She tried again. Clutch, gas, stall. Clutch, gas, stall. She tried to stay positive. She had, after all, moved five feet. “Come on,” she whispered to the steering wheel. “Come on.”

On her fourth attempt, she managed to coax her way into gear and roll slowly down the long driveway. She pressed on the gas, and the engine revved, but the truck didn’t move any faster. She took her foot off the pedal and tried to press the clutch but hit the brake instead. The truck jolted forward, rocked back, and shut off, stranding her halfway down the driveway. Her eyes welled. She gripped the steering wheel and stared straight ahead. The sky had unraveled. The sun had sidled up near the moon, her failure on full display. “I don’t think this is going to work,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” Jordan said. “You gave it a good shot. Why don’t you come home and I’ll make you breakfast.”

Rosie let out a long groan.

“Babe?”

“OK,” Rosie said. “OK. I’ll come home.” She hung up. For a few minutes she sat in the quiet before picking up her phone again and finding Dylan’s number.

“Rosie?”

“Sorry it’s so early. You know how to drive stick, right?” Rosie said, pinching the bridge of her nose.