The Cook

Bridget Fitzgerald arrived in Reno in the summer of 1874 with forty-two dollars, a trunk of clothes, and a letter of introduction that turned out to be addressed to a man who had left for Sacramento the previous winter.

She stood on Commercial Row with the letter in her hand and read it twice, as if the second reading might produce a different result. Behind her, the Central Pacific freight cars were being uncoupled in the yard. The air smelled of coal smoke and the alkaline dust that coated everything west of the Sierra. She had been in Nevada for four hours and already understood it was not the kind of place that waited for you to get your bearings.

She had come from County Clare by way of Boston, where she had cooked in a boarding house on Hanover Street for three years. She was good at it. Not merely competent -- good. She understood what it meant to feed forty people at once, to manage a kitchen at five in the morning when the butcher was late and the bread hadn't risen and someone had let the fire go out. She could make a passable soup from almost nothing and a respectable one from very little. In Boston this had been enough to keep her employed, if not comfortable. She had heard that the West paid better.

The West, or at least this part of it, appeared to be a single unpaved street lined with wooden buildings, a rail depot, and more saloons than she could count from where she was standing.

She found work the same afternoon.

The hotel on the south side of Commercial Row was run by a man named Theodore Foss, who had come to Reno three years earlier from Ohio. He was not a bad man, but he was overwhelmed. The hotel had thirty-one rooms, a dining room that served three meals a day, and a cook who had given notice the previous week with no replacement in sight. Bridget walked in through the kitchen door, assessed the situation in about forty seconds, and told Foss what she would need.

He hired her on the spot at fourteen dollars a month plus board.

The dining room fed mostly railroad men and the occasional traveler making the passage between San Francisco and the Comstock mines in Virginia City, thirty miles to the south. The Comstock was still producing silver in 1874, though the men who came through Reno spoke of it the way you speak of something you're not sure will last. They ate quickly and asked for seconds and tipped when they had just come from the mines and not at all when they were heading back.

Bridget cooked for six months before she understood what she had actually walked into.

It was not the cooking itself. The cooking she had known how to do since she was twelve years old, learning from her mother in a kitchen in Ennis where they fed her father and four brothers and whatever neighbor happened to be passing by. What she had not known, not fully, was how much a dining room could be the center of a place. Not the hotel -- the whole block.

By November the miners from the Comstock knew her name. The railroad foremen sent their new men to Foss's table on their first night in town. A woman named Santos who ran a laundry two doors down brought her children in on Sunday mornings and Bridget let them eat the leftover pastry from Saturday's service. A man named Ah Wun, who had cooked at a camp near Elko before the line was finished, stopped in one afternoon looking for work and she hired him as her second without asking Foss first. Foss said nothing. The food had improved and the dining room had been full for eight weeks straight.

She was sending seven dollars a month back to Clare, where her mother was still in the house she had grown up in and her youngest brother was trying to save enough to follow her west. She had written him that Nevada was not what she had imagined but that it was real in a way Boston had never been, which she could not fully explain and did not try.

Theodore Foss sold the hotel in 1878 to a man from Sacramento who brought his own staff and did not need a cook. By then Bridget had saved enough to make a different arrangement. She put thirty dollars toward a half-share in a lunch counter on the east end of Commercial Row with a woman named Maria Vasconcelos, who had come to Reno from Sonora by way of the mines. They served from seven in the morning until two in the afternoon. Bridget cooked. Maria kept the books and dealt with the suppliers, who were occasionally surprised to find themselves negotiating with her and did not get the better of it.

The lunch counter lasted eleven years. By that time Bridget's son Patrick was four years old and sleeping in the back room every morning while his mother cut the bread and got the fire started and listened to the town wake up around them.

She had not planned to stay. She had planned to earn enough to go back to Clare, or perhaps to San Francisco, which everyone in 1874 spoke of as the real city, the place where things actually happened. She had not gone to San Francisco. She had stayed on Commercial Row, in the town at the edge of the Sierra, and fed whoever was passing through.

After a while she stopped thinking of it as staying.

---