someone yelled.
Lena watched Denny work, watched the tendons shift in his neck.
He looked up. “Don’t you have tables?”
“Yeah, I do, but the funny thing is, it’s a little hard for me to take care of my tables without my drinks. Is that asking too much? Let me know if it is, really, please do. I’d be happy to take off and pull a Marna on all your asses.” She blew out smoke. “Our rookie can take my tables. She seems to be getting her drinks.” Sure enough, there she was—in the middle of the room holding what was probably that same Bass pitcher, standing still. “Freakin’ lost kid at the mall,” Lena muttered.
Denny smiled at that. She was pretty sure she caught a smile.
Thirty-four left her an excellent tip. Thirty on an eighty-dollar tab. And they were girls. And they hadn’t been drunk. That could mean only one thing: restaurant workers. Lena wished she’d figured it out earlier. She would’ve comped them a round or two. The Almost Home usually got the staff from the Congo Cafe down the street, known for their big pastel drinks with plastic animals floating inside—and even more for the time a customer choked on a rhino. And there was the gang from Michael’s, where you could pay ten bucks, easy, for a crummy martini. Michael’s staff was okay, though. Lena had dated one of the bartenders for a while. He was arrogant and had bad breath, but she missed him for a long time after they broke up, maybe still missed him a little, on slow Wednesday nights, when he used to come in.
Tables were no less packed and the kitchen was still hopelessly behind—what else was new—but people weren’t ordering much anymore. Check totals were low. The Broncos were killing the Falcons and people were bored. Even Denny, Lena could tell, was bored, though he would never admit it. Well, he wouldn’t be bored soon. A group of thirty was coming in. On top of all this. And not even for the game. Singles. They took over the place, table-hopped, and then expected you to remember who they were. Lena hated waiting on them even on slow nights. Lousy tips and loud cologne. Ugly sweaters. It all gave her the feeling of a damp Sunday. Which, actually, it was.
At least the Singles only came in once every couple months—at least they weren’t regular regulars, who were more than enough as is—who were the reason Lena’d quit taking bar shifts in the first place. On tables, you weren’t trapped, forced to take the same blather day in and day out. And the questions. Hey, Lena, how’s Denny and that cute little girlfriend of his?—right in front of him, just to see if she would rattle. Whoever said that a bartender was like a psychiatrist had it all wrong. Customers didn’t want to come in and talk about their problems. They wanted to talk about your problems.
When she wasn’t delivering food to tables, JJ followed Colleen and tried to catch what she was saying. “Those are tables 1 through 10,” Colleen instructed, pointing, “and 11 through 20—that one’s 88, no reason, just is. . . .” She showed JJ little tricks, like how to calm people down when they got the wrong order and how to clean off the tops of the steak sauces with one twist of a cocktail napkin.
“Right. Oh, I see. That makes sense.” Every so often it occurred to JJ that she wasn’t actually absorbing anything. Each new fact engulfed and swept away the one that came before.
It was possible she was still a tiny bit high. Things were definitely different.
She was relieved when Colleen asked Keith to start her on paperwork. A chance to sit down at a desk, drink a soda. The office was just past the last bar stool—the bar stool where she’d sat waiting for Denny. Denny. Denny looked like a bartender, JJ thought now, as Keith pulled forms from a file cabinet and told her some helpful hints—Denny looked exactly how she’d always imagined a bartender to be, with deep-set eyes and the kind of dark hair gray could slip into with some degree of character. That’s how her mother would put it, JJ realized, some degree of character. She stared at the forms and tapped out a sonata on her thigh. It was hard to concentrate. The office was small and hot and the desk was strewn with papers and overfull ashtrays. On the wall, hanging straight in front of JJ, was a calendar open to a topless woman drinking a bottle of beer. The woman’s nipples were like huge pink eyes.
“Always use the long spoons for iced tea,” Keith was saying.
JJ filled in form after form, feeling more permanent with every line. It occurred to her that she didn’t need to write anything down she didn’t want to. She could leave stuff out. It wasn’t as though the Almost Home Bar and Grill in Denver was going to dig up info on the Cincinnati dog-wash job she’d quit after one week. Or the record-store job, which had required a lot more knowledge than you’d think. Or the nanny job—the nanny job, that too, gone. Easy. Clean slate. JJ pressed the ink into words and numbers. The paper was fresh and smooth with slight waves—you could almost see it coming out of the factory machine, being sliced off.
By the time JJ was down to college work-study and a fictitious stint at an inner-city library, Colleen reappeared and sent her into the kitchen to check on an order of garlic bread.
Lena was there, yelling at the cooks, “Where are my fucking orders? Is every single one of you on crack?” They didn’t even look up, just continued burger-flipping and pouring oil and pulling things out of a see-through refrigerator. Their aprons were dirty, their faces wet. A tinny polka from a radio rose and fell beneath the crackle of the grill and the churn of washing dishes. It made JJ want to dance, almost. “It’s my ass on the line out there,” Lena spat. “My culó.” She grabbed a few plates of food from a silver counter full of them and was off. Roll of eye, swish of hair.
JJ stared at the counter. Its surface was hot, lit by yellow lights, and it was scattered with stray french fries and onion rings and wilted bits of lettuce.
“Hey,” one of the guys called. He waved a spatula. “¿Como estas?”
“Je parle français,” she said, in a daze, though she didn’t, not since high school. Then came to. “Garlic bread? Colleen’s?”
He pointed to a plate straight in front of her. Melted butter, slivers of basil. Her stomach gave a pull.
“Thanks,” she said.
“You like?” he asked, almost shyly.
“Garlic bread? Sure.”
He waved her off. “Half hour,” he said. “Just for you.”
“Oh no, but you’re busy, and besides, this is my first day—”
“Yeah, yeah. Just don’t show the—” and he said something in Spanish that didn’t sound very nice, and they both laughed.
JJ hurried off with the plate. She concentrated on the hot not hurting, pretended she was one of those people who walked on lit coals. She tried to remember if she’d fed Norman before she left for work. A guy she’d known in college had given Norman to her. Thank you so much, she’d said and wet her lips in case the guy was about to kiss her. They were alone in his room. She had liked him for a whole semester and thought, Isn’t that how it goes, that he would decide to like me back right before I leave? But he didn’t like her, as it turned out—not like that—and the frog hadn’t been meant as a gift either. He’d gotten it as a gift and didn’t want it anymore.
Right now, Norman’s plastic cube was sitting on her dresser, the only piece of furniture that had come with her boardinghouse room other than the bed. Every morning, she dropped a pellet of food through a tiny hole at the top of the cube. For a while she was giving him two, since it was clearly the highlight of his day—the only time he swam up from the bottom—but the instruction booklet said just one, was very clear about the matter. It also said not to worry about having only one frog per cube. It said, These frogs do not get lonely.
College guys, JJ thought. And just college. If only she could delete that too. Changing majors, all that indecision. And before, even—no, especially before. Everything leading up. Years of piano lessons and music camp and music theory. Certainly that one day, at the end of her junior year, when a professor finally bothered to take her aside and tell her that—oh