Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress (29 page)

“Yes, Brenda, can you make me a half-decaf low-fat cappuc
cino?” Kate asks. “Nonfat would be better, but I know you might not have it. If you do, I’d be so happy. I love your cappuc
cinos here, they’re so
good
. Except the last time we were here, it was a little cold. If it’s not too much trouble, could you make sure that my cappuccino is really hot? Can you do that for me, Brenda? By the way, how’s your sister? What’s her name? Myra, right?”

“You guys are both so cute,” Greg adds.

I hate these people.

In the kitchen, a new storm is brewing. Terry rushes up to the grill and tells Adrian, “Can you fix this omelette? The woman says it’s not done in the middle.”

Adrian opens the omelette with his fingers and pokes at it. “It’s fine,” he says. “It’s the best fucking omelette we’ve ever made. Tell her—”

“Well, she’s right behind me,” Terry says. Indeed, the woman in question, wearing workout clothes and a huge attitude, has waltzed right into the kitchen.

“Are you the owner?” she demands of Adrian. “I’ve got to tell you, this is the worst omelette I’ve ever had in my life. In addition”—she checks off the list on her fingers—“it came late, the coffee is cold, I couldn’t get orange juice, and this bimbo”— she points at Terry—“is rude.”

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Time stops as we wait for Adrian’s reaction. The hum of the restaurant fades against the crackling of static in the air. Calmly, Adrian walks out from behind the grill and puts an arm around the woman.

“Let’s not talk about this here,” he tells her softly. “Let’s go outside.” He opens the screen door for her, and as she exits the kitchen, he slams it at her back.

“First of all,” he growls, “don’t call my waitress a bimbo. Second of all, get the hell out of my restaurant. Learn some manners.”

As she strides off speechless and fuming, Adrian mutters, “Ah, fuck her. In fact, fuck everything. Close the kitchen. Shut down the restaurant. I’m outta here.” He throws his apron on the floor and walks out. Terry shrugs and Oaxaca grins broadly.

“You know he’ll be back,” Danny says hopelessly and picks up a frying pan. Oaxaca inspects the tickets, which have contin
ued to roll in from the printer. “Garden salad,” he says, “side of potatoes, two short stacks . . . ”

At two there is a brief lull in the madness. I take the time to start my portion of the day’s cleanup, which mostly involves try
ing to clean the cappuccino machine, which now looks as if sev
eral gallons of milk have exploded and then dried on its surfaces. Because I can feel someone staring at me from across the counter, I turn and see Dominic holding a couple of pink cake boxes.

Dominic is one half of Cake and More, a tiny company he runs with his partner, Ian. These two make some of the most beautiful confections I’ve ever seen, which is why Adrian, who can’t even keep up with his juice payments, has lately decided to sell their cheesecakes. I have to smile when I see Dominic because, despite the fact that Adrian refers to him and Ian as “those pastry fags,” I know that he’s come all the way out to Hoover’s on a Sunday afternoon mostly to see me. We’ve had a
running flirtation going since he started bringing his cakes to

Hoover’s. Right now, I couldn’t be happier to see him.

“Hi, how are you?” I ask him.

“Pretty good,” he says. “Just thought I’d bring these by. We’re working on something new and I thought maybe you’d like to try a sample.” He opens one of the boxes and shows me a tiny round gâteau coated with dark chocolate and topped with a pink sugar rose.

“Wow,” I tell him, “you guys are really talented.”

“Maybe you can share it around,” he says a bit nervously.

“Thank you,” I tell him. “Cup of coffee for your troubles?” Dominic smiles and nods assent. I make him a double espresso and rummage in my apron pocket for money to pay him for the cakes. At Hoover’s, we have to pay our distributors out of the day’s sales. Lucky for Dominic, I’ve sold more than enough today to cover his bill. It won’t last, I know. Sooner or later, we’ll have to stop paying him. But for now, I want to keep him around, so I give him the cash and he hands me a receipt.

“Busy day?” he asks.

“This place is insane,” I tell him. “Two of our servers are in jail in Tijuana.”

Dominic laughs and I start telling him about my morning. For a moment, things feel almost normal. I’m just a waitress in a pretty diner, leaning over the counter I’m polishing, flirting with the good-looking cake man.

But it can’t last.

A clot of hungry beachcombers, crusted with sand, stumble through the door demanding immediate service and wanting to know if they can get popovers to go.

“Sorry,” I tell Dominic, “I’ve got to get back to work.”

“Right,” he says. “Thanks for the coffee.” He pulls himself up from the counter and starts to head for the door. At the last minute, he stops himself and comes back, behind the counter

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this time, so he can speak close to my ear. “Maybe we can get together sometime?” he says.

“That would really be nice,” I tell him and pause. “You know, I’ve got a kid,” I add.

“No, I didn’t know,” he says, smiling. “How old?”

“One and a half.”

“What’s her name?”

“It’s a boy. Blaze.”

“Well, where’s Blaze today?” he asks.

“He’s with my parents.” I’ve said everything I need to with those four words. There’s no boyfriend, no husband. I’m a single mother, plain as day.

“So Blaze can come with us,” Dominic says. And now he’s said everything he needs to. Ah, the modern rites of courtship, I think to myself.

“Why don’t you call me?” I say and scrawl my phone num
ber on a paper napkin and hand it to him.

“OK, good,” he says and, in another second, is gone. I head toward the kitchen and am immediately body-slammed by Terry, who is coming around one of Hoover’s many blind corners. Terry happens to be carrying a pot of scalding hot coffee, half of which splashes across me and sinks, still steaming, into my chest.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she mumbles as I yelp in pain. “I didn’t see you.”

I spend the next thirty minutes trying to assuage the burn
ing pain in my chest with icy towels. There’s not much for me in the way of sympathy. Terry is claiming that
I
walked into
her
and has actually become indignant. I finish my cleanup and my last few tables. My enthusiasm for Dominic and his cakes translates into cash as I am able to happily sell several slices of the cherry cheesecake to the late lunch crowd.

By three-thirty, the flow of business is slow enough for me to leave. I can identify at least four different food stains on my
apron and my legs threaten to fold at any moment. I have been in a state of constant movement for eight hours. I prepare my cash drop and take it upstairs to Adrian’s office, where he’s been hiding for the last two hours. He says nothing as I dump cash and tickets into a cardboard box near the door.

When I come back downstairs, my parents are waiting for me with Blaze.

“We thought we’d just drop him off here,” my mother says, “so he can have a nice walk home.” She hands me Blaze’s stroller and diaper bag. “You look tired. Long day?”

“You don’t even know,” I tell her and tuck Blaze into his stroller. “Un un un,” he says and, right now, I’m interpreting that to mean, “Hi, Mom, let’s go home.”

On my way out, I pass Danny sitting outside the kitchen, drinking a beer, taking his first break of the day. Oaxaca is attempting to scrape dried popovers from the kitchen floor.

“Look at the little mite,” Danny says, smiling at Blaze. “He’s so sweet. Hey, chum.”

“Un un un,” Blaze responds.

“You going home?” Danny asks me.

“Yes, if I can make it there.”

“Y’know,” he says, “I’d like to have a son someday.”

“Why’s that, Danny?”

“Well, so I could name him Harley.”

“Harley? Is that a family name?”

“No, it’s so his name would be Harley Davidson. Isn’t that a great name for a kid?”

“Have a good night, Danny.”

When I get home, I am too tired to ponder the riddles of the day. Why, for example, people keep coming back to Hoover’s. Or why Danny and Oaxaca don’t take a kitchen knife to Adrian. Or how much longer I can work in this restaurant without having a nervous breakdown. I am, however, sure of two things. For one,

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I have the day off tomorrow. I will take Blaze down to a park by the beach and push him on the swings while he watches the ocean. On the way home, I’ll stop in somewhere and have a cap
puccino for myself and an apple juice for Blaze. It will be warm and sunny. The taste of life will be sweet.

The other certainty is that I have a hundred and fifty dollars in cold cash tucked into my apron pocket. Whether or not the trade-off to earn those dollars has been worth it is a question that will have to be addressed tomorrow or as soon as I can lift my aching body off the couch.

Maya arrives home at 5:30
P
.
M
. and falls onto the other couch. “I can’t believe I have to go back there in the morning,” she says.

“How’d it end up?” I ask her.

“Not good. When I left, Adrian was giving Danny and Oaxaca a lesson on how to make popovers properly. I think they might be there all night. Oaxaca missed his bus and Danny looked like he was on his fiftieth beer.”

“How much did you make?” I ask her.

“A hundred. You?”

“One-fifty.”

“Not bad,” she says. “What shall we have for dinner?”

I lasted six months at Hoover’s. The final weeks were grim. Adrian stopped paying everybody, including staff. Because our paychecks bounced regularly on paydays, and this was a wonder
ful sales incentive, we’d have to sell at least the amount on the check in order to collect any wages at all. The muffin and dough
nut man was not that lucky. He stopped coming around after issuing the following edict: “Tell Adrian to pay me or I’m comin’ back here to break both his legs.” Because Adrian engendered such unbridled hostility among his distributors, many of us actually started fearing for his life. Maya, for example, had a real
fear that one morning she would arrive at work and find Adrian’s dead body stuffed in the Dumpster. As a result, she avoided going into the back of the restaurant until she saw Adrian, still alive, walk in the front door.

Poor Danny managed to scrape enough money together to go back to New Zealand. Before he left, Maya and I invited him over for dinner. He arrived with a bottle of wine and twin turquoise necklaces, one for each of us. “You girls have been so nice to me,” he told us, “and I know I haven’t always been easy to work with. I don’t know how to thank you.” I couldn’t decide which was more heartbreaking, the fact that Danny had such a low opinion of himself or that, aside from our apartment, all he ever saw of the United States was the view from inside Hoover’s kitchen.

Oaxaca, whose name turned out to be Francisco, worked like a galley slave for many months before finally quitting. He resurfaced years later at another restaurant where I worked, hired as a busboy. We greeted each other like survivors of a par
ticularly nasty accident. Unfortunately, Francisco seemed per
manently scarred by his experience at Hoover’s. He’d lost his edge and wandered around the restaurant as if lost, spilling cof
fee and showing up late. He just wasn’t used to being treated fairly and quit after a couple of weeks.