Georgie, All Along (40)

“Here y’all are,” I say when I arrive at the table, because unlike Bel I never did debate and forensics, and also because this kind of confident folksiness always got me big tips at the end of a shift. I’m not even sure how I’m getting paid for this, come to think of it, since there was no time for paperwork, but it doesn’t matter at the moment. I go through all the motions: ask if everything looks all right, laugh when one of the mortgage brokers pats his belly and asks whether his eyes were bigger than his stomach, promise to come back and check on them in a few. When I turn to scan my other tables, I catch sight of Olivia across the room, scribbling an order down and looking stressed, her ponytail sagging and her forehead still sweating.

Remy passes behind her, cringing slightly at whatever they must hear. I can tell they’re not new to this work, and also can tell they’ve been carrying a pretty heavy load here.

It’s hectic for another hour and a half; we cycle the brokers through meals and desserts and coffee that doesn’t much seem to sober them up, though they can still slur their way through a truly impressive amount of conversation involving acronyms like PMI and FHA and APR. Predictably, Hawaiian shirt guy and his table companions are the last to leave; he sways when he stands and I brace for fainting, but in the end he steadies himself and says, “Thanks, honey,” to me on his way out. Once I blink through the contact buzz I’m pretty sure I get from his gin-soaked breath, I turn to find Remy closing the doors to the dining room, sealing all of us lunch shift survivors into blessed, long-awaited quiet.

“What the hell ?” Remy says, sagging back against the door.

Olivia’s already on a barstool, her head down on her folded arms, and the bartender—I think his name is Luke—tosses a wet white rag into a bussing tray and slams his way through to the kitchen, clearly fed up.

“Well!” I say. “We did it?”

Olivia groans.

“Two hours until these doors need to be open again for dinner,” says Remy, gesturing toward the mess that still needs to be reset. “We didn’t do it yet.”

“Five minutes,” Olivia says, her voice muffled and miserable. Remy does another eye roll, and I start clearing plates. “Five minutes to let me replay the moment I dropped hot buttered rolls on a man’s lap.”

Could’ve been worse, I think automatically, before I can remember I’m replaying the moment I kissed her brother. I desperately shove the memory away, annoyed that my thoughts have so readily returned to the frying pan, right when I’ve finally stepped out of the fire.

“This is all my brother’s fault,” moans Olivia, and the answering tremble in my hand sends a knife and fork sliding noisily off the plate I’ve picked up. I contemplate asking whether Olivia’s day spa offers memory-erasing hypnosis. I know she can’t be talking about Levi, and yet—

“It’s not his fault,” says Remy. “It’s his wife’s.”

Thank goodness I keep hold of the cutlery.

Olivia raises her head and narrows her eyes at Remy. “His ex-wife,” she says.

I must be staring, because Olivia turns on her stool to face me and clarifies. “Evan’s ex-wife ran the restaurant for three years. Until she abandoned everything six months ago for her dirtbag high school boyfriend who she’d been DMing for a year.”

“Oh no,” I say, and mean it, even though I hate the knot of irrational tension that loosens knowing for sure that we are not talking about Levi being married. If Bel were here, I know she’d be pinching me big time, Hallmark movie thoughts in her head. Friend fic thoughts in her head. But I don’t seem to feel much of anything beyond vague surprise and sympathy at the news that Evan’s newly single.

“He should never have married her,” Olivia says, sliding off the stool again and joining Remy and I in the cleanup. “She was awful.”

Remy snorts. “You liked her!”

“I was blinded by her extremely white teeth and her skill with a curling iron. I haven’t had truly great beachy waves since she left.”

“She thought unicorns were a real animal,” Remy says to me. “Like a certain kind of horse. Rare and expensive.”

In spite of myself, I laugh. “Really?”

Remy nods, smirking, but then shrugs as they consolidate a table’s leftover drinks into an empty glass, stacking as they go. “But she was great at this job. She kept this place running pretty smooth.”

“Which is why Evan needs to hurry up and hire her replacement,” Olivia says, clearly disgusted by the state of a napkin she’s picked up off the floor.

“You have any experience in management?” Remy says, giving me a half-hopeful, half-joking look. “I can’t do it; I’m starting vet school in the fall.”

“Oh, that’s nea—” I begin, but Olivia cuts me off.

“Ohmygod, Rem!” she exclaims. “I didn’t even have time to tell you about Georgie; she works for Nadia Haisman!”

I don’t get the opportunity to correct the tense on this, but it doesn’t much matter, because for the next half hour, the conversation slips easily into the kind of coworkers-getting-to-know-each-other banter that reminds me of my early waitressing days. Some of it’s about me—the jobs I’ve had, the famous people I’ve met and not met, whether my parents are the ones who leave free plant cuttings on sidewalk corners all over the county—but a lot of it, owing to my expert deflection, is about Remy and Olivia. I find out they’re cousins; Remy’s mom is the sister of Olivia’s mom. Luke’s a cousin, too, on the Fanning side, and he and the chef (not a cousin on either side, thankfully) are in what Olivia calls a “not very secret situationship.” Remy tells me about wanting to be a large-animal vet, Olivia tells me about the spa, and both of them tell me about how Evan’s ex-wife transformed the restaurant’s décor into its current modern farmhouse meets seaside cottage aesthetic, which I suspect must be being kept a secret from that lady who runs the antiques store.