Just One Day(66)

When the last of the diners leave, the kitchen staff and the waiters seem to all exhale at once. Someone blasts some old Rolling Stones. A bunch of tables are pushed together and everyone sits down. It’s well past midnight, and I have a long walk home. I start to pack up my things, but Nathaniel motions for me to join them. I sit at the table, feeling shy even though I’ve been bumping hips with these people all night.
“You want a beer?” he asks. “We have to pay for them, but only cost.”
“Or you can have some of the reject wine the distributors bring by,” a waitress named Gillian says.
“I’ll take some wine.”
“It looks like someone died on you,” says one of the waiters. I look down. My nice skirt and top—my good job- hunting outfit—are covered in sauces that look vaguely like bodily fluids.
“I feel like I’m the one who died,” I say. I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired. My muscles ache. My hands are red from the near-scalding water. And my feet? Don’t get me started.
Gillian laughs. “Spoken like a true kitchen slave.”
Babs appears with the big bowls of steaming pasta and small chunks of leftover fish and steak. My stomach lets out a gurgle. The platters get passed around. I don’t know if her cooking is “eclectic,” but the food is amazing, the orange tequila jalape?o sauce is only faintly orange, and it’s smoky rather than spicy. I clear my plate, and then sop up any remaining sauce with a hunk of Jonas’s not-sourdough bread.
“So?” Babs asks me when I’ve finished.
All eyes turn to me. “It’s the second best meal I’ve ever had,” I say. Which is the truth.
Everyone else oohs, like I’ve just insulted Babs. But she just smirks. “I’ll bet your first best was with a lover,” she says, and I go as red as her hair.
Babs instructs me to return the next day at five, and the routine starts all over again. I work harder than I ever have, eat an amazing meal, and pour myself into bed. I have no idea if I’m filling in for someone or maybe being auditioned. Babs screams at me constantly, for using soap on her cast-iron sauté pan or not getting the lipstick off the coffee cups before they go into Hobart or making the whipped cream too stiff or not stiff enough or not adding the exact right amount of vanilla extract. But by the fourth night, I’m learning not to take it so personally.
On the fifth night, before the dinner rush, Babs calls me to the back near the walk-in refrigerator. She’s sucking on a bottle of vodka, which is what she does before the rush begins. Her lipstick leaves smudges on the rim. For a second, I think this is it, that she’s going to fire me. But instead she hands me a sheaf of documents.
“Tax forms,” she explains. “I pay minimum wage, but you’ll get tips. Which reminds me. You keep forgetting to collect yours.” She reaches under the counter for an envelope with my name on it.
I open up the envelope. There’s a wad of cash in there. Easily a hundred dollars. “This is mine?”
She nods. “We pool tips. Everyone gets a cut.”
I run my fingers over the money. The bills snag on my ragged hangnails. My hands are beyond thrashed, but I don’t care because they’re thrashed from my job. Which has earned me this money. I feel something well up inside me that has nothing to do with airplane tickets or Paris trips or money at all, really.
“It’ll go up in the fall,” Babs says. “Summer’s our slow season.”
I hesitate. “That’s great. Except I won’t be here in the fall.”
She wrinkles her red brows. “But I just broke you in.”
I feel bad, guilty, but it was right there on my résumé, the first line—Objective: To obtain short-term employment. Of course, Babs never read my résumé.
“I go to college,” I explain.
“We’ll work around your schedule. Gillian’s a student too. And Nathaniel, on and off.”
“In Boston.”
“Oh.” She pauses. “Oh, well. I think Gordon’s coming back after Labor Day.”
“I’m hoping to leave by the end of July. But only if I can save two thousand dollars by then.” And as I say it, I do the math. More than a hundred bucks a week in tips, plus wages—I actually might be able to pull it off.
“Saving for a car?” she asks absentmindedly. She takes another swig of her vodka. “You can buy mine. That beast’ll be the death of me.” Babs drives an ancient Thunderbird.
“No. I’m saving for Paris.”
She puts her bottle down. “Paris?”
I nod.
“What’s in Paris?”
I look at her. I think of him for the first time in a while. In the craziness of the kitchen, he became a little abstract. “Answers.”
She shakes her head with such vehemence her auburn curls come loose from her bandanna. “You can’t go to Paris looking for answers. You have to go looking for questions—or, at the very least, macarons.”
“Macaroons? The coconut things?” I think of the gross cookie replacements we eat on Passover.
“Not macaroons. Macarons. They’re meringue cookies in pastel colors. They are edible angel’s kisses.” She looks at me. “You need two thousand bucks by when?”
“August.”
She narrows her eyes at me. They’re always a little bit bloodshot, though, oddly, more so at the beginning of a shift than at the end, when they take on a sort of manic gleam. “I’ll make you a deal. If you don’t mind working some doubles for weekend brunch, I’ll make sure you earn your two grand by July twenty-fifth, which is when I close the restaurant for two weeks for my summer vacation. On one condition.”