Keeping The Moon(15)

orders although I knew almost nothing about the menu, and messed up the register so badly it stuck on $10,000.00 and beeped for

fifteen minutes straight before Isabel, in a fit of rage, whacked it with a plastic water pitcher. It was Us against Them, clearly,

and for once I was part of Us. I didn’t really know what I was doing; I had to go on faith. So I just handed out my drinks and

grabbed the phone when it screamed, wrapping the cord around my wrist and stabbing the pen Morgan had tossed me in my hair, the

same way Isabel wore hers, and fought on.

“Last Chance,” I’d shout over the din. “Can I help you?”

And now, I was doing it every day.

At first, just walking up to a table full of strangers had scared me to death. I couldn’t even make eye contact, stuttering

through the basic questions Morgan had taught me—What would you like to drink? Have you decided? How would you like that cooked?

Fries or hush puppies?—my hand literally shaking as it moved across my order pad. It made me nervous to stand there so exposed,

all of those people looking at me.

But then, on about my third table, I finally got the nerve to glance up and realized that, basically, they weren’t. For the most

part, they were flipping through the menu, extracting Sweet’n Low packets from their toddler’s grip, or so lost in their own

conversation that I didn’t even register: twenty minutes later they’d be flagging Isabel down, sure she was the one with their

check. They didn’t know or care about me. To them, I was just a waitress, a girl with an apron and a tea pitcher; they didn’t

even seem to notice my lip ring. And that was fine with me.

“In this job,” Morgan told me after a dinner rush, “You get a lifetime of experience every day. A crisis will crop up, worsen,

come to a head and resolve itself all in fifteen to thirty minutes. You don’t even have time to panic. You just push through.”

She was right. For every burger overcooked, salad with the wrong dressing, or missing order of fries, there was a solution. Each

time I got a little faster, a little stronger, a little bit more confident. Even Isabel was my ally.

“He’s an *,” she said over her shoulder after a grumpy tourist had snapped at me for giving him unsweetened tea instead of

sweetened. “He’s on vacation, for God’s sake. He should lighten up!”

Finally, no matter how bad it got, or how rude anyone was,

they were gone within an hour, tops. After what I was used to, this was nothing.

My mother, however, expressed concern. “Honey,” she said, her voice crackling through all those phone lines stretched across the

ocean, “you should be having fun. You don’t need to work.”

“Mom, I like it,” I said, admitting to her what I was careful to remain blasé about at the restaurant: that I actually enjoyed

it. I felt like I was holding my breath, fingers crossed, as if at any moment it could be over, just like that.

I assured my mother that I was not stuffing myself with onion rings and was running every day, which made her feel a little better.

And I didn’t bring up Mira’s signs, or her bike, or her collection of broken furniture. My mother was prone to overreactions.

She was distracted, anyway, about to embark on a tour of Italy which included a huge, open-air aerobics session on a soccer field.

Hundreds of women would be step-kicking and lunging along with her, and my little waitressing job would be soon forgotten.

But not by me. Because I had a friend.

“Colie,” Morgan said at the end of that first week, after we’d locked the door behind the last customer and mopped the floor. My

feet hurt and I smelled like grease, but that night I’d made fifty bucks, all mine. “Come on. I want to show you something.”

I followed her out the back door and up some steps to the roof, which was flat and sticky and smelled like tar. All around us it

was dark, with places lit up here and there: I could see the supermarket and the bridge, as well as one lone circling searchlight

from the car dealership.

“Can you see that?” she said. “Right there.” She pointed over the trees to a bright spot nearby, close enough to make out if I

stood at the very edge of the roof.

“It’s Maverick Stadium,” she said. “That’s where Mark used to play.” Mark, Morgan’s fiancé, was someone I already felt I

knew. She talked about him constantly. How he wore boxers, not briefs. How he wanted three kids, two girls and a boy. How his

batting average was improving and he’d had two home runs already this season even with a wrist injury. And how he’d asked Morgan

to marry him three months ago, on his last night in Colby, as they sat together at the International House of Pancakes saying

good-bye.

“I miss him so much,” she said. She kept a picture of him-- he was literally tall, dark, and handsome--in her wallet. “Only

three months left in the season.”

“How’d you meet him?” I asked her.

She smiled. “Here, actually. During a dinner rush. He was sitting at the counter and Isabel knocked a cup of coffee in his lap.”

“Ouch,” I said.