“What you didn’t do is ask!”
“You didn’t give me the chance to tell you the specials.”
Guy put a hand on her arm. “Jessica –”
“You’ve got the specials in writing right there at the hostess stand!” If nobody in the restaurant was staring at them, it was only because they were doing all they could not to. Faces suddenly engrossed in their grilled salmon and shrimp ravioli. “You think I need you to recite the specials, like I’m some mentally retarded child? I know the specials, and don’t you think if I wanted the fried calamari, I sure as hell would have asked for it?”
A man could convince himself of anything, especially when his voice echoed so loud, it bounded from the rafters like God’s proper will.
Jessica felt herself grow small, helpless. Little servant girl in a man’s world.
It didn’t matter what was right.
All that mattered was who was footing the bill.
“I’ll be more than happy to remove the starters from your check, sir…” Guy assured them, chin bobbing. “And please consider dessert our compliments for the evening.”
“Thank you,” the vulture replied, as though his whole life had been leading up to such reparations.
“Is there anything else we can do for you?”
And Jessica let her anger simmer low, screams of solid frustration circulating through her bloodstream. Heart pumping pure hatred for a man who wasn’t about to give up his leverage just yet.
“Well…” The vulture picked up his wine glass. Held it close to his face even as the half empty bottle rested comfortably by his elbow. “This wine is not exactly what I expected.”
“Jessica, the wine list, please.”
Jessica took a deep, unintentionally sobering breath and made her way to the hostess stand. Picked up the wine list, bound in brown vinyl, and walked it over to table thirteen like a friendly, undersized dog.
In the end, they chose a Cabernet no different from their initial selection.
And took the liberty of reminding her that Chris never got the twist for his Absolute martini.
Jessica shuffled back to the bar. From every direction, tables continued demanding their drinks, starters, main courses, desserts, and checks. The smirks of her schoolmates wormed their way into her, delighted with the floorshow.
Only Malik seemed to be doing all he could to communicate solidarity. Seething in his seat, he sent hateful lightning bolts spinning towards table thirteen.
Nothing doing, though.
Too little, too late. So very, very Malik.
Jessica typed in her order, and Dinah presented the bottle. Earned herself a few sympathetic smiles from a few barflies, but at that point, the dominos were down.
Jessica was in the weeds.
Stuck in the tall grass.
She pressed her fingers against either temple, dug in. Still another three hours left in her shift. And after that another shift. And after that, who knew?
Summer had barely hit the ground, and already, Jessica felt like running.
***
Jessica was done for the evening. Receipts totaled along with her gratuities. Line for line, tip-out log tallied; pen digging into paper as her right hand stabbed at oversized calculator buttons. Fifteen percent for the food runners, ten for the busboys. Two percent for the hostess and three for the bar.
She snagged Carlos outside the kitchen. Slipped him his twenty-three dollars. The bus crew was already two-thirds done, stacking chairs and wiping down the Tennessee marble tops. Jessica flagged Ramon, who strode over with a sad smile that rarely ventured past his thick mustache. She dished him his fifteen, adding a tired gracias.
The hostess had already gone home for the evening.
Jessica ducked behind the podium. Counted out three bills and slid them into the white envelope.
One hundred and fifty three dollars in tips now down to one hundred twelve.
She stood up a little too fast, resulting in a hollow thump as her head slammed against the edge.
With a soft groan, Jessica reached into her apron. Counted out eight dollars. She wove her way between empty tables, feet throbbing against tightly laced, black dress shoes. Took a seat at the bar. Hardly able to summon the strength, she dragged the weighted barstool close to the shiny, blue-grey Carrara counter top. To her left, a twenty-some blonde in a cheap suit drew his whiskey closer to his spindly body, as though sensing Jessica could use the room. She hardly noticed; stared longingly at the bottles lined up like toy soldiers atop a blue-lit inset, their contents luminous and inviting.
A few seats down, Dinah was serving up a Heineken to one of the stragglers.
Jessica gave a wave.
Dinah strode over with a weary smile. “Hey, girl.”
Jessica brandished eight dollars between her middle and index. “Got your money, Blondie.”
Dinah took the cash, fanned it out like a peacock tail. “You got a two dollar bill in here, honey.”
“I know.”
“That’s good luck.”
“Says who?”
“Supposed to be good luck, anyway.” Dinah scooped some ice into a pint glass and filled it with tonic. “Like a four-leaf clover.”
“Because they’re both green?”
“Because they’re both rare.”
“So’s getting struck by lightning.” Jessica reached for a straw, plunged it into her drink. She took a sip, savoring the bubbly snap of quinine. “That’s what passes for good luck these days, you get me a kite and a key.”
“Eight bucks is eight bucks.”
“That’s eight more than I got from table thirteen. We calling that good luck, too?”
“Didn’t leave you anything?”
“On a hundred and fifty dollar tab.”
“Dick.”
Guy motioned from the register, ready to tally some bar tickets.
Dinah left Jessica with an encouraging smile, encoded with a sad understanding of problem customers.
“I mean, guests,” Jessica muttered resentfully.
“Miss?”
Jessica glanced down the bar. Caught sight of a classy suit, burgundy shirt, black silk tie. Black man, somewhere in the wilderness of middle age. Facial scars from an acne-riddled youth dotted his cheeks and lengthy jaw line. Large hands encircling his Heineken like a prayer book, close-cut hair crop-dusted with notions of someday going completely gray.
Jessica gave him the eye. Old man even dreams of buying me a drink, he’d better wake up and apologize.
“May I just say…” Heineken man ventured, accent hinting at a northern point of origin. “That man you were stuck with earlier, gentleman in the Armani suit?”
“What of it?”
“That was no gentleman…” Heineken man picked up his beer and brought his lips in for a landing. Swallowed. “That man was anything but, and I would like to extend my ill wishes. There’s no excuse for anyone treating anybody the way he treated you tonight.”
To her left, the blond whiskey drinker followed up with a barely perceptible true that.
Jessica shrugged. “Thanks.”
“For what it’s worth.”
“Not a hell of a lot, sir.”
Jessica heard Guy bark out her name. She lazily rolled her head towards her boss. Saw him standing by the register with a paternal scowl; arms crossed, fists stuffed with greenbacks and credit slips. Directly to his right, Dinah bit down on her lower lip, teeth white against scarlet lipstick.
“My apologies, sir,” Guy said, putting aside all paperwork and gliding over to Heineken man in one smooth sentence.
“No need for that,” Heineken man insisted. “You can’t control everything.”
“I hope Jessica hasn’t offended you in any way.”
Jessica’s stomach folded into fourths, fingers strangling her glass.
“Who’s talking about her?” Heineken man asked. “I was talking about table thirteen, that sorry excuse for a man who pu
t the hurt on our girl, here.”
Jessica was positive she’d heard wrong.
Guy appeared equally unprepared. “Well, we do our very best to please everyone who –”
“There’s some people in this world beyond pleasing,” Heineken man declared. “Too often, I have to ask if those people are even worth pleasing. Don’t know why I have to ask myself so often, the answer’s always the same.” He turned towards Jessica with a warm smile, eyes mischievously implying that this was her chance. “Do you honestly think there was anything you could have done to please a husk like Mr. Table Thirteen over there?”
Jessica felt an unfamiliar rush of pure, instinctual warmth. Sent her lips curling in a grateful smile.
Before she could answer, Guy stepped in: “We don’t make it policy to discuss clientele at work.”
“Seems to me her shift is over.”
“She’s not wearing her streets. I wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea.”
“Well, it appears the curtain has fallen.” Heineken man cast a sly, theatrical glance around the cavernous restaurant. “Don’t know how I’m supposed to get the wrong idea from what’s right before my face.”
“Now, sir…” Guy switched gears, shifting to playful indignation. “Do I go down to your place of business and tell you how to do your job?”
“It’d be interesting… I’m a restaurant manager.”
Dinah split the bar with an unintended yelp of laughter.
Everyone turned to find her covering her mouth, eyes mortified.
“Chaucer Braswell,” the stranger said, tipping an imaginary hat. “General Manager of The Blue Paradise. Wilmington, North Carolina.” He turned, extended a hand in Jessica’s direction: “Chaucer Braswell to you, too.”
Jessica met his hand with a firm shake. “Jessica Kincaid.”
“All right…” He turned back to Guy with a conciliatory nod. “Sorry to put you on the spot. Customer’s Always Right is the third rail of the food service. So I know. Yes. It’s unfair for me to ask you to side with any opinion I may have towards Mr. Table Thirteen –”
“Tell you what I would’ve done to Mr. Table Thirteen,” the blond whiskey drinker offered, staring into his glass, green eyes narrowing. “I would’ve taken that Filet Mignon and dumped it right on his bald-ass head. Then taken that bottle of wine and poured that all over his thousand-dollar suit. After that, maybe squeeze a lemon wedge right in his beady little eyes. Just to add that extra touch of…” He trailed off, glanced around from face to face; Dinah, Guy, Chaucer, then finally landing on Jessica.
She locked eyes with him, instantly struck by the worn rage behind his childish scenario. An already skinny body looking several sizes smaller beneath an ill-fitting, dime-store suit.
“There’s no excuse,” he told her. “No excuse for a man to treat a woman – to treat anyone – the way he treated you. If the wrong appetizer and a bottle of subpar wine is the worst thing in that cocksucker’s life, he should be down on his knees and kissing your feet for proving to him just how good he’s got it.”
Guy cleared his throat, trying to pull the train back into the station.
The blond stranger wasn’t going to let that happen: “Am I wrong? Because I don’t believe I am. Matter of fact, I’d lay down twenty to one that each of us has got a little something they’d like to do to Mr. Table Thirteen. Teach him a lesson I know we all know he richly deserves.” He leaned forward, soft overhead lights casting a shadow over his eyes. “Sir? Mr. Braswell?”
“Chaucer’s just fine, young man…” He absently scratched his cheek, weighed his words between broad shoulders. “And can I assume we’ve just entered a morally indifferent, consequence-free world?”
“A perfect world.”
“What’s your name, son?”
“Eli.” Raising his glass, he added: “Eli Messner.”
“Well, Eli… I suppose, once Mr. Table Thirteen was done with his meal. And after I’d collected my invisible tip on a hundred and fifty dollar tab… I’d follow him out to his car. I’d pull out my notepad, and write down his tags. Naturally, and yes, trust me, he would come up to me. Ask what I was doing, and I’d tell him, straight up: Just jottin’ your plates. He’d ask me why. Don’t know if I’d really answer him. Maybe send a shrug his way. And, yes, I do know this man would instantly lose his cool, demand I hand over the note. Which I’d do. I would hand it over. I would watch him tear it to shreds, eyes all haughty and defiant, like he’d just single handedly stormed Normandy.”
Chaucer took a sip of his beer. “Then, I’d simply recite his plates by memory. Walk away. And, yes, I do know he would spend the following months wondering just what I was planning to do with that one simple piece of information. What I would be capable of with a few simple numbers. Let the man sweat it out with the knowledge that he will, eventually, be punished…”
Guy continued to feign an obsessive interest in that night’s totals.
The rest of them nodded, replaying the scene in their heads.
“Classy way to go,” Eli said.
“There’s a million and one ways to go about vengeance,” Chaucer replied.
“Or justice.”
“Two different creatures.”
“Meaning?”
Dinah stepped in. “We’re talking about a perfect world, right?”
Guy threw her a sharp glance, but the night had long slipped from his grasp.
“We’re talking about a perfect world, yes,” Eli affirmed.
“I’d have to go for the master plan, then…” Under Guy’s watchful eye, Dinah served Chaucer a free beer, another refill for Eli. She leaned over the bar, arms crossed. “I’d shuffle through the credit card receipts, find this man’s name. Find out where he lives. Watch and wait. A man like that’s got to have something dark stored somewhere in his cellar…” Dinah’s eyes played over her manicured fingernails, thoughts lost in a scheme that would never see the light of day. “I know it’s pie in the sky, but in a perfect world, yeah. I would find some way to completely destroy his life. Systematically. Bit by bit. Taking it all, ‘till all he had left was his shadow, and then shine just one more light on him…”
Someone in back turned off the XM radio.
No more ambient electronica; the entire place gone silent.
Chaucer took a long tug at his beer. “Anything you want to add, Guy? Ain’t no shame in admitting it. Managers are only human. Even though they may not always –”
“It’s just about that time, gentlemen,” Guy interrupted, checking his Rolex. “Got to settle up –”
“Know what I would do…?” Jessica came back over the top, sucking the last bit of life from her drink. She glanced around, marveled at the sound of her own voice in the void of afterhours. “If I had my way with Mr. Table Thirteen? I would just go ahead and kill the dirty old fucker.”
One by one, the overhead lights were extinguished. Remaining players surrounded by a dark curtain.
“I mean, we are talking about a perfect world, right?” Jessica held up her hands. Palms spread flat, the universal symbol of a clean slate. Free of all responsibility, unrepentant. “And everything you all have been talking about has been… based, somehow, in some idea that we can, someway, teach certain people certain lessons. Make them see the error of their ways, make them think twice before they treat anybody with any sort of disrespect again… But your perfect world ain’t perfect because you get to do what you want. It’s perfect because what you do makes some damn difference after you’ve done it… There’s no teaching some people. Most people. Most people, like Mr. Table Thirteen, there’s nothing that’s ever going to change him. Just as the rich get richer, the mean and ugly stay mean and ugly. So finally, why even bother taking him to school…? I say we all just kill him.”
Jessica wiped a drop of moisture from her lips. “Kill him, and don’t get caught.”
The clatter of pots and pans falling to the kitchen floor wasn’t enough to break the
hypnosis. Everyone stared into their drinks, down to their hands, or at a pen stuck between two decimal places.
As for Jessica, she was hardly aware of what she had said.
“Dinah…” Guy kept his voice low, as though afraid to compete with the silence. “I’ll finish up here.”
“You sure?” Dinah asked.
“Yeah… Take your niece with you.”
Eli raised his eyebrows. “Dinah, you have a niece?”
“I believe you’ve already met.”
“Yo,” Jessica raised a hand and pushed herself away from the bar. Wrought iron scraped against the floor with the jarring screech of a large, angry eraser. “It’s been a thrill, gentlemen.”
“Good luck tomorrow,” Guy said dismissively.
“What have you got going on tomorrow?” Eli asked.
“Nothing concerning any of you,” Jessica replied.
“Have a good night, boys,” Dinah chirped, ever the professional. “Come back and see us.”
Chaucer tipped his imaginary hat. “Good night, ladies.”
“Same,” Eli concurred.
To Jessica, there was nothing more disheartening than leaving a bar sober. Sad to say, that was the way it would have to be. Out through the double doors, and into the parking lot, listening to the stars above.
She tore her tie from around her neck. Slung it over her shoulder.
Dinah did the same, and the two of them slid into the Mustang for a silent ride home.
Chapter 3: A Long Way From Louisville.
The stereo clicked, whirred; moving onto disc two in the rotation.
Bahduizm, a mellow gem from the mid nineteen-nineties.
Jessica kicked her legs up, feet resting on the chair across from her. She popped open her outdated Toshiba laptop and plugged in her password, secondhand table wobbling slightly as she struck the keys. From the corner, a tall halogen lamp sent soft light spilling over the living room’s white walls, hard wood floors, worn couch, coffee table, armchair, bookshelves and television. A string of purple Christmas lights surrounded the enormous casement windows, iron rungs dusty with yellow pollen. Summer heat poured through in humid waves, complete with the chirp of insomniac crickets and the sandpaper sounds of cars cruising University Road.
Jessica stared out from her third-story seat, past the front lawn of Camelot Apartments. Across the street, tucked between shadows and tangerine streetlights, low-rent apartments lined the entire block. Next to them lay the entrance to Pinecrest Cemetery; over a hundred acres of tombstones disappearing into a skyline of witching hour trees.