Writers & Lovers. Lily King

or after service, whoever’s closest to the stereo at the bar will switch stations fast.

      ‘How’d you get this job?’ she says. ‘You’re not one of Marcus’s usual hires.’

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘You’re more like us, the old guard.’ She means people hired by the previous house manager. ‘Cerebral.’

      ‘I’m not sure about that.’

      ‘Well, you know what cerebral means, so case in point.’

      Tony comes out on the deck to give us the breakdown. Only one large table out here, a party of ten for an anniversary. Mary Hand and I push two tables together, cover it in several cloths, lining up the points of the corners of the top layer with the straight hem of the bottom. We do the same to the rest of the smaller tables, then set them, shining the silver and polishing the glasses with small cloths as we go. We put a candle on each table and get the flowers I arranged for lunch out of the walk-in. The chef calls us all to the wait station where he tells us the specials, explaining each preparation and ingredient. The chefs I’ve worked with before were high strung and volatile, but Thomas is calm and kind. He never lets things in his kitchen get out of hand. He doesn’t have a temper or a vile mouth. He doesn’t hate women, not even waitresses. If I make a mistake, even on a busy night, he just nods and takes the plate and slides back what I need. He’s good, too. We’re always trying to get our hands on an extra carpaccio or seared scallops or Bolognese. The high shelves in the wait station are full of finagled food, pushed to the back where Marcus can’t see and eaten surreptitiously throughout the night. I have to eat at the restaurant—I can’t afford more than cereal or noodles at the grocery store—but even if I weren’t broke I would sneak that food.

      Thirty minutes later every seat in my section is filled. Mary Hand and I fall into a groove. The French doors to the deck have to be kept closed because the AC is on in the dining room, and when our meals are up and loaded we hold the door for each other. She brings my drinks to one of my fours, and I deliver salmons to her deuce when she’s opening bottles of champagne for the rowdy ten.

      I like going from the hot kitchen to the cool dining room to the humid deck. I like that Craig is working the bar because no matter how many orders he has, he always makes it to your tables to talk about the wines. And I like the mindless distractions, the way there is no room to remember anything about your life except that the osso bucco goes to the man in the bow tie and the lavender flan to the birthday girl in pink and the side cars to the student couple with the fake IDs. I like memorizing the orders—aren’t you going to write it down, the older men will say—punching them in on the computer in the wait station, collecting my food in the window, stabbing the dupes, serving on the left, clearing from the right. Dana and Tony are too busy with their big tables to insult anyone and after I bring out Dana’s salads while she’s taking an order, she garnishes my vongoles.

      I have a table from Ecuador and speak to them in Spanish. They hear my accent and make me say a few sentences in Catalan. The feel of that language in my mouth brings back Paco, the good parts, the way his whole face crumpled when he laughed and how he let me fall asleep on his back. I tell them one of our dishwashers is from Guayaquil, and they want to meet him. I get Alejandro, and he ends up sitting and smoking with them, talking about politics and grinning madly, and I get a glimpse of who he is when he isn’t engulfed in spray and steam and food waste. But things pile up in the kitchen and eventually Marcus storms out to the deck and sends him back to his station.

      The only conflict comes at the second seating when Fabiana puts a deuce that was supposed to be Dana’s in my section.

      ‘She just got the five,’ Dana says. ‘What the fuck?’

      Fabiana comes all the way around the wait station, a place she avoids for its chaos and potential for stains. She wears silk wrap dresses and is the only woman allowed to keep her hair down. She is clean and showered and never smells of salad dressing.

      ‘They asked for her, Dana. You’re getting the seven at eight thirty.’

      ‘The fucking teachers from Wellesley? Oh thanks. I’ll probably get a fiver off their ice water and the side salad they split three ways.’

      I lean past the tall shelving to peer through the doors to the deck. A tall woman and a balding man. ‘You can have them. I don’t even know who they are.’

      Marcus is coming toward us from the bar.

      ‘Why are you still here?’ Fabiana snaps at me for his benefit. ‘Get out there, Casey.’

      I think they’ve started sleeping together.

      I go out to the deck.

      ‘Casey!’ They both get up and give me tight hugs. ‘You don’t recognize us,’ the woman says. The man looks on benevolently, red cheeked and mellow, a few cocktails already in him. She’s large, boobs angled like the prow of a boat, a short gold chain with a turquoise stone around her neck. It looks like something my mother would wear.

      ‘I’m sorry.’

      The table behind them needs their check.

      ‘We used to work in Doug’s office. With your mom.’

      It was her first job after she left my father, in a congressman’s office. The Doyles. That’s who they were. Liz and Pat. They hadn’t been married then.

      ‘She fixed us up, you know. She told Pat that I wanted him to ask me out. And she told me he was going to, even though he’d never said such a thing. The cheek! And here we are.’ She takes my hand. ‘We’re so sorry, Casey. We were devastated to hear. Just devastated. We were in Vero, or we would have been at the service.’

      I nod. If I’d had some warning I might be able to handle it better, but this is a surprise attack. I nod again.

      ‘We wanted to write you, but we didn’t know where on the globe you were at that point. And then we ran into Ezra, who’d heard you were back here and at Iris!’ She puts a warm hand on my arm. ‘I’ve upset you.’

      I shake my head, but my face betrays me and my eyebrows go all funny.

      ‘She gave me this necklace.’

      Of course she did.

      ‘Excuse me,’ the man behind them says, waving his credit card.

      I nod to him and to everyone who stops me on my way back to the wait station. I unroll a place setting from the lunch bin and put my face in the napkin as I print out the check.

      ‘Get a grip, will you,’ Dana says, but she puts the slip on a tray with chocolates and brings it out to my table for me.

      I push through the swinging door into the kitchen. The cooks are busy, their backs to me and to the food that’s waiting for me under the heat lamp. I go into the walk-in. I stand in the dry cold, looking at the dairy shelves in back, the bricks of butter wrapped in wax paper and cartons of heavy cream. Cases of eggs. I breathe. I look down at my hand. Caleb let me have her ring. She wore it my whole life, a sapphire and two small diamonds. The sky and the stars we called it when I was little. Her friend Janet had thought to take it off her finger afterward. My hand looks like hers when I wear it. I can do this, I say to the glinting blue-black eye. And I go out to take the order of Liz and Pat Doyle.

      When I bring their pinot grigios and their apps they’re still somber with me, but by the time their swordfish and risotto comes out Pat is talking animatedly, using words I don’t understand like equities and the Shiller PE, and by coffee they’re chuckling about someone named Marvin doing the hustle at their daughter’s wedding and have nearly forgotten they know me at all. They leave me their business cards, though, on the tray with their merchant receipt and cash tip. Sixteen percent. They both own their own businesses. Neither of them works in politics anymore.

      Table by table, people vanish, leaving behind their soiled napkins and lipstick markings. The tablecloths are disheveled and crusted, wine bottles turned upside down in their watery holders, a sea of glasses and coffee cups and smeared dessert