27
Dead plate: A dish of food that is deemed unservable, either because it was sent back or prepared incorrectly.
Dead plates are typically fair game for servers or cooks to eat, dependent upon the restaurant’s policy.
2012
Petunia is dead.
Wasn’t it inevitable? Neither she nor her father has ever even suggested they get clean; they simply take turns being drunk.
Petunia had been taking more than her fair share of turns the last several months, leaving Troy more often sober.
A parent’s love? Regina supposes it is, in its way. The Burger Queen does not think so. She thinks, if Troy loves his daughter, he won’t enable her.
Regina hates that word in all its forms—enable, enabling, enabler.
It’s a bullshit word, the psychobabble catchphrase of the moment, and destructive to all parties concerned because it’s just another label to slap blame on.
The dining room is buzzing, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
First with Petunia’s death, then with Troy’s disappearance.
On his knees, wailing a siren sound as the ambulance took his daughter’s body away, is the last anyone has seen of him.
Not even Gladys has, and she is angry. Regina wishes she could be angry. All she can be is worried. For the time being, she sends Gladys home from lunch with boxed dinners so she’s not walking to the kitchen after dark, even picks up a new Burger Queen crown for her when hers gets shabby. And she keeps eyes and ears out for any sign of Troy climbing out of his bottle.
In the meanwhile, she’s running meal services with the haphazard assistance of those in need of that twenty-dollar bill she offers for their trouble.
Sometimes, she can’t find anyone interested in more than the sandwich and cup of soup.
It’s not that they’re lazy—another word she despises—just too old or too young, too exhausted or too lost inside their own heads.
Then there are those who come in drunk, or high; Regina doesn’t send them away unfed, but neither does she ask for their help.
Busy day turns into busy day, and Regina hasn’t enough energy left at the end of one to even think straight.
The learning curve is indeed curvaceous, and she’s still figuring out how to navigate the course.
Meals become simpler.
No one complains about soup and sandwiches, day after day. Or the cereals. Though a few mumble about missing Troy’s eggs. Bottom line is, she can’t do it on her own, but she’s afraid to hire someone. Hiring means a paycheck, means health insurance and Social Security deductions and a million other things that leave a paper trail she is absolutely not willing to leave.
But something’s got to give.
Regina has made baked ziti and sausages, figuring it’s at least as easy to serve as soup and sandwiches.
It is certainly less time-consuming to make.
Word has gotten out; even Gladys could not stay away.
The line is longer than usual, and Regina is only one person.
“Help serve, there’s a twenty in it for you.”
Over and over she asks.
Grunts, heads shaking.
No takers.
Regina plugs on, her feet sore and her back aching. She might have to cave and hire someone, under the table to avoid that paper trail. She’ll have to be careful when the various inspectors come. If they come. This part of the city is largely ignored. Once acknowledged, someone would have to do something about it and, in Regina’s experience, past and present, no one wants to. It’s one of the reasons she chose Rock Landing to begin with.
By six forty-five, most of the hungry are served.
Regina is ready to drop right there, but she can’t leave the dining room unattended even to clean the kitchen.
It is going to be a long night, too long to indulge in the meal she’d planned for herself.
Her back, that old injury, screams I told you sos from her past. She scoops herself a plate of ziti, skewers a sausage, and eats standing there in the doorway. If she sits, she won’t get up again.
The entrance door opens and closes with a bang.
Great.
Another hungry person to serve.
Regina lowers her plate to the table, but the woman, leggy and curvy and not at all dressed for the weather, doesn’t get in line. She clacks on high heels to the far corner of the dining room, finger to her red lips. Hiding behind a group of elderly folk, she can’t get low enough for the poof of her hugely teased Afro. It sticks up over the head of one old man, making him look like a fuzzy brown mushroom.
The door opens again with a bang.
A man stands in the doorway, scanning the dining room, door held open by one meaty hand.
He is big, his puffer coat making him even bigger, and he is angry, if the red blotches of his face are to be believed.
“Close the door,”
the Burger Queen calls out.
“You’re letting the cold in.”
He takes another step inside, lets the door go.
“Have you seen a tall Black woman, really pretty, wearing one of those flowy shirts and a leather miniskirt? Hair out to here?”
He holds his hands wide around his head.
Heads shake.
Mumblers mumble.
Gladys is already on her feet, head high and shoulders back, that imperious air as grand as any Victorian lady’s.
She moves closer and the man steps back, eyes on her paper crown and eyebrows expressing derision, but Gladys says, “As you can see, there’s no one fitting that description here. Now, if you’d like something to eat, young man, take a seat like a gentleman,”
and he takes another step back.
“Eat?”
He scans the room, grimacing. “Here?”
“Don’t be rude.”
The old woman claps, just once.
“If you require no sustenance, then I’ll thank you to leave.”
The man scans the room again, squinting and shrugging in turn.
His face is no longer blotchy red.
Regina watches, puzzled but amused.
Silence follows his departure, everyone focuses on the old man/mushroom. Eyes, followed by a nose, and a red-lipped smile appear above his head. Several laugh. The woman kisses the crown of the old man’s pate. “My people!”
She dances about the room, kissing this head and that cheek.
Regina is certain whoever she is, she doesn’t know everyone, but she seems to know many.
The rest have simply gotten caught in her whir.
“What have you to say for yourself, young lady?”
Gladys stands before her, as imperious and authoritative as she’d been with the blotchy man.
“Excuse me?”
A sniff, nose just a fraction higher than it had been.
“Racing in here, being chased by that man, dressed like”—and higher—“that.”
“Maybe you should be minding your own business.”
She adds, “Ma’am,”
though it comes off more like a sneer.
Regina can’t exactly place her accent, but it isn’t American.
And she can’t place her age.
When she ran into the dining room, she’d have said twentysomething. Looking at her closer, she thinks she has to be in her late thirties.
“If I had minded my own business, you would have been dragged out of this establishment by your hair.
Caveman that he is.
Now button those top buttons and sit. Regina,”
she calls, waving.
“If you please.”
The tired has been shooed from her legs.
Gladys the Burger Queen resumes her seat off to the side, almost in the corner, where she always sat with Petunia or Troy, and now alone.
Regina scoops baked ziti onto a plate for the newcomer, delivers it to the table where she sits, old-school chastised and properly submissive, buttoning her top buttons.
“Thank you,”
she says when Regina places the plate in front of her.
Then, “She always like that?”
“Always.”
It’s a lie.
Gladys is Gladys, but rarely so cogent.
“You run this place?”
“I do.”
“I heard about it before, from . . .”
She points to the diners.
“Anyway, thanks for not giving me away.
He’ll calm down soon enough.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t date men like that.”
“Date? I don’t think you can call what we do dating.”
She waves a hand from head to toe.
“Some think they pay for all this, not just use of certain parts.
They’re wrong.”
The impulse to smile siphons away.
Regina doesn’t want to be judgmental; she has no right to be.
She’s done way worse than accept money for sex.
She hands the woman a can of soda. “Just be safe.”
“I always am.”
She grimaces, holds up the can.
“Got anything diet?”
The dining room is mostly empty by a quarter after seven.
A few latecomers still sit in a corner, eating what is left of the baked ziti.
Regina planned well.
No leftovers. That is where she wants to be, going forward. Just enough. No waste. And no one going hungry.
The chased woman is still there, sitting on the edge of the latecomers’ table, chatting.
Three boys and a girl, all late teens.
Regina thinks they’re runaways, but she can’t be sure.
When they get up to leave, the woman waves them off but makes no move to leave herself. Instead, she approaches Gladys at her solitary table, head bowed.
Regina joins them, slightly afraid but not knowing exactly which woman she fears for.
“I want to thank you, for what you did.”
Gladys glances up.
The imperious expression lingers only around the edges of her features.
There is a question there.
Confusion. This is the Gladys, the Burger Queen, that Regina knows best. She goes to their rescue.
“There’s a twenty in it for you if you help me clean up,”
she tells the younger woman.
To Gladys, she says, “I’ll be done soon.
I’ll take you home.”
Gladys sniffs, nods almost imperceptibly.
The dining room is clean in half an hour.
Prep tables are already wiped down.
All that is left to do in the kitchen is clean the hotel pans now soaking in the sink and set up the Crock-Pots for the morning.
“Thanks for your help.”
Regina hands the woman a twenty.
“Thanks for the food, and . . .”
She holds up the bill before stuffing it into her bra.
“I guess I should be going.”
“Will you be safe?”
“Safe is as safe does.”
She tries to smile when she says it; Regina can tell by the way the corners of her eyes crinkle.
Too much hardship, hard living.
This close, she looks more like fifty.
The kettle Regina’s put on to boil sings.
She locks the front door after the woman leaving before attending to it.
Gladys is still in her little corner.
Waiting. Her memory might be broken, but some things are too ingrained to fall through those cracks.
Pouring tea into the Bernardaud cups, Regina inhales.
Peppermint is never her go-to, especially late in the day.
Too rejuvenating.
Tonight, she needs it just to get up the stairs.
“Thank you.”
Both Gladys’s hands wrap around her cup.
Knuckles are boles keeping two rings, both on middle fingers, both neither expensive nor cheap, from falling off.
One is set with a rather large red cabochon that should look incongruous but somehow doesn’t.
Regina can’t get away with big rings; her fingers are too stubby. Earth hands, a palmist once told her, though she remembers being the exact opposite of what that was supposed to make her. Gladys’s fingers are long and must have once been graceful. They dance on the hot mug, a symphony of clacks from her rings.
“She’ll be dead within the year.”
Gladys blows across the top of her teacup.
“Mark my words.”
“You’re probably right.”
Regina does the same.
“You all right?”
“I’m fine, dear.
Thank you.”
Is she playing at senility? Regina believes it’s mostly real, and sometimes convenient.
She’s never known anyone like Gladys the Burger Queen.
Not in any life.
They finish their tea in silence.
Regina takes the cups to the kitchen.
She’ll wash them when she gets back.
The two-block drive to Gladys’s apartment building also happens in silence. Regina walks her up the stairs, to her first-floor apartment directly across from Troy’s. She’s tempted to knock on the door.
“Here.”
Regina hands Gladys the to-go containers she’d packed.
“In case Troy isn’t himself tomorrow.”
“Thank you, dear.”
No mercurial sniff.
Her expression is concerned, her watery eyes on Troy’s door.
“Petunia was a good girl.”
“She was.”
“I’m so very sad she’s gone.”
“Yeah, me too.”
More silence, less comfortable than before.
Regina still has a few things to do, and she is exhausted.
“Well, good night, Gladys.”
The old woman dips her head.
“Good night, Queenie.
Pleasant dreams.”
The door closes, and Regina can only stare.