Chapter Two Grace #2
Javi looks at me. He has brown eyes, dark, and when he looks at me with the full weight of his attention I can feel him deciding whether to push. He almost never pushes. This is one of the reasons we work.
"Okay," he says.
I eat a potato. My finger taps the edge of my plate, slow, idle, I force myself to stop when I notice.
"You ever think about going somewhere?" he says. "Not permanently. Just a trip. A vacation. Somewhere that isn't the restaurant and your apartment and the bodega."
"Where would I go?"
"Anywhere. That's the point. You're twenty-four, Grace. You've never left Philadelphia."
That's true. I haven't. I grew up here — or the part of growing up I remember, which starts around thirteen and involves a family I don't feel connected to and a series of schools.
And of course, this restaurant, which is the first place that ever felt like it belonged to me.
Before thirteen there's nothing. Not a painful nothing.
Not a hole I'm avoiding. Just an absence, empty in the way a room is when the lights are off and nobody's in it.
I've accepted this the way I've accepted that I have dark hair and bad circulation and a prescription for anxiety and a habit of tapping my finger on things when I'm thinking.
"I like Philadelphia," I say.
"You like this restaurant and like, three blocks of South Philly."
"That's enough."
"It's really not. You’re sheltering yourself."
"It's enough, Javi. Please, just drop it"
He puts his hands up. "Okay. It's enough."
We eat in awkward silence because that’s the most he’s tried to get me to change in our entire friendship. Devon comes out and asks if the salad is good and Javi tells him it's the best thing he's made all week, and Devon's face goes bright red in excitement. He goes back to the kitchen and I grin.
This little family is all I need.
The eight-top comes in at six thirty and the birthday party comes in early, so the next two hours are work and I disappear into it with enthusiasm.
The tapping happens when I'm standing at the POS system entering the eight-top's order and it happens again when I'm walking the birthday cake out from the kitchen.
My stomach tightens when the whole table starts singing and the noise is loud and close and my body wants to step back from it.
I don't step back. I set the cake down. I smile. I sing along.
My finger taps the candle lighter in my apron pocket the entire time in beats that go faster and faster while I try to control my breathing and my face.
At ten forty-five, the last table pays and leaves and Javi starts closing the bar and I roll silverware and the restaurant settles into the quiet that comes after a full night.
Marco is gone — he leaves when the kitchen closes, always, because Marco believes his job ends when the last plate is served and everything after that is someone else's problem.
Devon is wiping down the line. The dishwasher is running its last cycle.
Javi puts on music, low, and I roll silverware and don't think about anything.
The walk home is three blocks. Javi walks with me because Javi always walks with me even though I've told him a hundred times he doesn't have to.
We don't talk. The street is quiet. The wind is still cold.
My hands are in my jacket pockets and my right index finger taps the inside lining, two beats, then nothing, then one beat, then nothing.
At my door, Javi waits while I get my key in the lock.
"Eat something," he says.
"I ate."
"Eat something for dinner, Grace. You had lunch."
"I’m good, really. See you tomorrow."
He frowns. “Want me to stay a bit? You seem tense.”
Shaking my head, I tell him I just need some time to decompress after the crazy shift we just had. He replies with some sappy comment about how he will always be here for me, including if I need him to bring some wine and chocolate for a good old fashioned slumber party.
Rolling my eyes, I swat his arm and shoo him off.
I watch him walk back toward the restaurant, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched against the wind, and I stand in my doorway for a few seconds because the night is quiet and I feel fine.
I feel the way I always feel, which is here, present, and not reaching for anything more.
I lock the door, brush my teeth and set my alarm. I get into bed, the sheets are cold and my apartment is dark and outside the wind pushes through the grid and rattles the window frame.
I close my eyes and a flash behind my eyelids startles me.
Yellow. Warm yellow, the kind that comes from a lamp or a low sun through a window.
And under my hands, a texture that isn't my sheets.
Rough. Cold. And then it's gone. I'm in my bed in my apartment in Philadelphia and my finger is tapping my thigh under the blanket, four beats fast, and I don't know when I started.
I stop.
One. Two. Three. I breathe in and out until my heart stills.
Digging in my dresser, I grab my melatonin and take a couple and then I close my eyes against the feeling of dread building in the pit of my stomach.