6. Chapter Six Grace
Chapter Six: Grace
He comes back on Thursday. And Friday. And Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.
By the second week, I stop checking the door when it opens because I already know when he's going to walk through it.
Dinner shifts, between five thirty and six.
Always alone. Always table four if it's open, and if it's not, whatever table has its back to the wall and a sightline to the door.
He orders the pork shoulder now, every time, because I told him it was better than the branzino and he listened. Coffee, black. Cash. Thirty percent.
I still don't know his name.
He doesn't offer it and I don't ask because asking would mean this is something, and it isn't something.
He's a regular. I have dozens of regulars.
Arthur and Helen on Wednesdays. The two lawyers from the firm on Broad Street who split a bottle of Barolo every Friday and argue about law shit loud enough for the whole dining room to hear.
The woman who comes in alone on Sundays with a paperback, orders the risotto and stays for two hours, never looking up from her book.
He's one of them.
That's all.
Except I've started walking past table four when I don't need to.
The efficient route from the kitchen to the bar runs along the left wall, past tables one through three.
Table four is on the right side, against the opposite wall, and there is no reason for me to cross the dining room to pass it on my way to refill a water pitcher.
But I cross anyway, and when I pass him, I can feel his attention shift.
Not his head. Not his eyes, as far as I can tell.
Just the quality of his focus changes, I can feel it on my skin when I walk through the edge of it.
He tracks the room constantly, but when I pass, the tracking narrows, and I'm inside it.
This should bother me.
Men have paid attention to me before and I've never liked it.
The ones who stare at my chest while I'm taking their order, the ones who touch my arm when they ask for the check, the drunk guy last year who grabbed my wrist and Javi had to come around the bar.
I've never had a problem stepping back, creating distance, shutting it down.
Yet, I keep walking past table four.
Tonight, he's eating the pork shoulder and I'm carrying a bread basket to table seven when I pass him.
Deep down, I want to start a conversation, but instead I look down at his hands while I walk.
He's holding the fork in his right hand, and his left hand is resting on the table, palm down, and his index finger is tapping the wood next to his plate.
The same thing I do, the same kind of absent rhythm that means nothing and everything, and my feet stop moving for a half-second when I see it.
Is he mimicking me, or does he have the same anxious tic I do?
I keep walking. I deliver the bread basket and go back to the bar to pour two glasses of the house red and bring them to the lawyers.
I ask if they want to see the dessert menu and they say yes, they always say yes, and the entire time I'm thinking about his index finger tapping the table the way mine taps everything. It’s such a small thing, and for some reason I can’t stop ruminating over it.
"Grace."
Javi is looking at me from behind the bar. He's holding a cocktail shaker in one hand and a rag in the other and his face has the expression it gets when he's about to say something I don't want to hear.
"What."
"You're doing the route."
"What route."
"The route past The Rhino. You've done it four times tonight and you only needed to do it zero times."
"I'm working the floor, Javi. I walk past all the tables."
"You walk past all the tables in order. Except his. His, you walk past when you're going in the wrong direction."
My finger taps the bar. "Can you just make drinks and stop surveilling me?"
"Surveilling. That's a big word. Did The Rhino teach you that?"
"I genuinely hate you."
"You genuinely don't. I’m your only friend." He shakes the cocktail and pours it and slides it across the bar to a woman sitting on the end stool. "He's doing the finger thing, by the way."
"What?"
"The tapping thing. You both do it. I'm just saying. It's very cute and very weird. I think it’s time to just pull the bandaid and ask the guy to marry you, you obviously have a deep and long-standing connection."
I walk away before he can say anything else. My face is warm and I'm irritated at Javi and at myself. The tapping against my apron pocket is fast enough that I can hear the fabric rustle.
The man at table four finishes his pork shoulder and leaves cash under the saucer as always before he walks out without looking back at me.
Aware of Javi watching me, I clear his table and don't stand there this time.
I pick up the plate, the cup and the money and I force myself not to linger in that musky cologne scent he left behind.
But my thumb runs along the edge of the saucer where he held it, and the ceramic is still warm.
The Saturday night rush is the worst we've had in months.
Every table full by six fifteen, a forty-minute wait at the door, Marco screaming at Devon about the risotto, Javi slammed at the bar, and me running the floor alone because the other server called in sick and Danny can't find a replacement on a Saturday.
I'm fine. I'm good at this. I can carry the whole dining room if I have to, and tonight I have to, and there's a part of me that's alive in the chaos because the busier I am the less I think.
My body takes over. Plates up, plates down, water, bread, check, clear, reset.
The rhythm is physical and demanding and it fills every corner of my brain and there's no room for anything else.
He's not here tonight. I checked when the door opened at five thirty and five forty-five and six and six ten, and each time it wasn't him.
I'm annoyed that I checked and more annoyed that I cared.
The eight-top by the window is a birthday party. I've got their entrees up and I'm carrying four plates on my left arm and one in my right hand, weaving through the dining room.
The man at table three is on his phone.
He's speaking Italian.
Fast, loud, animated. His hands are moving and his voice carries across the dining room, and the words hit me mid-stride.
My left foot stops. Just stops, mid-step, and the plates on my arm shift and I try to catch them with my right hand as my body goes cold from the back of my neck down through my spine.
The words don't mean anything to me. I don't speak Italian.
I've never spoken Italian. But the sound of it…
the cadence, the vowels, the specific music of a man's voice speaking fast Italian, does something to my chest. My skin tightens across my shoulders, the back of my jaw aches and there's a taste in my mouth that wasn't there three seconds ago, metallic and wrong.
The smell of the branzino on the plate in my right hand is suddenly so strong that my stomach turns.
I need to move.
The birthday table is waiting. The plates are getting heavy. The man at table three is still talking, still loud, still Italian, every syllable is pushing against something inside me. My heart is pounding so hard I can barely breathe.
Shaking my head, I force myself to move, to deliver the plates.
I smile, nod, stay pleasant. I say happy birthday before turning and walking back through the dining room.
The man at table three laughs and says something loud and without realizing it, my feet take me to the bar by the longest possible route, the one that stays as far from him as the room allows.
My hands are on the bar top. I press them flat and lean my weight into them.
"Hey." Javi is in front of me. "You okay?"
"I'm good."
"You're not good. Your hands are shaking."
"It's a busy night. I'm tired."
He looks at me, and I can see him deciding, and tonight he decides to push. "Is it the Italian thing?"
He knows. Of course he knows. Three years of working together and he's seen it happen a dozen times, the flinch when Marco puts the TV on Italian chef shows, the time a customer ordered in Italian and I had to go to the bathroom for five minutes, the way I avoid the Italian market on Ninth Street even though it's on my walk home and has the best produce in the neighborhood.
He's never asked why. Tonight he asks.
"I don't know what it is, Javi."
"Okay."
"I'm not being difficult. I actually don't know. I've never known. It just… it makes me feel wrong. In my body. Like my skin is on backward. And I can't explain it and I can't stop it and I've felt this way since I can remember, and I don't know why."
He's quiet. He puts a glass of water on the bar in front of me and waits while I drink it.
"Have you ever talked to someone about it?" he asks. "A therapist?"
"And say what? 'Hi, I'm Grace, and hearing Italian makes me want to crawl out of my skin for absolutely no reason'?"
"Yeah. Exactly that. That's exactly what you'd say."
"Javi, I don't even know my medical history. I don't know my birth parents' names. I don't know anything about the first thirteen years of my life. What's a therapist going to do with that?"
"Maybe help you figure out why a language makes you feel like this? Regressive therapy or something?"
"Or maybe tell me I have a weird phobia and charge me two hundred dollars an hour for the diagnosis."
He doesn't push further. He fills a second glass of water and puts it on my tray. "For you. Not the table."
I take the tray, walk back into the dining room and work the rest of the shift.
I don't pass table three again. I route around it.
Every single time. The man finishes his dinner, pays and leaves.
I bus his table and there's nothing wrong with the table, there's nothing Italian about a table, it's a piece of wood with four legs and a candle on it, but I bus it fast and don't linger.
The rest of the night is muscle memory. I run the floor and clear tables, pour wine and make small talk with the regulars and smile at the birthday party when they leave.
By the time closing comes, I'm so exhausted that Javi doesn't ask if he should walk me home.
He just locks the bar and falls into step beside me.
At my door, he says, "Think about it. The therapist thing."
"Yeah."
"I mean it, Grace. Whatever this is, you don't have to carry it alone."
"Yeah, yeah. I know. Night, see you later."
Inside, I lock the door and go straight to the bathroom, turn the shower on and stand under the hot water until my body stops feeling wrong.
The metallic taste is gone. The tightness across my shoulders is loosening.
My finger taps the tile wall, slow, spaced, the rhythm my body goes to when the anxiety subsides.
I take my pill. I eat a handful of crackers because I haven't eaten since the staff meal at three and I can feel the emptiness, but the idea of real food makes me nauseous. I sit on my bed in the dark with wet hair and my phone in my hand, scrolling through nothing, looking at nothing.
Feeling nothing.
Javi's question is in my head. The therapist thing.
I've thought about it before, years ago, in that vague way you think about things you know you'll never do.
What would I even say? That I don't remember anything before thirteen and it doesn't bother me except when Italian is involved and then my body turns against me?
That I take a pill every night for anxiety I can't trace to a source?
That I tap my finger on everything I touch, and I don't know when I started or why?
A therapist would want a history. I don't have one. There's no story to tell, no childhood to unpack. Just a blank space, a foster family I see on holidays, a bottle of pills, a life that fits inside six blocks and a body that reacts to things my brain can't access.
I put the phone down. The apartment is dark and warm from the shower steam, and I should dry my hair but I won't because I never do and tomorrow it'll be wavy and tangled and Rosa will have something to say about it.
I think about the man at table four. Not about the Italian, not about the trigger, not about any of it.
About his tattoos. The saints on his forearms, the ink that's part of him, and the writing I couldn't read.
I saw it once, on the inside of his left wrist, small letters in a script I didn't recognize.
I didn't look long enough to make it out.
It didn’t look English, but maybe it was just faded. Or… knowing my luck, he’s Italian and one day he will break out into song and dance and trigger a breakdown.
That’s always the way these things go.
My brain has finally quieted and I slip into that space where I’m numb. I turn off the light and pull the blanket up, close my eyes and fall asleep thinking about the warmth of his saucer against my thumb and nothing else.