15. Chapter Fifteen
Percy
“Mon Petit Percy,” Stanley announces to the kitchen, “will you pass me the salt?”
I pass him the salt.
“Merci.” He says it like a man throwing a rock. “That’s it, right? Merci? Did I nail it?”
“You nailed it,” Benson says, without looking up from his phone.
“He didn’t nail it,” Rowan says from the stove.
“He never nails it.”
It’s been a week, and it hasn’t stopped. He won’t stop. Somewhere in the middle of it, it quit being about the book or the language, and now it’s the name he calls me. We’ve stopped explaining it to anybody who asks because everyone knows. It’s my goddamn nickname.
The hall is full of bags. Rowan’s making eggs anyway for a house that’s leaving in two hours, because it’s the last morning, and that’s what he does. I’ve agreed to get the dishes after they leave.
Blue eats. He’s got his hood up, a duffel by his foot, and he’s on his third plate.
“Cabo,” Stanley says, to nobody, to the ceiling. “Fourteen of us. Faulkner’s dad has a condo. I intend to come back a different man. Tan. Unshaven. Taller.”
“You’ll come back with a rash,” Benson says.
Stanley puts his hands in the air like he’s reading it in the sky. “A different man with a rash.”
I almost smile.
Stanley says to anyone who’ll listen, “I can book someone a last-minute flight if any of you change your mind.” He looks at Rowan first.
Rowan slides another egg onto Blue’s plate and says, “The Reeves are making a roast.”
“Rowan is coming to my house,” Benson says. “Which means I’m going home.” Benson throws his hands at Stanley. “I told you this.”
Stanley looks at Blue.
“Brothers,” Blue says, which is the whole of his travel plans. Three of them, apparently, all younger.
Stanley swings around on his stool and points his fork at me. “Mon Petit Percy.” He lifts his phone and his eyebrows. “I’ll buy you a ticket right now if you promise to get shit-faced and talk to me in French.”
“Working.”
He scoffs, putting his phone down. He squints in disbelief. “Over break?”
“Yeah.”
He whistles. “Alright. Sick. That’s real money, right? Is that the place Benson used to work?”
I nod.
“Get it, Mon Petit Percy.” He goes back to Cabo, and to whether he’ll need two swimsuits or three, and whether Drew’s dad has a boat.
Benson looks over at me. “You could come to my house,” he says. “My mom would lose her mind.”
“I’m working.”
“Yeah, but not every day, right? I don’t think that’s legal.” He shrugs and goes back to his phone. “If you change your mind, text me.”
Rowan says something about how the eggs won’t eat themselves, so I eat two plates.
The house empties over the next couple of hours.
Doors banging. Bags dragging down the stairs.
Stanley loses his passport twice and finds it both times where he left it, and the third time, he only pretends to lose it.
Someone’s car horn goes off in the drive.
Benson thumps me on the back on his way past and says something about saving my money.
Rowan turns off the stove and checks it, and then comes back and checks it again.
Then it’s Blue in the doorway with his duffel. He looks at me for a second.
“Text me if you need anything,” he says.
He wouldn’t say that to anybody else. He knows I won’t.
He pulls the door shut behind him, and the sound of it goes through the whole house, and then there’s nothing.
The heat clicks. The fridge shudders on. A car goes past out on Hawthorne Street and takes its sound with it. I go and turn the thermostat down. I check my phone. Nothing. I check it at one, and again while I’m getting my boots on.
I’ve been doing this for two weeks. She hasn’t said where she’s going for break. I didn’t ask. I don’t ask her questions.
I scroll up the group chat from last week while I’m sitting on my bed with one boot on.
Stanley: You guys can call me Pony Boy from now on.
Benson: Go to sleep.
Rowan: We’ll stick to your real name.
Stanley: It’s to boost morale.
Benson: I’ll boost your morale.
Me: Mon Petit Poney.
Benson: When did Percy join the chat?
Rowan: First text from Percy is iconic.
Stanley: Mon Petit Percy.
Four hundred messages in that chat since September, and one of them is mine.
I put the phone in my pocket and go to work.
The Camerie takes me for six doubles in seven days, and Marco is so glad to see me, he shakes my hand.
“My guy,” he says. “My guy stayed.”
Everybody else who works here is somebody’s kid at the college, and they’re all gone, so it’s me, two line cooks, and a bartender who’s been here nine years. Twelve-hour days. I’m on the floor by ten-thirty in the morning, and I’m mopping myself out the back door at midnight.
I didn’t expect to be good at this or to somewhat enjoy it.
I know which tables turn fast and which ones sit for two hours over one bottle of wine.
I know to fill a water glass from the right when the guest is talking and never to let a woman see me looking at her plate to judge whether she’s finished.
I clear a four-top in one trip, forearm and palm, and I’ve never dropped anything.
Marco tells the bartender I’ve got hands like a magician. It’s always about the hands.
It takes a slow afternoon when I notice that it’s a beautiful restaurant.
The ceiling comes down low over the tables so the whole place feels held in a hand.
The lamps are set at the height where they light your plate and not your face.
The plaster’s old, and it’s been left old on purpose.
There’s a run of small windows high on the wall, above the bar, that put a stripe of evening light across the ceiling around seven o’clock every night that nobody in this restaurant has ever once looked up at.
Clerestory. I look at it every night while I’m rolling silverware.
My feet ache in a way that follows me out the door and all the way home. I count my tips when I get in. The whole walk I keep a hand on them inside my pocket. It’s not much. Every day it’s a little more.
On Tuesday, my phone goes off in my apron pocket while I’m bussing table nine. It buzzes again. When I’m around the corner, I pull it out.
Penelope: The airport in Chicago has a Calder in it, and everyone walks right past it.
Penelope: I hate it here.
Chicago.
She went back. She sat on my floor in December and told me there’s nothing for her there except expectations and playing pretend, and she never wants to go back. But it’s Spring Break, and she’s texting me from Chicago.
Mike Deveroux broke my arm when I was seven years old, and I went back to him twice. They took me out, and I went back, and the second time I asked to go back. Because the alternative was a house with adults I didn’t know. So I get it. I’m not confused about why she’s in Chicago.
Me: What’s a Calder?
Penelope: I’ll show you when I’m back.
I put the phone in my apron and get back to work.
On Wednesday night, Oliver Whitmore comes in with four people at seven-fifteen. I know him from the Christmas Eve dinner. I know exactly what he looks like, how he sat, and I know he ate slow. He watched Penelope across the table like a patient man waiting for his opening.
He doesn’t glance at me once. I fill his water twice.
I clear the appetizers. I stand two feet from his shoulder with a plate in my hand while he tells a story about a zoning board and everybody at the table laughs at the right time.
I take his plate away, and his eyes never leave the woman across from him.
I’m not offended by it. That would be stupid.
I’m the busboy. He’s a man having dinner.
But I stand there while he talks about a building, and I understand something with my whole body that I already understood with my head, which is that there is not a single circumstance in this life in which Oliver Whitmore would look up and see me as a person who exists in the same world he does.
And she’s in Chicago right now, in a room with people like him, wearing something I’ve never seen, being somebody I’ve never met.
I clear his table. I wipe it down. I reset it with clean linen and turn the water glasses right side up.
Penelope texts me on Thursday morning, but I’m at work, so my phone’s in my apron and I don’t read it for a few hours.
I finally get to it while I’m folding napkins, but someone calls my name, so I put it back in my apron and forget about it.
She texts me that afternoon, but I’m still at work, so I don’t answer it until that night.
By then I don’t even know what to say. She’s saying she’s back in town.
Ivory’s in Cabo. I give her a simple reply.
Whenever my phone buzzes, something in my chest goes up like it always does, and then I don’t lean into it. The next day, I don’t even check it until I’m on break.
Penelope: Are you okay?
Me: Yeah.
That’s what I sent. One word.
There was more I could have put there. I didn’t, because this was always going to end.
I’ve known since the first night I stood in her apartment and understood what rich looks like from the inside — the furniture, the smell, the coat.
She has a whole life in airports, men in suits, and a two-year plan.
It’s a life that doesn’t include someone like me. So I don’t grab at it. I answer slow.
That night, I’m the last one out of the Camerie. Marco locks up behind me, calls me a beast, and drives off.
I walk. It’s Spring Break, but it’s still forty degrees out.
The snow from the last dumping has gone to gray slush at the curb, and the whole town is sleeping.
Every window on Ninth is dark. There’s nobody on any of these streets.
I’ve got sixty-one dollars folded in my front pocket. Tonight I counted before I left.
The Hawthorne House is cold and black when I get in. I don’t turn the heat on. I go up in the dark. I put the money in the drawer. Four hundred and something now.
In the side pocket of my bag, there’s the puck.
I lie down on top of the covers with my boots off and my jacket still on because it’s forty-one degrees in this house. I look at the ceiling, and the phone is on the mattress next to me, face down.
I don’t check it.
And I don’t sleep.