SIX TACOS
KURT
People ask me what it’s like working at Twisty Tacos.
Nobody asks me that. Nobody talks to me if they can help it, which I have cultivated carefully, like a garden.
But if they asked, I would tell them this: it is like being a lighthouse keeper, except the sea is one specific woman, and the sea comes inside, and the sea knows your name.
Several versions of your name. None of them correct.
I’ve worked the Tuesday register for six years. I have a system, a smoothie budget, and a laminated chart.
We’ll get to the chart.
Tuesday. 11:52 a.m.
Eight minutes before the surge, I did my checks the way a man boards up windows. Napkins: stocked. Salsa bar: secured. The good spoon: hidden. Register drawer: closed, because of the Incident of March, which we do not discuss.
The new hire watched me work with his arms crossed and that face he makes. The face that suggests everything is going wonderfully. No one has ever made that face in this building. I don’t trust it.
“You’re sweating,” Lennox observed.
“I’m preparing.”
“It’s a Tuesday lunch shift.”
“It’s THE Tuesday lunch shift.” I took down the chart from its hook by the register and pressed it into his hands, because Gus pays me eleven dollars an hour and none of them cover letting a rookie die. “Study this. There will not be time later.”
He looked down at it. I know what he saw, because I made it, laminated it with my own money, and updated it quarterly:
SMéAGOL MODE — FIELD RECOGNITION CHART Stage 1: The shoulders rise.
(You have time. Not much.) Stage 2: The curl.
She will bend over the tray. Do not reach toward the tray.
Do not LOOK at the tray with intent. Stage 3: She refers to herself as “we.” Abort all transactions.
Stage 4: Hissing. Audible. Sustained. Evacuate non-regulars.
Stage 5: There is no Stage 5. If you are seeing Stage 5, it is already over. Think of something nice.
Lennox read the whole thing. Then he read it again. Then he looked up at me with an expression I want to describe as appropriately frightened, and instead can only describe as moved.
“She has stages,” he said, softly, like a man reading a love poem.
“Get out of my station,” I said.
11:58 a.m. The birds outside went quiet. The regulars, without any signal I could detect, began consolidating their belongings.
12:00 p.m. The doors opened.
She inhaled on the threshold. I had time to cover one ear.
“HIIIIYA KURTIE-POOOO! GIMME TWENTY-TWO OF YOUR FINEST TACO CREATIONS RIGHT MEOW, AND TELL THE KITCHEN THE QUEEN SAYS HI!”
Twenty-two. The number had gone up. Morale, presumably. War economy.
“For here or to go?” I asked, because it’s my job, and because some small doomed part of me still believes in procedure.
The restaurant went silent. A fork stopped mid-air at table four. Somewhere in the back, the ice machine, wisely, ceased.
“To… go?” she whispered. Stage 1. The shoulders. “TO GO? You want me to take the sacred twenty-two OUT THERE? Into the ELEMENTS? Where the SEAGULL is?”
“Forget I—”
But she was already moving. She marched to the condiment station with the stride of the righteous, seized a packet of salt, and stalked back to the register holding it aloft between two fingers like a tiny weapon of mass purification.
“BEGONE, TACO-HATING DEMON!” She tore it open and salted me. Me, personally. Over the counter, across the shoulders, a light dusting on the hat. “I BANISH THEE BACK TO THE DEPTHS OF TACO HELL FROM WHENCE THOU CAME!”
I stood there and let it happen. This is not defeat. This is efficiency. The banishment takes forty seconds; the argument takes ten minutes. I’ve run the numbers. I always run the numbers.
“Thank you,” I said, brushing salt off my shoulder. “For here, then.”
“FOR HERE.” She beamed, restored, monarch of all she surveyed. “Was that so hard?”
And then — the new development, the thing that has ruined the last of my peace — the new hire leaned into frame with a to-go bag he’d prepared IN ADVANCE, held it up where she could see it, and said:
“I also packed a to-go bag. In case of aftershocks.”
I watched her face do something faces shouldn’t. Fury and delight, at the same time, at war, neither winning. She pointed at him. The finger trembled with unresolved jurisdiction.
“You—” she started.
“Me,” he agreed.
“This changes NOTHING.”
“Noted at length,” he said, and rang her up wrong on purpose so she could correct him, which she did, at volume, for six minutes, and I am telling you the man looked like he was at a spa.
They’re going to be at this for months. I know it the way sailors know weather.
Give it three months, I thought, watching them bicker over the correct pronunciation of “al pastor” while a line formed behind her.
Maybe four. I’m never wrong about these things.
I called the March Incident two weeks out. Nobody listens.
2:15 p.m. Break.
There is one place in this town where nobody yells, nothing is laminated, and no one has ever been banished with sodium. It’s the smoothie shop two doors down. I go every shift. It’s not about the smoothies. It’s about the seven minutes.
The girl behind the counter has worked there as long as I’ve worked at Twisty’s. Name tag says PENNY. In six years we have exchanged, conservatively, two hundred words, and I treasure every one we didn’t.
“The usual?” she asked. Two words. Off to a rich start.
“Surprise me,” I said. “Whatever tastes like the void.”
Penny looked at me for a moment. Then she turned to the blenders and made something gray-purple, unlabeled on any menu, and slid it across the counter. On the cup, where a name goes, she’d written: VOID (KURT’S).
Possessive. The void was mine. She’d given me custody of the void.
Our eyes met over the register with the mutual, bone-deep exhaustion of two people who spend their lives handing food to the public.
She raised one eyebrow, maybe an eighth of an inch.
I don’t know what happened to my face. Something.
A muscle moved that hasn’t moved in years. It frightened us both.
“See you Thursday,” she said.
I don’t work Thursdays.
I decided, walking back, cup in hand, that I would begin working Thursdays.
This is unrelated to anything, and I’d thank you not to bring it up again.
2:24 p.m. I returned to find the new hire waiting for me by the freezer with the posture of a man about to ask something stupid. I knew it was going to be stupid because he was doing casual wrong. Nobody leans on a freezer casually. Freezers hum.
“Hey. Quick question. Totally random.” He examined his own knuckles. “What’s the deal with you and Dolly?”
I took a long pull of my void.
“My therapist asks the same thing,” I said.
“No, I mean—” He recalibrated. “The nicknames. The whole… bit you two do. She comes in here three times a week. For you. I mean not for you, but—” He stopped. Started over. “Is there history? There’s history. What’s the history.”
I looked at this man. This large, inked, confident man, who had memorized a stranger’s taco formation, laminated nothing, planned for aftershocks, and was now standing in front of me pretending his heart wasn’t hanging out of his shirt like an untucked tail.
Asking me — ME — whether I was his rival.
Four years, I have waited for the universe to hand me something. Anything.
“That’s between me and Dolly,” I said, and walked away sipping.
Behind me, I heard the exact silence of a man’s entire evening being ruined.
Was it cruel? Possibly. Was it the single most nourishing moment of my professional life? It’s not close.
5:47 p.m. She left at closing, twenty-two tacos and one aftershock bag heavier, yelling “SEE YOU TOMORROW, KURTSTIPATED!” over her shoulder while the new hire held the door and watched her go with his whole soul on his face.
I wiped down the counter. I straightened the chart on its hook. I finished the void.
Three months, I thought. Maybe four.
God help this restaurant.