TEN TACOS
KURT
It was a Thursday, and I was at work, and before anyone says anything: the schedule needed coverage, Gus was grateful, and my presence had nothing to do with anything two doors down. I picked up Thursdays for the money. The money, and the coverage, and the schedule.
Nobody’s even asked. I’m getting ahead of it. This is called being organized.
The smoothie shop was empty except for Penny, who was reading a paperback behind the counter with the stillness of a museum exhibit.
Two doors down, my place of employment hums like a dying refrigerator and smells like a fiesta that never learned when to go home.
In here: quiet. Blenders at rest. A little rain starting outside.
If heaven exists, it has this exact square footage.
She marked her page with one finger when I came in. Didn’t say hi. Neither did I. We’re not animals.
“Void?” she asked.
“Void.”
She turned to the blenders. I watched her work — unhurried, no wasted motion, the exact opposite of everything — and when she slid the cup across the counter, the name line said:
KURTSTIPATED.
I looked at the cup. I looked at her.
“You’ve met Dolly,” I said.
Penny shrugged one shoulder, a gesture containing approximately forty sentences. The relevant ones: she comes in here sometimes. She’s loud. She calls you that from the street. I find it accurate.
“It’s a medical slander,” I said. “Unfounded. There’s a pamphlet campaign.”
Penny looked at me for a moment. Then she took the cup back, crossed out KURTSTIPATED, and wrote underneath it: ALLEGEDLY.
I paid double. I told her it was because I didn’t want change. That was a lie. I don’t know what it was. Something is happening in my chest lately and I assume it’s medical; I’ll add it to the pamphlet pile.
“See you Tuesday,” she said, going back to her book.
She knows my schedule now. I walked back to work in the rain and did not require an umbrella, because certain information keeps a man warm, and that is the most embarrassing sentence I have ever thought, and I’ll thank you to bury it with me.
7:40 p.m. They came in together.
I heard them before the door — you always hear her before the door, that’s just physics — but this was a new configuration of loud. Two voices. Overlapping. Recounting.
The door burst open and there she was, flushed and windblown and holding a small handmade flag, mid-sentence — “—AND THEN THE AUNT WENT DOWN, TELL HIM ABOUT THE AUNT—” — with the new hire a step behind her, not in uniform, laughing that laugh he does that makes the fangirl table reapply lip gloss, holding her jacket, which she had clearly shoved at him at some point, which he had clearly just… kept holding.
They’d been somewhere. Together. On purpose.
She looked —
Okay. A word about how she looked, and then we’re moving on and never coming back to it.
Six years, I’ve watched her walk through that door. I could chart it — I have charted things before, I’ll chart anything — and the constant is this: she walks in lit up, and it’s real, but it’s ignition light. Effort light. A fire somebody has to build every single week, on schedule, or else.
Tonight she walked in still burning from hours ago. Nobody built it. It was just… on.
I stood behind my register with my rag and felt something in my chest go quietly to rest, like a sentry hearing the relief shift finally coming up the hill. Six years is a long watch.
Anyway. The counter needed wiping. I wiped the counter. Moving on, as promised.
“KURTIE-POO!” She slammed the flag down on my counter like a customs declaration. “TWENTY TACOS. I WON THEM IN COMBAT. HE’S PAYING. HE WEPT.”
“I didn’t weep,” said the new hire.
“HE WEPT INTERNALLY.”
“That part’s true,” he admitted.
“Twenty,” I said, keying it in, because I am a professional and the register is the last neutral territory in this restaurant. “For here or—”
“FOR HERE, KURT, WE’VE DISCUSSED THE SEAGULL—”
“For here,” I confirmed. “Name for the order?”
It’s a bit. We both know it’s a bit. Six years, same bit: I ask, she says DOLLY at a volume that moves the napkins, I write something wrong, she corrects it tomorrow. It’s the closest thing I have to a hobby.
Except before she could inhale, the new hire leaned over my counter — MY counter — plucked the marker out of my hand, and wrote on the bag himself:
20 FOR: THE CHAMPION ?
Then he handed my marker back with a nod, like we were colleagues who had just efficiently solved a problem, and walked around into the kitchen — off the clock, in his civilian clothes, no hat, a violation of at minimum four food safety codes and one unwritten law older than the codes — and started making her tacos himself.
I stood there holding my own marker.
Let me walk you through what this man has been doing for two weeks, because a pattern has emerged and I’ve had time to study it, God knows I’ve had time:
He remakes her order before I can ring it in.
He intercepts her tray. When she and I run the Lolly/Polly bit, he watches from the food window with his arms crossed and his eyes narrowed, like a scout stealing another team’s signs.
Yesterday she called me “my darling Kurtstipated” on her way out, and I watched him take a breath and hold it for four seconds, which in a man that relaxed is a Category 5 event.
He thinks we’re rivals.
For her.
He thinks I am his competition.
I have never known peace — I want to be clear, peace and I have never met, we would not recognize each other on the street — but this is a new genre of no peace.
There is a large tattooed man performing dominance rituals at me across a taco restaurant because a woman calls me pet names she invented to annoy me, and the truly unbearable part, the part I would need a second smoothie to discuss, is that he’s not entirely wrong to sense something in the room.
He’s just reading the timestamp wrong. By about six years.
Not my job to fix his math. I gave him the skee-ball intel. That’s the whole donation. A man has to leave something in the tomb for himself.
8:15 p.m. They took over her corner booth, the flag planted in the napkin dispenser, and split twenty tacos while she reenacted, at full volume and with props, something called “the wooden sea.” He watched her the entire time with the face of a man watching weather he’s decided to live in.
I refilled their drinks once. Neither of them noticed me do it. Correct ice ratio in hers, because I’m not an amateur, and when I set his down he glanced up mid-laugh and gave me a nod — an easy one, no signs-stealing in it for once, just thanks — and I nodded back before my policies could stop me.
Six weeks, I thought, wiping down the counter for the fourth unnecessary time. I’m revising the estimate down. Six weeks, maybe five.
I called the March Incident, you know. Two weeks out. Nobody ever listens.
9:02 p.m. They left the way they came, loud and overlapping, and the door swung shut, and the restaurant exhaled into its nighttime hum, and it was just me, the flag she forgot in the napkin dispenser, and a bag with THE CHAMPION ? written on it in handwriting that wasn’t mine, on my counter, in my kingdom of one.
I put the flag in the lost and found, where I could see it from the register.
Then I finished the void.
ALLEGEDLY, the cup said, where a name should go.
I kept the cup, too. The lost and found is whatever I say it is. I’ve worked here six years. I’ve earned a shelf.