SEVENTEEN TACOS
KURT
The corporate man came on a Thursday, which should have warned me. Nothing good arrives on my Penny day.
His name tag said R. WHITFIELD JR., ASSET EVALUATION, and he was gray in a way that went past the suit — gray like a form, gray like hold music — and he stood behind my register with a stopwatch, and I want to be very precise about what he did, because it matters to the historical record of what I did next.
He timed me.
Transactions per minute. He clicked the stopwatch at Mrs. Alvarez — clicked it AT her, while she counted quarters from a coin purse older than the franchise — and made a small gray note, and said, without looking up, “You could shave four seconds if you didn’t converse.”
If I didn’t converse. With Mrs. Alvarez.
Who has ordered the same two al pastor every week since before this man’s stopwatch was manufactured, and who tells me about her grandson’s soccer while she counts, and who I have never once rushed, because her forty extra seconds are the only part of my job that has ever felt like a job worth having.
I looked at the stopwatch. I looked at the memo taped in my window. I looked down the counter at the whole gray shape of what was coming — five-dollar tacos, “consolidation,” Tuesdays realigned into a portfolio — and I felt something I have not felt in six years of professional numbness.
I felt the numbers stop mattering.
I took off my apron. I did not ball it up in rage; I folded it, once, the way you fold a flag, and I set it on the counter next to his stopwatch, and I said, in my flattest register, which — as certain people could tell him — is the register I save for things I mean:
“I quit.”
The stopwatch clicked. Habit, probably.
“I hate this job,” I told him, since we were doing evaluations.
“I have hated it every day for six years. The fryer burns me. The customers frighten me. There is a woman who salts me weekly and I’ve stopped fighting it.
But every Tuesday, for six years, I have stood at this register and watched a twenty-five-cent taco make every single person in this town happy — including, and I’ll deny this in writing, me — and it is the only thing I have ever been part of that works.
You want to shave four seconds off it.” I picked up my jacket.
“Shave them off someone else. And Mr. Whitfield — I’m the only one who knows how the fryer works.
Nobody wrote it down. It’s all up here.” I tapped my temple. “Enjoy the review.”
I walked out of my kingdom of one, through the doors, into the daylight, unemployed, on principle, at the age of twenty-eight, and it was the single most alive I have felt since I was twenty-two and the doors first detonated on my watch—
—and I made it nine feet.
Because the sidewalk was full of people.
They’d taken over the patio. Poster board everywhere.
The fangirl table had matching t-shirts SILKSCREENED — when?
HOW? — and Gus was hauling a folding table, and Mrs. Alvarez was directing traffic with her cane, and at the center of it, standing on a milk crate with a marker in her teeth and the notebook open on an easel, was the surge herself, mid-command, and she saw me come out apron-less and stopped everything.
“KURT.” She pointed at me with the marker. The whole sidewalk turned. “REPORT.”
“I quit,” I said.
Silence. And then — I have witnessed many volumes from that woman, I have a chart — she produced the loudest sound I have ever heard her make, which given the historical baseline should be studied by the military, and it was a CHEER, and the sidewalk cheered with her, and before I could file an objection she’d bounded off the crate and slapped something onto my chest.
A sticky note. It said: EXIST.
“That’s your assignment,” she said, eyes wild, marker held like a saber. “You’re our secret weapon. You EXIST at people, Kurt. Nobody withstands it.”
“I don’t want to be a weapon.”
“TOO LATE. YOU’RE ENLISTED. WELCOME TO THE RESISTANCE.”
I looked down at the sticky note. I looked at the crowd.
I looked at six years of Tuesdays organizing themselves into an army on a sidewalk, and I was deciding how to feel about all of it when I noticed, at the edge of the crowd, holding a to-go cup and a small handmade sign that just said NO. in perfect neutral lettering —
Penny.
She’d closed the smoothie shop. There was a BE BACK WHENEVER sign on its door; I could see it from here.
She’d walked two doors down, on a Thursday, to stand at the edge of a taco protest with a cup that — she held it out as I approached, because apparently I was approaching — had my name on it.
My actual name. No allegations. Just KURT.
“You came,” I said.
Penny shrugged one shoulder. The shrug contained multitudes. Relevant excerpts: the void doesn’t drink itself. Also, obviously.
I took the cup. I stood next to her. I existed, at maximum wattage, per my assignment, and the resistance raged around us, and neither of us said another word for an hour, and it was the best Thursday of my life.
Three months, I’d said, once, about other people. I was off by four days, and nobody ever listens, and standing there on that sidewalk, drinking a void with my name on it —
— I finally, six years late, stopped keeping count of things.