Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Margo saw it when she came through the kitchen door at ten. A small white card in a plastic stand, centered on the table between the salt and the pepper, in Joey’s handwriting.
RESERVED — MR. KLEIN — INDEFINITE
She picked it up, looked at it, and set it back down. The window light fell across the empty seat.
“Joey, what is this?”
Joey appeared from the back office with a clipboard and a pen behind his ear. “A reservation.” He grabbed the pen out from behind his ear and made a note.
“Bernie is at home in a recliner.”
“I’m aware. The reservation is for when he’s not.” He looked up. “I had a situation Tuesday. A woman with a large bag sat in the booth and stayed for forty-five minutes. She ordered one coffee. She did not tip. I can’t have that happening on an ongoing basis.”
“You could have asked her to move.”
“There was no system in place to justify the request. Now there is.” He tapped the sign. “Reserved.”
Anna came through with a tray of clean cups and stopped when she saw the sign. She set the tray on the counter and picked up the card.
“He’s been gone a while,” she said, reading it.
Margo raised her eyebrows. “And Joey made him a reservation.”
“It’s precautionary.” Joey straightened the plastic stand where Anna had lifted the card from. “His spot has a specific function in this restaurant. Bernie will return and when he does it will be in the condition he left it.”
Anna put the card back in the stand. “The salt shaker’s been moved,” Margo said.
Joey’s head turned. “What?”
“Half an inch to the left.”
Joey crossed the dining room in four steps. He examined it like he was defusing something. Moved it half an inch to the right. Stepped back. Moved it a quarter inch further.
“The woman with the bag,” he said.
“Probably.”
“This is why we have systems.”
Anna was behind the counter pressing her lips together, stacking the cups from the tray she’d brought through.
“Don’t,” Margo said.
“I’m not laughing.” Anna set a cup on the shelf without looking at Margo.
“You are.”
“He measured the pepper shaker yesterday with a ruler he brought from home.” She set another cup on the shelf.
Margo sighed. “I saw the ruler.”
“And he has a backup ruler.”
“Of course he does.”
The lunch rush came at eleven-fifteen, the grill hissing and the smell of melted cheese filling the kitchen.
Margo worked the grill. Anna worked the floor.
Joey worked the pass with the clipboard he’d been carrying all week, which now had a column labeled BOOTH STATUS that he updated every thirty minutes.
The room worked, except it didn’t, quite. It was the same number of tables, the same menu, the same light through the front windows. But the quiet in the corner had a weight to it Margo hadn’t expected.
She caught herself looking at it during a lull. Just her eyes going there—the clock, the door, the ocean, and now the corner.
A man she didn’t know came in at twelve-thirty and started toward the booth.
“That one’s taken,” Anna said, intercepting him with a menu and steering him toward table six. “This one has a better view of the ocean.”
The man sat at table six. He did not look convinced about the ocean view.
At one o’clock Dante came through with a case of tomatoes and stopped at the pass. “Hi, Margo. How’s Mr. Klein doing?”
“He’s fine. Walking with a cane.” She flipped a sandwich without looking up.
“My grandmother had a knee replacement.” Dante shifted the case to his other hip. “She was back at bingo in five weeks.”
“Bernie doesn’t play bingo.”
“I’m just saying. When’s he coming back?”
She shrugged. “When his knee lets him.”
Dante went to the walk-in. Anna, refilling the coffee station, glanced over her shoulder. “Everybody asks.”
“Everybody can wait.”
“Mrs. Feldstein asked me yesterday if he was okay.” Anna set a stack of filters next to the machine. “She said Thursday lunch isn’t the same without him running his pools from the corner.”
“Mrs. Feldstein bets on his pools?”
“Apparently she’s been in the football one since October.”
Joey, who had been wiping down the pass, stopped.
“He’s still running the pools. From his recliner.
By text message.” He set the cloth down and squared it with the edge of the counter.
“The data collection is compromised. He can’t observe behavioral patterns through a phone screen.
Half his methodology depends on in-person assessment. ”
“You know his methodology?” Anna asked.
“I’ve studied it. It’s flawed but internally consistent.” Joey picked up the cloth again. “The off-site administration is a separate issue.”
Anna looked at Margo. Margo looked at the grill.
At one-thirty, during the lull, Meg came through the front door with a bag from the hardware store and a coffee she’d picked up somewhere that wasn’t here.
“Outside coffee,” Joey said from the pass.
“I’ll recycle the cup.” Meg set the hardware bag on the counter. “New hinge for the gate. Luke said he’d come by Saturday.”
“The gate’s been sticking since August,” Margo said.
“Which is why I bought a hinge.” Meg pulled out a stool and sat at the counter and looked around the restaurant the way she always did—assessing, cataloguing, filing. Her eyes landed on the booth.
“Is that a Reserved sign?”
“Joey’s idea,” Anna said.
“It’s not an idea,” Joey said from the back. “It’s a policy.”
Meg leaned over to read it. “MR. KLEIN — INDEFINITE.” She sat back. “That’s actually kind of beautiful, Joey.”
There was a pause from the back office. “Thank you,” Joey said, in a voice that suggested he wasn’t sure if he was being made fun of.
“You’ve been going over there a lot,” Meg said, turning to Margo.
Margo flipped a towel over her shoulder. “He had surgery, Meg.”
“How often do you go?”
“Wednesdays. Fridays. Sundays.” She wiped the same spot on the grill she’d wiped ten seconds ago. “Someone has to make sure he eats.”
Meg’s eyebrows went up over the rim of her outside coffee. “That’s three times a week.”
“The Circle’s schedule has gaps.”
“What do you do over there?”
“We play cards.” Margo put the towel down and picked it up again. “And he’s trying to get me to watch basketball.”
Meg set her coffee down. “You’re watching basketball?”
“I didn’t say I was watching it. I said he’s trying. There’s a difference.”
“What kind of basketball?”
“College. His roommate from Michigan sends him hot fudge you can’t get out here and apparently it’s connected to the season somehow. I don’t fully understand the system.”
Anna had stopped stacking filters. Meg was looking at Margo with an expression Margo recognized from years of raising this particular granddaughter—the look Meg got when a spreadsheet suddenly made sense.
“So you play cards,” Meg said, “and watch basketball, and eat hot fudge. Three times a week.”
“The hot fudge was once.”
Meg wiggled her eyebrows. “So far.”
“It’s nice to have company,” Margo said, which was true and also not the whole of it, and Meg knew that, and Margo knew Meg knew that, and neither of them said anything else about it.
Joey, who had been at the pass the entire time and had apparently heard everything, said nothing. He made a note on his clipboard and walked to the back office. Margo saw him go. She did not want to know what he’d written.
At two o’clock the rush was done and the Shack settled into its afternoon quiet. Margo wiped down the grill and hung her apron.
Meg was at the counter finishing her coffee.
Margo looked at her granddaughter. Meg’s face was perfectly pleasant, which was the most dangerous version of Meg’s face.
“Fine. Yes, we play cards,” Margo said, not exactly sure where it had come from. “With flamingo cards his brother sends from Florida. He doesn’t like pickles. I didn’t know that. Fifty years of pickles and he’s been moving them to the side of his plate.”
She hadn’t meant to say any of that.
“Flamingo cards,” Meg said.
“His brother’s lonely. He sends novelty decks.”
“That’s actually kind of sweet.”
“It’s cards, Meg.”
Meg was pressing her lips together in exactly the same way Anna had earlier, and Margo realized this was genetic and there was nothing she could do about it.
Margo stopped at the booth on her way out. The Reserved sign. The salt shaker, precisely placed. The window light falling across the seat.
She straightened the sign half a degree.