Chapter 9
I got an email the first week of October saying I was number twenty-nine on the waitlist for Janine’s class. Buoyant, I skipped to the restaurant. The fall menu was taped to the door. Cinnamon-apple half-smokes, pumpkin-spice Hennessy. I pushed past, the cheap paper flapping behind me.
By the kitchen, she grabbed my wrist. “So, remember that director, Ryen?”
“Who?”
“Girl, he made that short film we saw.”
“Right!”
She smiled big. “He asked me out.”
“Really?” I dipped down to look at the receipt for one of my tables. “Durk! Thirty-six’s been waiting on fries for like forty minutes!”
Milan stroked her braids. “Are you surprised?”
Durk dropped a plate of Tater Tots in front of me.
“What? They didn’t order Tots!” I touched Milan’s shoulder. “No, I just wouldn’t have guessed he was your type.”
Durk stormed back to the grill. “Tell them we outta fries.”
“How are we out of fries?”
Milan said, “He doesn’t remind you of Benjy?” Benjy was the only boyfriend of Milan’s I ever liked.
Eric walked behind the bar. “Milan, stop running your mouth.”
“Be quiet, Eric! No one was talking to you.”
“They already paid for fries, Durk.” I plucked the receipt from the counter. “I dunno… that’s cool that he asked you out, I mean. What’d you say?”
The grill smoke cast a cloud over Durk’s face. With the bone of his wrist, he wiped a bead of sweat from his brow. “Open the fucking window, Moe!”
The new dishwasher opened the window. Traffic horns blared, the city wailing.
Milan said, “We’re going out next weekend.”
“You know I’ll spin the block if he hurts you.”
She smiled. “I know.”
“So, what’re you wearing?
This made her light up. “Remember the top I wore to Renaissance? So—”
“Would y’all do something?” Eric snapped. “Here, run Tanya’s food.”
“I want my fries!” I cried.
Durk slammed a pan on the stovetop. Customers turned. “We don’t have no fucking fries!!!!”
I took my break on the fire escape after Milan went home. Jay picked up the phone, already talking, “… in class scraping slime out of the sink, it hit me: The election’s in almost exactly a month.”
I tugged my eyelashes until a shiny black hair appeared on my thumb.
“The good news is our democracy is strong. It’s been tested, but it’s still standing.”
“Did Obama tell you to say that?” I asked.
Jay had a 2008 “Yes We Can!” Obama poster above his bed that he sought advice from.
“So what if he did?”
“That man didn’t save us fifteen years ago and he’s not gonna save us now.” I didn’t really know, since fifteen years ago I was nine.
“You don’t mean that!”
“I do look forward to his reading list every year.”
Jay mentioned Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, how the Democrats were going to have a tough time reaching voters because of their lukewarm response to the violence.
I said, “Wait, wait, you mean Palestine?” He said, “No, no, Lebanon.” Fourteen hundred killed, one million displaced.
All of this had happened last week. I didn’t know how I missed it.
Leigh barged through the door. How did she always find me?
I told Jay I’d call him back and climbed from the fire escape. Leigh paced the bottom of the stairwell, heaving into the phone.
“Are you all right?”
Shooting me a wild expression, she spat, “Get back to work.” But there was no conviction in her voice.
A party of two was seated in my section. I tied my apron around my waist and grabbed a water carafe.
It was Tristan and a guy I didn’t recognize. I palmed my flyaways, fighting back the strange torrent of excitement at the sight of Tristan’s head huddled over one of our dirty menus.
“Hey,” I said.
He looked up, a gold hoop shimmering in his ear. “Oh, hey. What’s up? How are you?”
“I’m good.” I pulled my notepad from my apron, which bulged with dried-out pens and crumpled receipts. I wished I’d cleaned it out. “What can I get you?”
Tristan glanced at his menu, smiling.
“What?”
He shook his head, twisting his bracelet. It was twine, like the kind kids braided at summer camp. “What’s good here?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing’s good here?”
“Nope.”
The corner of his mouth lifted. “Cool. I’ll take the wings, then. Flats only.”
“You’re one of those people.”
He threaded his fingers behind his head. “Flats, drums. There’s a big difference.”
I collected his menu. “It’s all from the same chicken getting its ass beat at a factory farm and force-fed antibiotics so it won’t die before it gets its head chopped off.”
He stared at me like he was trying to understand something.
I could tell he was high. He grinned, suddenly, like he’d heard my comment on a radio delay.
I thanked him for the article just to say something.
He said, “No problem.” His friend cleared his throat, failing to cover up a laugh.
When I walked away, my heart was a raft bobbing wildly in my chest.
While I was entering their orders into the computer, I heard Tristan say, “Remember my buddy Jay? Yeah, that’s his girl. Yeah, yeah. The one with the open relationship stuff.”
I didn’t hear what the guy said back, but he laughed. The optics of these men snickering about my love life shattered something delicate inside me.
I barreled toward their table. “What’s good?”
Tristan blinked, the fog clearing from his eyes. “What?”
“Why are you talking about me?”
“All I said was that you were in an open relationship, chill.”
I was shaking. “Fuck you, Tristan.”
Leigh came up and snatched my apron loose. “Shift’s over. Out. Now.”
I stomped downstairs for my bag. When I came back up, Tristan was at the top of the staircase. “Look, I don’t know what I did.”
I shouldered past him out the front door. I was so frazzled, I couldn’t remember which way the Metro was. Tristan followed me onto the sidewalk. “You’re really not gonna speak?”
I spun around. “Clearly you have something to say. Jay’s not here. Say it, come on.”
His heel caught on the edge of the stoop. He stumbled. I briefly felt bad for him.
“Why are you even here?”
“I didn’t know you worked here.”
“How convenient!”
His eyes dropped to his shoes then sprung up. “You know how fucking crushed Jay was about you wanting to be open?”
“Don’t do that.”
“You’re asking what my problem is.” He shrugged. “I’m telling you my problem.”
“That has nothing to do with you.”
People moved around us on the sidewalk, swaddled in the deep pink of their private worlds. Tristan shook his head. “You weren’t even there those weeks after. I was. I—”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“We worked through it.”
He blinked. “And how do you work through telling someone they’re not enough for you?”
“What the fuck? That’s not what—”
“By the way, you were thousands of miles away, all right? I was the one who had to hear about that shit for weeks. You knew he wouldn’t say anything. He loves you too much. But I don’t love you. I’m not afraid to tell you what you did was fucked.”
“What I did? I didn’t do anything. I told him the truth about how I felt.”
“You felt you wanted to fuck other people?” He laughed. “That’s not how relationships work.”
Someone turned to look at us then kept walking. I was hot with humiliation.
“You don’t know anything,” I croaked, “about relationships or about me and Jay.”
He watched me carefully. “I know more than you think.”
The restaurant door opened. Rah appeared with a dishrag over his shoulder. “You good?”
We said, “Yes.”
He looked at Tristan then turned inside.
Tristan stared at his back. An electric scooter zipped in our path.
Tristan grabbed my wrist and pulled me out of the way with the same cool pragmatism with which he’d wrapped my hair behind my ear.
The nerve endings along my arm lit up, a hundred neon signs in the seedy part of town buzzing a bright red “OPEN.”
I wrenched myself from his grip. He looked surprised that he’d touched me.
“Ever think maybe you’re so protective of Jay, not because you don’t trust me, but because you don’t trust yourself?”
I hadn’t even meant to say it. Or I’d said it to see what he’d say.
He glared at me. He started to speak then changed his mind.
When he charged into the restaurant—the door springing back on its hinges, sending the fall menu fluttering to the ground—I watched him, heart thundering, through the glass.