I acquired a reputation as straitlaced in The Restaurant when I started seeing the hateful man. My colleagues interpreted it as some kind of new leaf or intentional maturity that I never went out with them after work anymore. But it was just that I didn’t need that scene to fuck with myself because he did it for me. As the employee roster at The Restaurant was infiltrated by more and more people who didn’t know anything about me, and those who did moved on, quit, or were fired, who I was to everyone morphed into this paragon of good work, consistency, professionalism. An example. I ignored new people until they had lasted for three or four months. I came in at five, rocked my shift the same hard way I did every night, no matter how busy or not, and walked out whenever it was over without looking back. I never left without polishing my tables. Not once. There were many nights when I was so exhausted I’d forget which position I had started at, and have to polish the whole thing again just to be safe. No matter how weary I was though I loved the strangeness of the place when it was empty. That every night we could walk onto a blank stage and invent all that. Take The Restaurant from pristine and silent down to a staggering state of chaotic, deafening, and excessive disarray, and then put it all back together like no one was ever there.

Calvin waited on the Bishop and his guests earlier. I helped him get their wine started but I never noticed the camera and Calvin left over an hour ago. After he finds out about the camera he will consider quitting The Restaurant even though he has built up his call parties over the past seven years so that he can count on a fat night every night. Recently one of his regulars left him a $3,000 tip on a $900 tab, which none of us could shut up about until the week before Christmas when one of his other regulars left him $5,000 on $500. Even though you know that about $4,500 of it is because that guy gets off on having a handsome, older, immaculately groomed and well-spoken black man wait on him, and even though you know that about $400 of it is because Calvin is a genuinely beautiful and irresistibly charismatic individual, for neither of which amounts could you possibly qualify even though you know that your skill set is as technically proficient as Calvin’s, certainly proficient enough to have deserved the remaining standard of $100, you still can’t help feeling stunned by the mighty whoosh of air as fortune passes you by.

In that restaurant all of us were off. Chipped. Everybody on the way to the curve. Maybe it’s the same in a law firm, a nail salon, whatever high or low. Maybe that’s just what it is to be alive, you’ve got that broken sooty piece of something lodged inside you making you veer left.

That was the summer Cal would come over to my apartment after he got off from the bank, before we had to be in at The Restaurant. Those were warm afternoons, my apartment toasting the Texas sun through big old perfect windows. I moved into that place when I saw the money I was making at The Restaurant. I bought that car too. You can make good money—high fives if you really push, low sixes if you’re Cal—but you never lose the feeling that it’s fragile, your connection to the money. That place I lived in after I first got that connection, it was small and expensive but it was clean and bright and everything was nice. The carpet was thick and new and Cal and I would scuffle on it every afternoon. His kisses. His face—so soft—Your face! I’d say—I take care of myself, Mami, it’s what you got to do he’d murmur—his lips hot, fresh.

First the loveseat was in the dining room, that’s where Cal told me about Angeline and I told him about how I’d married my daughter’s dad when I was seventeen because my own dad hit me for the first and only time. Whacked the side of my head and said we needed to plan a wedding before I started showing. I went along but when she was three I left. Her dad’s a good guy and I love her like nothing. Neither of those changed the fact that I’d felt crazy since she was born, like I wasn’t meant for it. I just woke up one day and said I can’t do this. This isn’t real. I’m in the wrong life. It was that abrupt, overnight, like a snake molting out of a skin. Leaving it behind, slithering away cold-blooded.

Cal would bring Max and Elena into the restaurant so they could all have dinner there once in a while, on special occasions like when he finished his cleansing. The cleansing was an annual thing, Christmas through April or something like that, and he cut out meat, cheese, alcohol, sugar, and weed. I teased him after he first delivered that list—And I know you’re still not getting any so what you got left for yourself my friend?—and he said Yes ma’am you have a point there but it’s about purification. And let me tell you how good that long bone cowboy tastes come April.

But believe me that move is not original in the business. I knew a guy who did that in Morton’s one night, they have a spiel with a cart and all these props, and there’s a part where you have to hold up a potato and talk about what they can do with it. He held up the potato and—I can’t do this, he said, and put the potato down and left. He told me After you do it it feels like the stupidest thing because most likely you just end up in some other restaurant holding some other potato but way behind on your rent.

The elders meet with me privately, in the library. Nine of them and a seventeen-year-old girl. Well, you’re the last person we’d have expected this to happen to, one says. Now, I don’t know what the circumstances were, says another, and you don’t have to tell us. But we all know how young men are. Ultimately it’s you girls who have to decide, who have to make choices to stay in the straight and narrow when it comes to purity.

I am so ashamed, so mortified, that I leave myself there at the table. I make myself four inches tall and I wing over to a bookshelf in a far corner. I alight on the highest shelf and look down at the girl in the red tank top. Her hair obscures her face and she stares at the table, trembling. I don’t know her, and I don’t know these men in dark suits, and there is nothing I can do to help her. She is too small, and there are nine of them. I tiptoe behind a book and lie down. I turn away from the room and fall asleep.

Tonight they’ve put me on thirty men in The Private Room. The men are all white, fat, and over fifty. Sometimes parties like this will show up all at once on a hotel bus or in a drove of limos, if they’re in town for a convention and everything is organized. But these guys trickle in, and by the time the last few arrive some of them have already been drinking for two hours. DeMarcus, my partner on the party, got everything started—introduced us, went over the set menu, helped them pick out their wine.

I wonder if it’s a good thing that DeMarcus will be the face and I’ll be backwaiting. You get to know the look of new money and the look of old; you can call on sight, with near-perfect accuracy, whether a person is a martini, a red wine, a Stella, a Just water no ice extra lemon and a straw did I say no ice?; you know that certain European accents doom your take. You have an entire catalogue of these things in your head but still there will come that table, they’re wearing jeans and when you ask them what they want to drink they say two Diet Cokes and an iced tea and you think you know what you’re in for—an appetizer as an entrée, split three ways, ten percent on a tab that’s missing a couple digits. They’re making out at the table, he looks twice her age, you can’t figure out why the other one is with them. Low-class, you think, guess it’s not my night. Then you walk up with the second basket of bread they asked for and they say to bring out a bottle of Dom Rosé. After that they drink the 2000 Harlan Estate and order the big lobster tail. You start moving like you’ve got somewhere to be and when the bartender tries to play around with you instead of handing over the decanter you snap at him because if they come through you stand to make $500 off a three-top.

We take the order, DeMarcus on one side of the table and I on the other. We have an unspoken rivalry about who can get from position one to position fifteen the fastest. The pros get the order taking down to a call-and-response that reads each guest’s mind and draws out his selections for three courses with all pertinent temperatures and modifications in forty-five seconds or less, without letting him feel the slightest bit rushed. You expand your intake words, like Certainly and Absolutely and That won’t be a problem, sir, you let them hang rich and pillowy in a smile and the guest thinks only of how accommodating and efficient you are, he doesn’t hear the ticking of the giant railroad clock in your head that is Chef, waiting on the line for this order because a big party will affect the cook times for everything in the house. I’m one position behind DeMarcus, since one of my guys takes forever to acknowledge me, even though I’m standing there next to him saying Sir? Sir? Have you had a chance to decide? At some point you have to give up and wait for the friends he’s talking to to advocate for you, give him a sign with their eyes that he’s being rude to you. [...]