I don’t remember much about working there. I remember the to-go girl was incredibly good at her job and that was the first time I had ever seen anyone work smart and hard like that. The phone on her shoulder, the competent look on her face, how she shaved a fraction of a second off her process by not letting the cash drawer open all the way. The tough way she stapled the order chit to the bag. I wanted to be like her and not like Barrett. It wasn’t that I liked waiting tables so much then—it was that I had somewhere to be. Some function in life. I didn’t understand how to be a wife or mother. But there were rules to being a waitress. The main one was don’t fuck up. Another was whatever you skip in your prep will be the one thing you need when you’re buried. If you look at the stack of kids’ cups while you’re tying on your apron in the afternoon and decide there will probably be enough for the night because you really don’t want to go out to the shed and dig around for the new sleeve, eight soccer teams will come in at nine, and you’ll have to go out to the shed anyway, and by the time you get back you’ll have killed your tips on all your other tables. That incessant fulfillment of Murphy’s Law taught me to be superstitious. I never said It looks like it’s going to be a slow night and we’ll get out early because that would suddenly make the smoking section fill up. The smokers took forever. You could never turn those tables because they just weren’t in a hurry. They smoked before they ordered. They always had appetizers and drinks. They smoked after the appetizers. They always had dessert. Their tabs were inevitably more, but they undid it by staying there for so long you could have had three $25 tables instead of one $40, even though the smokers tipped better. And I never said I think we’re going to be busy tonight because then it would be dead and they wouldn’t cut anyone and you’d stand around for six $2.13 hours. If I knocked over a saltshaker while I was refilling it or wiping down a table I always threw a pinch over my left shoulder.