"Oh my goodness! I'm so sorry!" apologized the mother of the infant who had just, gleefully and with surprising accuracy, thrown a mushed handful of her dinner into my face. Luckily, I had the presence of mind not to open my mouth. A glob of peas-and-spaghetti-sauce-and-probably-some-baby-spit dripped onto my shirt.
I loved my job, I reminded myself staunchly. I loved my job. I loved my job. I lo--
Stupid babies.
I smiled tersely at the mother as she rattled off apology after apology and kept my hands locked tightly on my pad an pen, poised as I had been to take their dessert orders.
"Quite alright," I muttered politely, mostly to shut up the mother. "May I offer you anything for dessert?"
Waitressing, I told myself of my summer job, was an exercise in patience. Whatever I could possibly have to do in the future couldn't be worse than this never-say-anything practice. And it seemed I had a talent for working the most infuriating tables. School hadn't been out two weeks and I'd already had food thrown in my face, had a glassful of water knocked onto my pants (a mere five minutes after I'd started my shift, of course), and been knocked so hard in the forehead with a tray that there was a mottled bruise ten days later. Luckily, my bangs hid it.
"No, no thank you," said the woman thoughtfully, as she tried to contain her fussing daughter of five or six. "I think we'll take the check, please."
I smiled dutifully. "Sure. I'll bring that right out." I wanted to wring her neck. This table had been a waiter's nightmare: the children had squabbled and hemmed before choosing their meals. The mother had let them be noisy and asked me about five or six dishes off the menu, keeping me from my other customers. And when the meals had come out, she'd sent hers back, claiming to be allergic to mushrooms--I wondered what she'd thought "portobellos" to mean. Then requested more napkins twice--what, were they eating them?--and then thrown food at me.
With trembling fingers I ripped their sheet off my pad and entered the kitchen. When James, the only other waiter in the place I was on particularly good terms with, saw me seething and dripping, he snatched the bill out of my hand and began adding it up.
Min, the chef who loved to clean me up after these messes, clucked at me. "My dear Mary Jane, what has happened to you now?" Short and grandmotherly at fifty, Min was one of my absolute favorite people. She hovered over me as I sank onto a stool. I just needed to sit for a minute.
"James, toss her a towel, there's a love," she ordered, bustling around. James threw it over his shoulder, face all screwed up the way it always was when he did math. I gratefully wiped my face and shirt, and then tried to work the rest of the goo out of my bangs, being careful of my bruise.
Min began dumping pots and pans into the industrial-sized sink as James turned around, waving the check triumphantly. 'You," he informed me, "are the most accident-prone person I've ever met."
"Thanks," I muttered, indicating the check. "And I am not accident prone, I am simply a magnet for accident-prone people."
James simply shrugged and I took the check out to my table, luckily the last of the night. I pasted a careful smile on my face; this was, after all, my job, trying though it may be at times.
The middle of the woman's three children was now crying quietly in her seat while the muck-throwing baby was chanting, "I want I seam, I want I seam," over and over in her shrill baby voice. I offered the mother the check and hurriedly left.
James and Min were still seated in the kitchen; the former, it seemed, was waiting for me; he had to tables left, this close to closing. He did that sometimes.
"Just think," he told me reassuringly as I washed my hands. "After this, you can go home and shower."
"True that," I said, relishing the very prospect. "I cannot wait."
Min made a very loud, cross banging-pot noise and we both turned to look at her. "You can't rush out," she insisted. "I've made a new dish and you have to try it." The days when Min fed me were the very best days, and she fed me more than she did James.
"What today, Minnie?" I asked, trying to summon the excitement that crusty bangs had dampened.
"Lobster streudel," she announced proudly; she pointed to the oven gleefully.
I winced. "Min, that sounds disgust--"
"Try it." This came from James, who had still not come to appreciate Min in all her grandeur. "It's like the elixir of life. You will never be the same." He nodded at me vehemently.
I sighed. "When I get back." Min beamed at me as I creaked to my feet. I was exhausted.
When I got to the table, the mother and her children were gone. A check for the precise amount of the bill--forty one-ninety two--sat on the edge. Under this, there was a napkin, on which she'd written, "Sorry, it was all I had." And inside the napkin was two dollars, a lollipop, and a wet-nap.
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