“In this job,” Morgan told me after a dinner rush, “You get a lifetime of experience every day. A crisis will crop up, worsen, come to a head and resolve itself all in fifteen to thirty minutes. You don’t even have time to panic. You just push through.”
She was right. For every burger overcooked, salad with the wrong dressing, or missing order of fries, there was a solution. Each time I got a little faster, a little stronger, a little bit more confident. Even Isabel was my ally.
“He’s an asshole,” she said over her shoulder after a grumpy tourist had snapped at me for giving him unsweetened tea instead of sweetened. “He’s on vacation, for God’s sake. He should lighten up!”
Finally, no matter how bad it got, or how rude anyone was, they were gone within an hour, tops. After what I was used to, this was nothing.
My mother, however, expressed concern. “Honey,” she said, her voice crackling through all those phone lines stretched across the ocean, “you should be having fun. You don’t need to work.”
“Mom, I like it,” I said, admitting to her what I was careful to remain blasé about at the restaurant: that I actually enjoyed it. I felt like I was holding my breath, fingers crossed, as if at any moment it could be over, just like that.
I assured my mother that I was not stuffing myself with onion rings and was running every day, which made her feel a little better. And I didn’t bring up Mira’s signs, or her bike, or her collection of broken furniture. My mother was prone to overreactions.
She was distracted, anyway, about to embark on a tour of Italy which included a huge, open-air aerobics session on a soccer field. Hundreds of women would be step-kicking and lunging along with her, and my little waitressing job would be soon forgotten.
But not by me. Because I had a friend.
“Colie,” Morgan said at the end of that first week, after we’d locked the door behind the last customer and mopped the floor. My feet hurt and I smelled like grease, but that night I’d made fifty bucks, all mine. “Come on. I want to show you something.”
I followed her out the back door and up some steps to the roof, which was flat and sticky and smelled like tar. All around us it was dark, with places lit up here and there: I could see the supermarket and the bridge, as well as one lone circling searchlight from the car dealership.
“Can you see that?” she said. “Right there.” She pointed over the trees to a bright spot nearby, close enough to make out if I stood at the very edge of the roof.
“It’s Maverick Stadium,” she said. “That’s where Mark used to play.” Mark, Morgan’s fiancé, was someone I already felt I knew. She talked about him constantly. How he wore boxers, not briefs. How he wanted three kids, two girls and a boy. How his batting average was improving and he’d had two home runs already this season even with a wrist injury. And how he’d asked Morgan to marry him three months ago, on his last night in Colby, as they sat together at the International House of Pancakes saying good-bye.
“I miss him so much,” she said. She kept a picture of him—he was literally tall, dark, and handsome—in her wallet. “Only three months left in the season.”
“How’d you meet him?” I asked her.
She smiled. “Here, actually. During a dinner rush. He was sitting at the counter and Isabel knocked a cup of coffee in his lap.”
“Ouch,” I said.
“No kidding. She was so slammed she just kept moving, so I cleaned it up and made all the apologies. He said it was okay, no problem, and I laughed and said pretty girls get away with anything.” She looked down, twisting her ring a bit so the diamond sat in the center of her finger. “And he smiled, and looked at Isabel, and said she wasn’t his type.”
There was a faint cheer from the stadium, and I saw a ball whiz over the far fence and out of sight.
“And so,” she went on, “I said, ‘Oh really? What is your type, exactly?’ and he looked up at me and said, ‘You.’ ” She grinned. “I mean, Colie, I’ve spent so long watching guys I liked go after Isabel. When we were in tenth grade, I spent a whole year in love with this guy named Chris Catlock. And then one night he finally called me. I almost died. But then . . .”
There was a another cheer from the stadium, followed by an announcer’s voice crackling.
“. . . he asked me if I could find out if Isabel liked him,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “It was awful. I cried for days. But that’s what’s so amazing about Mark, you know? He picked me. He loves me.” She smiled again, tilting her head back.
I looked at her profile. “You’re lucky,” I told her.
“Oh, you’ll find someone,” she said, patting my knee. “You’re just a baby still, anyway.”
I nodded, my eyes on the distant stadium.
“I know,” I said, and I had that feeling again, that all of this could slip away at any moment. I could have been anyone to her.
We stayed on the roof for a long time, Morgan and I. We let our feet dangle over the edge and chewed gum and listened to the game, waiting for the crack of the bat and then whistling and cheering, as the runners dashed toward home.
I worked alternate lunches and dinners at the Last Chance, perfecting my blue cheese dressing and mastering the Cuisinart. But I still had a lot to learn.
“Waiting tables,” Morgan said to me one day, “is a lot like life. It’s all about attitude.”