Evening at Baxter's

Zoey wanted to be anywhere else than standing behind the register, smile firmly in place, as a customer lambasted her for the awful, terrible condition of the restaurant he chose to dine in at least once a week. She knew his name was David, he was at least fifty, if not pushing sixty, and led a miserable existence as far as she could discern. The corner of her lips quivered with effort as spittle ran down David’s reddening face, as his complaints rolled on and on. She had developed the ability to tune them out by now, they were so frequent. Instead, she held her smile, let the man vent, clearly, he needed to, and allowed her mind to wander, imaging a pair of blue eyes…

As David finished, standing across the counter with fists held at his side, drawing ragged breaths, Zoey focused on the disgruntled man and took the opportunity to speak.

“You know, you don’t have to eat here every week.”

David’s eyes widened, as did Zoey’s. She hadn’t meant to be rude, but after four weeks of suffering through David’s tirades, her standard response of I will pass on your complaints to my manager, had lodged in her throat.

“I want to speak to your manager. Now,” David said, in the kind of voice an angry parent would use.

Zoey straightened, tilting her chin up. She may look young, but she was far from a child. Her upper twenties loomed less than eight hours away.

“I’m afraid Mr. Baxter is unavailable.”

He turned to leave, but swung back around, fixing his beady eyes on her. “You know why I eat here?”

Oh god, Zoey thought. He was going to rip into her again. “For the food?”

“There is not another restaurant in this pitiful excuse for a town where I can get a seat. Nowhere! Don’t you think I want to eat over at Joslyn’s? Seafood Café? The Dinner?”

Zoey shrugged.

David’s eyes flashed and his mouth dropped open, and then the merciful sound of sirens blared through the open front windows, prompting David to shut his mouth. Zoey watched as a police car sped by, followed by a firetruck. And then another, heading towards Main Street. 

“I expect to talk to Mr. Baxter the next time I am here,” David said. He turned on his heel, storming out the door, following the sirens on foot.

“Don’t you want your change?” Zoey said limply, holding up a couple of dollars and a quarter, as the door slammed shut. She shoved the money in her pocket, grabbed a couple of menus, and stepped from behind the counter to drop them off to a middle-aged couple sitting by the window.

“Could we close this window?” The woman asked, her arms crossed over her down jacket, her hair pulled back in a prim bun. Streaks of grey adorned her hair.

Zoey glanced out the open window at the cars speeding down the two-lane road, the plume of smoke darkening the sky. No one drove twenty-five miles an hour when they could go forty. Pedestrians dotted the sidewalks, heading to the hardware store across the street, or the drug store beside it. To Zoey’s dismay, another couple entered the restaurant. She now would have three tables to tend to.

“So can we?” The woman asked.

Zoey glanced down, gaze sharp, at the woman. The fluorescent light flickered above the woman's head, highlighting her sallow cheeks. Her husband kept his nose glued to the menu. “I’m afraid not.” 

Zoey walked back to the counter, leaving the flummoxed couple to peruse the two-page menu. She began to get menus for the people who had just sat in the wooden booth against the wall when she felt heat radiate from her phone in her pocket.

She pulled out her buzzing phone and left it sitting in her palm, another spam call. Somehow, the device was already two years old. It felt like a month ago when she had extracted it from the box, ripping the plastic from its pristine screen with a contented sigh.

She could feel the time slipping away from her.

She didn’t feel older. She didn’t look older, at least in her opinion, but she was being whipped through time, the days peeling away from her like dead skin. Her eyes traveled around the restaurant. A job meant for six months, a year at most, had somehow become the cornerstone of the last three years of her life.

Despite the poor reviews and the less-than-ideal pay, she couldn’t see herself leaving yet.

“Order is ready for table six, Zoey.” Her eyes trailed from the steam radiating off the pasta to the blue-eyed man smiling down at her. His apron was askew, splattered with tomato sauce, but his tousled tawny hair was perfection.

They’d probably have a better rating if he actually wore a hairnet.

“Thanks, Ivan,” she said, returning his smile, slipping her phone into her back pocket, and swiping the plate off the counter to keep herself from staring at him. 

She tossed the menus down at the booth couple and with graceful steps across the checkboard tile floor, set the plate before the older woman situated by the door with a practiced smile. She sighed inwardly as her gaze tracked back towards Ivan as he disappeared into the kitchen.

“Could I get some ketchup?” The woman asked, holding up the empty bottle on the counter. Zoey couldn’t remember the last time they had refilled the ketchup bottles, or if they even had any in stock. She glanced down at the wrinkled smile of the woman and her plate of pasta. Ketchup on pasta? Wasn’t that odd?

Zoey sighed. “Of course.” She took the empty bottle from the woman and followed Ivan into the kitchen, head flicking to the door as the bell rung, announcing the arrival of a group of six young people. She hoped they didn’t stand in the doorway waiting for her. One of them could probably read the small seat yourself sign hanging on the wall.

“You know what those sirens were about?” Ivan said, looking up from his phone as Zoey shut the door behind her. He perched on a stool in the center of the kitchen. One high schooler Martin Baxter had hired, Kirk, raised a disinterested brow at Zoey’s arrival and returned to scrubbing a pan with a sponge that looked like it belonged in the trash. The other high schooler, Nancy, stirred a boiling pot of pasta, her glazed eyes remaining on the swirling brew.

Zoey set the empty ketchup bottle on a counter cluttered with open pasta boxes. “I suppose some landmark of our town has burned to the ground?”

Ivan threw up his hands. “A landmark! The landmark. Jocelyn’s. They’re still trying to save what they can, but everyone there is saying it’s a lost cause.” 

“Maybe that’s why a party of six just showed up.”

“Six?” Ivan whistled.

Zoey nodded in confirmation.

“Oh, sweet Jocelyn, why have you cursed us so? They’ve shut down the whole block on Main. We’re basically all that’s open now for restaurants.” Ivan tucked his phone in his pocket and stretched, allowing his white untucked shirt to rise above his pants. Zoey tried not to look at the sliver of pale skin exposed, but she did anyway. He had shucked his apron off, she spotted it draped over a fifty-pound bag of potatoes.

“Great,” Zoey said, trying to casually lean against the counter without dragging her arm across one of the many knives left out. “Oh, do we have ketchup?”

“Ketchup?” Ivan said, scrunching up his nose. He leaped from the chair, landing silently against the tarnished linoleum. “Maybe? You two know anything?” He cast his eyes over the two high schoolers.

Nancy shrugged while Kirk snorted. “Shouldn’t you know the answer to that, our chef?”

“That will be treasured chef, to you, Kirk.” He turned to Zoey, charming smile in place. The kind of smile that made Zoey forget all his shortcomings as a restaurant employee. “As for ketchup, your guess is as good as mine.”

Zoey searched the kitchen to no avail while Ivan remained seated, occasionally jumping up to keep Nancy from overcooking the pasta. There was not a bottle of ketchup anywhere, although she did rummage up two individual ketchup packets wedged behind the silverware. She couldn’t remember ever serving a ketchup packet, but they were sealed. Ketchup didn’t expire, did it?

 She returned to the woman with the ketchup packets. The woman’s plate remained full, no steam rolling off of it now. The woman mumbled thank you and ripped into the packet, allowing dark red globs to fall onto her cold pasta.

As Zoey took orders, she paused, overhearing a couple of newcomers talking in hushed tones.

“The article was correct,” the woman said. “This place is a dump.”

“Where else are we going to eat with main street aflame?”

“Do you think it’s true about the rats?”

Zoey turned from her table of six, their orders half taken, and cleared her throat, causing the two women to jump in their seats. “We may be a lot of things, but a home to rats is not one of them.” As far as she knew.

She finished taking orders and retreated to the kitchen to deliver them to Ivan so he could distribute preparation duties as he saw fit. She told him about what she had overheard.

“It’s like they’ve all read the magazine,” Zoey said.

“So, we have been rated the lowest restaurant in town. This place could be, better,” he gestured to the décor, “cleaner. Probably the food could be better. But, the help is quality.” He grinned. Behind Ivan, Kirk rolled his eyes as he sliced a partially rotten tomato, tossing it into a steaming pot Nancy was stirring with vigor.

Zoey felt her cheeks begin to flush as Ivan smiled at her, but tempered it, instead, allowing a wry smile to cross her face. “I’m not sure of the quality. We could probably pick up a bottle of disinfectant once in a while.” They washed the tables plenty, after each customer, but the rest of the place remained relatively untouched. Zoey could see a layer of dust coating the dark windowsills.

Ivan waved his hand. “Martin doesn’t believe in cleaning.”

She couldn’t disagree. She had seen Martin’s books. The money set aside for cleaning supplies was pitifully small. She supposed they were lucky he allocated enough money to purchase toilet paper for the staff bathroom. Zoey had never entered the customer bathroom and didn’t think she ever would want to. Martin had never said she had to clean the toilets, after all.

Zoey thought of the two women’s murmuring. “Do we have rats?”

“Just Kirk and Nancy,” Ivan said, rolling his eyes.

*

At the end of the day, after numerous complaints about food, service, and atmosphere, and collecting the most single-day earnings she had experienced at the restaurant, Zoey pushed into the kitchen with a stack of dirty dishes, dropping them into the sink. Ivan was putting a bowl of sauce in the fridge, to use tomorrow. Nancy and Kirk had vacated as soon as the hour hit eight. They never stayed to clean up.

She closed her eyes and exhaled, fighting exhaustion. She wouldn’t feel tired, especially as the minutes ticked down to her birthday. She had to enjoy the last hours of her mid-twenties, if possible, after a day of beratement. It was her own fault, she supposed, and Ivan’s, but it wasn’t as if food service was the future either of them had wanted for themselves.

“You know, we could try harder,” Zoey said. Her voice sounded hollow and small, even to herself. “We could do better.”

Ivan was quiet, wringing a dishcloth between his hands.

She tried not to look crushed at his lack of a reaction. She knew she should have kept quiet.

“Sounds like you think we should start acting more like adults.” A smile twisted the corner of his lips. “You’re not getting old on me, are you, Zoe?”

Was she? Were the pressures of age weighing on her mind, making her feel like she should try to be a responsible human being? An actual adult? They had to if they wanted the restaurant to stay open and pass the next health inspection.

“A little responsibility won’t kill us,” Zoey said. Though, she thought, maybe the restaurant closing was what she needed. It would be a push to move on, even if it meant going her separate way from Ivan.

Ivan considered her a moment. She felt his stare hot on her cheeks.

“We should go get something to eat,” he said. “To celebrate surviving today.”

“Surviving,” Zoey nodded. Surviving was exactly what she was doing.

“Yeah, let’s go.” He tossed his rag on the array of knives and spoons left out on the counter. Utensils he wouldn’t wash but would use the next day. Zoey was almost tempted to say something about them.

“You don’t want to eat here?” she teased instead, gesturing to the empty kitchen.

He shook his head ruefully. “I’m not in the mood for a restaurant at all, especially if I’m going to have to start being responsible. Take out? We could go eat at the beach.”

“That’s perfect.”

He grinned at her and she returned his grin.

Perhaps her birthday would not be so terrible.