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Nate
is doing that thing again, with his big open teeth sucking, burbling little
bits of saliva, and him staring off into space.
Stop sucking your teeth, I say. I’m standing over the stove, pushing
vegetables around. It's the end of the night, and you can hear the murmur of
the restaurant in the kitchen. Most of the night you can't hardly hear it.
Nate stops and rolls his eyes bigger than he needs
to.
You should get a tooth pick or something, I say, find something to do with
your mouth besides smoking and sucking your teeth. He gives me a low sliding
grin, and fumbles the dish-towel out of his apron. I throw a handful of
shrimp into the pan, drizzle fake butter from a squeeze bottle. Yellow
crescent of squash, clear strips of onion, green coins of zucchini, brown
dots of garlic, the shrimp crackling.
Nate tries to look busy, runs his dish-cloth over
an already clean counter. I can see the tips of his ears blooming red, and
feel bad for getting on to him.
Nate is damaged, this is a fact. He’s a hard
worker, but when he does dishes sometimes he can't put spoons with the
spoons, forks with the forks, and me or one of the waitresses has to help
him, while he looks on sadly. Sometimes I have to go find him after sending
him out to dump the kitchen trash. It just makes my stomach go heavy.
Nate, hey Nate, watch
this for me will you? I say, And don’t let it burn. His eyes are immediately
on the pan.
I got it, Lewis, he says. He comes from somewhere down in the Delta, some
town with sixty people that’ll be gone in ten years. I can tell by how his
eyes are stuck on that pan that he'll do a good job.
Out the back door, turn left, walk-in freezer, fourth shelf, all the way to
the right behind the corn-meal. I like how the vodka gets syrupy in the
freezer, and I like the sudden warmth after the sudden cold of the freezer.
You can really feel yourself start to unhitch a notch or two.
I get back in the kitchen and Nate’s doing these
little pull-flips that look polished, smooth and hitchless.
He’s been watching me when I cook, or he’s been practicing at home. He gives
me another grin with his eyes looking to the side, and I smile back and raise up my palms.
Go head and finish it, I’ll prep, I say. I get a dish from under the counter,
spoon a mound of white rice in the middle, do a circle
of red pepper, green circle of dried parsley, yellow twist of lemon. Nate does these little head nods to himself and flips it
over once, turns from the stove with the pan trailing steam and carefully
pours it all on top of all the rice.
Looks good, I say. Nate takes the pan over to
the dish pit, starts to spray it down.
Nate, the cook’s got to tell the waitress, I say,
otherwise the food’ll get cold.
Nate comes back over from the dish pit and puts the
plate of food on the counter. Dawn, order up! he
yells out and looks proud.
Back when he first started working here I asked him, once I found out he
lived on his own, if someone every came by, someone to check up on him, I
meant. He looked at me and his lips seemed to dance a little bit and he said
that his friend Davy came by sometimes and they’d watch the television or
watch a movie, go play pool maybe, and by the way he looked at me I knew he
knew what I was getting after, so I let him smoke in the kitchen that night
and sent him home early and even gave him some of my tip-out. Everyone has
questions they don’t deserve to be asked, that is also a fact.
He only eats once a day, right before he goes to sleep. He says this is the
way he was raised.
I pop out of the kitchen and do a quick head count. Only three tables left,
all of them have their food, only thing left is desserts which are all cold
tonight and Dawn can take care of it. Let’s start to break down, I say to Nate and he quick as anything dumps the two cutting
boards from the counter into the dish pit. He is a hard worker, as I have
said to the owner more than once.
I start to break down, pouring or scooping what I can use tomorrow into
plastic buckets, throwing away what I can't. I have worked since eleven this
morning, and I am tired and want to go home, feed my girls. They are pure
bred Labradors, Lola and Nadja,
best hunting dogs you could ask for, and I have pictures of both of them in
my wallet if you’d ever want to take a look at them.
Nate is humming something from the radio to himself and drying the knives, sticking them on the
magnetic strips above the sink. I turn off the fryer,
put the fry basket over the still pockling grease.
Dawn comes in and asks for the mop and bucket and I say I’ll get it. I tell Nate on the way out to start breaking down the
stove-tops, make sure to scrub underneath the burners. He nods, digging his
arm into a pot of hardening black-bean soup.
I stop off in the freezer to unhitch a little more. My breath in the
freezer’s light is orangish, like how the air gets
around sunset. In the cramped utility closet I pull the mop and bucket
out and swat a broom that falls against me out of the way. The yellow bucket
with the dirty-white mop head, the purple night with a creamy yellow moon,
and I push open the green kitchen door.
Dawn is screaming and Nate is standing there, his
lips dancing in a little o around his mouth. He’s holding a burner and he
didn’t use a wet dish-towel or anything and there’s this awful steam or smoke
coming up from his hand, and he’s just looking at it and not making a noise
and I want very much but am unable to say Let go Nate
let the damn thing go please God let him let the damn thing go.
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