SMALL TIPS AND BIG MESSES

A SNEAK PREVIEW

(a work in progress)

Chapter 1

Is it racist of me to speak to my employer in broken English? English is, after all, my first language, and having graduated from high school with the top English mark out of a class of 300, I damned well hope I know how to speak it properly. But Sally, my boss, doesn’t speak English properly, and when I talk to her I find myself mimicking her speech.

So, is it racist of me?

After all, if no one speaks to her in proper English, how is she ever going to learn how to speak it? I’m definitely not as racist as Mary, who used to waitress here and called everyone spics, chinks and niggers. But still sometimes, when the restaurant’s not too busy, I find myself worrying about it. Tonight wasn’t one of those nights, though.

Ding, ding, ding!

The bell was dinging in the kitchen.

Ding, dingdingding!

I was standing behind the cash register waiting, waiting for a customer’s credit card receipt to print out. I looked around: although there were two other girls on duty tonight, neither of them seemed to be in the dining room, at least not the part I could see from the cash.

Ding!

There was a lineup to the cash, stretching almost to the door, and every single one of the people in that line was staring at me, with a ‘why aren’t you doing anything?’ look on their face.

With a soft whirr, the interac machine spat out a receipt. I ripped it off, attached it to a clipboard and dug around for a pen that looked like it might be working. Finally, I found one, and went to hand it to the man standing in front of me. He smiled and waggled the pen he was already holding at me.

Dingdingding!

I returned the smile, and handed the clipboard over.

“I’ll be back in just a sec,” I said to the room at large in what I hoped was a pleasant and modulated voice. It can be hard to speak in a pleasant, modulated voice when you’ve got a pounding headache and are gritting your teeth.

I ran over to the kitchen door and stuck my head in. “What?!”

Kim, one of the other girls, was on the other side of the room packing takeout orders. Judging from the pile of bags in front of her, she had at least five orders on the go. She looked at me, stuck out her tongue and shrugged.

A small wrinkled hand shot out in front of me, waving a yellow bill.

“How many spices?” Tom yelled, somehow managing to keep his cigarette lodged in his mouth all the while.

How should I know? I’d been glued to the cash for what seemed like years.

I looked at the bill: it was the new girl’s hand writing. Where the hell was she, anyways?

“Medium,” I yelled back at him. “Medium spices.”

When I first started working at the restaurant, I used to forget which items on the menu were spicy all the time. Back then, I used to go back to the customer’s table and ask how hot they wanted their food. That was four years ago. These days, I go by the mantra, “when in doubt, medium it out.” If it’s too hot, I just tell them Sally was cooking (she puts more chile powder in) and if it’s too mild, obviously Tom cooked it. Sorry ‘bout that.

Across the room, I saw Sally’s hand reaching for the pineapple sauce. Dammit. I looked down at the order Tom had shoved in my face. “Sally, lady say she no want pineapple sauce,” I yelled.

Sally looked at me and scowled.

I’m outta here.

“Cash,” I hollered apologetically.

The man I had been serving before was gone. The clipboard, with a signed credit card receipt was sitting balanced on the calculator.

A room full of eyes stared at me reproachfully. I looked down at the receipt, and sighed. A $70 meal, and he leaves a $2 tip?

The phone started to ring. I looked at it, and then at the lineup in front of me.

“Sorry ‘bout that. Who’s next?”

The phone rang three more times, and then went silent. I looked at the phone line–Kim had picked it up in the kitchen, thank god.

A lady stepped forward and told me her telephone number. I looked over the pile of takeouts sitting in front of me.

“I’m sorry, that number doesn’t appear to be there. Your order must still be being prepared. Can I help someo–“

”Oh, wait!” the lady exclaimed. “Maybe my husband gave you the cell number. What’s the cell number again? Let me think. 38– No, no... 32–“

The phone started to ring again. Kim was still on the other line.

“No, maybe it was 87...”

The front door of the restaurant opened, and two more customers sauntered in. They looked at me expectantly. I gave them my best hostess smile, and raised a finger (not my middle one, though the temptation was great).

I grabbed the phone. “Gilded Lilly. Could you please hold the line? Thank you!” I jabbed down on the hold button before the person on the other line had a chance to reply.

Meanwhile, the lady had moved aside, mumbling numbers under her breath. She had been replaced by a couple who had dined inside. They were done their meal, but their bill still hadn’t been added up or taken to their table.

“Sorry ‘bout that,” I chirped for what had to be the zillionth time that night. I shoved fortune cookies into their hands and began adding up their bill. Where the hell was the new girl?

The couple who had just walked into the restaurant was now beginning to look impatient.

“Table for two?” I asked, still punching numbers into the calculator. They nodded, and I reached out with my non-calculating hand to grab to menus.

“Someone will be right over to take you to your table.” Or so I hoped.

The phone began to ring again.

Dammit, I’d lost track of where I was in my calculations, and was going to have to start over from scratch.

I grabbed the phone again and punched a line at random. “Gilded Lilly, please hold.”

“I’m already holding!” a voice snapped at me.

“Thank you!” I chirped.

The washroom door popped open, and a face popped out. The new girl. Finally. I gestured wildly, and she sauntered over.

“Table for two.” I shoved the menus in her hands, and turned back to the cash. The lady had finally remembered her husband’s cell number, and surprise, surprise, her food was sitting in front of me as it had been for the past half hour.

Ding

I smiled and looked around the room. “I’ll just be–“

”–a sec,” finished a man who had been standing there rather patiently for the past ten minutes.

I stuck my head back in the kitchen.”What?”

This time, Sally was the one waving a bill. A white one.

“Delivery!”she hollered. I’d bet I can count on one hand the number of time’s I’ve heard either Sally or Tom use normal speaking tones. “Call Susan.”

“I call Susan already,” I hollered back and slammed the kitchen door shut.

* * *

A half an hour later, Susan still hadn’t arrived, and I’d received two irate calls–one from the person whose food she was supposedly out delivering, and one from the person whose food was still sitting, getting rapidly cooler, on our counter.

Susan has a new boyfriend. I found this out last week: she asked me if I was seeing someone, and when I replied ‘no’ without bothering to reciprocate the question, she left in a snit. Sally doesn’t approve. Never having met Susan’s new man, I’m not sure if this is because he’s an awful loser, or if it’s because her new man means she has less time to be at Sally’s beck and call.

Sally says I’m smart to not have a boyfriend. “Men too much trouble,” she says, wagging a meat tenderizer at me.

These days, Susan’s new man usually tags along with her on deliveries. I’ve seen him from afar: he’s pretty cute. I could only assume the too of them had decided to pull over on some shady street and engage in a little nooky.

All good and well. As someone who has gone nooky-less for quite some time now, I could only applaud. But could they get it on after the deliveries are done?

The new girl had gone home looking exhausted -- from what, I’m not sure — and the steady stream of customers had slowed to a trickle. I had asked Kim to man the cash, and was taking a much needed dishwashing break.

Sally hung up the phone. She’d called Susan’s cell and land line repeatedly, not believing, I guess, that I really had made the call. She jerked her jacket on, and yelled something at Tom in Cantonese. Then, she turned to me.

“Where...” she squinted at the receipt. “How you say?”

I wiped the dishwater from my hands and walked over to pull a map of the town down from its place by the microwave. The map was falling apart, and at least three years out of date.

“St. Martins, Sally.”

Sally repeated the street name to herself while I skimmed up and down the map with my finger. It wasn’t there. Either Kim had taken the address down wrong, or... I turned and fished around beside the microwave some more. Aha! This one looked slightly newer: it was only torn in two places. I found St. Martins on my first try, and Sally, after studying the map for a moment, nodded, grabbed the delivery order and was out the door.

By ten o’clock, the restaurant was dead. Kim was long gone, and Susan was still a no-show. I’d vacuumed the floors, emptied the trash, refilled the pop cooler and finished the dishes.

“I go home, Sally?” I asked, hopefully. The restaurant was technically open for another hour. Sally looked at the clock, grunted and waved me out the door.

Damn, my feet hurt.

* * *

It became obvious at approximately 4:30 the next afternoon why Susan hadn’t been answering her phone. A woman out for a stroll with her dog on rue St. Martins street saw a tennis-shoe clad foot sticking out of the ditch. Her cell phone, police later told us, showed 32 missed calls from the Gilded Lilly.

Small tips and Big Messes Chapter One is the exclusive property of the author and

may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the written permission of the author.