Shattered Tips and Tender Lies

The Neon Cat empties out slow on a Tuesday. That's the thing about a Tuesday crowd, they linger like they paid for the extra hour and didn't. By the time the last guy stumble-walked out the door, singing the last line of some Whitney song to nobody, it was past two in the morning and I was the only one left on the floor.

I'm Florence Monroe, twenty-eight years old, and I've waited tables at The Neon Cat for three years now. Three years of wiping down the same tables, hearing the same bad singers butcher the same songs, and pocketing tips that range from decent to insulting. It's not a career. It's a paycheck with a stage in it.

That night I was wiping tables with more elbow than the tables deserved. I knew it too. You get to a point where you can feel your own anger coming out through your hands, and mine were scrubbing at a ring of dried whiskey like the ring had personally wronged me.

It hadn't. Jeff had.

Jeff, my ex, the man I gave two years of my life to, had cheated on me when I was twenty-six. Not with a stranger, either. With a woman from his gym, a woman with a name so generic I refuse to say it out loud even in my own head anymore. Two years. I found out on a Sunday, from a screenshot a friend sent me, and I threw his clothes into a garbage bag on the curb before he got home from wherever he'd been lying to me that day.

That was two years ago and I still scrubbed tables like they owed me money.

"You missed a spot."

I looked up. Tomas was leaning in the office door with a glass of water in his hand, watching me. Tomas Griffin, thirty-four, owns the place. Half Mexican on his dad's side, half white on his mom's, build of a guy who used to sit at a desk and now doesn't, and a way of watching people that used to irritate me and had stopped irritating me somewhere in the last few months without me noticing when.

"There's no spot," I said. "Table's clean."

"Table's clean. Your face isn't."

"Go count your money, Tomas."

He didn't move. He never moves when you tell him to, that's one of the first things you learn working for him. He came out a couple steps and set the water on the bar.

"You've been wiping that same table for ten minutes," he said. "I watched you. It's clean. It was clean five minutes ago. You're just taking it out on the furniture."

"I'm closing. This is what closing looks like."

"This is what angry looks like. I own a bar, Flo. I've seen ten thousand angry people close out a night."

I balled the rag up and threw it on the table, which showed him, somehow, since the rag just sat there wet on the wood I'd spent ten minutes drying. "Fine. I'm angry. Congratulations on your detective work."

"Want to talk about it?"

"No."

"Okay." He picked the water back up and drank some. "Stockroom's a disaster, by the way. Limes rolled behind the kegs again and I can't reach them. Help me reorganize it tonight and I'll pay you an extra hour."

That's how Tomas asks for things. He doesn't push. He just puts the next thing in front of you and lets you decide if you want to pick it up. I should've said no and gone home. I'd been on my feet for nine hours. Instead I heard myself say, "Extra hour at what rate?"

"Time and a half, since I'm asking you to lift kegs at two in the morning."

"Fine."

"Fine."

I grabbed my bag from behind the bar and followed him back. The stockroom is this narrow little room behind the office, all steel shelves and cardboard, cold enough that I kept my jacket on. There's a single bulb in there that makes everything look like evidence in a trial. He handed me a box of limes and pointed at the shelf they were supposed to live on, and we started in.

For a while we just worked. He's actually not bad to work with, he lifts the heavy stuff without making a show of it and he doesn't stand around directing like some owners do. Then somewhere between the napkins and the backup tequila he said, "It's a him, right? The anger."

I stopped with a case of tonic halfway to the shelf. "What makes you say that?"

"You went from zero to furious in about four seconds when Destiny asked if you were seeing anybody. At the staff meeting. Two weeks ago. I remember it because you looked like you were going to bend her in half."

"Her name is Destiny?"

"Flo."

"It's a him," I admitted. "It's always a him. His name is Jeff and he's a liar and I hate that I still think about him when I'm scrubbing whiskey rings at two in the morning. There. You got your story."

Tomas set a case of beer down slow and didn't say anything right away. I've figured out over three years that he does that on purpose. Most people fill a silence because silence makes them nervous. He just lets it sit there until you either walk away or keep talking, and apparently I keep talking.

"Two years," I said. "I was with him two years. We had a whole thing. I had a drawer at his place. He had a key to mine. And the whole time he's got some gym woman on the side, and I find out from a screenshot, from my girl Keisha, on a Sunday, while I'm making pancakes. Pancakes, Tomas. I was standing there in my apron with batter on my hands finding out my relationship was a lie."

"That's a bad Sunday."

"It's a bad everything. And the worst part is I'm still mad. Two years later and I'm still mad, and I hate that more than I hate him. Because being mad means it still matters."

He leaned against the shelf and looked at me, and the single bulb made half his face go dark. "You want the blunt version or the nice version?"

"There's a nice version?"

"Sure. The nice version is you're healing at your own pace and one day you'll be ready to trust again. The blunt version is you're keeping the anger because the anger is the last piece of him you've got, and letting go of it feels like losing the argument."

I stood there holding a case of tonic and stared at him. "That's blunt."

"Told you."

"Okay, so what do I do with it? I can't just put it down. It doesn't work like that. You don't decide to stop being angry, it decides when it's done with you."

"Sometimes it does. Sometimes you decide first and the feeling catches up. I had a startup fall apart on me, you know that. Five years ago. I spent a year telling everybody the story of how I got screwed, investors, partners, all of it. Every party, every date, same story. And one day I noticed the story was the most interesting thing about me and I got sick of it. So I quit telling it. The anger didn't leave that day. But it stopped having a job."

"So you just stopped talking about it."

"I stopped feeding it. Different thing." He picked up the limes I'd missed, the ones rolled behind the keg, and set them on the shelf. "Anyway. You don't have to do anything tonight. You just had to say it out loud to somebody who isn't going to repeat it, and now you have."

I put the tonic case on the shelf and looked at him. He wasn't doing the owner thing. He wasn't doing the sympathetic boss thing either, the one where they tilt their head like a dog. He was just standing there in a cold room, holding limes, telling me the truth like he'd hand me a mop.

"Why are you like this?" I asked.

"Like what?"

"Like you actually listen. It's unsettling. I keep waiting for the turn where you make it about you."

"I made it about me. The startup story. You weren't even mad at me for that."

"You earned that one."

He laughed, short and quiet, and went back to the shelves. I went back too, and we finished the stockroom in maybe twenty more minutes without another word about Jeff, which was its own kind of relief. But standing there passing boxes back and forth in a room the size of a closet, I caught myself thinking something I hadn't thought in two years, which was that a man could be easy to be around, and that the thought had snuck up on me in a stockroom, of all places.

"Done," he said, checking the list on his phone. "Go home, Flo. You've been here since four."

"You're still the boss at two in the morning, huh?"

"Always. Get out of my bar."

I got my jacket and headed for the door, and he called my name just before I reached it.

"El Fuego's still open," he said. "Tacos on me, since you lifted kegs. You in?"

I should have said no and gone home to my bed. I said yes.

We sat at the little counter by the taco truck with our foil packets steaming on the stainless steel top and talked about nothing, and it was the first easy hour I'd had in two years. That was the start. The thing I did a week later is the part I've been putting off, but a story's a story.

It was another Tuesday. Destiny and the rest of the crew had gone, and I was in the back pretending to count garnish when Tomas came in for a case of Coke. He reached past me to grab it and I don't know what got into me, I really don't, except I do know, and it wasn't him. It was Jeff. I'd seen on Instagram that Jeff and the gym woman had gone to Cabo, and something in me snapped like a dry branch, and I thought, fine, I'll show him, I'll have some beautiful man's mouth on mine by the weekend and I won't even feel bad about it.

So I grabbed Tomas by the collar and pulled him down and kissed him.

I kissed him for maybe two seconds before he put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me back, gentle but firm, the way you move a drunk friend off a barstool they're about to fall off of.

"Whoa. Hey. Stop." He held me at arm's length. "Not like this."

"Not like what? You didn't like it?"

"That's not the point and you know it. You've been off all night. You've got that look, like you're doing math on somebody's face. Who am I making jealous right now, Flo?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Sure you don't." He let go of my shoulders and stepped back. "Look, you're a grown woman, twenty-eight years old, and you can kiss whoever you want. But I'm not going to be a prop in somebody's revenge play. I've been that guy before. You know what it's like to find out you were the middle of somebody's story, not the end of it? I did my time with that. I'm not signing up again."

I stood there with my hands still half raised like an idiot. "You could've just let it happen, you know. It was a good kiss. I'm a good kisser."

"I'm sure you are. That's what makes it worse." He rubbed his jaw, which he does when he's thinking, not when he's mad, I've learned the difference since. "What do you actually want, Flo? Not what does Jeff deserve. What do you want?"

And that question just sat there in the cold air between the kegs, and I hated it, because the honest answer was I don't know, and I've never been good at saying that out loud. I'm from a family where not knowing is a character flaw. My mother raised three kids on a nurse's salary and she always knew, or at least she always sounded like she did.

"I don't know," I finally said. "Okay? I don't. I thought I did. I thought it was simple. Get under somebody new, feel wanted, move on. And then you're standing there being decent and it messes up the whole plan."

"That's the most honest thing you've said to me."

"Don't get used to it."

"Too late." He picked up the Coke case and put it on the dolly. "Here's where I'm at. I like you. I've liked you for a while, probably longer than I should've, since you work for me and that's a whole can of worms. If you ever want to kiss me again, and you actually want it, me, this specific man, then ask me. Plain. And I'll say yes or no like a grownup. But no ambushes, and no using me to get even with a man who isn't worth the electricity it costs to think about him."

"You could've just said you're not interested."

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't say you were."

"I said ask me." He wheeled the dolly toward the door and stopped at the threshold. "Think about it. No rush. Taco truck's still open if you want to talk."

And I stood in that stockroom under the one flickering bulb with my heart doing something complicated, and I thought, well. Damn.

So that's how it started, really started. The next day I asked him, plain, in the office with the door shut, if he'd kiss me, and he said yes, and it was different from the ambush kiss, slower, both of us actually in it. And after that we fell into a thing. I picked up the late shifts. Nobody questioned it, because everybody knows Flo likes the late shifts, likes the quiet. After close we'd sit at the bar while he counted the drawer, and then we'd kiss in his office with the door shut, and Destiny and the cooks didn't know a thing. He was clear that this was separate from the job: my shifts, my tips and my paycheck were never part of it, and either of us could say stop, about anything, any time, no consequences. I'd never even been to his apartment.

I told myself I was still in charge of it. That was my story and I was sticking to it. He's my boss, I told myself, so obviously I'm the one taking a risk, so obviously I hold the cards. And for a while that worked, or I let it work. But here's what I started noticing. Little things. He started keeping my favorite brand of sparkling water stocked in the back fridge without me asking. He started closing the drawer count faster so we'd have more time. One night I caught him looking at me while I was restocking napkins and he had this expression, like hope with a leash on, and I thought, oh no. Oh no, this man is catching feelings. And the scary part was the feeling in my chest when I saw it, which was not annoyance.

"I can hear you thinking," he said one night at El Fuego, weeks in now, both of us three tacos deep on a Tuesday that had run long. "What is it?"

"Nothing. Just work stuff."

"Flo."

"Fine. I was thinking you look at me like you're waiting for something."

"I am."

"Waiting for what?"

"For you to stop flinching every time this starts to feel real. You do this thing where it's good, and then you get quiet, and then you change the subject to something safe. I'm patient