The Last Shift Before Friday

The pool closed at six, same as it had all summer. I'd pull the last kid out of the water at ten of, chase him through the locker room ritual of wet towels and flip-flops, and lock the gate by six fifteen. Then the shower at the facility, because the Y locker room was free for staff and my apartment water pressure was a sad little trickle that I'd stopped complaining about years ago.

So by seven most nights I was walking the eleven blocks to the Surf & Turf Grill, and I'll admit right now that part of the reason was the food. The bigger part was that my apartment was too quiet. Fifty-one years old, never married, and I could hear my own refrigerator humming from the couch. That's the kind of detail that makes a person leave the house.

You want to know what I did at the Surf & Turf? I sat at the corner table by the window, ordered a soda with lime, and watched the kitchen through the pass-through. There was a cook back there named Selena Pinkney, and she was the most interesting thing in that building.

Selena was 47, four years younger than me, and she worked the line like she was arguing with it. Fast hands. Hair scraped back under a bandana. She'd call out orders to nobody in particular, just to hear them, and the ticket printer would spit and she'd jaw-tighten every single time, like the machine was personally insulting her. I could've watched her for hours. Some nights I basically did.

Deb from the front desk at the Y, who picked up weekend shifts waiting tables here, had pointed her out to me back in June. "That's the friend I told you about," she'd said, leaning over my table with her tray. "Selena. She's got a mouth on her but she's solid. You'd like her."

I'd said something noncommittal. Deb had rolled her eyes and walked off. But I'd looked through the pass and Selena had looked up at the same moment, and something had passed between us that I still couldn't name three months of Tuesdays later. Nothing had come of it. She was working. I was drinking a two-dollar soda in a corner like a creep. That was the arrangement.

Tonight was a Tuesday in late August, humid as a wet towel, and the air conditioning at the Surf & Turf had been broken since July. Everybody sweated politely and pretended not to notice. The dinner rush had come through like a freight train and left the place smelling like fryer oil, and the jukebox was playing one of its six country ballads, the sad one about the dog.

I was on my second lime when I noticed the rhythm back in the kitchen was wrong. Tickets stacked up on the rail. Selena was moving faster but getting less done, and she'd started swearing under her breath in Spanish, which I'd only heard her do twice all summer.

The manager, a heavy guy named Ray who always looked damp, came out front and clapped his hands for attention. "Folks, bear with us tonight. We're short-staffed." Then he leaned over the counter and hollered into the kitchen, "Denny called in! Something about his kid!"

"Denny's kid was sick LAST week!" Selena's voice came back through the pass, flat and loud. "He's at the track betting on horses, I'd put money on it!"

Ray shrugged at the dining room like she'd made a lovely point. "So it's just Selena on the line. Kitchen's going to be slow, people. Order appetizers. Be nice."

The dining room groaned. The printer started churning again, and I watched Selena's jaw tighten, tighten, tighten. She slapped a tray of burgers down on the flat-top and stood there for half a second with her eyes closed. Just half a second. Then she opened them and kept going.

And I got up. I didn't decide to get up, if that makes sense. My legs just did it, and then I was walking past the hostess stand and through the swinging door into the kitchen, and the heat back there was like walking into a car in July.

"Hey," I said.

Selena looked over her shoulder, spatula still going. "You're the soda lady."

"That's me. Soda lady. Corner table, three months running."

"What are you doing back here, soda lady? Health code."

"I'm not back here. I'm at the door." I was, barely. "You want help with the dining room side? Bussing, running food to the pass, refilling drinks, whatever. I lifeguard for a living. I know how to wipe a table."

She stared at me. The printer churned out another ticket behind her and she didn't even turn around this time, which told me how bad it was.

"You'd do that?"

"You're drowning. It's painful to watch."

"Wow. Flattery." But she was almost smiling, and there was sweat running down her temple into her bandana. "Okay. Yeah. Grab an apron off the hook by the walk-in. If you spill anything on a customer, Ray will bill you for their dry cleaning, I'm not joking."

"Understood."

"Lesley, right?"

I stopped with my hand on the apron. "You know my name?"

"You sit in the same corner every Tuesday and Thursday for three months. Deb talks about you. Yes, I know your name." She flipped a burger. "It's a good name. Go buss table six, they've been done for twenty minutes and the woman keeps giving me the evil eye through the pass like I personally slow-cooked her fish."

I grabbed the apron and went, and I'll tell you, bussing tables at 51 years old on a broken-air-conditioning Tuesday night felt better than it had any right to. I cleared six, wiped it down, reset it, took drink orders for the new party because the waitress was pinned down at the far end. I ran plates to the pass and called out table numbers, and Selena started calling back, and somewhere in the next forty minutes we developed a whole system with no words in it. Two taps on the pass meant up next. A rag thrown over the shoulder meant the six-top needed water.

At one point the waitress, a kid named Bri who couldn't have been older than 23, grabbed my elbow. "Who ARE you? Ray doesn't let people help."

"Ray doesn't let anybody help. Ray isn't here right now." He'd retreated to his office the second I picked up a bus tub.

"He's going to love you or fire you. Possibly both."

"Can't wait."

Around nine the rush broke. The dining room emptied down to three tables and a guy at the bar nursing a beer and watching the news. The printer went quiet. I wiped down the counter by the register and when I turned around, Selena was standing at the pass-through with two glasses of iced tea, and she pushed one across at me.

"Sit," she said. "You earned a sit."

I sat at the counter. The tea was sweet and cold and the best thing I'd had all year.

"Thanks," I said. "I mean it. You were buried."

"You have no idea. Denny's been calling out twice a month since June and Ray won't fire him because Denny knows the supplier guy." She pulled her bandana off and shook her hair out, and it was dark and heavy and damp at the temples, and I made myself look at my tea. "You're good at this, you know. Bussing."

"Lifeguard. I wipe things for a living. Kids, mostly, but the skill transfers."

That got a real laugh out of her, a big one that came up from the chest, and she leaned her hip against the counter across from me. "Deb said you were funny. She said you were funny and single and that I should ask you about yourself, and I said I don't have time for a social life, I have a line and a rent payment."

"What changed?"

She looked at me then, really looked, the way she'd looked up at me through the pass in June. "I watched you walk into a kitchen you had no business in and start working. That changed some things."

The jukebox cycled to the ballad about the truck. Out in the dining room, Bri was rolling silverware in napkins and pretending very hard not to listen.

"So," Selena said, and tapped her glass against mine. "Tell me something true, soda lady. Deb says you never do."

"Deb talks too much."

"One true thing. That's the toll for the iced tea."

I thought about it longer than I should have. "I don't come here for the food," I said finally. "The food's fine. That's the toll paid."

Selena set her glass down slow, like she was being careful with it, and I watched her jaw do that tighten thing one more time, except this time I knew it wasn't the printer.

"Ray's office door is closed," she said. "Bri, you got the dining room?"

"Yeah, Chef," Bri called back, way too cheerful.

Selena came around the counter and stood close enough that I could see the little burn scars on her forearm from the flat-top. "Walk me to my car?" she said. "It's stupid hot in my lot and my car has good air conditioning, and I want to sit somewhere that works and hear the rest of it."

"That's not much of a plan."

"It's not a plan at all. That's the point."

We went out the back door into the parking lot, and the heat hit me like a wall even at nine at night. Her car was a blue Honda with a cracked windshield on the passenger side, parked in the shade of the dumpster fence because that's the only shade the lot had. She hit the remote and the thing sighed cold air at us before we even opened the doors.

"Get in," she said. "Driver's side is mine, obviously."

"Obviously."

She slid in and I took the passenger seat, and we sat there with the AC running and the radio off, and neither of us looked at each other for a good thirty seconds. We both watched the dumpster fence like it was going to do something.

"One true thing back," she said finally. "You paid the toll, I pay the toll."

"Okay."

"I've watched you drink a soda with lime at that corner table every Tuesday for three months. Every Tuesday. And I know you're there Thursdays too because Deb won't shut up about you." She picked at the hem of her shorts. "And I told myself it was nothing. Some lady at table twelve. But every time a ticket came in I'd look up through the pass before I looked at the ticket, and that's not nothing, Lesley. That's something."

"Selena."

"I'm not done." She turned in the seat to face me. "I ended a thing with a bar manager eleven years ago, he was eight years older than me, and I still can't tell you why I ended it. I just chickened out. I've been chicken ever since. So if you're sitting there waiting for me to say something brave, this is it. This is all of it."

"I'm not chicken," I said. "I'm just out of practice. My last actual date was three years ago. A swim instructor. It went nowhere because I couldn't say what I wanted, which apparently is my whole problem."

"And what do you want?"

The AC was blowing right on my knees and I was sweating anyway. "Right now? I want to touch you and I'm asking first."

"Yes," she said, before I even finished. "God, yes, I've been waiting on that yes since June."

She came across the console and I put my hand on her jaw, and her skin was still hot from the line, and I kissed her. It was not a polite kiss. She made a noise into my mouth and grabbed a fistful of my shirt and pulled me closer, which was awkward with the console between us, and neither of us cared. Her mouth tasted like iced tea and she kissed the way she worked, fast hands, no wasted motion. When we broke apart she was breathing hard and grinning like she'd won something.

"Well," she said. "Took you long enough."

"Me? You had three months of Tuesdays too."

"I was busy. Denny keeps calling out." She kissed me again, shorter, and then sat back in her seat with her hand still on my knee. "My place is ten minutes from here. It's a mess, dishes in the sink, I've been living on the line all summer."

"I don't care about your dishes."

"I know you don't. I'm stalling because I'm nervous, which is stupid, I'm 47 years old, I cook for a hundred people a night."

"Follow me or take me, either way. I walked here. I don't have a car."

"You walked eleven blocks. Every night. In this heat." She shook her head. "You really don't come for the food."

"Not the food."

"Get in proper then. Buckle up, soda lady."

* * *

Her place was a small apartment over a shuttered bait shop, and it did have dishes in the sink, and it smelled like coffee and laundry soap, and it was the first room all summer that wasn't too quiet. There was a radio on the counter and she turned it on low, some country station, and then she turned to face me in the middle