The Night the Whole Town Tipped Back
Table Six
“Can you not clomp around like that,” she said, loud enough that the couple at the next table over glanced up from their fish fry. “It’s distracting.”
I apologized, the way you do on instinct before you have even decided whether an apology is owed. I tried to walk quieter, which if you have ever worn a below knee prosthetic, you already know is a losing trade. Trying to walk quieter just changes which part of the gait looks wrong. It did not fix the sound. It just made me less steady doing it.
Her steak, when it came out, was too rare. She sent it back. The second one was too well done, somehow, in the exact eleven minutes it took the kitchen to fire a new one. The third time it came out she did not send it back, she just told me, flatly, that the sauce tasted cheap, in a voice built to be heard by everyone within fifteen feet.
Every trip I made past table six after that came with something new.
About my apron, which apparently sat wrong. About the “unfortunate” way I had my hair pulled back. About how, and this was the one that actually stuck with me, other tables seemed to be getting served faster than hers, “for some reason.”
I want to be honest about something. I have waited tables through worse nights than that one. I have had drunk men say things I will not repeat here. I have had a woman throw a fork at me once, years ago, over a wrong order that was not even mine to begin with. I know how to keep smiling through a bad table. It is most of the job, some nights.
What made table six different was that it was not really about the steak, or the sauce, or the pace of service.
It was about the leg. She kept coming back to the leg. Every complaint had a way of circling around to my leg like it was the actual subject of the meal and the food was just an excuse to keep talking about it.
By the time I brought her the check, my hands were not steady. Not from fear exactly. From the specific exhaustion of being made to feel, over ninety straight minutes, in front of half the regulars I consider family, like the thing that saved a child’s life was actually a defect I should be apologizing for.