The Hunger Moon (16 page)

“Hey, Ren.”

“Hi.” Renata answered the familiar voice automatically, then went numb with shock.

“Surprised?”

“Yeah, kind of.”

“Marcia didn’t give me your number, don’t worry. She’s been real evasive.”

“Well, I’m not listed.”

“I asked Rick to get it from his friend. Rick said you’re starting work next week for a guy he used to work for.”

“That’s right.”

“Why so cold?”

“I’m not being cold, Bryan. I’m just surprised, that’s all. Why’d you call?”

“Well, Merry Christmas, for one thing.”

“You, too.”

“Did Marcia tell you I wanted you to call me?”

“I guess she mentioned it.”

“But you didn’t feel like it.”

“It’s just that I didn’t see the point. Nothing personal, but why?”

Bryan made a sound that was not quite a laugh. “No, you’re not a bit cold.”

“Bryan, what’s this about?” Renata stroked Charlie’s sleeping head. She was trying to leave her voice calm, so he wouldn’t react and wake up. She needed to get off the phone quick.

“I just called you, that’s all. Why are you so hostile?”

“It’s not hostility.” And it wasn’t. It was panic. Renata twirled
the phone cord. She would hang up, change her number.

“Then, what?”

“Listen, I’ve got to go, okay?”

“Is someone else there? You should have told me. I don’t want to interrupt anything.”

“You’re not interrupting anything; I’ve just got to go. Merry Christmas.” Renata put the receiver down quietly. Then she unplugged the phone. Charlie squeaked in his sleep. Renata wrapped her arms around him and breathed the warm baby smell coming off his scalp. If it weren’t for her secret, she might have been glad to speak to Bryan, to sip a drink and curl up under the blanket and chat for an hour, finding out what he had been up to in the last year, and telling him all about her cross-country drive and Boston. Tears pricked her eyes. It frightened her that Bryan could be as suddenly nearby as his voice in her ear. But after hanging up, the apartment was emptier than before, the air more still. Even holding Charlie close enough to feel his soft breath on her arm didn’t, surprisingly, ease the feeling that she was completely alone.

She dreamed of the baby’s birth, except this time Bryan was in the delivery room coaching her. He was joking around like he always did, and Renata was laughing during the whole labor. In her dream, she didn’t feel any pain at all, just a pleasant sense of exertion, but after a while she told him, “I don’t think the baby can come out.” Bryan told her, “Use your intuition,” and she became angry with him, saying, “You have this baby if you think it’s so easy.” The next moment they handed her the baby, and she knew it was a boy because he had his father’s face.

O
N THE FIRST DAY OF HER NEW JOB
, Renata was unexpectedly nervous. First she was afraid that June would forget or be late, although they had confirmed everything several times. But June rang the bell five minutes early, giving Renata time to dither through her final preparations, tying her black tie half a dozen times. It made it worse for her that Charlie was still napping when
it was time to leave. He would wake up and find her gone, and there was no way to tell him why. She leaned over the crib and touched his cheek, causing a frown to wash over his brow like a brief disturbance in calm water.

Driving to the restaurant, she had time to worry about more things. Viva’s was the fanciest place she had ever worked—waiters in starched black and white, eight-page wine list, the works. What if she spilled the wine, or knocked over some crystal, or dropped a whole tray of dinners? Thrust into the world without the baby, just Renata again, she felt jittery and awkward, as if she couldn’t count on her arms and legs to know how to act.

T
HEO WAS TALKING
with the phone tucked under his chin when she appeared in his office; he gave her a friendly wave and motioned for her to sit down. He was the owner, who had hired her on Rick’s recommendation. The day of the interview she had brought Charlie; it was before meeting June and she hadn’t known what else to do with him. Luckily, Theo was a father himself; he had ordered Renata a cappuccino while he held Charlie on his knee and made faces at him. Then he had shown her around the restaurant, which was decorated with milky-blue walls and pink shell-shaped sconces. A giant aquarium filled with electrically hued tropical fish separated the dining room from the bar. The fish seemed to swim silently among the tables, their fan-shaped bodies lit from an inner source.

Theo hung up the phone and greeted her, tossing her a freshly starched apron. All his movements were crisp, as if he were perpetually on the alert for a dinner rush.

“You can start with three tables to get your feet wet. It’s going to be slow tonight—post-holiday slump. Gil’s the shift manager; he’ll tell you the specials and introduce you to the chef. Ask for tastes of anything you want so you can describe the food. Push the grilled tuna; it didn’t sell at lunch and we don’t want to get stuck with it. You can have that for your dinner, by the way. Eat early or late; you won’t have a chance in the middle of your shift. Half hour for meals, plus a fifteen-minute break when Gil tells you you can go. Don’t be afraid to ask questions.”

Gil was a pudgy man with a slicked-back ponytail and a diamond earring. Renata could tell he was a lifer in the business; he handled trays and wine bottles completely unconsciously, as if they were extensions of his body.

“You’ve had a chance to read the menu at home?” he asked her.

Renata nodded.

“We like to recite the specials here from memory, but don’t worry about it tonight. Here’s a copy to read from. We do the tuna rare, but that freaks some people out. Tell them they can have it any way they like it, but the chef doesn’t recommend going any better than medium. Don’t worry, though, Ron’s not a prima donna. He’ll cook the fish to shoe leather if that’s what the customer wants.”

Gil gestured to the left and right as he talked, using his pen as a pointer. Renata met Ron, an unexpectedly muscular man wearing classic checked chef’s trousers. She nodded hello to each of the prep cooks and to the rest of the wait staff. She remarked that she seemed to be the only woman.

“There’s another woman, Susan, whose shift begins tomorrow, so you’ll meet her. But you’re right, Theo has a bias for male servers—a European quirk of his. Everyone’s nice, though. Don’t worry if Martin is rude to you; his New Year’s resolution was to quit smoking, and it’s making him a bitch. He’s usually very sweet.”

Renata went out to greet her first table, a couple of business types. They started with Coronas and lime, and she went to the bar to pick up the drinks. The bartender, Bill, winked at her.

“You’re a nice change,” he said, putting the drinks on her tray. She smiled and went to serve the bottles of beer. She poured a perfect inch of foam in the glasses and put a basket of bread between them. They stopped talking and leaned back to look at the menus.

“Let’s see,” Businessman One said expansively, looking up at
Renata with a smile she guessed was supposed to be charming. He had a small, even row of teeth and wore a splashy geometric tie. His short hair was perfectly groomed, as if he had just left a barber shop. “I’ll have that tuna special. And a small Caesar.”

“Sounds good for me, too,” his companion said. They both wore dark, perfectly fitting suits and flawless white shirts. A little different scene, Renata thought, than the white linen gauze and Birkenstocks that walked into The Pelican, where she had worked in Venice.

Renata called in her order. This was a snap. As soon as she had felt the drink tray with its two beers perfectly balanced on her hand, it was as if she had never stopped working. The dress code was a little different here, and the prices a lot higher, but waiting tables was waiting tables. She went to greet her next table, a four-top with a family.

She recited the specials from memory, then took their drink orders. As she turned to go to the bar, she saw that the businessmen’s glasses were empty. She poured the remaining beer out of each bottle, placing the empties on her tray. “Two more?” she asked. They nodded, engrossed in their conversation. Her third table sat down and she greeted them as she passed.

Bill’s trade at the bar was picking up, but he smiled as he put the drinks in front of her. Gil caught her eye as she was on her way back to the dining room. “Good work,” he said. “I can see why Theo hired you; you’re a pro. You move really well.”

Renata sold two more of the tuna specials at the family table, and one more at her third table, a couple dressed for a date, the woman in a short black dress, and the man in a silk weave jacket with a collarless linen shirt.

“Hey, you’re moving my tuna,” Ron said. “Great.”

“The veal special would like her sauce on the side, if that’s not a problem,” Renata said. She knew how important it was to get along with cooks. They usually hated the dieters even more than they hated having their specials messed with.

“Not a problem.”

She served the Beaujolais to the couple carefully and slowly, and, she thought, perfectly. When she was done she saw that both the businessmen’s and the family’s dinners were up. She hadn’t removed the Caesar plates yet from table one, but made the swap gracefully. She walked as fast as she could without seeming to hurry back to the kitchen for the family’s dinners.

Gil was at her side. “I’ll back you up. Who’s getting the tunas?”

“Mom and Dad. Mom gets the double vegetables, dad gets the garlic mashed,” Renata said without consulting her pad.

“Right. Is that your calamari appetizer?”

“Yep. For three. I’ll be right back for it.”

On the way back from delivering the calamari to the couple, she picked up the empties from one and went to the bar for two more Coronas. Bill said, “They keeping you busy out there?”

“Not bad. I’m only starting with three tables, but they all sat down at once.”

“Always the way.”

Finally Renata’s tables were all eating and she had checked back to see if everything was okay. Her busboy was doing a good job with their waters and bread baskets. She was just about to take a breather when she saw that a large order for one of Martin’s tables had just come up. She came up behind him. “Follow you out?” she asked.

“My, aren’t we the efficient one,” he sneered. “Take the side dishes of vegetables,” he said, turning and walking away.

Renata blinked, then picked up the three plates of vegetables. She guessed correctly who was getting them and then turned back to the kitchen without a word to Martin.

Ron looked at her and shook his head. “If he stays like that much longer, we’re going to have to shoot him. And if we’re going to shoot him anyway, then he might as well start smoking again.”

Gil passed by. “Everything copacetic?”

“So far.”

“You look good out there. Feel like picking up another table?”

“Sure.”

By the end of the night, Renata had worked all six tables of her station, though the pace was leisurely. She was trained not to waste any motions. Anytime she was headed in a particular direction, she touched base with customers that way who were waiting for service, checked on how folks were enjoying their dinners, or picked up an empty plate. She loved finding the rhythm that made all her movements seem effortless and fluid. Her shifts always melted away then, and she was surprised when it was time to take a break or quit.

Stripping off her apron at closing time, Renata felt good. She already had a rapport with Gil and Ron, and she had plenty of time to settle in with the rest of the wait staff. She counted out tips for the busboy and maître d’, then put some bread and leftover tuna Ron had wrapped for her into her tote. He had cooked the fish, chilled it, and wrapped it first in plastic so she could microwave it, then again in heavy foil for freezing. Renata had almost never cooked for herself during the time she worked at The Pelican. When chefs liked you, they fed you.

As they were filing out, Gil waiting until last with his ring of keys, Bill fell into step beside her. She almost didn’t recognize him with his blue parka and ski hat. When she was picking up drinks from him, she had been too focused on getting the orders right to really look at him, even though he had been flirting with her all night. Now she saw him; he was cute in the way Bryan was cute—mussed and boyish.

“Want to go somewhere for coffee?” he asked her.

“I’d like to,” she said, “but not tonight.” Something stopped her from adding the rest of the sentence she had intended, that she had to get home to her baby. Instead she said, “Suddenly I’m exhausted.”

“It’s funny how that works,” he agreed. “You go with this big energy wave that carries you over the shift, and then suddenly— boom—you’re flattened.”

“Especially the first night.”

“Yeah. Hard to believe it was your first night, though. You looked like you’ve been out there forever.”

“Well, in a way I have been.”
Let that one out of the bag early
, Renata thought. Just in case he was tending bar as an interlude— a guy filling in a ski-bum winter, or someone in law school who would be doing this only for a semester or two. Renata was beginning to think that, like Gil, she would be a lifer. She might become a shift boss, or even a manager, but she didn’t know anything except restaurants. In a month she would be twenty-seven, and somehow that seemed too old to go to school and learn something else. But she also liked the work. She liked the way she had an invisible window on people’s lives as they sat at dinner talking business, or love, or divorce, or overdue bills, or work gossip. At first she had been amazed at how few people stopped their conversations, or censored them, when a waiter approached their table. Most continued talking as if she weren’t even there, and as Renata silently removed a plate, or poured water, she was able to hear the most astonishing things. It made her feel protective toward her customers, this intimacy.

“You need a lift anywhere?” Bill asked.

“Nope. Thanks. My car’s right here.”

“Okay, then. I’ll give you a rain check on that coffee.” He smiled and turned the corner. He really did remind her of Bryan. The masculine confidence, so sure of his appeal and good looks, the insistent quality of the smile, as if to say,
You couldn’t possibly have a reason for not smiling back, and if you do smile back, then I’ll know you like me, and once we’ve got that straight, anything is negotiable
.