Later in his career as a cook, Bill would work in a restaurant where the head cook was a cocaine dealer, the chef was a candidate for an insane asylum, not to mention nearly as mean as that guy in the workhouse, Ronnie, who asked Bill on his first day there what his wife was doing, inferring that she was fooling around without having to worry about getting caught since he was there locked up, one line cook was a speed freak and coke-head and the other was fooling around with one of the waitresses, a chubby blonde with a nasty mouth. Bill was fooling around with one of the waitresses too.
That line cook and that waitress, one day in the middle of a summertime brunch rush would have a humongous fight, loud and nasty, so much so that the customers could hear what was going on. More important, it would stop the flow of orders since in the midst of the fight the cook left the line and went in the back with his girlfriend. Bill, who happened to be working that day for the other line cook—Bill was doing a double—did his best to push out the orders as he could. In the end, the kitchen would run more than a half hour behind through the entire meal.
Hence the no fraternization rule.
Bill did not want to fight with Marie. He wasn’t her boyfriend or her lover or her confidante although she was pushing toward speaking to him about things that were sensitive to her. They had had sex several times now, and yesterday’s was beyond the pale in that it was intimate and sensitive. Even Bill had been taken aback not only by the character of their intimacy but by the nature of the feelings. Somewhere, somehow, he felt for her. After all, she had a husband who beat her and who fooled around on her yet she was tied to him by two kids.
The webs we weave.
He had changed one fryer grease when Marie came over. He was just starting to work on the second one. He’d turned off the gas and had set up the pot under the spigot. But Lorraine came in then with an order for a four-top so Bill stopped what he was doing and went to cook.
He had already soaped down and scrubbed clean a good part of the line so he was careful not to make a mess anywhere. Tending to the items on the Garland, out of the corner of his eye he saw Mickey sipping from that glass of alcohol he had collected from the liquor glasses that had been sent in to the dishwashers. Mickey was wobbly, Bill noted, or so he thought as he watched him. Jim was eyeballing Mickey.
“What you up to?” Bill called out in the direction of all the dishwashers.
No one said anything.
“You drinking again, Mickey?”
In a slightly Irish accent, Mickey said that he wouldn’t do anything like that.
“You better not be,” said Bill. He turned back to the Garland but not completely. The order called for French fries on three of the plates, so when Bill saw that he could leave the broiler, he went over to the reach-in freezer and pulled the bag of fries. He dropped enough to cover the orders into one of the baskets of the fryer where he had just changed the grease. He dropped the fries knowing they would take a little longer to brown since the grease was totally fresh.
Marie was leaning against the steam table shelf. She watched Bill work. “You know they gonna fight,” she said.
“Sooner or later,” said Bill, “but not tonight.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
