Maybe, despite the business being very busy, the hotel running at full capacity or close to it at all times, The Falstaff Room setting new volume records repeatedly and banquets running at full booking, it was a calm before the storm for Bill. Caesar was too quiet. He wasn’t acquiescent or accommodating, but he was quiet and kept his distance.
The girls were all tired. Toward the end of the evenings in The Falstaff Room Bill could see it in their demeanors and in their faces. Jo Ann carried herself differently toward the end of the nights, showing her age perhaps although Bill thought of it as her showing her excess weight, which was not terribly excess. Rosie and Edelgarde lost the pep in their step so to speak.
Jimmy G was cantankerous. He did not have as much time to sit and read the Greek newspaper or magazine he brought with him. He did not have much time to disappear. He could only get away late at night when the orders were still coming in but it was just the stragglers. Then he would first stop out by Kalista and get espressos for him and Bill before he was off somewhere, who knew where, mostly into the main kitchen where the Jimmy Banquet Chef and his uncle Victor were closing up whatever was happening with the banquets.
Rosie and Edelgarde sweated. Bill could see it sometimes. They ran orders faster than Jo Ann. Jo Ann had one pace, steady, and she kept to it no matter what. Even when Caesar got on their cases, Jo Ann remained unflustered and steady-paced.
When Jimmy G came back from where he went it was Bill’s turn. Bill was working full days every day and he wasn’t about gallivanting. He went off the men’s room, smoked a cigarette on the way, and when he got back, if there were nothing much going on, he would stay out in the hall slightly down the ramp or off to the side up by Kalista. He would smoke a cigarette, drink coffee or espresso or even a soda. They called it pop in Ohio. The first time Bill had heard soda called pop, he didn’t know what it was.
Bill and Kalista were getting close. She was like his own grandmother, Fannie, his mother’s mother who stopped being his grandmother, kind of, somewhere along the line after his mother died. Fannie was fat and happy and round and round-faced. Kalista was kind of the same way, kind of like Grandma at Suburban too.
Kalista treated Bill like family. She took care of him no more and no less than she did her own family which was all over the kitchen in all different positions. She thanked him often for taking care of her lazy nephew Jimmy G who would always, as she said it, do the least he had to do to get by. She also thanked him for taking care of Jimmy Banquet Chef, but every time she did this Bill reminded her that it was the banquet chef taking care of him.
“No,” she said once. “Yes and no. You smart and you work hard and you help him. He rely on you and he need someone to rely on.”
True or not, it was nice to hear and Bill appreciated that Kalista was honest with him, that she shared some of the family stuffs that were going on, particularly about her young great-niece who worked banquet pantry sometimes and how she was sometimes a bit wild.
“I’ve known a few wild ones in my short time in kitchens,” Bill told Kalista.
“The girls like you,” Kalista said. “One thing I don’t like, you married. You should be shamed of yourself.”
When Kalista said this, Bill was cowed and looked to his feet.
“Men,” she said.
