Her Friend Set The Poor Waitress Up On A Blind Date— Mins Later, The Mafia Boss Entered With His Dog

Chapter 3

He reached for his water glass, then stopped halfway, because the dog was getting up. Wren felt it before she saw it — the enormous slow movement beneath the table making the cloth tremble. Then a warm, heavy mass, firm as a sandbag, pressed against her knees, and the black mastiff pushed its head into her lap, released one long breath, and went completely still.

Wren’s hand was already resting on its head before her mind had time to wonder whether it should be. Her fingers found the hollow behind its ear, the exact place, without searching. She heard the water glass touch the tablecloth across from her. She looked up. The man hadn’t moved. Not a single muscle in his face shifted, but all the color had drained from him.

“It doesn’t do that,” he said, his voice so flat it sounded like a man reading numbers. “It’s never done that.”

Four hours earlier, at eleven-forty in the morning, Wren Kelly had been standing in the blind corner between the bar and the kitchen door, doing the thing she did every day without anyone ever knowing. She counted table two — four people, two hundred fourteen dollars before tax. They’d leave eighteen percent, because the woman in the green sweater had said thank you twice, and people who said thank you twice always left eighteen percent. Table five, two people, a hundred thirty dollars, fifteen percent, maybe twelve if the man paying had been the one who ordered first. Table nine would leave nothing at all. Table nine had never left anything in three years. She added it up in her head, subtracted the share for the bar and the busser, and arrived at a number. Today’s number was eighty-four. She needed a hundred and ten. She had needed a hundred and ten every single day for thirty-seven months, and she had never stopped counting, not while she smiled, not while she poured water.

At table seven, there was a coffee stain the size of a coin on the napkin. Replacing it meant a hundred and twenty dollars deducted from the shift. Wren folded it diagonally twice, set it down with the clean side facing up, and the stain vanished inside the fold as though it had never been there. It was a skill no one had taught her. She’d taught herself during her second month, when she realized a hundred and twenty dollars, multiplied by four times a shift, multiplied by six days, came to thirty dollars a week — and thirty dollars a week was a hundred and twenty dollars a month, which was nearly ten percent of the monthly co-payment she scraped together to keep a bed in a Warwick care facility for a woman who didn’t always remember her name, while the rest of a massive four-thousand-one-hundred-dollar monthly bill continued piling into debt behind it.

At table four, a man snapped his fingers without turning his head, twice into the air, as though calling an animal. Wren came, and Wren smiled, and Wren asked what he needed. He said more lemon, without speaking to anyone at all. She brought the lemon. She was still smiling. She had learned long ago that a smile wasn’t something she gave away. It was something she put on, like an apron, and both came off at the end of the shift.

In her apron pocket, beneath her order pad and two pens, there was a leather strap — old, frayed at one end, hand-stitched with thread that didn’t match, shorter than any dog leash sold in a store. It had been in that pocket during every single shift for two years. She never took it out. She only touched it sometimes with two fingers when someone at a table spoke to her as though she weren’t there. Then she took her hand away and kept working.

At twelve-ten, Dahlia Ward blocked her at the service counter, arms folded, wearing the look Wren had known since tenth grade. They had known each other eleven years. Wren knew Dahlia’s laugh, the one that began with something like a sneeze and ended with her having to grab hold of something. Wren knew Dahlia brought donuts from the corner bakery for the morning shift every Tuesday, not because it was anyone’s birthday, but simply because Tuesday was the longest day. Wren knew Dahlia talked with both hands when trying to persuade someone. And right now, both hands were moving.

“Six o’clock,” Dahlia said. “You don’t have an evening shift. You don’t have plans. Don’t tell me you have plans.”

“I have a bus at six-fifteen.”

“You’ve had a bus at six-fifteen every day of your life.” Wren was about to refuse a third time, the words already arranged, gentle and funny, the kind of refusal that left no mark. Then Dahlia lowered her hands, and that was what made Wren stop, because Dahlia never lowered her hands in the middle of an argument.

“Wren,” Dahlia said. “You haven’t let anyone buy you a meal in three years.”

No one said anything more. Plates clattered in the kitchen. Wren looked down at her hands, at the calluses along the base of her fingers, at the skin thickened by carrying trays, and she thought about a hundred and ten dollars, and about the eleven dollars she’d lose if she had to wash her second uniform, and she said yes.