by Holly Rayner
“Chefs don’t wear these rings,” the Sheikh said. “Whoever your birth father was, he was an important man. I can tell you that much. Anyway, I’m sorry to bother you about it. It’s just rare to see. And it’s lovely to see a woman wearing it.”
Anita shook her head, trying to clear it. This was more than she had bargained for.
“Thank you,” was all she could say. And then she left to go tend her other tables, that would doubtless not be so fraught with emotion.
THREE
The rest of the night went well. The Sheikh—Hakim, Anita mentally corrected herself—seemed to greatly enjoy his chakchouka, and the men’s laughter bouncing through the alley was a constant, every time Anita came out to refill drinks, or see if they needed anything.
The group managed to plow through more hummus, pita and meat than Anita would have thought possible, but Hakim just kept ordering more. It was as though, Anita allowed herself to think in a particularly weak moment, he wanted an excuse to stay.
Not long before closing, Hakim’s go-between—the one who had first tried to get the table without a reservation—got up and whispered something in his ear. Whatever it was, it seemed to upset Hakim, who looked hurriedly at his watch.
The man, who Anita remembered was called Ahmed, signaled for the bill, reaching out his hand for it when Anita brought it over.
Anita’s heart sunk; she didn’t have high hopes for a good tip if Ahmed was the man in charge of handling payments for his employer.
Still, she held off on looking at the signed receipt until she had said goodbye to the whole party. Each of the men, all of them in high spirits, thanked her personally, so it took a little while. Their enthusiasm was contagious, and Anita found herself smiling broadly at every over-the-top goodbye. She felt more like she had hosted them at her house than that she had just waited on them at a restaurant.
When it was finally Hakim’s turn to say goodbye, Anita wasn’t sure what to expect. But he gave her the same, gracious goodbye as the others had, even telling her that the chakchouka was the best he’d ever tasted, and that he would be sure to come back next time he was in Houston.
Was it just her imagination, or did he linger just a little bit longer than the others?
When they had all left, Anita felt as though the wind had been let out of her sails. She had expected a bit of a letdown, excitement-wise, once the night was over, but she hadn’t expected this. She felt… sad. Empty, even.
She opened up the check—better get the disappointment of no tip on a huge bill over with, she thought glumly.
She blinked twice when she saw the number. $200. Ahmed had left her a tip as large as the bribe he’d originally been going to give her.
Anita squinted at the elaborately-written note on the top line next to it.
“For the best table in the house,” it read.
She smiled. Maybe the guy wasn’t so bad after all.
She began stacking up the plates, bowls and cups. She’d told the busboys to go home early, as they had come through for her when she needed it, so she’d have to get all this put away on her own.
She tried not to let her mind wander back over the night. Her energy was waning, and now that the adrenaline rush was finally gone for good, she found that she wanted nothing nearly so much as to be upstairs in bed.
But she couldn’t help but wonder, again, if Hakim had seen the carving of her name, and if he had put it all together. Her gaze flicked up to the head of the table where he had been sitting.
That was when she saw it: just a glint of gold amongst the reflection of the twinkling lights.
Anita dropped the pile of dishes heavily on the table, not caring about the crashing sound they made, her heart beating faster as her body managed just one more little jolt of adrenaline. She rushed over to the glint of gold.
It was just what she had thought: Hakim’s ring, left behind by accident, she could only assume.
She scooped it up and took off at a run. Her tired feet stumbled, but she’d navigated the dining room so many times that she didn’t trip over any of the tables or chairs strewn about.
She reached the front door and looked frantically left and right. She could only hope they were still there.
It was dark, and it took her eyes a minute to adjust, but she was able to make out a limousine down the street to the left. The cluster of dishdasha-clad men around it made it clear that this was her aim, and she stumbled towards it, moving as quickly as she could without looking like a complete fool.
When she was close enough, she called out Hakim’s name. She saw him turn, so distinct in his suit. She saw him look down at her hands, and the precious object within them, and break into a wide smile.
“My ring!” he said when she reached him.
Anita set the ring in his open palm. Her fingertips grazed his skin as she set it down, and her heart, that had begun to calm, started racing anew.
This was no time for a crush, she thought. This was not the man to get awkward feelings for.
But it certainly wasn’t helping that he stepped closer to her as he picked up his hand to get a closer look at the ring.
“I fiddle with it sometimes,” he said, under his breath. If he hadn’t been standing so close, Anita doubted she would have heard him.
“I’m glad I caught you in time,” she said. Her mouth was running away and talking without permission from her brain. “I can’t imagine what I would do if I lost mine.”
“No…” he said, still apparently mesmerized by the ring he’d almost lost.
And then, as if released from a spell, he slid it onto his finger. “You must let me thank you.”
“What?”
“I mean it,” he insisted. “You’ve saved me from losing something precious. Please, let me have your number. I’d like to take you out to dinner.”
Take her out? To dinner?
Ahmed was behind him. “Sir, we really must be on our way. They’ll be waiting.”
“Yes, just a moment,” Hakim replied, then focused his attention back on Anita. “I’ve got to go. Let me have your number, so I can work out the details with you.”
The flash of the anger in Fadi’s eyes flitted through Anita’s brain. But in the rush of it all, there was nothing else she felt like she could do.
She spouted out her phone number, feeling ridiculous as soon as she did so—his phone wasn’t out, there wasn’t a pen, and she’d left her pad of paper inside.
“You’ll forget…” she said, silently cursing herself for having put the pad away.
“Never!” he said with a wink.
Anita blushed as the Sheikh disappeared into the limo and sped off into the night, leaving her standing in its wake, unsure what exactly had just happened, but certain that whatever it was, it was something good.
FOUR
It turned out that a good way of getting a second wind on a night that had been punishingly busy and stressful was to get asked out to dinner by a handsome sheikh.
Or so Anita was finding. The exhaustion that had begun settling in when the Sheikh’s party had gotten up had left her completely.
It had been a hard night, and there was no one left in the restaurant but her and Fadi. Fadi had sent the dishwashers home, not realizing that Anita had already sent the busboys home, leaving them with no one left to help them close up for the night.
So they did it all themselves.
Anita could tell that Fadi was still in a sour mood, it was just that it was hard to care when she was floating on a cloud the way she was. She turned up the music, which they would normally turn off during cleanup, and danced around him.
She was determined to pull him out of whatever kind of funk he was in, but Fadi wasn’t having any of it. She couldn’t remember a time when he’d so stubbornly committed to being upset, so she tried harder, turning her enthusiasm up a notch, and putting on a song that she knew for a fact he liked, even if he would deny it if she ever told anyone.
She sang in his
ear. “Shake it off, ah ah ah, shake it off!”
“Enough!” His voice was a half-growl, half-roar.
It scared Anita. Fadi had never scared her. He’d made her anxious to please him, and sorry she’d disappointed him. But scared?
“Turn that off,” he said, more quietly. “I need to talk to you.”
Like a puppet on strings, Anita went to the sound system and turned off the music. The restaurant felt so cold and empty without it.
She returned, and stood in front of him, waiting for whatever punishment was coming.
“Now,” he said. “The waitresses said they saw you talking to the Sheikh tonight. Is this true?”
She nodded. She wanted to add something in her defense, about how they had just been making the usual waitress-customer small talk, but it wouldn’t have been true, and she had a feeling that excuses would only have made things worse.
“And am I to assume,” he continued, with the same glowing coal of anger in his eyes, “that your good mood is due to something he has said?”
Anita nodded again, but this time Fadi looked like he was waiting for further explanation. She gave it to him, her voice sounding quiet and weak in the light of her father’s anger.
“He lost his ring. I returned it to him. He said he wanted to take me out to dinner to thank me.”
Fadi looked like he was about to boil over again, but he held it in. There was something else in his expression that Anita couldn’t quite make out.
And then she placed it. It was fear.
“You’re not going,” he said, then he turned away, as though that was the end of the discussion.
Anita was worn out from a day that had been an endless roller coaster of emotions. She was in no mood to have one of the greatest feelings she had felt in her young life yanked away from her with no explanation.
“I am going,” she replied. Her voice shook when she said it.
Fadi’s voice shook when he answered, but with anger rather than trepidation. “You have no idea what I’ve given up for you.”
Anita felt her own anger rising to meet his. “And how would I? You never tell me anything!”
He turned back to face her, the hot coal in his eyes again.
Anita continued, her own emotions rising. “Hakim taught me more about my family in two sentences than you have in eighteen years! I have a right to know!”
He started stepping towards her, now, and the fear she’d felt earlier was coming back. He was like a powerful beast, she thought. She’d never given much thought to how strong he was, but he was more musclebound than a cook had any right to be.
“Right?” he bellowed. “What right? You don’t have a right to anything, girl. You only think you do because I raised you like a little princess!”
Anita felt her rage turn into righteous anger. He’d done nothing of the sort. She’d worked alongside him for everything they’d ever got. Yes, he’d struggled to make a life for them, but she’d always struggled with him. Nothing had ever been handed to her. And he had the nerve to insult her that way now, just because she had talked to a man that he didn’t approve of?
“Well, I’m not a little princess anymore. I’m not a little anything anymore. And I deserve to know.”
She could see the conflict in him. It was like he wanted to say two things at once, but he couldn’t say either. Instead, his rage boiled over. He grabbed a glass candleholder off the nearest table, and hurled it across the restaurant.
The sudden movement seemed to break the spell. All Anita could think was that that was quite a lot of rage for her never to have seen in the last eighteen years.
Fadi turned back to face her. The emotions had drained from his face, his anger broken with the glass candle holder.
“It’s dangerous for you to talk to those men. You won’t do it. You can’t. That’s all you need to know.”
And then he walked away, leaving Anita alone in the empty restaurant.
FIVE
Anita began trying to get the restaurant back into order, but realized very quickly that she had no chance of doing it by herself. The day was hitting her, hard, and the second wind she’d gotten at Hakim’s invitation was completely gone now she knew she couldn’t accept it.
She wanted to rage at Fadi. She wanted to rebel, and tell him he had no power over her, and he couldn’t tell her what to do. But tonight had been so different. It had been like she didn’t even know him. The strangers had brought out a side to him that she’d never even known existed, and wished now that she had never seen.
The one thing that she knew was that after seeing him like that, and seeing the way he insisted that it was too dangerous to see Hakim, she couldn’t see him.
She resolved to keep asking. Now that she knew a little more about the history of her ring, she felt it like a hand on her, reaching out from the past. It was like her father was calling out to her.
But she would never get anything out of Fadi if she disobeyed him in such a serious way. And one evening of polite conversation with a man who felt indebted to her for returning his lost ring felt like a bad trade for a lifetime relationship with her father.
She climbed the stairs slowly, heading towards her bed, convinced that if Hakim actually did remember her number and ever contacted her, she would have to turn him down.
She changed into her pajamas and climbed into bed. This, at least, was still the same. This room was home. It had been home for as long as she could remember.
This was her life. It was the one where she worked her hardest at the restaurant, and at school. It was the life where she was a dutiful daughter who cared about her family, and her friends, and didn’t get asked out by handsome princes.
Anita was just beginning to doze off, her eyes opening and closing sleepily, when she saw her ceiling light up, followed by the subtle buzz of her phone. She reached out to grab it off the nightstand, her tired arm grasping awkwardly and accidentally knocking a book to the floor.
She picked up the phone and looked. A text from an unknown number:
Hello Anita. Are you still awake?
Anita laughed into the empty room, careful to keep her laughter quiet enough that Fadi wouldn’t be able to hear it through the walls.
It was Hakim. It had to be. And he didn’t text much, judging by his weirdly formal text speak. Besides, anyone who did much texting would know that a text like that, sent at 1:30am, was a booty call. And there was nothing funnier than the idea of the proper, elegant sheikh she’d met earlier making a booty call.
She went to reply that she was, then hesitated. She had to turn him down. She had to tell him she couldn’t see him. But, Anita thought, she didn’t have to do it right away. It would be rude not to at least have a little bit of a conversation with him.
I am. Is this Hakim?
A silly question, but she felt a little awkward texting the man with the entourage and the limousine from the pink and yellow patterned bedroom she’d had since she was three.
She saw the little bubble. Typing…. Typing… Never had that little typing bubble been more annoying to her than it was now. Finally, she got a response.
Oh good, I remembered right. Thank you again for finding my ring. I hope you will allow me the honor of taking your out to dinner tomorrow night. Pardon my contacting you at such a late hour. I only did so because I needed to know if you would be available, so that I can make the proper arrangements as early in the morning as possible.
It was, by leaps and bounds, the longest text Anita had ever received. No, the Sheikh apparently did not text.
She bit her lip. She couldn’t answer his question right away. If she did, the conversation would be over before it started. She wanted to live in the moment a little longer.
Since she was never going to see him again, Anita figured she might as well say what she really wanted to. She typed it into her phone and pressed send, holding her breath while the progress bar filled at the top of the screen.
Is that the only reason?
A typing bubble. And then no typing bubble. And then a typing bubble again. Was he trying to kill her?
Finally, a response.
For shame. Such implications! And here I am, innocently begging you to promise to see me when you’re almost certainly in bed. Innocently. Like an innocent person.
Anita smiled to herself. He didn’t do texting, but the man certainly did sarcasm.
