by Bill Hopkins
Chapter 22
Saturday Noon
Rosswell overslept, missed Mrs. Bolzoni's breakfast, and then scurried to Mabel's, thinking he was so hungry he could eat a horse and chase its rider.
Inside, the restaurant resembled a sardine can overstuffed by a madman. The noise level rose to the volume of a big gang fight in a small alley, but Rosswell couldn't find anyone actually shouting. Myriad normal conversations piled one on top of the other, ballooning into cacophony.
Pond-raised catfish was the special today. Hush puppy aroma made Rosswell drool. One of the fluorescent lights overhead popped with the sound of a New Year's Eve champagne bottle opening, then failed. A couple of the folks waiting to be seated jumped, gawked at the light, and laughed at a joke Rosswell couldn't quite hear.
"Mabel?" Rosswell tapped her on the shoulder as she rushed to and fro. "What's going on? You giving something away?"
Mabel blew out her mouth, holding her lips so the air whooshed straight up her face. The terminally ill air conditioner failed at keeping the place under eighty degrees. Still, it was better than the ninety-six degrees outside under a cloudless sky.
"Everything's gone nuts," she said.
"I can see that."
"It's all your fault."
Rosswell ran a few scenarios through his mind, sifting for one where he'd be found guilty of causing a crush of tourists to inundate Mabel's Eatery. Why was she irritated? That was the purpose, wasn't it? You open a business, you increase walk-in traffic, but you don't complain when you're successful at attracting paying customers. That was capitalism. Wasn't it? He gave up.
"What did I do wrong?"
"You sent my daddy off God knows where on a research assistant task. He won't answer his cell phone."
"Cell phone? When did he get a cell phone?"
"He got it this morning and I got not one, not two, but three busloads of starving Baby Boomers from Tupelo, Mississippi."
"Sorry." Rosswell slumped his shoulders. Where had he sent Ollie? He couldn't remember. After meeting Alessandra the night before, he'd excused himself and plodded to his bed, crashing into a sleep deep enough to drown him. He had, in fact, slept through his alarm.
"I'll go somewhere else."
When he turned to leave, Mabel grabbed his collar. "You're staying right here."
Women confused Rosswell. Mabel hated him because he killed her baby daddy, but she wouldn't let him leave her restaurant. He guessed she would make him stand in line for an hour before he got to eat lunch. It was part of his punishment.
"Judge, you and I have had our ups and downs." Rosswell nodded, yet said nothing, preferring to let Mabel take the lead. "That's in the past. This is in the now." She waved a hand at the throngs of people. "See that? I need your help. Two waitresses quit."
"Karyn and Jill?"
"They said they had to take their midwife tests. Thank God the cook is still here."
Rosswell tossed the dice. "We're okay, right? I mean, you and me."
"Yes."
Rosswell asked, "Now, what can I do?" at the same time he concluded that he and Mabel had resolved their rocky relationship. It was the best he could hope for. No need to jeopardize it by drawing it out. She said she wanted to be friends again, and Rosswell had said okay. Period. Even if. End of story. A curt explanation was what he got and he wasn't getting anything more.
Rosswell said, "I could ask a couple of the women at the courthouse if-"
"Here." Mabel thrust one of her aprons at him and forced a pencil and a ticket pad into his hands. "Write legibly and stick the ticket on the whirly when it's written." She showed him a lazy Susan device, hanging from the top of the shelf that opened into the kitchen. Waitresses slipped tickets under the clips on the whirly. Then the cook spun it, fetched the ticket, and fixed the order.
"Uh?okay." Rosswell wrapped her apron around his waist, finding he had enough to wrap it again, thanks to Mabel's increasingly large size.
"Be nice to the customers. You get half the tips. Put all the tips over there in that jar. We split them up at the end of each shift. Get the orders right." Mabel surveyed the filled tables. "Start there." She pointed to a table at the far end of the restaurant. "They've been waiting the longest." The man and woman sitting there didn't look happy.
When Rosswell reached the table, he was sweating. His palms hurt and he was short of breath. This was worse than sending someone to jail.
"Ready to order?"
The man said, "A half hour ago."
"Honey," the woman said to the man, "it's only been twenty-five minutes."
"Ready when you are." Rosswell poised the pencil above the ticket pad, smiled and waited.
I wait because I'm a waiter. "They also serve who only stand and wait." Thank you, Johnny Milton.
The woman said, "Could we have a couple of small glasses of water? No ice."
Rosswell rushed to the water station, retrieved two glasses of water and scampered back to the table.
The man frowned and held up the large glass. "We asked for small glasses with no ice. These are large glasses of water filled with ice. Ice dilutes the drink."
Oh, brother. Ice dilutes water?
Rosswell said, "They're on the house. Free refills, too."
The woman picked up the menu. "Give us a couple of more minutes."
After fifteen minutes, most of the people had food in front of them, calming the noise level.
"Dang," Mabel said behind Rosswell.
He whirled around. "Did I do something wrong?"
"You did everything right. You're more efficient than any waitress I've ever had."
Rosswell felt himself blushing. He was on the verge of fainting, having missed breakfast and being late for lunch. A ringing, no doubt due to his empty stomach, had started in his ears. The smell of the food had revved up his drooling into overdrive. Now, after having drooled himself to the depths of Sahara Desert dryness, his tongue felt like a package of sandpaper. Bright spots danced in front of his eyes like he'd stumbled into a herd of overactive lightning bugs. Sweat soaked his shirt.
"Thanks. I've never been a waitress before."
"I called Karyn and Jill, begging for their help. They'll be here any minute."
The county assessor, a fifty-something balding man folks called Betourne, and his deputy, a thirty-something balding man Rosswell didn't know, came in and sat at an empty table.
Mabel said, "Take care of those two and then you can leave. Or eat. You get a free meal."
Rosswell nodded, thinking that was what he needed to make his life worthwhile. More courthouse gossip about the alcoholic judge who waits on tables.
Mabel said, "Try not to shoot them."
