In the morning, she had to fight comfort. She woke up well-rested and with Parth’s warmth on her side. The comforter wasn’t too thick, the outside air wasn’t too hot, and she had to fight to leave bed.
When she showered, she had to fight not to stay under the refreshing, almost-cool water.
After her second cup of coffee, she had to fight the urge to make a third.
When Parth jokingly offered to play her some new songs on his acoustic, she had to fight how much she wanted to hear some stripped-down demos.
Pulling on her jacket, she had to fight the urge to tell Parth about Melissa taking her to get an amulet, and how much she couldn’t believe the jacket actually felt like an amulet.
Leaving, she forgot her sunglasses, and had to fight the sun.
But she made it to work on time.
—
Before she could even get through the dining room, before she could set her stuff down in her locker downstairs, before could even think about clocking in, Amparo had a hand on her arm and was speaking in a hushed voice.
“Did you hear?” Amparo asked.
“I just got here?” Mara said.
“You need to go to your locker?”
“That’s my first stop.”
Amparo guided her, as if Mara didn’t know the basement existed. They were barely on the stairs when the news came spilling out of Amparo like a sliced-open soda bib.
“Gerry was murdered,” she said. “Stabbed to death. In the alley behind here, a few doors down. Stabbed something like 30 or 40 times, they said. Then the killer stuffed him in the trunk of his car. Left the car there in the alley. Threw away the key, no one’s found that yet. The cops had to pry the trunk open because it started smelling bad.”
“Oh my God,” Mara said. “Oh my God.” She tried to keep her breathing even. Fought off the feeling that she was cursed, fought off the feeling that Death itself was following her around.
“If you look in the back the cops are still there,” Amparo said.
Mara couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen flashing lights when she came in. Must’ve been too wrapped up in thinking about Parth, too wrapped up in music. She felt stupid for letting her guard down.
“I feel cursed,” Mara said. “I feel like Death itself is following me around.”
Amparo pulled her in for a hug. “You’ve had some mal suerte lately, it’s true.”
“Amparo?” Maria’s voice called from the top of the stairs. “Mesa cinco tiene su cuenta, mami.”
Okay, time to go work, I guess, Mara thought, grisly images of a covered-in-stab-wounds Gerry flashing across her mind. She hadn’t even thought to ask when it happened. Gerry had been in Olly’s two nights ago. He owned half the block and lived two buildings down. Had he been murdered the same night he’d stormed into the kitchen and yelled at Tommy? Or had some knife-wielding murderer been stalking their shared alley on some other night?
Or, more pressingly: did Table 16 need anything to drink besides coffee?
Did Booth 21 want any Cholula or Tapatio?
Was Table 13 ready to order?
Mara tried to work her tables as normally as possible. Customers were reasonably agreeable. Yet every time she saw someone walk past the window, she wondered if they were a murderer. Any movement out of the corner of her eye made her flinch. Images of crime scenes, black-and-white photos of sliced-up bodies, blood looking like spilled ink in newspaper photos, kept flashing across her mind.
Mercifully, after lunch, something shook Mara out of her own thoughts.
“Hey, Mara,” Martín called. “Can you come to dry storage?”
She had just finished bussing a table—Maria was deep-cleaning the reach-ins and Mara felt like doing a favor for Luis—and her only customers were a couple talking leisurely and picking cubed potatoes off of nearly-empty plates. It was prime special project time.
“We had to combine dry storage and server stock into one area,” Martín said. “I need you and Tommy here to organize. Figure out what goes where, what’s shared, what’s for kitchen, what’s for front of house. You know.”
“Hey Mara,” Tommy waved with his elbow resting on a mop bucket. He had a thick bandage wrapped around one hand.
“Sure, can I close out Table 14 first, or you want me on this now?” Mara asked.
“I’ll close 14 out,” Martín said. “Is it just 14 you have?”
Mara almost laughed to herself, wishing she could saddle Martín’s shy ass with table after table. “Yeah, just 14.”
Tommy and Mara set to work. Mara picked up a box of paper towels, put it in the middle of what she in her head deemed the server’s side. Tommy hefted a 20-pound bag of potatoes, put it on the shelf six inches off the ground, and started adding bags of onions. They worked like that, each on the side in front of them, occasionally shrugging at each other when a case of honey or whatever could be a shared item appeared. Those boxes went in the middle, everything else fanned out, and before they knew it, what seemed like a huge task had devolved into a tedious one.
“Your hand okay?” Mara asked.
“Oh,” Tommy said. “This, ah. Burned it. Real bad. At home, lifting a pan out of the oven—my oven is a little shorter than ours here, yeah? So. Hand, meet broiler.”
“Yikes, dude.” Mara got the feeling Tommy didn’t want to talk about his injury. Like it wounded his fragile line cook pride or whatever. For some reason she couldn’t name, Mara felt like Tommy was bullshitting.
“How was it on the floor tonight?” Tommy asked. “Anyone too wild out there?”
“Oh, you know,” Mara said. “A good song has quiet parts and loud parts.”
“No one I need to—what? Punch out in the mosh pit? To defend the honor of my good friend Mara?”
“Nah, the, uh, mosh pit is all homies. Plus, who’re you punching with that hand?”
“Oh this? Just a burn,” Tommy said, a little too quickly.
Mara was used to white boy cooks talking like they were one horse away from knighthood. Let a guy wear baggy pants, play with knives, and drink on the job, and he inevitably starts thinking he’s part pirate, part tavern poet.
“One guy did ask for scrambled eggs instead of poached on a Beni,” Mara offered.
“Excuse me?” Tommy said.
Laughter was leaking as Mara told him “yeah he said he knew it was weird but he just liked the taste of hollandaise with scrambled eggs and smoked salmon I was like dude.”
“People never cease to amaze,” Tommy said.
“I got you, though,” Mara said. She was trying to jam spare server books between two boxes. “I remembered, you know. That night with Gerry. I wasn’t even going to fake-ask you for substitution. I wanted to spare you.”
Tommy set down the box of onions he was holding. The box must’ve nicked his hand, because he winced and held it for a second. “God, Gerry. What an asshole.” Tommy looked hard at a stainless steel pan. Shook his head. “You hear what happened to him?”
“They’re saying maybe murder?”
“That is the suspicion, I’m sad to report. Right down the alley. Didn’t even make it to his garage.”
“Damn,”
“You know the thing about guys like Gerry?” Tommy’s look hardened, his neck clenched. “You can get so much in life if you’re just not an asshole. If you’re just not so narrow-minded, your tastes so stuck in that time in fourth grade when your mom took you to Smith & Wollensky but still cut your steak for you, the way that kind of fucked-up psychosexual shit is probably going on with these types of guys, you know what I’m saying, if you’re just not an asshole, I can maybe do a substitution for you, I can maybe add barbecue sauce to whatever, but these guys, their entitlement just radiates off them like they’re Bikini Atoll, you can feel it all the way back in the kitchen, these guys thinking they’re lord of the restaurant.”
“Totally,” Mara said.
“And it’s like, I even—I mean,” Tommy exhaled. He stopped and stared, then his face softened into something like resignation. “Years ago, I was working at this Chili’s out in the burbs. My first job, actually. Started as a busser and dishwasher, worked up to the grill. We had this regular. Autistic guy. Real sweet dude, real nice. He just had super particular tastes. He liked his burgers with mustard and onions only. He liked his fries precisely one extra minute in the fryer, so whoever was on the fryer would scoop out his order and dunk it for him. We did accommodations like that. For him.”
“That’s awesome,” Mara said.
“The thing about his order that changed was what kind of cheese he wanted. He’d rotate American, cheddar, Swiss. He’d keep it in his head, too, which kind he’d had last time. One time, it was Swiss time, but we were out of Swiss. Server came back, said Owen—that was his name—was freaking out, like rocking in his seat. Not disturbing anyone, just rocking back and forth, muttering something. So I sent the server out there, said to tell Owen to wait five minutes. There was a CVS in the strip mall a block over. It was basically Chernobyl, I mean, nothing was ever on the shelves, people shooting up in the dumpster area, someone left a Chevy in the parking lot and it became a vagrant hotel for a whole year. But hey, Owen’s freaking out, maybe I can do something to help. I ran out on a quote-unquote smoke break—cursing myself for not wearing a hazmat suit, stepping over discarded needle after discarded crack pipe, and they have exactly two blocks of Swiss cheese. And exactly one block that wasn’t moldy.”
“Amazing,” Mara said.
“Long story short, Owen got his Swiss cheese burger, I didn’t need a tetanus shot, and it’s just not hard to do nice things for nice people. But it’s never nice people who want things. It’s guys like Gerry.”
Mara set a couple bottles of cleaner in the middle of the shelf. The story did make her smile, even if Tommy was getting worked up. She wondered if she’d been wrong to suspect him. He was a weird guy, Tommy. Could give off creepy vibes. But maybe he was just passionate. Then again, Tommy worked up? Not someone she wanted to be in the room with.
“Guys like Gerry—lemme tell you, we had a guy like Gerry at that Chili’s, the GM, actually. Let’s just say I am glad I work for Martín now. Shit, I’d go to war for Martín. This GM, though. This GM was so racist, he called everyone in the kitchen but me ‘José.’ Dead serious. Swear on my life. Called everyone ‘José.’ Unbelievable. Then one day, he was gone. The GM, I mean. Gone. Without a trace, you might say. There was a new GM. Everyone moved on, acted like nothing had happened. Like the new GM wasn’t different. Honestly, he didn’t seem much different. I don’t know. I didn’t stick around for two weeks after that. I didn’t stick around to find out if that new GM would just vanish without a trace either.”
Mara put down a box of to-go bags. “Wait so he just up and left? Or like he disappeared disappeared? You don’t know what happened to him?”
“Nah, he was gone. Wasn’t too long before I moved into the city, either.”
That’s two restaurants where some shady shit happened to someone and then you bounced, Mara’s whole body was screaming. Somehow, she managed to say: “Sounds like the world needs more Owens and less Gerrys.”
“See, this is why I like you,” Tommy said. He gestured to a 5 lb can of ketchup. “Where you want this? We don’t use this shit except for the meatloaf.”
“Yeah, but then you just steal one of the bottles that we have to refill,” Mara said.
Tommy laughed. “You and me, we see the world the same. What else is there to say—fuck ketchup.”
—
On the bus, Mara texted Melissa. Had to do a special organizing project with that one cook today.
The one whose last day at Lilypad was the day someone got murdered? Melissa asked.
Yeah. He told me the GM at his old Chili’s disappeared, too.
At the stop, an old woman with a cart, two goth teenagers, and three Cubs fans got on. Someone had smoked weed recently, and someone had a general booze stink wafting off of them. The bus screeched and groaned, its air conditioner working hard.
Wait a second I think I heard about something like that. What suburb? Wait, doesn’t matter.
Mara wasn’t sure how to respond. Her leg was tapping. She’d been fine around Tommy, but now her insides were a rolling boil. She hugged her jacket around herself. Some amulet, she typed and then deleted without sending.
Okay, so, my cousin used to work at this Chili’s, Melissa texted, and the rumor was the GM got murdered. One day he was gone and no one ever said anything.
Okay Tommy definitely said that no one ever said anything, Mara wrote back. Didn’t say anything about murder.
Probably because he did it! LOL
Mara looked up at the right time. Her stop was after the next light. She yanked the chord, stood. Her legs shook under her and she grabbed the handrail. Shook her head.
One of the goth teenagers was looking at her. They had a look of terror, like there was a ghost behind Mara or something. Mara turned and made for the front of the bus with long, steady strides.
When she got to the front, the old woman with the cart looked up at her. “Forgot your sea legs today?” and she laughed an open-mouth laugh. Her teeth were half gold and her breath was made of gin. Mara felt dizzy again.
Before she could get off the bus, one of the Cubs fans pushed past her, ran into an alley, and splashed vomit into the ringing, echoing space between two metal dumpsters. His friends stayed seated, laughing.
Mara stepped off the bus. Watched it lumber off, wondered if she should help the Cubs fan. But there he was again, adjusting his hat, a little off-kilter, but clean.
“Next bus in six minutes, if you’re going to the game,” he said.
Mara walked to her apartment as though the air had obstacles, tree branches she couldn’t see but felt, the phantom feeling of flies landing on her arms. Climbing the stairs felt like hiking. When she put the key in the lock, she didn’t know what she expected to find. For some reason, though, she didn’t expect things to be normal.
Couch. Coffee table. TV. Kitchen counter. Chicken in the fridge note on the fridge. The blanket over her mom’s recliner, folded neatly, TV tray set off to the side, pill bottles on an end table and an ambitious pile of to-be-read books.
Mara took cold chicken and a bag of dried mangoes into her room. Sat down at her laptop. Without realizing she was doing it, typed Chili’s manager murdered Chicago suburbs into a search bar.
Almost everything that came up was unrelated, newspaper headlines sharing one word of what she typed. One Reddit thread stuck out, though. A poster told the story more or less exactly as Melissa had told it, to r/unsolvedChicago: my old boss at Chili’s was super racist dude. Called everyone in the kitchen José. Like ok I’m from Mexico but we got other names down there. Anyway my old boss disappeared one day. Replaced with a new GM, no one ever said anything. Rumor was, the racist guy got murdered. Another cook said his cousin was an EMT and he said that the guy’s head got bashed in with a brick. But no one at work ever said anything.
Mara sat in her bed, computer propped on a pillow in front of her, grinding a dried mango down to nothing with her molars. Her eyes were reading and her teeth were chewing, but the rest of her body felt detached. She sat frozen.
Tommy flashed through her mind. That night at Jimmy’s Pub. Miming hitting a guy with a brick.
No. She couldn’t do that. Did she work with a killer? No way. Part of her brain was screaming that it was Tommy, Tommy had killed his old GM at Chili’s, Tommy had killed John at Lilypad, Tommy had killed Gerry. Another part of her brain wouldn’t let those thoughts in, wouldn’t let her believe it.
What evidence did she really have? A few unconnected stories. Weird mannerisms from Tommy, who was a weird guy. Stringy limbs, too-intense eyes. Martín talked about how great he was in the kitchen. There was no way. Cooks did drugs, they drank, they slept around, they maybe schemed about being TV stars, but murder?
Mara looked at her screen again. Clicked out of the tab. She couldn’t let herself think this about a coworker, it wasn’t fair. She ate another mango strip, and it didn’t make her feel better.