Page 45 of The Maverick
Priya was at the server station when I came in through the back, and she turned around and pointed at me with both index fingers the way people pointed at someone they'd been waiting for, and said, "There she is," loud enough that Marco from the kitchen leaned out of the pass-through to see who she was talking about.
"There who is?" I said.
"The one who played today." She fell into step beside me as I hung up my coat and tied on my apron. "Rebecca, three separate tables asked Luis if you'd be here tonight. Three. One of them left their card."
I stopped tying. "Their card?”
"Business card. It's at the host stand. Luis has it."
I didn't know what to do with that, so I finished tying my apron and went to find Luis.
He was at the bar going over the reservation sheet and he looked up when I came over with the expression of a man whohad been vindicated about something and was being gracious enough not to say so directly.
"Before you say anything," I began.
"I'm not saying anything."
"You have that face."
"I have my regular face." He slid a business card across the bar. "A woman at table twelve asked me to give you this. She said—" he glanced at a notepad— "she said she produces a podcast about Southern musicians and she'd like to have a conversation."
I looked at the card. I didn't pick it up yet.
"Okay," I said.
"Rebecca."
"I know."
"Do you?"
I picked up the card and put it in my apron pocket and looked at him. "Thank you for letting me play today. Genuinely."
He waved it off. "You saved my lunch service. I should be thanking you." He paused, in the way Luis paused when he was about to say something he'd already decided but wanted to deliver carefully. "I'm making next month's schedule at the end of the week. I'd like to put you on it. Two lunch sets, maybe a dinner. In addition to your regular shifts, if you want them."
Something moved in my chest. Slow and warm, like the first real heat of a fire that had been trying to catch.
"The pay would be the same as today?" I said, because I needed to know, because the math was always there, because I was the kind of woman who asked.
"Same rate. Plus tips."
A hundred and fifty dollars a set. Two sets, maybe three. On top of my regular shifts.
I did the math fast and quiet, the way I always did, and the number I came up with was one I hadn't ever seen. The kindof number that had a cushion in it. The kind that meant when the heat ran long in February or the guitar needed a new set of strings, I wouldn't have to hold my breath.
"Yes," I said. "Absolutely yes."
Luis nodded, satisfied. "Good. Now, go work. Table six has been waiting ten minutes and they look like the kind of people who track that."
I went.
The dinner service was the best shift I'd worked since I'd come to Charleston.
Not because it was easy—it wasn't, it was a full house and the kitchen was backed up on the risotto and table nine changed their order twice—but because of the way the room felt toward me. There was a warmth in it that hadn't been there before.
People who'd been at lunch looked up when I passed their tables and said things likethere she isandwe heard you play earlier, honey, you were just wonderful, and I took each one of them in the way I was learning to take compliments—not deflecting entirely, not drowning in them, just a quietthank youand a real smile and moving on before my face could do the embarrassing thing.
Priya found me in the server station between courses and said, low and genuine, "Proud of you, Bec." Just that. She didn't make it a bigger thing, which was exactly the right size for it.
