Friday evening, I put on my good blouse, had my sister do my hair, and walked right up to that front door, first time in thirty years I ever came in the front, and I asked the girl at the stand for a table for one.
She sat me in the window. I have never once sat in that dining room. I have looked at the back of it through a plate window the size of a shoebox since 1995.
I ordered the fish. I paid for it.
It took the line about four minutes to find out I was out there.
Then Manny came out of that kitchen in his whites with his hands still wet and shook my hand at the table. Then Trey. Then the two new boys who I only worked with a year, and then Dale, who has been on that grill since 2001 and who is not a hugger, and who hugged me in front of a full dining room and went back in without saying anything.
Six of them, in the middle of a Friday, at a party. The rail backed up like it does when I am out sick, right about seven, same as always.
The nephew was at the front door in a blazer and did not know what to do with any of it.
But Royce was there. Royce Dunning owns that building and that name and he is seventy-one and he drove up from Branson for the party, and he came and sat down across from me with his hat in his hands.
Then he took me back through the kitchen to the dish pit, which he had not seen since the remodel, and the painters had rolled primer over the wall behind the sink.
You could still read it through the primer. His father painted it there in 1979 with a brush, and every person who has stood in that pit for forty-six years has read it about ten thousand times.
This room is the top of this kitchen and not the bottom. Nothing goes out that line that did not come out of here first, and whoever is standing in this spot tonight is the reason we open tomorrow.
Royce stood there with his thumb on it for a while.
He had it scraped and repainted in the same brush lettering by a sign man out of Springfield, and it cost him four hundred dollars, and he made his nephew watch it get done.
The nephew is not fired. He is at the Republic store learning the front of the house from a woman named Iva who does not put up with one thing.
I did not go back to that pit. I am sixty-one and my hands are what they are.
I am kitchen manager on days now. Real money, a chair in the office, and I hire the dish crew myself, and there are three of them and I taught every one of them where to stand and why.
He told me anyone can spray a plate. His grandfather painted the answer to that on a wall in 1979 and it was six feet behind him under a coat of primer the whole time he was saying it.