Sunday morning I got up at 4:40 like I have for twenty-six years, put on my uniform, the old one, the real one, drove down there, walked in, and asked for a table by the windows.
My section. I sat in my own section as a paying customer at seven o’clock in the morning.
By eight that line was out the door and around toward the bank, exactly like she wanted, and by eight fifteen it had stopped moving.
You cannot run twenty-six years of regulars with four servers who have been there nine days. Marv does not order. Ruthie Pankow does not order. The deputies coming off nights do not order, and one of them has a shellfish thing that could put him in the hospital, and none of that is on a ticket anywhere.
The girl working my section was twenty-two and she was drowning and she started to cry by the register.
So I got out my purse.
I have carried a copy of that card folded in my wallet since 2006. The original is laminated and it was taped inside the server station cabinet, and the remodel crew put that cabinet in a dumpster in April.
Forty-one names. Table, drink, order, and one thing you ought to know. Marv, table six, coffee black, wheat toast dry, and his wife passed in March so do not ask about her unless he brings her up first.
Verlene Meeks started that card in 1999 and trained me on it, and she gave it to me in 2003 when she got sick, and her handwriting is still the top three lines.
Bluebonnet regulars. Learn them. A person who has to say their order out loud in their own hometown is being served and not welcomed, and anybody can serve. Add to it, and hand it on.
I did not get up and work. I want to be honest, because the version going around town has me tying an apron on and I did not.
I sat at that table and I read that card out loud to a twenty-two-year-old girl, table by table, while she wrote on her pad, and it took eleven minutes, and she got that room fed.
Miss Ashton stood at the end of the counter for the whole eleven minutes.
She came to my table at eleven when it cleared. She is twenty-nine. She did not apologize well and she did apologize, and she asked me what she was supposed to do now, which is not a thing you ask somebody you called the before picture.
I told her to buy a laminator.
I am back on days. Same section, and I would not take a different one. She raised the whole floor a dollar seventy-five in June and I did not ask her to and neither did anybody else.
The card is retyped and there are eleven copies, one in every apron on that floor, and it is on the training checklist, and it is up to fifty-three names because the new girls have been adding.
Verlene’s three lines are printed at the top of every one of them.
She said I came with the building, like the grease. She was closer to right than she knew. The building is the part you can remodel.