EVER SINCE THE Rambo incident, Dino had been acting sort of hostile toward me. He smiled like he hated me. He was always saying how good I looked and how I should marry him. Instead of saying “Smile” every morning, he’d started saying, “You sure look healthy, Momma.”
“Let’s get married,” he’d say about three times a day.
“I don’t want to get married, Dino.”
“Oh, come on, Mrs. Monroe.”
He called me “Mrs. Monroe” because his name was Dino Monroe.
“I need a good wife.”
“Good luck,” I’d say three times a day. “Because a good wife is hard to find.”
Charlotte had left three bruises on the insides of my thighs and she’d scratched my cunt so that it stung every time I pissed. It was hard to walk around that restaurant all day because the welts would rub and then start to bleed.
“What’s that between your legs?” Dino finally said.
I had to stop serving the blue plate specials and tell him straight to his face.
“Dino, be polite, man, because I want to like you. Be my friend, okay?”
Then he shut up for a minute but came right back to the marriage rap.
Momma was still doing her routine. But since she was too cheap to replace Rambo, she’d started working the register herself. Only she was practically blind, so she’d ask each customer how much the check was and how big a bill they were paying with. When it came time to go to the bank, she’d roll up the deposit in a paper bag and stick it in her girdle before waddling off. Theat’s when we’d eat the corned beef.
One day, who comes into the place but Rambo himself. He was weirder than usual, unsettlingly calm. He had the collar of his jacket turned up and the visor of his baseball cap pulled down and he smoked Lucky Strikes very quietly, staring at the ashtray. None of the crew said anything to him. I had to talk to him, though, because I was his waitress.
So I said, “Coffee?”
And he nodded.
Herbie’s is one of those places that rich people think are quaint and the poorest people are always welcomed. Anyone who can scrape together one dollar and sixty cents for the breakfast special will be served. It’s not the kind of place that anyone gets thrown out of. Even if they can’t pay the check, we just let them leave. That’s what dive coffee shops are for. So no one thought to throw Rambo out. He just drank and smoked and thought things over.
“Look at that poor boy. He can’t get a job,” Joe whispered in the kitchen. I nodded. Most of the crew couldn’t get a good job anywhere else. That’s why they were all working at Herbie’s. Take Joe, for example. Joe is a great chef and a good guy, but he’s from Saint Kitts and he doesn’t know how to read, so we have to pretend that he can. I put up all my checks with the orders clearly written, hanging on the line, and Joe stares at them all day long, checking back and forth every once in a while. But all the time I’m whispering, “Chopped sirloin, mashed, and string. Burger well, L and T.”
Joe wouldn’t last a minute in a fancier place. They’d get someone who knows how to read. He was right about Rambo. The guy probably couldn’t find anything else and had to come in to ask for his job back. Joe bet me a joint. He’d get it too.
After a whole hour, Rambo got up and kind of shuffled to the bathroom. The back of his pants were dirty and stained. I could tell he’d been sleeping out on the street, really falling apart and punishing himself.
Rambo would have to hate himself and give up everything he believed in to crawl back to Herbie’s and beg Momma for a job. She looked at him conspicuously over her glasses.
“You look like a bum,” she said, too loud. “I can’t take you back looking like a bum.”
That did it. I would have done the same thing in his place at the same moment. I mean, I don’t like Rambo, but to turn someone down before they ask, when they’re just thinking about asking, takes away their dignity to make the decision to ask by themselves. It was unnecessarily gross. When Rambo blew his cool, he did the weirdest thing. He stared at Momma and then he turned around and jumped behind the counter. He leaped, like they do in basic training, and grabbed a big prep knife. He stood there, in battle, pausing for a moment to remember where he was and then plunged the knife into Dino’s arm. There was blood everywhere. The customers started screaming and Rambo started running and Joe rushed over to Dino while Momma called the police. In the middle of this, I stood in the corner of the restaurant and thought, Why Dino?
Then I realized. It’s just too damn hard sometimes to give up on somebody. Momma was his boss, telling him what to do for three years. All that time, Rambo had been phony polite to her every day. He couldn’t let go of that. Somewhere inside, he thought he still needed her. That’s why Rambo took it out on one of us. On Dino. On someone just like him.
Then I went over to Dino. His apron was covered with blood and he was looking old and shaking but he didn’t say anything. Not even a moan or cry. He just tried to keep it all together by thinking about other things. The ambulance came and the cops came and when everything was cleaned up and settled down, Joe and me were the only ones left in the store. Eventually new customers started coming in again, looking for menus, not knowing about anything that had gone on before. So Joe and I looked each other in the eye, he heaved a sigh, and we started working again—me taking orders and him cooking them up.