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Tia had spent most of her down time at the restaurant this week working on the motion for sanctions in the Axel Equipment case. Now, at one o’clock on Friday afternoon, she saved her work on her laptop and headed downstairs to make lunch for herself and her part-time waitress.
She turned on one of the ovens and slipped on her apron, and she was washing her hands when her waitress, Renata, entered the kitchen and began gesturing excitedly.
“You won't believe this, boss!" Renata whispered. "We've finally got some lunch customers! Six of them!"
"Really?" Tia asked. "But I didn't hear anybody come in. I usually hear voices when people enter the restaurant."
"Well, they're here. Five white people and one black woman. They look like they might be office workers. I put them at a table in the main dining room and gave them some menus, and I told them I'd be back in a few minutes to take their orders."
Tia was tempted to peek into the main dining room to take a look, but managed to restrain herself. The last thing she wanted to do was scare them away with unprofessional behavior. "Why don't you go ahead and take their orders?" she told Renata. "But tell them our lunch special for the day is a chicken platter that comes with a choice of either oven-fried or barbecue chicken, plus collard greens, yams, macaroni and cheese, and cornbread muffins. And quote them a price of two dollars less than what's on the menu. That way, maybe they'll all order the special and it won't take me as long to prepare their meals."
As soon as Renata left, Tia quickly slipped pans of oven-fried chicken, barbecue chicken and macaroni and cheese into the preheated oven. She pulled containers of pre-prepared collard greens and glazed yams from the refrigerators, dumping them into separate pots which she placed on the stove to heat up. Then, just for good measure, she added pots filled with string beans and dirty rice to the stove and turned on her second oven.
As she began filling two muffin tins with cornbread batter, she couldn't help wishing that her food had already been simmering when the customers came in. This was a restaurant, after all, and your average person would expect to smell the aroma of food wafting in from the kitchen.
She slipped the muffin tins into the second oven and reminded herself that she was doing the best she could under difficult circumstances. Becoming a daily donor of meals to the homeless shelter again simply wasn't an option. Not if she wanted to stay in business.
When Renata returned with the orders, Tia was relieved to find that five of the customers had requested the so-called lunch special—two with barbecue chicken and three with oven-fried chicken. The final person had asked for cornmeal-crusted catfish with macaroni and cheese, collard greens, and cornbread.
Thank God for small miracles. Tia headed to the refrigerators for the catfish. Within the space of twenty minutes, she had prepared the meals and passed them along to Renata. She put a sweet potato pie and a pan of cinnamon apple dumplings into one of the ovens. Then she waited another ten minutes before slipping off her apron and heading to the main dining room to greet her customers.
"Thank you for choosing Tia's Place," she said with a friendly smile as she approached their table. "I'm Tia Jacobs, the owner. And I just wanted to stop by to make sure that everything's okay."
"Everything's wonderful," said an attractive white woman with pretty green eyes and a short cap of curly, black hair. Her companions echoed their agreement. "We were actually on our way to The Takoma Café," the woman said, referring to a deli establishment several blocks away. "But we decided to stop here instead."
"And it's a good thing we did," the sole black woman of the group chimed in. "I can't wait to tell my girlfriends about this place. I haven't had catfish this good in years."
Tia smiled, fully aware that all the marketing in the world couldn't make up for word-of-mouth referrals. "Well, I'm happy that everything's to your satisfaction," she said, making brief eye contact with each of her customers. "If you need anything else, please let Renata know."
As it turned out, nobody ordered dessert. But Tia gave them a styrofoam container filled with cinnamon apple dumplings to go anyway. “On the house,” she said.
After her customers left, Tia shared a late lunch of leftover chicken, dirty rice and string beans with Renata. But Tia was too excited to eat much of anything. When Yvonne arrived with B.J. close on her heels, Tia put them to work and headed upstairs for a smoke break.
Back in her office, she came face-to-face with the Axel Equipment motion that she’d forgotten in the excitement of the afternoon. Oh, who gave a shit? She’d just have to finish it over the weekend. Her restaurant was slowly beginning to catch on. That was the important thing. And if she was lucky, maybe she'd even have a repeat of the near capacity dinner crowds she'd seen on the last few Friday nights.