PART 1 — THE TRAY
Four hundred dollars is a dinner to some people. To me it is the electric, the phone, my brother’s bus pass and the food for a month.
I am twenty-one. I am two years into a course I am paying for myself and I put money into my mother’s account on the first of every month, and waiting tables at Haverly’s is how all of that works.
The money is all right. It is the people that vary.
On the Thursday I had a couple on table eleven, which is the corner booth by the service corridor.
Late thirties, both of them, extremely well turned out. They ordered without once looking at the right-hand side of the menu. Two starters, two steaks, a side each, cocktails before and a bottle at a hundred and forty.
Four hundred and eleven dollars and some change.
He asked for the check at about twenty to ten. I brought it, put it down in the tray, and went to deal with a nine-top that had been waiting eleven minutes.
When I came back about four minutes later the booth was empty.
So was the tray.
I went straight to Vaughn. I did not shout, I did not cry, I said the words in the right order.
And he did not go to the camera. He did not even look toward the office.
He put his hand out and said, “Tip book.”
I said, “Vaughn.”
And he took it out of the front pocket of my apron. In the dining room. On a Thursday at ten o’clock with about thirty covers still in.
And he said, loud enough for the near tables:
“Give me that. It comes out of tonight, Corrie. Your table, your problem — don’t make a scene on my floor.”
I had a hundred and sixty dollars in that book. It was a good night.
I did the rest of my shift. I finished at ten past one and I drove home and I sat in the car outside my mother’s house for about twenty minutes before I went in, because I was going to have to tell her the first was going to be short.
Then at eight the next morning he rang me.
Not the office phone. Him, personally, at eight in the morning, which that man has never done.
He said, “Can you come in now.”
I said, “I’m not on till four.”
