I’m a server at an Americanized Chinese restaurant. This is based on real experiences:
The news confirmed the first local cases on a Tuesday evening, but Nel and Caroline read the news on Wednesday. Nel’s fingers throbbed from the wrong weight of bowling ball as his phone buzzed relentlessly with message after panicked message until he silenced it completely and sat like a Rodin sculpture in the neon flicker of the fourth lane, pondering the development and its consequences. Caroline was on her feet at the time. She wore black socks that were too tight and blacker shoes with frayed laces. Her apron carried a stain from the night before, and her black shirt sported an undefeatable breast wrinkle and the faintest dusting of dandruff. The dining room, growing quieter morning by morning, hadn’t seen a a table within the first half hour after opening. The take out orders rang off the hook, though. Caroline received the news from her parents in urgent capitol letters: “TWO CASES OF CORONAVIRUS. ONE COUNTY OVER! BUY SANTIZER!!”
The host sat Caroline’s first guests near the largest window with the brightest glare, which they faced away from (effectively obscuring themselves in shadow.)
“Good morning, friends,” Caroline greeted them. “Is it anyone’s first time at a Lee Family Kitchen?”
The guests flipped their menus backwards and frontwards with dismay as if it were the front page of a newspaper. Then they studied the table, looked underneath it, and then stared with pleading eyes back at Caroline. “Have any of your cooks been to China recently??”
Caroline could not even feign surprise. She’d been asked that question twice in the past two weeks. She wanted to respond by saying that only one back of house employee at Lee’s Family Kitchen was actually Asian and that none of them could afford such a trip even if management deigned to let them clock out long enough to take it. Instead, she smiled and found a way to shake her head and nod it simultaneously, “None of our cooks, no.”
Her guests shared a cartoonish sigh of relief. “You can’t be too safe!”
“No, I’m sure you can’t,” Caroline agreed. Her pen pressed intently against the pad in her server book. “Now, are we in the mood for a signature mai tai or one of our non-alcoholic made-from-scratch options?”
“Just waters with lemon,” they insisted. “And you haven’t been on a cruise ship recently, have you?”
“I promise, if I could afford to take a cruise, I wouldn’t have come to work today.” This Caroline said out loud, but with enough dry charm that her guests laughed obliviously along with her. They sat at that table for an hour after they finished eating and tipped her four dollars on thirty.
Caroline almost met the president once — the good one.
The lights in Lee’s Family Kitchen flickered like props in a haunted house. It was never the same light fixtures. One day the bar would flicker. Another afternoon, the server station. For a week or two, there’d be no trouble at all. On this particular morning, the lights over the host stand and in the hallway to the bathroom alternated flickers like a spectral conversation.
Caroline could have learned Morse code in middle school.
Nel arrived at work with his shirt untucked and rushed to the back of the restaurant faster than he’d ever greeted a table. He hung his jacket beside Caroline’s but not before stealing a breath mint from her inside pocket. She hid them inside a half-empty pack of condoms along with her lighter and an extra hair tie. Nel zipped the pocket back, snagging his finger in the process. Maybe the managers would send him home early. He could go next door with whatever cash was convalescing in his wallet and do shots with the morally dubious new bartender, or he could buy toilet paper before the grocery stores stopped carrying it altogether, or he could order a bidet. Nel clocked in five minutes late.
The line cooks argued with the sous chef over sauce consistency and how much chili paste belonged in “extra spicy.” Meanwhile, ticket times doubled. The smell of fish oil permeated the server line as an order of pad thai overcooked in the wok. Caroline sniffed her own sleeve for relief. She smelled like cigarettes and hand lotion. Nel, whose clothes didn’t smell of anything, walked innocently to the host stand where the aroma had yet to venture and stood where he could greet guests with a bright and smiling face were any soul to walk through the door.
Coronavirus spooked suburbanites like a snowstorm. Lee’s Family Kitchen stood at the entrance to an enormous mall, and the mall was like a modern Colosseum – once an arena for slaughter, now a lonely prison for its retail champions. If Nel left early, he’d run inside and buy new jeans. There was a sale. There were several.
A middle-aged couple sat the bar with their own squirt-top bottle of hand sanitizer. They wiped their menus with it. Caroline imagined all the ways they might contract the coronavirus without it ever touching their hands. Their straws, their forks, the collars of their shirts, their hair, their lips, their pillows at home all glowed in her mind’s eye like sadistic Green Lantern creations.
Half-way through her double, and she’d barely passed fifty dollars. “But no face-masks yet,” Caroline noted to herself. Maybe by the end of the week?
The manager called the staff to the tea station — out of the guests’ earshot.
“Alright, everybody, I know it’s been a slow week, but I think we’re gonna have a great shift.” He believed himself, no matter how dryly he spoke. “We need to keep pushing our non-alcoholic specials.” He looked pointedly at Nel. “And we need to get those cocktail sales up, too. Sell wine, sell cocktails, but sell those non-alcoholic drinks, too!”
“How are the hot tea sales?” an older server asked.
“Those are up, but all of our cocktails are down.”
“What about sake?” Caroline asked.
“Sake is up, too, but our cold drinks need work.”
“It’s the first week of March,” Nel added. “It’s cold.”
The manager ignored him. “Make sure we’re mentioning specific made-from-scratch drinks at the table.”
Caroline watched the host lead a pair of guests to one of her tables. The guests looked around the table as if for a camera or mood lightning and then pointed to the opposite side of the restaurant.
“We’ve got some more changes to the menu,” the manager continued. “We are no longer serving donuts.”
“The ones we introduced three months ago?”
“That’s right,” the manger confirmed as Caroline watched the host take her guests to a spacious booth in the far corner of the dining room at which they immediately crossed their hands at as though it were possessed. The host guarded herself with their menus as she followed them timidly across the restaurant back to Caroline’s section where they selected a table only two away from their original rejection. “Chef also told me that we can definitely not make orange sauce anymore,” the manager continued, “and we cannot use the sichuan sauce to make the sichuan beef since it’s not on the menu. And we are still 86’ed our Japanese lager.”
“When will we be getting more?” a new server asked.
“Someone has to order it,” he answered.
“Don’t you place the bar orders?” Nel pointed out, but the manager apparently didn’t hear him.
Caroline left the alley rally without ceremony and met her guests at their chosen table as soon as they settled.
“Do you still have the orange shrimp?” they asked before she could so much as open her mouth. “We don’t see it on the menu.”
The truth fell from Caroline’s lips like a time of death.
Their eyes pleaded. “And the beef sichuan?”
“Can I recommend honey shrimp?” Caroline asked. “And the Mongolian beef?”
The guests looked at each other, then at Caroline, then at each other again, and then they stood up and left.
At the end of the night, Caroline clocked out with a little over a hundred dollars. Nel left long before her with an uncertain amount that he spent immediately on shots next door. He was drunk already when she found him.
“Did you go through my box of condoms?” Caroline asked him as he offered her his tequila.
“Someone had to,” Nel chuckled.
The news pestered everyone from above the bar. The first local cases of COVID-19 were in self-quarantine, and the stores were out of hand sanitizer.
The Favoring Wind 