Here and Now

Chapter 1

Here and Now

People grieve in different ways. Some grieve forever, some never grieve at all. Some grieve for attention, some grieve in denial. And some, but very few, grieve but no one else knows it.

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Chapter One

Work. A place where you can make money by serving somebody else. But every time you go somewhere, you also have to pay money to be served. The amount of money you pay, depends on the level of service. Personally, I think it's jacked up. While the money is nice, I hate it that other people tell me how good I am at serving them by giving me money. Like a stripper. If they leave you a good tip, you're good. If they leave you a bad tip, it could mean a number of things. You could get a bad tip because they didn't have enough cash on them or because they don't know how to properly tip. You could also get a bad tip because while your service to them was good, the rest wasn't. And then, of course, it could just be your service.

Every single day that I go to work, I think on all of these things. Like one day, for instance, a guy left me a really good tip. And the table next to him, which I gave the same amount of attention to, left a totally disgraceful tip. And for the rest of the day, I just kept wondering what I did wrong. Or maybe I didn't do anything wrong, they just usually tip bad. I started getting so self conscious, that with every table, I started becoming over baring with my attention. Waitressing, I tell you, is for the birds.

I work at a gourmet Chinese restaurant in Hemphill, Texas. It's basically the only restaurant in the city that doesn't have typical "American" food. Which is why I work there. At least it's different than the regular "grab-n-go" restaurant that most of the kids at my school work at. With, the exception of my two closest friends at this school, Casey and Gemma. Casey is your typical basketball jock that acts all hard and tough but is really just a softie underneath. And Gemma is his little sister. They are actually really close for siblings. When I first moved here, they showed up at my front door saying, "hey, we're your neighbors." Like it was the most normal thing in the world to introduce yourself like that. At first I thought they were together, since they were so close but that was cleared up quickly, once I asked, and they both yelled at me for a total of about 45 minutes.

After that, the three of us became really close. Hanging out like everyday and every night last summer. And then, once school started, we kept that pattern going. Gemma, actually has an internship just outside of town. And Casey, well he didn't have a job. Other than keeping guys away from Gemma, he is constantly going from practice to practice for different sports. He's quite the overachiever when it comes to sports.

"Okay, what would you guys like to eat today?" I asked my 30th table that day. While Chinese was pretty straight forward, people always seemed to complicate it. "No rice." "no egg." "I'm allergic to flour. So can you make that without flour?" Like, what? You just made my job 20x harder.

After the stereotypical family ordered a couple of large orders of sweet and sour chicken and chicken chow mein, I went back to my realm of aggravation and disdain.

"Get that annoyed look off your face." My boss said, interrupting my internal rant about work. My boss was an old Asian lady who was about four foot nine. And she had to be about 85 years old. Even though she never told us her age straight. She was fierce though. She was more limber and spry than I was. But she was also very bossy, blunt and rude. But man, could that woman run a business. "You have customer. Look happy." She pulled at the edges of mouth. She also had a really thick accent which made it hard to understand when she got really angry. I pulled a forced, but believable, smile on my face and walked back into the main dining hall. It was believable because that was the only smile I wore these days. A forced one.