The Book Club

5

Business was good at the taquería but that wasn't to be unexpected. They made good food. So while he and his friends were regular customers, they had to wait at the counter for a while before they could sit down at a table together. Classes were over for the day for most of them, but Kale still had a British Literature class at four on the main campus, so they ate with some leisure. Even with the traditional music blaring loudly from the speakers hidden behind fake plants, their group got more than one dirty look from other diners as the raucousness of their late lunch amped up. It was the middle of the day at a fast-casual Mexican food dive that catered mostly to college-age kids. So not one of them cared if some random family of four thought they were too loud.

Among them were two sociology majors, a super-stressed engineer in the making, a guy who thought it had been a good idea to switch from pre-law to women's studies, and the aforementioned Kale, who was slogging his way through a Literature major with the belief that he'd teach one day. Despite their varied backgrounds and interests, the group, which had formed here and there over the course of their freshman year, rarely discussed anything of any real value during their weekly taco binges. Each of them was solidly placed in his third year of his degree path and schedules were hard to arrange with such an intense course load for most of them, but one o'clock on Tuesdays became a sacred time, not just for consuming copious amounts of cheap food.

Three of them belonged to the same fraternity, so they saw plenty of one another either in the house or at various parties or events. The other two lived off-campus, one with his recent bride, and one with his parents. But each week, they shared a platter of tacos, dared each other to douse their food in the hottest made-in-house sauce, and carried on like a group of old men sharing war stories. Before freshman orientation, an introduction to biology class, or a shared experience with bad food from the university dining hall, none of them would have known one another and, most likely, none of them would have been in at that table in that taco shop on that day.

At the neighboring table, a couple, meeting in a neutral place, begrudgingly picked their way through, for him, a plate of nachos, and for her, a pork burrito smothered in something the taco shop cashier had called red sauce. The sauce was greenish orange, which was never a color combination one wanted to see. The small creatures beside each of the adults shared a resemblance to them and to each other, but their faces were hardly visible under matching black hooded sweatshirts and behind two of the newest and most expensive smartphones.

The tension was clear but the situation wasn't entirely clear to the cheerful young waitress who made the rounds, offering drink refills and asking how good the food was. The man, in a pressed pale blue shirt with white cuffs and a striped red and darker red tie, had a modern haircut and wore an expensive watch. He rolled his eyes at the waitress and gestured dismissively to her about his nachos. Not as good as the waitress was hoping, apparently. She chuckled nervously and strung together a few words that sounded like Spanish and had the tone of an apology.

The woman across from the man was less polished and wore her straight blond hair in a high ponytail that sagged at the base. Her sweatpants and t-shirt each boasted of an expensive brand name but were mismatched and dirty. She took another bite of the burrito which required a serrated knife and she belched, closemouthed, quietly, and uncomfortably. None of them wanted to be there and the food had made things worse.

The man glanced at the table of college boys who had sent up yet another guffaw about something. He clenched his fist around the thin paper napkin that was coated in orange grease. The teenage creature at his elbow sighed and looked across the table at his twin. They exchanged a knowing but silent understanding before they each refocused on their screen. The woman shifted around in her seat, the vinyl squeaking as she moved.

Back behind the counter, the waitress pulled more styrofoam cups from the bag kept underneath and stacked them next to the cash drawer. She kept her eyes on the couple with the teenagers, knowing that things were not going well at that table, and not just because of the food. The college boys had no problems with the tacos, which were honestly the only good thing on the menu even if they were mostly grease, but didn't all boys have iron stomachs? The business man, whose left hand was tanned orange but devoid of a wedding ring, met her gaze and glared back. The woman, who was pale in comparison but had the faint outline of a wedding band on her ring finger, was sweating and shifting even more in her seat. The waitress turned to pull a bin of tortilla chips from the kitchen pass-through counter and when she looked back at the family of uncomfortable people, the woman was gone. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a gray jacket marked PINK shimmer past, toward the restrooms, its owner walking briskly and at an angle, as if holding something in.

Eighteen minutes later, when the woman emerged from the restroom, the restaurant was unrecognizable. She'd cowered in the stall at first, hearing the rapid shots from a rifle, she'd guessed. The thought of her children had brought her out of the stall, her green sweatpants still around her ankles, but the swing-out door had been blocked by something, she didn't know. She could hear screams and more than one set of footfalls as people, no doubt, ran for the side exit and out to the patio. Through the thin wall and the hollow door, she heard flatware drop and metal pans thud, echoing a painful sound over and over again as their wobbling stopped. Glass shattered—one of the windows, she believed—and the rifle shots eventually slowed until all that could be heard was the mournful blasts from a trumpeter's instrument that led the mariachi band over the speakers.

It was the waitress's body that blocked the door. The woman could see, once she'd pulled her pants up and placed her face on the floor in front of the door, that the name tag 'Lucy' was pinned to the front of the lacy white shirt belonging to the waitress and that that waitress was slumped, face first, against the bathroom door. She'd been running for cover, the woman believed in between chaotic thoughts of where her children and ex-husband were at the moment, and had been gunned down on her way into the bathroom. The woman pushed, at first gently out of respect for the fallen waitress, and then more firmly as the thoughts of her family, however shattered it had been, pounded in her brain.

She'd kept herself low, once free of the disgusting bathroom—made no less disgusting by her pre-shooting visit and the tainted burrito she'd evacuated from her bowels—but she could tell at once that the shooter was gone. The harsh recessed lighting overhead buzzed along with the new upbeat track playing through the speakers. The sound something sizzling in the kitchen filtered in between beats and the pungent smell of cooking peppers made her eyes water. The sight of the bodies on the floor made her scream.