The Night Shift, page 2
“You had a nine-to-five before this, right?” Mitch asked.
“Right.” Jean dunked another batch into the electric blue liquid.
“What happened? You didn’t like it?” Mitch watched her closely.
“No, I liked it. It just wasn’t for me anymore.”
“What does that mean? I bet you had insurance and everything. Did you have dental?”
Jean didn’t tell him that she had to quit because she was teeming with emotional problems. She just shrugged. “I did, yeah.”
“Oh man, that is the dream! You know how many cavities I have in here?” Mitch gritted his teeth like a jack-o’-lantern. He winked at a pair of men at the end of the bar and made them another round.
“Yeah,” Jean agreed, wiping her hands dry. “This has been an adjustment. Especially financially.” She frowned at the crowd of clean glasses.
“If you want more work, my cousin said they’re looking for help at her restaurant.” Omar’s voice was so quiet, Jean had to lean forward to hear each word. “Just a few hours, but it’s good pay. Early in the morning, helping her in the kitchen. Only prep, nothing fancy. You can go right when we close, so it could work out well for everybody. It’s hard to go from nine-to-five to a couple weeknights over here. You interested?”
“Yeah, of course—that would be great.” Jean felt a genuine rush of gratitude. Rent was looming and she keenly missed her beautifully regular and, comparatively, abundant direct deposits from Dr. Goldstein’s office.
“What? You’re giving out jobs and you didn’t ask me first? That’s cold, Omar,” Mitch said, feigning insult and ignoring the girls with matching side-swept bangs and overly glossed lips who leaned toward them expectantly.
“You’re lazy, man,” Omar said with a smile. “I’ll take you over there after work,” he said, turning to Jean.
“Tonight?” she asked, rolling one of her ankles looking for some small moment of physical comfort, like dodging under an awning in the rain.
“They need somebody to start now. If you meet my cousin tonight, you’ll probably just get the job.”
“Sure, okay, sounds good. Thanks.” It didn’t sound good at all, but she really needed the job. So, leaving Mitch to close up, Jean buttoned her denim jacket and followed Omar into the night.
“The shift starts at two and you have to finish up before they open for service in the morning. Between here and there you can get a little break, a little breakfast, you know, whatever you need.”
“How far is it?” Jean struggled to keep up. Her legs had never been so stiff. Between working all night on her feet and the cold, she was having trouble matching Omar’s pace. It was humiliating to be so unaccustomed to physical labor. It felt dishonest, like she had cheated her way out of an important, character-building rite of passage, like losing teeth or shaving her legs for the first time.
“Maybe fifteen minutes. It’s downtown. You want to take the train?”
“No, it feels good to walk,” she lied.
“Sorry, I know I walk fast. But hey, the faster you walk, the less chance you get hit by that can of soda some racist throws at you. You ever work in a kitchen before?”
Jean wasn’t sure what to say to that; she keenly understood that not a single observation she had to offer would be of any value. “No. Have you?”
“A lot, yeah. I basically grew up in my uncle’s restaurant. It’s easy. You don’t have to talk to customers. That’s the best part.”
“Sounds amazing.”
A gust of bitter late-autumn wind stabbed through her jacket, and the skin on her face and hands stung with cold. She was going to have to dig out her winter coat and hope that the zipper worked through another winter. She was grateful for Omar’s silence, because her face was too cold to talk. Omar stopped in front of a locked gate, skimmed with graffiti. Jean tucked her bare hands into her armpits and waited as he texted.
The gate rumbled up halfway, and Omar motioned for Jean to duck underneath. It seemed impossibly gymnastic for her sore, frozen body to bend like that, but somehow, it did.
A young woman with overplucked eyebrows greeted her on the other side. She was short and curvy, and had a bleached blond buzz cut.
“Hey, Lu,” Omar said, closing the gate behind them. “This is Jean. She just started at Red and Gold.” He turned to Jean and said, “Lu runs everything over here. She’s fancy.”
“Hello,” Jean said, unsure of the degree of formality required of her. She put her hand out, the way she would have done at any other job interview, and Omar’s cousin shook it, examining her through narrowed eyes. Her hands and forearms were wrapped in matching winding lines, all part of an elaborate tattoo Jean couldn’t make out.
She dropped Jean’s hand and turned to Omar. “You hungry?” she asked him.
He nodded.
“There’s still croissants from yesterday. Help yourself.” Omar disappeared, turning on an overhead light that illuminated an immaculate, minimalist café. A neat row of empty vases lined a long zinc counter, and a series of skillfully photographed Mediterranean landscapes marched across the electric white walls.
“Wow,” Jean said.
“Yeah, they spent a lot of money in here,” Lu said, following Jean’s gaze. “The restaurant is next door. A Michelin star and now they think they’re the shit.” She rolled her eyes. “They expanded over here because it was so busy. We make all the pastry for the restaurant, too.”
Jean nodded and adjusted her posture, trying to project a sense of alertness that she did not possess.
“You have any experience?”
“Um, not really.” Jean’s eyes dropped to Lu’s hands, almost mechanical in their neat clasp.
“That’s okay,” Lu said. “I actually prefer that. Working with these little shits who think they know everything makes me dizzy.”
“You want a coffee, Jean?” Omar called.
“Yes please—just milk,” she called back, suddenly aware of yelling so close to Lu’s face. “Sorry,” she murmured. Jean was conscious of her tallness, which made her hollering seem worse somehow.
Lu waved the apology away. “You start at two and end at six when we let in the morning shift. It’s not rocket science. If you pay attention, you’ll be fine.”
Jean nodded and forced her eyes to open wider. The coffee would help, she thought.
“So, what happened at your last job? Omar said you quit?”
Jean couldn’t tell her the truth. If she tried to explain, it would sound ridiculous and Lu would surely throw her out. Her boss had asked a few personal questions about her mom so she had to quit? She couldn’t tell Lu that.
“I was an assistant,” she said instead. “To a psychotherapist. She’s older, losing her eyesight, you know, in her eighties, and...”
“She retired?”
“Something like that,” Jean fibbed, relieved.
“Can I call her for a reference?” Lu asked.
Jean froze, but after a moment she nodded, continuously, as though nodding along to a song. Dr. Goldstein would give her a great reference. After all, she’d worked for her for a long time. Jean had started while she was still a student, before her academic life deteriorated. Dr. Goldstein was kind enough not to ask too many questions when Jean left school for good, her schedule opening up like miles of empty road. As long as Jean did her job well, Dr. Goldstein didn’t pry.
But, when Dr. Goldstein showed a growing interest in her past, in her parents, it sent chills down her spine. Jean wasn’t some patient—it wasn’t Dr. Goldstein’s, or anyone’s, place to figure her out. Jean didn’t want to be figured out at all.
So she did the responsible thing—gave two weeks’ notice and trained her replacement, a grad student named Arpita, who sat all floppy, like a child. She had done everything right. Dr. Goldstein would never begrudge her a decent reference. Would she?
“I guess this is a big change for you.” Lu leaned back and gave Jean one more appraising look.
Jean looked Lu in the eye, wishing hard that they were sitting down. “Nothing wrong with change.”
Lu grinned and Jean felt herself, involuntarily, match the other woman’s smile. It felt strange to smile for real. “Good answer. You’re hired. Just don’t be late. I fucking hate it when people are late. Go wash your hands and I’ll get you started on the biscuits.”
“What? Now?”
“Yes, of course now.”
Two
Jean woke up and reached for her phone. It had died early in the morning, while she was learning how to pipe uniform eclairs. She winced at the time. It was already late afternoon, which meant she would barely have time to shower, eat something, and get to her opening shift at Red and Gold.
Her roommates, an overly polite couple who went to visit one or the other’s parents in Long Island every weekend, were both at work. One, Molly, was a paralegal, and the other, Christine, worked as a medical assistant. They were neat and generally quiet, but most importantly, they left Jean alone. She desperately wanted to be able to have her share of the rent on time, so they would continue to leave her alone. Jean hobbled to the bathroom and turned on the shower. Her arms hurt from the bakery and her legs hurt from the bar—her bad hip ached from both shifts. She stood over the sink and swallowed a few Advil.
In the shower, she helped herself to some of Molly’s deep conditioning treatment, just to stand under the hot water a little longer. She briskly towel dried her short hair and caught the glow of her phone signaling a missed call. There were a few missed calls from a number she didn’t recognize, and, as dutifully as if she were still taking messages for Dr. Goldstein, Jean got a pen, prepared to make notes. She played the solitary voicemail tacked at the end of the flurry of calls.
“Oh, hi, Jean, sorry to bother you. It’s Arpita. From Dr. Goldstein’s office? Can you call me when you get this? It’s not exactly urgent, but maybe a little bit—like medium urgent? Thanks so much, and really, really sorry to bother you.”
Jean called back and left a voicemail on Arpita’s cell phone. She probably should have tried Dr. Goldstein’s office, or even Myra’s home phone, but she was too tired to think about having to talk to her old boss, to pretend cheer and ease when she felt like she’d been run through a meat grinder. She dressed quickly and slung her bag over her shoulder. She wrapped an extralong scarf around her face, hoping that it would compensate for her inability to locate her winter coat.
The sun hung at peak gleam, beautiful, making the day as warm as it would get, casting a maximally flattering light across every building and face Jean passed. She stopped at the deli next door for a coffee and tinfoil-wrapped egg and cheese sandwich and caught the bus down Second Avenue. Gliding down the street in that perfect light made everything seem fine. Whatever this phase of her life was, Jean would get used to it. People could get used to anything—that was a fact she knew too well, all the way down to her screw-and plate-studded bones.
It was funny, Jean thought, the way people her age talked about where they came from—it was such a binary, either all fondness, like Molly and Christine, or a full blackout, like her. To stop herself from thinking about it more, she unwrapped her breakfast sandwich and devoured it, focusing only on her body, bite after bite, adding, not subtracting, to the person she had become in this enormous city.
Jean felt much better by the time she arrived at Red and Gold. A New Wave record twinkled down out of the speakers like confetti. The Advil and caffeine were working, and Jean was optimistic about starting a fresh shift at the bar.
“Oh hey! You must be the new girl,” a voice called out from the dim back room.
“Yeah, I’m Jean,” she answered, squinting to identify the source of the voice. A young man studded with piercings sat in a corner booth, counting out cash for the register.
“Just give me one second; I already fucked this up twice. Math is not my forte, man.”
“Sure, sure—I’ll just go set up.”
Jean shucked off her jacket and scarf and stowed them away behind the bar with her bag. She started slicing lemons and limes into uniform wedges—her favorite part of the job. The small triumphs accumulated quickly, turning a just-okay day into a good one, almost by magic.
“Sorry about that,” the young man said, approaching her on the other side of the bar, like a customer. “I’m Iggy.”
“Nice to meet you.” Jean gave him an efficient look, the kind she used to give Dr. Goldstein’s patients, sorting them into two categories: trouble, or not. Not, she decided.
“You settling in okay?” he asked. He joined her behind the bar and stocked the register with the thrice-counted change.
“Sure,” she said. “The last few nights have been great.”
“A lot of Mitch, huh?”
“He’s not so bad,” Jean said.
“Thursdays can get a little wild—it’s the weekend for all of the college kids, you know?”
“I know.”
“You in school?” he asked.
Jean shook her head. “Not anymore.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Doesn’t matter—I didn’t finish.” Jean made an uneven cut and almost sliced into her thumb.
“Me neither,” Iggy said. “Never had the temperament for it. It’s a lot of time to do for a lot of debt. My parents wanted me to be a lawyer, but I was like ‘sorry, man, I have to object,’ you know?”
“Oh, I know.” Jean nodded.
Iggy laughed. “What did your parents want you to be?”
“Gone,” Jean said, tacking on another ubiquitous smile to soften her reply.
* * *
Iggy was right; Thursdays were wild. There was a fight, a group of underage kids Iggy had to eject, and an onslaught of vodka soda orders of medieval battalion proportions. Jean liked the frenetic tempo. There was no time to worry about being nice enough or striking the right tone; all she had to do was make ten thousand vodka sodas. When her right arm started to protest, Jean scooped ice with her left. She sank into the work, like she used to sink into running, and didn’t even care that she couldn’t slow down long enough for one of her fake smoke breaks.
Working with Iggy was different than working with Mitch. Jean understood, instantly, why a person would put someone like Iggy, and not someone like Mitch, on a shift where they served one million vodka sodas. Iggy was quiet and fast. Mitch’s chattiness would have been a disaster on a Thursday night. Iggy was also tactful. He broke up the fight with ease and sent the underage kids on their way with unexpected kindness. By 1:00 a.m. her feelings about Iggy had tipped from “not trouble” to unadulterated fondness. Getting to know someone this way was so emotionally economical. Jean thought, for the first time, that maybe she was in the right place after all. Maybe the emergency job she had taken out of desperation was actually the perfect job for her.
Even though her shift was technically over, she agreed to stay a half an hour longer after a pleading look from Iggy for help with the last rush. She buzzed from the work, the cash in her pocket, and the celebratory shot she and Iggy had taken just before she left for the bakery. Jean realized how hungry she was and stopped for a slice of pizza on the way. She knocked on the bakery gate, wiping away the grease on her lips from her dinner-breakfast with the back of her hand.
Lu lifted the gate, her face set in a furious scowl. “Jean,” she said coldly. “Want to explain why you’re late? Didn’t I say that was literally the only thing I give a shit about?”
“Oh, Lu, I’m really sorry. The bar was so busy, and I had to stay a little later. I’m so, so sorry—I’ll stay later here, too,” Jean stammered. Her heightened mood plummeted, like a bird shot out of the sky.
“You can’t stay later. We open at six. You better hope you finish what we need to finish. If you don’t, that’s it. If you’re late again, I’m sending you home for good. Understand?” Jean nodded, and Lu crossed her tattooed arms over her chest. “Everybody gets one, and this is your one.” Her voice was flat and stern.
“Sorry,” Jean murmured once more.
“Stop apologizing! Just come in and do your job.” Lu stepped aside and let Jean through the gate.
Jean’s night at the bakery was the exact inverse of her night at the bar—it was quiet, tense, and the feelings she had for Lu were not fond. Jean skipped her break, refusing even a trip to the bathroom, so furiously she concentrated on every single pain au chocolat. Jean raced through her tasks, completing each one more quickly than the last. She had always been good at making everything feel like a game, even if she was playing against herself. It was what Dr. Goldstein would call a coping mechanism. If you were playing against yourself, the only person you could disappoint was yourself.
“I’m not mad at you,” Lu said, the first time she had spoken outside of a series of terse commands about flour and butter measurements. “I just have certain standards and I expect everyone to follow them.”
“I understand,” Jean said. The lights blazed overhead, bright as the sun.
“Look, it isn’t an easy job, and I’m sure working at the bar isn’t easy either. If it’s too much, just tell me. No hard feelings, okay?” Lu slid a tray of bombolini into the deep fryer fragrant with oil, one at a time. Jean froze, momentarily mesmerized by the bronzing dough.
“It’s not too much. I like working here,” Jean said. “It’s nice to have some quiet after the bar.” She didn’t add how badly she needed the money. “I’ll figure it out. I won’t be late again.”
“I hope not,” Lu said, lifting the sizzling doughnuts from the fryer and motioning for Jean to roll them through a soft drift of sugar. “I like working with you. You’re fast and you don’t talk too much.”
