Amanda turned from the table and immediately the corners of her mouth turned from fake smile to an intense scowl. Pigs, she thought, and walked over to the computer station to input the orders. As she entered in the last drink, she felt a tapping on her left shoulder. There stood the man with a sunglasses tan and an affinity for gin asking her to please take his credit card.
“You see,” he rubbed his neck nervously and whipped his head around to see if the other man at his table was spying, “I don’t want my father to pay tonight. Could you just slip this is your little book there and pretend like nothing happened, I just don’t want him to know.”
“Absolutely,” smiled Amanda.
“Great.” And just like that the man sauntered back to the little booth that presumably held his mother, his father, and his wife. Yes, he was the responsible child.
Amanda focused her eyes on the black credit card the man had given to her, the name read in tiny machine printed letters, John P. Babbit, M.D. and below that in the same type, Babbit Chiropractic Care. She smirked and put the card in her book, as he’d instructed, for safe keeping until it was time to pay the bill. Absolutely you can pay, Mr. Babbit, she thought to herself.
And so, work continued on at the little Italian restaurant Corrotto’s. Everything was warm and swell as if Tuscany’s breathtaking grass fields and deep green cypress tress were floating just outside the heavy mahogany doors. A composure was brought to Carlos, wafting on those famous Italian breezes between ancient, woody, olive trees. A certain equilibrium settled beneath his salt-and-pepper hair as he greeted more and more guests, as he watched his dutiful minions pour out drinks and drop off steaming wicker baskets of bread, as his bank account piled and his corporate superiors above watched over him like benevolent gods who’d just created another Hercules, another David. Yes, this was his restaurant and he was proprietor. This was his Jerusalem, and his restaurant the holy temple.
But beyond the city on the hill, Amanda thought of the sweet immortality and boundlessness of Tribulations. How sweet, how much sweeter than any known confection created by paltry man, would the body of Christ be as she finally embraced him. How sweet it might be…
But Mitzi thought only of his perfect half-organic half-machine contraptions that lay waiting for him in his bedroom when he returned. The suck, suck of the water as it nourished though plastic, gossamer tubes as they stuck this way and that out of the body of the whole monster. His heaven would be here soon…
But Toddy thought only, as he gulped down the remaining drops of a nice bottle of chianti left on table forty-three, how entirely inebriated he really was, and how entirely he liked it that way. Only four more hours until his shift was over, and then, then he could caress the pleasant saccharine fluid of Schwampagne betwixt his tongue and palette and dream about the mischief that might ensure later on. Only then, only then…
But clearly outside the bounds of sanity, as though it appeared, Squirley swam deeper and deeper into the murky coy pond of paranoia and wondered when exactly it would culminate into Amanda’s ridiculous notion Tribulations. When might all these rules stop? Then, when might he trust a man like Gato or a man like Carlos or a man even like Toddy with his very identity, his very being? Man, he thought, might it be sweet…
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