"I fucking hate Valentine's day."
I glanced up from my station in time to see Sandy kick the swinging door closed behind her. She had a tray in each hand and both were piled high with dirty plates; the balance of servers will always impress me.
"Gee, Sandy, why don't you tell us how you really feel?" Mikayla called from her station at the far end of the kitchen.
Sandy pushed butt-first through the door to the washing station. "You can't see it, Mika," she called, "but I'm awarding you two fingers right now."
Mika laughed and a chorus of chuckles ran through the kitchen staff. The truth was we all hated Valentine's day, or at least we hated working it, but it was one of Clive's "all hands on deck" days which meant almost everyone who worked at La Petite got a shift on Valentine's Day with a full house of us for the evening. Yes, the restaurant is called La Petite. No, Clive won't tell us why. I think it was his ex-wife's idea. Sandy has her own theories.
I finished plating the fish in front of me and slid the plates across to the serving side, then took a step back from my station to stretch. There were five chefs in the kitchen including me. Most of us started at four to prep for the dinner rush but Erik had been there since lunch, the poor bastard. Of course he didn't have to close tonight.
"Finkelweiner! Back to work!"
I sighed, cracked my back, and grabbed the next order. Here comes the boss.
Clive was a short, loud man who got in your face when you screwed something up and wouldn't take no for an answer when he needed a shift covered. He also put up with very little shit. On the other hand he didn't put up with customer shit either, my pay actually included benefits, and he helped out when stuff got rough. Like now.
My boss was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, a wine bottle in either hand and that silly metal spoon hanging from his neck. Helping out on holidays normally meant something he could wear a nice suit doing since "let me speak to your manager" got said a lot more, but he wasn't above getting in the trenches with the rest of us. I'd seen Clive wait tables, scrub dishes, empty the trash, he even did half the plumbing around here. The one thing he did not do was cook, for which we were all grateful.
"I've got three dozen tables out there all waiting for their next course! Get your asses in gear!" Then he raised his voice and shouted back towards the washroom. "You too, Ballsmith!"
The conversation from that direction promptly ceased and a moment later Sandy came pushing back through the swinging doors with an empty tray in either hand.
"Yes, sir!" She called as she squeezed past his round frame and grabbed up the plates I'd just slid over. I flicked my eyes over to our boss and grinned. She rolled her eyes and gave me a smile back.
"Quit flirting you've got tables!" Clive called at her as he racked the unopened bottles. "Tables tables tables tables!"
"Hopping to it, sir!" She called, winking at me before backing away hastily with her trays once again piled with plates.
So yeah, I'm John Finkelweiner and she's Sandy Ballsmith. Ha ha ha, get it out of your system. It says Cassandra on her paystubs but I think I've heard her full name exactly twice. I'm named after my great uncle Johan, she's apparently named after a book character. We were both hired about the same time, a little over a year ago, and from the moment Erik snickered as he read our names off at training we've been catching shit for them. We bonded over it in that first week, us against everyone else, and it turned into a friendship. Mostly a work friendship although I'd thought maybe it could be more than that for a while. We got along really well, we were about the same age, we had very different senses of humor but she still made me laugh, and I thought she was hot. Tall, red hair (although she admitted she dyed it), curvy and not afraid of it. Having her around made long shifts easier in more ways than one.
It hadn't really worked out, though. The flirting had been there almost since day one, but when I'd pushed to see if we could make something more of it a couple of months later she'd shut me down. Not hard or anything, I just asked her out a few times and she said no so I dropped it. We were still friends, we still got along great, and I definitely still liked watching her work; I just didn't try to make it more than that.
The dinner rush started to wind down about an hour later to which we all breathed a sigh of relief. New diners stopped coming in, old ones kept leaving, and staff started to clock off. By ten o'clock, closing time, there were only a few diners left for Clive to shoo out, then he and Erik both left and it was down to Sandy and I.
"I fucking hate Valentine's Day," Sandy said again as the two of us cleaned the kitchen. "Hey, do you want any of this?"
She lifted the glass of wine she was holding. There'd been a couple of mostly empty bottles left sitting out and Clive had passed them off to us, with his compliments. I shook my head. She took a drink from her glass, then set it down and grabbed up a rag.
"What have you got against Valentine's Day?" I asked instead.
She shrugged, bending over the far side of the cook station to wipe down the counter. Sandy had on a white button up blouse, which was the standard server uniform, but she had a lot on top and generally left the first few buttons undone, which was not. It normally wasn't more than a hint of cleavage, but with her bending over like she was...
"Enjoying the view?" she asked.
"Yup," I said, grinning but turning my eyes back to my work. I wasn't embarrassed, it wasn't the first time she'd caught me looking and she didn't seem to mind. I swear she even did it on purpose sometimes.
"Doesn't Clive get on you about the dress code?" I continued.
"Tits get tips, and I don't think Clive cares. He got on me about the tattoo once," she said, motioning to the small green butterfly on her neck, "but it's a little cleavage it's not like I'm letting them hang out. You should have seen table bravo-seven, holy crap if she'd turned around too quickly she would've come right out of that dress."
"Worth looking at?"
"Not really, face like a horse and about a pound of makeup. The guy with her though? Yum. I'm a sucker for a man with a beard."
I, sadly, was not a man with a beard. Oh well.
"Too bad I was stuck back here, sounds like you got all the fun up front." I finished scrubbing off Mikayla's station. God damn that woman can make the biggest messes and did the worst job cleaning them up.
"Yeah, fun. Fuck Valentine's Day."
"What have you got against happy couples? Bad boyfriend experience?"
She sighed like there was a story there. "A little, I guess, but mostly bad restaurant experience. I've been waiting tables off and on since I was sixteen and holidays are always rough. Around here though? This is a great place to work but fuck Clive and his holidays. Special menus, special seating, Valentine's Day everyone sits for twice as long and tips half as much but here I'm stuck bringing them four courses and a couple of desserts. It's a pain in the ass. You cooks wouldn't know."
"Six hours working over a stove and I wouldn't know? I think I had about thirty seconds in there where I wasn't slicing, sauteeing, paring or plating."
"Proud of that?"
"Very. And the worst part? The little art bits you always have to do on days like this. Here's a sprig of something green, here's a swirly sauce shape, here's a little flower made out of a strawberry or a real goddamn flower that I had to cut into a different, smaller flower. I can't stand those."
"I thought you liked cooking."
"Cooking, sure. Garnishing fuck no. And then there's closing."
"Closing's not so bad when the company's good."
"Thanks."
"I wasn't talking about you."
I glanced up. She winked at me and took another sip of her wine.
"Bite me, Sandy," I laughed.
We chattered as we cleaned, comfortable with each other, talking about work, friends, how my feet were killing me because I really needed to buy new shoes and this great running shoe place Sandy went to. Apparently they could fix me right up. Then finally, as the clock closed on eleven, we finished. The kitchen was clean, the dishes were put away, and we'd done the last sweep up front; the only thing left was trash and locks.
"I think Clive was in the military," Sandy said. She was sitting on my station, legs swinging, as she finished up the last of the wine. It hadn't been much, one tall glass, but I'd passed on any since wine's not really my thing. I, on the other hand, was carting out the trash from the front and doing some actual work.
"Is that why you call him sir?" I responded.
"That and it annoys him."
"Are you going to help with these?"
"Nah," she grinned, "you look like you've got it handled."
"Thanks," I responded sarcastically, "go lock up in front, will you?"
