Here's What I'll Remember About My Last Day: That Table of Seventeen and the Pea-Hating Lady with the Mustache

Last night was my last night at the restaurant. The Boy From Work had scheduled me to work my last day with my favorite people: my favorite waitress, my favorite dish people, my favorite ice cream people. The only person missing was my favorite cook, the girl who was good spirited enough to host a going away party for one of the ice cream boys, a party where the departing ice cream boy vomited everywhere and the boys had to tie plastic bags on their feet just to get into the bathroom and try to get him in the shower so he could puke into the current of moving water. Later, my favorite cook would spend hours scouring the ice cream boy's puke out of her carpet and off her toilet. Later, she would be the one to get the ice cream boy in the shower. She would stay up with him all night, and she would take care of him the next morning. If that's not a good hostess, then I don't know what is.

Anyway, last night was my last night. At first it seemed like it was going to be just another Wednesday night at the restaurant, but things took a turn around six o'clock. I already had some decent tips in my pocket, and I was feeling pretty good about my last day. I'd had a group of four sit at the counter and tell me I was a great little server, that the food and service was wonderful. They left me eight dollars on a bill that definitely did not call for an eight dollar tip. I thought, What a way to make an exit. It seemed the best kind of last night to have: a complimentary, well monied night.

But a little after six o'clock several cars pulled into the parking lot. The car doors swung open and out poured people, people, people. They walked the entire length of the restaurant's large front window. There was no end to them. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven...

"Oh my God," my favorite waitress said. "This is yours. I want nothing to do with it."

The people kept coming. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen...

"Gee, they could have called ahead," she said, and then she disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me with the large table.

The fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth person finally filtered into the restaurant, and we arranged the entire back section for them.

I've never been the type of waitress to delight in big tables. The girls at my last waitressing gig salivated and fought over big tables. I always bowed out. I just wasn't a fan. There's so much potential for disaster when waiting on a large group. So many things can go wrong. Drink orders can go awry, food can come out on the wrong plates, the people themselves can be snobby and rude. I prefer to deal with people in small doses. I like a table of two, three, four, five. I feel like I can give better service when I don't have to raise my voice to Teaching Composition octave just to announce that I'm taking only drink orders and that I'll come back for the food orders after the drinks have been filled.

But these people, my goodness, they were dolls.

The table was comprised mostly of kids and teens (and the gayest twelve year old boy I'd ever met), so I'd dreaded my first approach to the table. Kids can be awful, they can be pains, they can make you want to strangle them. But these kids were heaven-sent, polite, super sweet. They said please and thank you. They complimented the food and service. They joked around with me. They turned on the jukebox and danced. They made the other customers smile.

I loved them.

When they left, the table of seventeen left me a big, fat tip. At this point I was definitely thinking, Okay, alright, great. This is my kind of last night.

Then 8:20 rolled around. That's when a family of four sauntered through the door and sat themselves at the first booth. At first they--a father, a mother, two girls--seemed mostly normal. They were the usual clientele: worn-looking rural-types, the man with a gristly beard, the mother with her own budding mustache. The girls were little and cute, but you could tell a few years later, when they were in the big school district next door to the one I attended, they would become girls so similar to many of the girls I worked with: cute girls with horrific grammar, girls whose main passion it was to stir up drama, girls who thought nothing of sleeping with other girls' boyfriends and then laughing about it over a burger and a shake.

But for now those little girls were fine and sweet and nice. They wanted chicken fingers, and they wanted them hot and with extra bleu cheese. Their mother and father wanted the daily special--the chicken and biscuits, which I had been coveting all night. The mother requested that the mashed potatoes that came with the special also be covered with gravy, but that was as much direction as they gave me.

Well, it turned out that they should have given me a whole bunch of directions. For starters, someone should have directed me to the fact that the mother was unstable, weepy, and vaguely crazy.

After I'd delivered their food I gave them a few minutes before popping back in to see how they were doing. When I arrived at their table, the father and the girls were eating like normal humans. The mother, however, was not. She had her face cradled in her hands and she was sniffling. No one was paying her any mind.

I didn't know what to do. "Uhm, how is everything over here?" I asked.

One of the girls waved her fork at her mother. "Could you get that plate out of her way?" she asked. "She doesn't like peas."

The woman was crying because the chicken and biscuits came with vegetables in it--quite standard, actually--and the inclusion of peas had wracked her to the core.

I blinked and blinked but picked up the plate and whisked it away. As I walked away from the table I was bombarded with thoughts. First, was the woman not a grownup? Could she not handle asking me to take her food away like an adult? Did she really need her children--who couldn't be more than twelve years old--to translate her sobs for her?

Second, if someone doesn't like peas so much and would be reduced to tears at their mere presence in a dish at a restaurant, wouldn't you think it wise for that person to perhaps clue the waitress and cooks in on the aversion?

This whole mess reminded me of a memorable Monday night--all you can eat pasta night--I was waitressing at the old joint. A woman placed an order for the spaghetti with meatballs and never said a single word about having an allergy that might flare up depending on what was in the spaghetti or sauce. When I brought out her plate, which was garnished with Parmesan and parsley, she shrank back in her seat. She was appalled. "What is that?" she asked, wagging her finger at the Parmesan.

I told her it was Parmesan cheese, just a garnish.

"I," she said, her voice horrified, "am allergic to Parmesan cheese! You need to get it away from me!"

Yes, lady, right. Because you would never in a million years guess that Parmesan cheese might come with or on or even in the sauce of spaghetti.

The lady with the peas reminded me of that lady. Except as far as I could tell, she wasn't allergic to peas, just terribly disturbed by their presence.

But I went over to that table with a menu in my hand and gave the pea lady a few more minutes to dry her eyes, to dry the moisture that had accumulated in the prickly stubble of her upper lip, and then I took her order for the fried chicken dinner. I went over several more times after that to make sure that this time things were okay, that she was happy, that she was satisfied now that any and all peas had been taken from the proximity.

I wondered what was going to happen when the bill came. I wondered if they were going to be angry that I charged them for her dinner. I didn't feel as though it was right to take off the price of her dinner when we hadn't done anything wrong, when she had just neglected to tell me she had a serious problem with peas. I even wondered if maybe this were some sting operation, the kind of which I'd heard about before--a family going into a restaurant, one of them raising a fuss and claiming the food was bad or wrong, then trying to get worked into such a lather over it that the manager or person in charge was forced to placate them by making the check disappear.

These people were going to be the last people I waited on at the diner, and these were the people I was going to remember for a long time. I prepared for the worst--screaming, fit-pitching, more crying--but nothing happened. In fact, they even left me a good tip. And then they left and we were able to sweep the floors, mop the floors, put up the stools at the counter, roll the next day's silverware, put away the pitchers of iced tea and lemonade, wipe down the ice cream counters, and that was it, it, it. I walked out of that restaurant with a thick wad of money in my pocket and shoulders that felt lighter.

It's been an interesting summer. I went into the whole summer job thing, the whole return to waitressing, with a big swallow of dread caught in the back of my throat. I felt above it, like I shouldn't have to go back now that I'd gone through graduate school, now that I'd spent a few years teaching college level writing. I whined. I even cried. After I got the job at the diner, I drove home thinking oh God oh God oh God oh God. I didn't want to go. I didn't want to do it. I thought no one would like me, that I'd be too old, that they'd think I was no fun, that the whole experience would be awful.

All of that worrying was for nothing. The summer was fun, and I liked almost everyone I worked with, and I'm pretty sure they liked me back. (Some, of course, more than others.) It was a hectic time, and I wrote almost nothing, which completely violated all my summer goals, but now that I've had my last day I feel like my head's on straight again, that I'm not going to be so caught up in the drama of the place, that I'll finally be able to get some things done--things like gutting this room I've been living in for the last year, my old room, my room decorated with the suns and moons I was so crazy over in high school. I'm starting to pack today, starting to sift things into boxes, starting to put things in piles to be packed into cars for my big move that's going to happen in a week's time. I've got an awful lot of work ahead of me...