Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce

lazy, the Guanajuatans for being easygoing and hardworking. Sometimes on his day off Danny comes up to the restaurant, ostensibly to check on us and grace the regulars with his presence like a politician, but he’s also there to pick something up. He’ll say to me Pablo working? Get me sixty? and I’ll say Okay boss. I pick up a stack of dirty plates and silverware and head into the dish room, where I unload them and then hold up three fingers for only Pablo, who is polishing Bordeaux glasses, to see. He nods with his eyes. A few minutes later I’ll come back to wash my hands or run some stock out to the line and he’ll discreetly slip me a tiny square package, three twenty-bagswrapped up tight in a piece of paper towel. I’ll wait for Danny to come find me, or sometimes he’ll ask me to put it under a Le Volte bottle. The Le Volte is a Chianti in the uppermost corner of the French/Italian wine bin wall; I’m too short to reach it, so I have to climb up on a chair without being seen. If he pays me I pass the three twenty-dollar bills along to Pablo—back in the spring he used to ask me to front it for him and bring it to him somewhere, like the W or the alley behind the Fitz. I rarely have money I don’t need to spend immediately on something or other, so sometimes I had to borrow from someone else to get it for him. The first few times he gave me extra cash when he paid me back, which I think was supposed to seal me into the whole thing, but since I quit using I’ve just been asking the bussers for it. They know it’s for him, and somehow he knows I don’t want to front it anymore, so he settles up with them when he’s back in the restaurant. I hate this arrangement, because I’m both too timid and too interested in protecting my income to beg off, and the bussers are barely making a living as it is. They live in one-bedroom apartments with five other people and share broken-down cars and every one of them has a morning job in a different restaurant.
    Lately they’ve been coming down harder on me. There’s something wrong with Pablo’s eyes; he has kind of a flat face, like you see in the pictures of fetal alcohol syndrome victims, and his pupils are strange. The top half of each is a cloudy blue, and the bottom half is an opaque dark, so when he stares at me and says Tellen, tellen Danny que necesita pagar, tellen Danny he pay, okay? Ten. Diez. I feel disarmed by his aberrant, unreadable gaze. He tells me in Spanish,then in English; then he holds up how many fingers to make sure I get it.
    My friend Calvin says they’re going to start cutting it worse for him, that even though he’s their boss they won’t tolerate it. We agree that he makes too much money to do it like this, that if he wants it he should just pay for it. Either give me the cash or get right with them straightaway.
    Suck it is his favorite, but not by much—we joke that he has Tourette’s syndrome, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true. He might be looking over the seating chart for the night, trying to puzzle out how he can possibly fit another six-top in at seven thirty, and run through a litany like Suck it shit fuck cock ’n’ balls shit fuck fuck fuck fuck suck it. He might hang up the phone after sweetly giving a stranger detailed directions and declare Filthy cunt whore suck my cock may I help you?
    Every night he makes snap public-relations decisions with a ferocity that is unquestionable and an accuracy that is never less than dead-on. He is a fast-talking Italian fox from the Bronx who can get his way with anyone, can make any Mur feel like a VIP, and thus has been the general manager of a multimillion-dollar-grossing fine-dining steakhouse since he was twenty-four.
    ( Mur is a term that denotes any individual “we don’t know.” A Mur is just a regular customer, no one deserving of special treatment. This fairly benign significance is the standard, though it might also be used more pejoratively, to indicate that