Stay With Me by Garret Freymann-Weyr Page B

me.
    "The guy at table nine wants you," he says.
    "That's a perfect solution," one of the women says to me. "Do we have to pay for both?"
    "I'll be right there," I tell Drew and say to the woman, "I'll ask."
    "We could take the other halves home," the other woman says. "Maybe Mama would like them."
    "She does love them," the first woman says.
    Sisters! Who call their mother Mama, just like Clare and Rebecca. I want to ask them a thousand things and warn them to stay alive, but there are some things even I know cannot be said. To anyone.
    "Can we do that?" they ask together and then start laughing.
    "I'm sure you can," I say. "I'll bring it right out."
    I pause at table nine and ask Eamon if he needs anything.
    "I'm in the wrong section, aren't I, bunny?"
    He calls me that sometimes, and when I asked him if he thought I looked like a rabbit, he said,
No, you look young and worth protecting.
    "You're in Drew's section," I answer. "He's great with cake and coffee."
    "How much commotion if I move?" Eamon asks.
    Hal's looking right at me, and no wonder. I'm not doing my job.
    "The customer is king," I say. "But maybe order something else so there's a reason I'm standing here."
    Eamon asks for a glass of wine and off I go, passing Drew arriving with the chocolate raspberry cake. I check with Hal that it's okay to tell the kitchen to cut pastries in half and then ask him to bring a Merlot over to the man at table nine.
    "The one who's moving?" Hal asks.
    "That's right," I say, without turning around.
    "Is he bothering you?" Hal asks me.
    "No," I say. "No. He's really nice."
    "Just remember that some people think waitresses are available," Hal says. "Like what's on the menu."
    "Yuck," I tell him and get back to work.
    The sisters act like seven-year-olds over their dessert. They're so happy to be eating it. When I give them the boxed-up remains I tell them both that I hope their mother likes it.
    "Just my mother," says the woman taking the box. "We're not sisters."
    So you never know. Raphael is right. A lot of the things we see are what we wish.
    "I've read your book," Eamon says when I come to clear his table. "It took longer than I thought."
    "You did?" I ask, almost dropping my little tray of dishes. "A week's not long."
    "Well, I was sorry not to see you Monday," he says. "But I thought I should finish."
    I put his bill down and say I'll be right back. I clear the rest of my tables so I can focus on what he has to say about
Tender Is the Night.
I can't believe he read it. Even Raphael hasn't done that. He just keeps saying he has every faith in my abilities. That's a mistake.
    "So, what's it about?" I ask, hoping this isn't cheating.
    I'm still going to keep on reading it twice, but it'd be nice to know.
    "I think it's about disappointment," Eamon says. "Life has failed everyone in this book. Everything they touch leads them to ruin."
    "Ruin," I say, thinking, of course, about Janie and Julian, but also about Rebecca.
    She wasn't part of a ruined great love, but ... she was obviously disappointed. Even before she killed herself, I knew as much as that.
    "I make and sell cake," she used to say whenever you asked about her work. "It is what it is."
    When she was a hospice nurse, she said, "I watch people die."
    Rebecca said
It is what it is
more than Clare says
Oh, joy.
Did life fail my sister? Did she think that?
    And then a thousand things about
Tender Is the Night
snap into place. Failure and disappointment. That makes sense. Maybe Rebecca, like the people in the book, felt them too much.
    No one ever believed you were a failure.
But, of course, it's too late to tell her. And it's not what I would have told her if I'd known her plan. I try not to get lost in Rebecca World and bring my mind back to the living.
    "You must think I'm so dumb," I say to Eamon. "That only took you a week."
    "I think you're what, twenty-two? Twenty-four?" Eamon asks. "A book about life's disappointments is a bad fit for you. That's all."
    I wonder how