Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler

the Williamsburg stuff, now I suppose it’s technically his juvenilia, worth millions. He dicked around with garbage and I sang opera in the bathtub.”
    “I miss your singing,” Simone said.
    “The third-floor skylight was missing. When it rained it was like the Pantheon, a column of water and light in the middle of the room. The floor rotted in this glorious black circle. It grew moss in the spring. They tried to sell it to us for $30,000. I am not kidding. We thought, Jesus, who would buy a place on Grand Street and Wythe? I assumed the river would swallow it up.”
    He stopped. I took a tiny sip of my gin and tonic, which was too strong for me though I would never admit it.
    “There are condos there now,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. My head was getting difficult to prop up. “All these half-finished, empty buildings. They’ll never fill them. There are no people.”
    “You are condos, new girl,” Sasha said.
    Walter stared into the bottom of his glass. “Fucking holes in the ceiling. Frozen pipes all winter, showering at the Y. We tossed crackheads out of the entryway weekly—
weekly.
One of them tried to stab Walden with a steak knife—
our
steak knife. And sometimes I wish we would have stayed.”
    —
    I RODE the L train, back and forth. Back and forth. In the beginning, I made eye contact with everyone. I applied mascara, I counted my cash tips on my lap, I wrote myself notes, ate bagels, redistributed the cream cheese with my fingers, moved my shoulders to music, stretched out on the seats, smiled at flashes of my reflection in the train windows.
    “Your self-awareness is lacking,” Simone said to me one day as I was leaving. “Without an ability to see yourself, you can’t protect yourself. Do you understand? It’s crucial to your survival that you pause the imaginary sound track in your head. Don’t isolate your senses—you’re interacting with an environment.”
    I learned how to sit still and look at nothing and no one. When someone next to me on the train started talking to themselves, I was embarrassed for them.
    —
    I WAS WORKING the dining room the first day Mrs. Neely didn’t have her wallet. I was replenishing the silver and I heard her exclaim. She threw her purse up on the table with her needle-thin arms and her knife fell to the floor. It sounded like an alarm. The surrounding tables turned. She pulled out slips of paper, crumpled Kleenex, several tubes of lipstick, her MetroCard.
    Simone picked up the knife and put her hand on her shoulder. Mrs. Neely sat back down but her hands continued to flap in front of her face. “Well I…well I…Well.”
    “You know, I believe we found it,” Simone said, catching one of Mrs. Neely’s erratic hands. “You are all set. I noticed you didn’t finish your lamb today, was it all right?”
    “Oh it was underdone. I don’t know what you pay that chef for if he’s not able to cook a lamb. I attended a dinner with Julia Child once, and we had lamb. James Beard, he could cook a lamb, my dear.”
    “Thank you for telling me. I will pass it along.” Simone picked up the check. I hadn’t seen Zoe come up next to me. Simone approached us.
    “There’s no wallet,” she said and sighed. “I’ll go ahead and comp it.”
    “I should check with Howard first,” Zoe said carefully.
    “Excuse me?” Simone turned to her. I backed up.
    “The situation is entirely out of control. It deserves a conversation. Chef is completely fed up—double orders of soup, lamb sent back three times? It’s getting worse.”
    Simone stiffened, I felt it from a few feet away. Zoe kept her hands clasped behind her back, enforcing composure. A silence bubbled between them and I knew Zoe would break it first.
    “You can’t just comp entire meals every week, Simone. That’s not your call. And it’s gone beyond the restaurant’s responsibility. Do you remember when she fell? That’s on us. Where is the line? Where is her family?”
    She