just something.
There is a woman who comes into our restaurant probably 5 of the 7 days of the week. Of those 5 days, she spends usually spends about 4 of them at the bar, all day long. I have noticed her since the day I began working there, as she’s hard to miss. Her hair is gray and curly, she is probably in her early fifties. She wears square glasses that make her head sort of seem like it’s a Christmas present, her hair the curly ribbons cascading off the top. I might also mention that almost every day that this woman comes into our restaurant, she is already quite tipsy. She then spends hours sitting at the bar by herself, drinking “GVG Martinis” and trying, through her drunkenness, to flirt with our bartender who, unbeknownst to her, has been gay all of his life. Usually once or twice during the week, she will decide to have a seat, usually outside on the courtyard. On one of these occasions, I sat her at 532, a table with a clear view of the door to the courtyard, since she claimed that a friend was joining her for lunch. This was at 3:45 in the afternoon, when our restaurant was dead and 15 minutes away from switching to the dinner menu. As I showed her to the table, I asked her the name of the woman joining her, so that I could direct her to the right table when she arrived. She “forgot” her friend’s name, and sputtered to give me an excuse as to why she didn’t know it. I assured her that it was okay, and asked for a description of the woman. She blankly looked at me, picked at her napkin on the table, and said in a wobbly voice, “she’s short and looks like most women.” I nodded my head slowly, turned around, and walked back to the front desk. I could only shake my head and think to myself how sad it must be to live the life of a woman who comes into a restaurant almost every day, gets drunk, and has to invent make-believe friends that are meeting her, so that the employees don’t begin to pity her. Her “friend” never showed up.