She pulled a pencil out of her hair but it did nothing to ruin what she’d just accomplished. I stared at her in wonder.
“You thirsty?” she asked me when she reached my table.
“Yeah, uh, could I get a Coke, please?”
“Well, gee, I can see what I’ve got, Beav. Sit tight,” she said, winking then heading to another table and taking their drink order.
She approached a third group of four teenage boys and I sat up a little for some reason. They gave her their drink orders and she wrote them down, smiling and patting one on the shoulder. The one in the back corner on the left asked her a question and she leaned over to hear him better because the music was so loud, which made me hold my breath for yet another reason I didn’t know. The one she’d patted on the shoulder purposely dropped something on the ground and tapped her on the shoulder then pointed toward what he’d let fall. She looked down and he said something to her to which she just laughed at then headed back toward the kitchen, passing me with a smile.
She got everyone’s drinks and spread them in a spiraling circle on a drink tray. She picked the thing up like it weighed nothing and walked our direction again. She set my drink down so quickly I barely saw it.
“Be right back,” she said over her shoulder.
She dropped off the table’s drinks between mine and the boys then moved on to the teenagers, setting theirs down along with a pitcher of dark syrupy soda. She took their orders as well as the middle table’s and then came to mine.
“Know what you want?” she asked, running her hand down the top of my head, her pencil tucked between her thumb and fingers, and grabbing a few strands of hair, pulling them softly to the ends. Her momentary touch assuaged my frayed nerves.
“Uh, surprise me,” I told her.
She didn’t question it and walked off to the kitchen.
She returned with another pitcher of soda and exchanged it for the pitcher she’d set down in front of the boys as if she knew they were going to drain it while she’d been gone. She set the empty pitcher on the bar top and the bartender took it from her. She glanced at her next table, looked satisfied then came to mine, leaning over the tabletop and resting her chin in her hand since the booths were set a few feet off the ground for easy access.
“I think you’re gonna like what I ordered for you,” she said, turning to look over her shoulder at the bartender when he said her name.
“Yeah, Pete?” she asked.
“Grab me a crate of pilsners, will ya?”
“Be right back,” she said.
And that’s how the entire night when on. About five hundred I’ll be right backs. She’d brought me a giant bacon burger a few minutes after she’d ordered for me, and I ate the entire thing along with a plate of fries. All the work I’d done that afternoon had caught up to me and I guess I was hungrier than I’d thought I was. That, or it was Finley’s oddly mollifying hands. She may not have been able to talk to me that often during her shift but every time she’d pass me, those hands found the top of my hand, forearm, fingers, shoulder, or occasionally my neck.
Around ten, they called all the servers onto the bar top by blaring a siren sound throughout the whole burger joint. I couldn’t help but cringe for Finley when she rolled her eyes and climbed on top of the bar with all the other girls. She was on the far end, closest to me, and when “Cotton-Eyed Joe” began to play they all wrapped their hands around one another’s backs and line danced. Finley’s face looked tired and she wore a forced smile. She hated it and that made me smirk.
She noticed me and smiled genuinely before shaking her head at me. Her dance moves looked rehearsed but sufficient. When the song was over, I stood up and offered her my hand to help her down.
“You looked really into it,” I teased her.
“See that girl over there?” she asked, pointing to another server. A girl, I’d noticed, who really enjoyed the line dance.
“Yeah?” I answered, curious where she was going with her question.
“Well, see, she has thirty-seven pieces of flair.”
I laughed. I mock examined her. “And it looks like you’re only wearing fifteen, Fin.”
“The thing is, Bob, it’s not that I’m lazy, it’s that I just don’t care.”
“You’re funny.”
“Yeah, yeah, sit down, will ya? Wanna piece of cake, Milton?”
“Nah, the ratio of people to cake is too big.”
She smiled. “All right, fine. I’m gonna clean up then. My shift is done. They cut me early.”
“Cool,” I said, then thought of something. “Wait.”
“What’s up?”
“Those guys earlier. One of them dropped something on the floor. What was it?”
She shook her head. “Oh, that. Yeah, he elbowed a sugar packet onto the floor and told me I’d dropped my name tag.”
“Clever,” I said, almost laughing.
“They’ve got a new one every week.”
Finley tossed her apron onto a pile to be laundered, I assumed, then washed her hands for what seemed like the thousandth time that night.
That night’s bartender came up to me just then. “You goin’ out with Finley Dyer now? She’s got issues, you know. I tried it out with her once and she wanted nothin’ to do with me.”
I eyed him. “And that’s why she has issues?” I asked. “Because she wouldn’t go out with you?”