![]() You know that song, Home is where I want to be but I guess I'm already there. She had to go back to Buffalo that night. We sent texts to save each other's numbers in our phones and that should have been the end of it. Levitated up out of our boredom by the other's energy. But Dawn kept giving me pieces of mango, and I kept kissing the juice back into her mouth, until both of our lips were raw with the sugar and the acid and the cold. Her eyebrows go up, and she gives me this shit-eating grin and beckons me into the walk-in cooler so Ricky doesn't catch us. I was feeling bold, so I ate it right out of her hand. "What're you gonna do," I say, and I shrug, trying to be cool. She's like, "Stupid goddamn names they got here, right?" I'm like, "Ugh, don't call it mango-rita." She goes, "Making mango-rita pulp for the bar." She must have thought I was flirting with her, because she smiled an endearing lopsided little smile as she popped out this perfect grid of cubes. ![]() I'd never seen anybody prep a mango the way she was prepping it. Men thought their dick was going to be the one to cure me of my confusion, used that as a flirting tactic more times than I can count. I had long hair, I wore makeup, I got manicures. I was what you'd call a lipstick lesbian. We were borrowing Dawn from another location because one of our line cooks was out with a collapsed lung, this was maybe the sixth or seventh night we'd worked together in two weeks. Everyone in the kitchen wore white jackets because corporate insisted, and caps or bandannas to cover their asses in case a customer found hair in their food. She wore her hair tight on the sides and long on the top, bleached and dyed a pastel purple, tattoos up and down her arms. The way Dawn was going at that mango, I couldn't help it. They tended to be metalheads with criminal records and no social skills. Not at that restaurant, and not at any of the others I had worked at before. At one point I went back into the kitchen and Dawn was there, going at a mango with a serrated knife.Īs a general rule, I didn't talk to the kitchen staff. ![]() I hated the curated soft rock playlist corporate wanted piped over the sound system and he knew it. ![]() Ricky let me pick what music to play on the iPod. I had my regulars, and I always got out after the kitchen did anyway. It was the first place we ever kissed, on a slow night, Ricky cutting a person every hour at first, then every two, until dinner service was mostly done and everyone was restless. Most of us hated the corporate homogeneity that crept in like a cancer, and the only reason any of us who had been there from the beginning stayed was because the manager was too chickenshit to fire us. The place retained its independent restaurant essence, for a while. Some farm-to-table restaurant that started out small and expanded to a second location and before you knew it we had uniforms and a district manager. If it weren't for the way Dawn cut mangoes, none of this would have happened. ![]()
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