When they walked in, the waitress didn’t bother to get up from the stool where she was filling out a crossword puzzle, just pointed at a pile of menus on the greeter stand and told them to sit wherever they wanted. Cait scanned the room, taking in the cook blowing cigarette smoke out through the emergency exit in back and a four-top of shift workers still wearing their high-vis vests. Cait picked a booth by the window and made sure to sit with her back to the wall, so she could keep a lookout.
The waitress eventually came over and took their order—coffee and a slice of cherry pie for Cait, ice water with lemon for Rebecca—and the two of them sat in silence while they waited, the swirl of Muzak filling their heads. The waitress shoved their drinks on the table with a grunt. Not expecting a big tip, then. Cait couldn’t blame her. She knew from her own waitressing days that when you got a table of women, they weren’t usually big tickets—appetizers split four ways and salads-as-mains and single glasses of house white. They tended to split the bill, too, and calculate the tip down to the penny. It wasn’t like serving a table full of men, all dick-swinging and red meat and bottles of Barolo. Not that they’d be serving Barolo in a place like this, but the principle remained. Men wanted to show off for each other, and—if you were lucky—that meant a fat tip for the cute waitress. If you weren’t so lucky, it meant fending off stray hands when you bent over to clear the table.
Cait always tipped big. She’d give the waitress 25 percent, easy, even though the woman hadn’t said a civil word to them yet. She’d do it to prove a point more than anything else. Maybe next time a couple of women walked in here in the middle of the night, the waitress would be a little nicer to them. “Smile, sweetheart. It can’t be that bad.” How many times had she heard that when she was serving tables? Let the smile falter for one second and they were onto her. They thought she owed them that smile. That she should be grateful.
Bartending wasn’t as bad. She controlled the alcohol, which meant that she was the most powerful person in the place. If somebody told her to smile, she could tell him to fuck off, and all they could do was laugh it off, because they wanted their liquor. Plus, there was a bar separating her from the customer. She still got the occasional hand reaching over when she bent down to fetch a beer from the fridge, but it was rare.
Cait poured a long stream of sugar into her coffee and stirred it with a spoon. She didn’t normally take it so sweet, but the adrenaline from the fox was long gone and the exhaustion had set in right behind her eyes and she was left feeling like she was swimming in murky pond water.
“I’m sorry you’ve got to drive at this time of night,” Rebecca said, scraping with her fingernail at a spot of syrup that had congealed on the table. “You know, I can drive for a while if you’re getting tired.”
“I’ll be fine once I get some coffee into my system.” There was no way in hell she was letting someone else drive her baby. “I’m basically nocturnal, anyway. This is no big deal.”
“Do you mind it?”
“Being nocturnal?”
Rebecca nodded.
“It’s fine. I’m a bartender, so it’s an occupational hazard.”
“You are? Where?”
“Back in Austin.” Cait took a long pull of coffee.
“There are some nice bars in Austin, I’ve heard.”
“Yeah, well, mine is the kind of bar where the bartenders wear Stetsons and Daisy Dukes. Not exactly the height of sophistication.”
Rebecca looked horrified. “Seriously? That’s so . . . so . . .”
“Gross? Degrading? Yeah, pretty much.”
“Why are you working there?”
“The money’s decent, and my landlord’s pretty attached to getting paid his rent.”
“Oh. Of course. Sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“It’s fine.” Cait tried not to roll her eyes. Of course this woman would ask her something like that. She’d probably never had to work a day in her life. She’d probably never even set foot in a place like the Dark Horse, or an IHOP, for that matter. She probably assumed the world just ordered itself around her, one long red carpet rolling out in front of her, ready to be stepped on.