This Is My Brain in Love - I. W. Gregorio Page 0,11
few days to make your decision. I know you’ve probably got a lot of options. But if it sweetens the pot any, I can also add the Netflix password that I stole from my BFF into your compensation package.”
He grins at that, the corner of his eyes crinkling, and I feel a pang that it might be both the first and the last time I ever see his smile.
WILL
When Jocelyn offers me a job on the spot, our role reversal is so absolute it’s dizzying. All of a sudden, I’m no longer the supplicant. I’ve been chosen, and I don’t know what to do with my newfound power to reject.
I don’t respond immediately, and Jocelyn’s face falls, and I’m surprised by how keenly I feel her disappointment in my own chest. It seems out of proportion to what I could offer as an employee.
If I’m being honest, I applied to the job to prove to myself and to Javier that I’m an equal-opportunity job seeker, and I agreed to the interview mostly because it seemed like a low-stakes way to get another interview under my belt. But then today when I told Manny where I was going, he got really excited. “Did you know A-Plus is the only restaurant in that strip mall that hasn’t closed in my lifetime?”
It made me wonder if there is a story there. In the Spartan, we’re always writing about stores that are opening. We’ve never really done a piece on the restaurants—the Utica institutions, really—that stay open. Just last fall, Javier went for a photo shoot for an article about a new gastropub; I remember laying out his photos and being surprised by how trendy it looked, and thinking that the owners must have spent a fortune on interior design.
That gastropub closed within eight months. And yet A-Plus, with its battered Formica tabletops and minimalist decor, has been around for as long as I can remember.
There has to be a story there.
Jocelyn stands up and bites her lip. “Well, thank you for your time.”
I blurt out a response without thinking about it.
“I’ll take it.”
Jocelyn’s eyes bug out comically. “You… Seriously?”
Watching her light up ignites a warmth in my belly that cements my decision, my use of power. “Yeah,” I say, taking in the bare-bones restaurant. It’s clean. Rough around the edges, for sure, but it’s not trying to be anything that it isn’t. “This place has a lot of potential.”
JOCELYN
Maybe I’m not the only one who’s desensitized to design.
I reach out my hand, happiness and hope bubbling up inside me.
“Welcome to the A-Plus team, Will. You can call me Jos.”
This Is My Brain on Hope
JOCELYN
That afternoon, I’m so stoked to tell my dad I hired someone that I actually hang out in our living room, something I haven’t done since middle school.
Amah pulls me in to de-string some snap peas, taking advantage of my public appearance. I look over at my brother fiddling around with his Nerf basketball hoop in the front hallway. “Hey, why isn’t Alan helping?” I complain.
“He no good at doing this. Take ten times as long and pea look like been chewed on by dog,” she says.
“Can’t he at least fold some napkins or something?”
“I did them already,” Alan says, bouncing off a rim shot. “Amah promised I could play for a while when I was done.”
“Five more minute, then homework,” Amah reminds him. My poor bro almost flunked math last year so Mom and Dad put him in summer school. That’s one of the reasons we’re so shorthanded—it’s not like Alan can do much (he only just turned twelve), but even having someone to do busywork like folding napkins and filling up the little take-out containers of soy sauce keeps us afloat.
The three of us in the room is as close to a family gathering as we can get when we’re not in the restaurant; my mom is already downstairs, cutting and marinating meat. When I was younger I used to wonder if this was the life she thought she’d have when she first came to America as a teenager. Did she imagine that she’d come home from a twelve-hour shift every night with her hair reeking of sesame oil and cornstarch trapped under her fingernails? She knew when she married my father that he was in the restaurant business, of course, but maybe she thought she’d be a cheongsam-wearing hostess at a fancy sit-down dim sum restaurant in the city, the kind of place that uses nondisposable chopsticks