Almost everything in Ruby’s was a health hazard. The ice machine in the back had the sides and the top ripped off, letting all of the guts of multiply colored wires spill out, eagerly awaiting the slip of a drop of water to send the thing into a shower of sparks. The floors in the back were slick with so much grease that I skated around the kitchen when I put dishes away. But, the worst part was the fact that somehow even after a number of health inspectors had come in the restaurant, if you’d call it that, to tell Alice that she was going to be shut down, we never were.
We kept making money, hand over fist. I assumed that the main reason people came back was the fact of our customer service. The waiters, bartenders, and even Alice were always close to the customers. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Alice Jasser was my boss. She’s small, but not small enough to be cute. Just enough for you to chuckle at. She was very kind and gave me my first job, as a dishwasher, in the back of the kitchen, in 100-degree heat. Each and every day for the longest time, I would trudge back there, leaving my old school self-buried in a bag. Only to pull out an even quieter and somehow more awkward version of me to replace myself.
Between school and work, I was taken up. My life was a never-ending loop of listening and being slightly passive aggressive to customers. That and the dreams. I had always blamed it on Ruby’s food. Almost every time I had eaten something from that hell, I always ended up having the dreams. But, after a while, they became regular. I even started to look forward to them after some time. Until, I realized who they were about, Delilah Redfield.