The tip of Angela Kane’s cigarette flickers as she dusts the stoop outside Kline. She savors a deep inhale as she bends down and takes a seat. Her nicotine breath becomes entangled with the sun’s golden rays. Fatigue drapes over her with each languid puff, weariness etched across her reflection in the dining hall’s tall windows. Poplar leaves beside the pathway are fluttering upward, their branches all bent to one side. 

Perched at the entrance, students ebb and flow. The lunchtime hustle and bustle has finally hushed, granting her a few stolen minutes of quiet. When Angie returns, she’ll swipe their cards, collect their cash, and send them on their way. While others cocoon themselves in thick winter jackets, Angie, with her one free hand, unbuttons her jacket, crumbs tumbling from her crimson exterior. A bronze-colored name tag adorns her right breast. Daylight falls into her as unto the night dew which lingered on thin blades of grass nearby. Puddles cradle small craters of wet: memories of rain, still on the surface.

She has dealt with marriages that had grown dull, the sudden arrival of illness, the intransigence of memory, swells of desire, weather-beaten friends and inadvertent intimacies, the will to change and the inability to change. So she takes fifteen and lights a cigarette.

She lets the new warmth of April settle in like a whisper or a secret. Spring unfurls slow and quiet along the shoreline of the Hudson. She could wait: she had waited, the unhurried pace of the seasons no match to Angie’s fifty-nine years in this town, a quarter of which she spent in this place. Miniscule buds on the trees accompanied precocious students’ big-worded conversations:  “Sartre,” “Heidegger,” “panopticism.” Their nervous energy can be unsettling, like a bum knee and an eight-hour shift. She gently taps her cigarette, watching her breath curl up beside her. She taps her knee—slowly, methodically—as a therapist had once instructed. 

You get used to things, she thinks, without getting used to things.

Angie runs her nails—a deep shade of purple, trimmed down to her fingertips—through her thin blond hair, tucking the loose strands behind her ears. Eyeliner and mascara conspire to create the illusion of eyes deep as weather. Dark folds linger beneath, immune to attempts at camouflage. A metallic cross drapes beneath a plump flap of excess skin which blends together her throat and her neck. 

Easily afraid, always unsettled: she carries something that cannot be set down. Angie is severe, salty, proud, opinionated, and physically imposing (or at least she sees herself that way). She inspires fear and muted amusement from the students, who smile at her tender-hearted but comically incapable warmth. Inside, she is surging with feeling—fear; full and complicated love for her son and sometimes, her ex-husbands; tidal anger. The consequence of looking inward for so many years is her trademark lack of insight; she has the sensitivity of a tuning fork, and so she’s hardened herself against too much sensation. 

Amidst the brisk student traffic, Angie takes another deep inhale. She has gotten used to the various bodies which run in parallel orbit around the college. Tweed-clad college professors, preoccupied and condescending; undergraduates, transient, anxious and absentminded and sometimes unexpectedly, unbelievably kind. Maintenance, B&G, Dining: all caught in the velocity of it all, continuously pulled inward. She observed their comings and goings; the students’ wide-eyed wonder in their freshman year, the pontifical wisdom they wore with honor as they walked with their diploma and she prepared lunch. 

Angie is glad to have landed here. From crafting aircraft breaks to house cleaning and babysitting—it is this role that unexpectedly emerged from the shadows that clung to her. The rhythm of the job became magnetic: the aroma of simmering macaroni, the familiar beep of the register which preserved her sanity (that fragile thing). She resisted the tides that swept others away: the changes, the new jobs, the prospect of something better. Hope was a cancer, she thought, and she didn’t want it. 

By thirty-two, Angie was married and had a daughter. Balancing the demands of work, motherhood, and her illness presented a challenge. Her first husband—and later, her second—didn’t understand. Relationships crumbled as swiftly as they formed, often when she found herself unable to step beyond her own doorstep, consumed by the paralyzing fear that gripped her. The simple act of grocery shopping became an insurmountable weight, and the mere thought of leaving her home sent her off-kilter. 

It was like drowning in cobwebs, she thought, whose sticky maze was spinning about her. A darkness rumbled through her, her soul suffocating in tar. Every heartbeat felt like a seismic tremor that reverberated through the body. This turmoil again and again sent her adrift, tethered only to relentless worry. To come up for air seemed impossible. 

There were days when it was excruciating. Years that seemed perennially rough. Unyielding. Blinding. Something passed over her, like a shadow crossing in front of the sun. Angie’s trepidation was a relentless specter, shrouding her in suffocating panic. She evaded anything that threatened to unleash her fear: public transportation, open spaces, closed spaces, standing in line, bustling crowds, empty rooms—everything, really. Angie’s anxiety held her in a relentless pull and cast a shadow over every move. She sought refuge at home, life remained stable even as it seemed to suffocate her.

It began in the high school at the end of a corridor, that central artery of the arts and sciences and P.E. During a mundane social studies lesson, an insidious panic emerged that constricted Angie’s breath. She felt the stain of some sadness make its way through her. A perceptive teacher sensed her unease and probed with a question, setting off a fire somewhere deep down within. She sought refuge in the girls’ restroom, where Angie huddled in a ball on cold tile, encircled by concerned onlookers who called for help. 

The sequence repeated itself the following day and the next again. She withdrew two months shy of graduation. Her sanctuary became the confines of her home, where stepping outside was laden with dread. A profound worry took root, coercing her into a life of confinement and self-imposed exile. Within the walls she knew best was a fortress, or a jail cell. 

Outside, Angie’s fear held her with a fierceness that matched the power of the ocean. Meadows green and bright with sunshine; rivulets of melted snow that ran down craggy mountains, glittering like silver chains; revelations and memories; concrete walls and so many futures—all suddenly beyond her grasp. Time passed and Angie boiled under the surface. Clenched, off balance, prickly. As if pickled in a jar. Some days she shook as though an electric current ran through her.

I can do better, Angie thought. Look, she said, look how I want to live, look how I want to hold on. It was criminal to look out on all that color, all that joy in a world of sadness and misfortune, and not do better. 

In due time she began to patch herself up, to walk down the street again. She found herself learning all the intimate ways that history works itself in, navigating tumultuous swings of antidepressants, experimental treatments, and other drugs. At times, she was a distant, shrouded planet, cloaked in the darkness of side effects and unrest, orbiting her own vexations. At others, her thoughts were a suffocating void where the weight of anxiety bore down upon her. Thinking became an elusive feat; every breath seemed a struggle as she gasped for a smoother, more gentle surface.

Eventually, a faint glimmer eventually began to pierce the darkness. It was like moving into a pocket of warm air. Gradually, the feeling began to wane, and when it returned, it did so only with a dull, medicated intensity. Shattered fragments of life unearthed themselves, and one by one, she picked them up. 

As Angie reached smoother shores, she summoned the courage to attend an interview at the local liberal arts college. They were hiring a part-timer for the kitchen, and she made the leap. At first, she was terrified of the power of her wish—to have an anchor, something to hold onto, outside home—but with time, her nerves receded. Soon, the bustling dining hall, initially foreign territory, began its transformation into her daily routine, an extension of home. 

The place etched its mark on Angie, where she served up routine as the temperamental chefs did meals. She found comfort in the predictable cadence of the job and in the occasional mischief of its occupants. One year, food fights were a daily ritual. Her eyes widened as she caught the sight of a student dashing through the hallway, stark naked. Another, she discovered a pig’s head in the servery. She loved complaining over roast beef and cigarettes almost as much as she loved the antics themselves.

The flow of life gave rise to good days and bad. Through routine, she navigated her little revolutions. When the sun shone, she smiled. Occasionally, her anxiety welled and turned into anger. Inside she was a tempest, a storm brewing as pent-up frustrations flashed—often unexpectedly—at minor figures, when no one could save the students who faltered, forgot their cards, or fell a few dollars short. Students glimpsed her moods, knew when the lights flickered and it was time to rush off. Sometimes even she was dizzy, spinning through the vastness of her emotions, their origin hidden behind the clouds.

Her lighter flicks on and off again as she lights another cigarette. Angie chews on her reflection: a solitary figure on a stoop, another cigarette smoldering between her thick fingers, trying to make her way and still reduced to a crawl. Doubt takes hold, as it often does, and she wonders if something is perhaps just inherently defective about Angela Kane, why this burden has fallen squarely upon her shoulders. Her notes half-broken, limbs creaking in resistance; weight stuck like a dense blanket of snow. A life churning with static. Doctors, lovers, kids and friends: they all seem to slip away through the cracks, out of grasp. 

She thinks about that lost decade, when her world was confined to four walls. It’s gone now, those years swept up with the wind. Life, it seems, has always been like this: never easy. The dread stings as it finds the surface. For Angie time is as big and round as the sky, and to try to make sense of it is like trying to make sense of music and God and why the ocean is so deep. Long ago Angie had known not to try to make sense of these things, the way other people tried to. 

Dinner’s prospects—like the fate of most things—are slim. Typically, the dining hall staff could bring home leftovers, those odds and ends that couldn’t find a place in tomorrow’s reheated menu or the dank basement’s cavernous refrigerators. She’d grown accustomed to TV dinners and the warmth of sloppy seconds. The fare, dripping with its fat and oil, is simple and familiar. But as she rests her wrist on her knee, the thought of lugging a hefty shopping bag feels like a recipe for pain. Her mind scans her freezer at home, its snowy insides with frostbitten meats and containers of pre-seasoned vegetables. 

One more cigarette before she heads back in.

Angie’s always loved food: eating it, cooking it, smelling it, the last bite and the first. All facts laid bare, she just likes it, plain and simple. Perhaps in some other life, it would transport her back to some idyllic childhood, to simpler times that she could keep close. Everyone has one: an illicit affair, a shoe collection, a drinking habit, a full refrigerator. A thread that keeps you connected to the rhythm of life. Three meals, sometimes four: they anchor her. A refuge, where past and future fade out of the foreground and the present moment becomes some kind of relief. Fork in hand, she has control. As the food descends and kindles in her stomach, it fuels the fire, banishing the chill of frigid nights and enveloping her in the heat of summer mornings. 

Those bites, the swallow, the exhale of a single drag. They’re hers. 

Back in her one-bedroom in Tivoli, Angie stays busy. Her curtains sway gently in the breeze, every stitch her own. Amid snapshots of her daughter, her granddaughter, a dog long dead and buried, it’s every bit a gallery of those soft spots that still remain. It’s really all there is to life, she thinks, those photographs caught in the amber of the moment: family and nature, desire and death, stories made from love and joy and scratch. At night, the television flickers to life, casting its warm, mind-numbing glow across the room. Golden Girls. I Love Lucy. When she reaches an end, she just turns back the clock, rewinds and restarts the series over again. A lifeline to something continuous—that, even in the stillness of this small and lonely place, life continues in its beautiful and gut-wrenching hue. 

Nights always close with The Andy Griffith Show because it reminds Angie of her father, whose time was cut short when Angie was twelve. She can still recall the mornings he’d return home from the bakery at the A&P, wet flour and an aroma of freshly baked bread clinging to his clothes. In the kitchen he’d craft velvety mashed potatoes, rich gravy, pork tenderloin in the oven. Flavors all so familiar. 

Overnight, he vanished. In the quiet corners of her mind, Angie navigates her past, retracing the blurred lines between what was and what might have been. In the presence of revolving colleagues and each year’s fresh batch of young faces, she shares his stories: how her father, Richie, toiled as a pinsetter at a bowling alley when he was six; the night he gifted her mother a golden necklace and she threw it in the river; when she was little and they sat on milk crates and collected coal along the Hudson line, and they were happy. 

Their shared moments exist together in delicate layers, like sponge cake or lasagna, fragile images sketched in parchment. A phantom crafted from loose threads of memory. She was so young when he left that Angie wonders whether she created him herself, whether any of what she tells is really true; whether her father is really just a tapestry of fragments and emotions that have emerged from the ether; the strokes of his existence, a dance of light and shadow. 

Angie stamps out the memory, the longing, the fear, the butt of her cigarette, and heads back in.

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Evan Kanouse is a writer, artist, and educator. He is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at The New School. He has studied and written about belief systems in education (M.Ed. Educational Leadership, Boston College. M.A. Religious Studies, Fordham University. B.A. Religion, Bard College). He lives in southern Connecticut, where he works at an N-12 independent school and is co-founder of Outbox, a non-profit organization dedicated to LGBTQ-inclusive education.

“All of our food is grown, raised, and caught Upstate,” Terrence said. He and his trainee walked out of the cooler — tubs of sliced lemons in their arms, stocking the dining room for dinner service. The heart of the kitchen was loud with the churning sounds of machinery, the fine chopping of parsley, deep sinks filling with ice and cold water. A chef scraped the grill with a bent spatula, digging up black soot and smelling of smoke. “The eggs and the beef are from local farms; the fish are caught in the lakes. Our produce is grown nearby.” They turned into the kitchen alley. Terrence emptied lemon wedges into a silver pan — seeds and juice splashing against stainless steel countertops and forming sour puddles. The sight of the yellow fruit made the trainee’s mouth jolt, bringing her tongue to life. “The shellfish are from New England,” he admitted. “But Chef can’t go without mussels.”

It was a Saturday night, the first of June, and it was humid. Terrence was sure that it was going to be busy. By seven o’clock, the bar would run out of fresh mint and they would have to start improvising; all of the lake trout would be gone by sunset and Chef would begin shouting and cursing in frustration, dripping sweat from her brow and onto the tile; the kitchen would become tense and booming and airless; the dining room would fill with patient bodies, breathing in each other’s heavy air, talking of trivial and faraway things. Terrence’s joints would stiffen by the end of the night. He would be dry-swallowing painkillers in any inconsequential moment of freetime.

But being busy was good. A busy Saturday meant that there would be lots of distractions to center his mind. The young servers, like ballerinas falling from their pointe shoes, would become flustered by their full sections and give a table to him. He would welcome six or seven parties at once — welcoming six or seven gratuities. A bounty of cash would grow in his pocket, allowing him to splurge on a bottle of post-shift rosé.

His life was full of these contradictions: he wanted Saturday to be both busy and slow; the grapefruit margarita was bitter and tart; he loved serving and he hated it; he missed Hudson and wanted him dead. Maybe these contradictions came with age. Maybe he was a contradictory person. Either way, he felt those busy nights in his bones.

At The Anchor, the first of June marked the resurrection of the summer menu. It was Terrence’s thirty-eighth June at the restaurant.

“I’m drowning.” One of the younger servers grabbed Terrence’s arm, churning the black sleeve of his dress shirt like a pepper grinder. He was standing at a P.O.S. in the dining room, sending drinks to the bar. His trainee loomed beside him like a shadow. “Can you greet table 14? Or take them? I don’t care. I’m going to kill that new hostess.”

As he expected, it would be his seventh table. He agreed.

In fleeting moments of tenderness, Terrence saw himself in the new servers. He saw himself when they came drifting into the restaurant in their clean, black clothes. He remembered fumbling with corkscrews — when a glass of water would slip from his hand and onto the tile. He was especially reminded of himself when they came as he had: in a pair.

“My boyfriend and I got hired together,” the trainee said. She was pretty and clear-skinned and went to one of the colleges in town. She couldn’t have been older than twenty-one, claiming to have service experience from a restaurant back home, wherever that was. “He’s training as a barback.”

Terrence was always amused when a couple got hired together. He watched how they engaged with each other, asking their partner for special favors and treating these tasks with a particular seriousness. He could always tell when they had been fighting or fucking before a shift — how they saw each other in the black uniforms of The Anchor versus the colorful clothes of the real world.

“Try to keep your work lives and personal lives separate,” he said to the trainee. He rolled the sentiment in a fine coat of sugar, not taking his eyes from the screen.

“We will. It helps that he’s behind the bar and I’m on the floor, I guess.” She took a sharp breath, matching the surrounding sounds of silverware. “It’s exciting to be here together, though. I never want to leave his side and now I don’t have to.”

“Just make sure that you know what you want.”

She nodded without knowing what he meant.

He finished at the P.O.S. and turned toward the bar.

“To work here, you’ll need to know how to eat seasonally.” Terrence and the trainee approached the service corner, scanning the counter for their drinks. He was always walking just a few steps in front of her. “For example, on the first of June — the first day of the summer menu — I would never recommend the mussels. It’s too early in the season and too close to their spawning.”

“Spawning?”

“When they release their eggs. It weakens them. They start to smell rancid.”

From across the counter, the new barback approached Terrence’s trainee. “How are you doing out there, babe?” He used tattooed forearms to pop the cap from a bottle of ale. It was the color of gold, crisp and malted, breathing citrus fumes.

“Trying my best.”

“I’m sure you’re doing great. You look gorgeous on the floor.”

She rolled her eyes, morphing into something playful and coy. “You look hot behind the bar.”

Terrence snatched the sweaty bottle from the boy’s hands. A fragmented memory of his youth dripped down his throat and he swallowed it away. “The galley needs ice,” he barked.

He looked back at the girl beside him. “Table 43 must be in the window. Let’s go.”

“Do you know the wine list?” They entered the kitchen alley. It was busy with backwaiters.

Intensity spilled from the line and engulfed the space in a steady hum. Seared fish and charcoal pierced through the watery air. They tucked themselves into a back corner, speaking quietly. The energy was too fragile and sanctified; it could easily have been thrown off by such conversations.

The trainee thought of the wine list. She tried to center herself in the strange sea of noise and scent. Her senses were being provoked and her synapses had trouble keeping up. She couldn’t overlook Terrence’s snarling. “More or less.”

“What would you pair with the blackened trout?”

She hung in the air, her mouth ajar.

From the window, the expo started shouting. “Runner, table 43!”

“A dry riesling,” Terrence answered for her. “The acid counteracts the spice. You don’t want anything with oak.” He swatted at the backwaiters so that he could grab the tray.

When Terrence and Hudson started at The Anchor — back when their skin was elastic, dotted with dimples and acne scars — they had been the same way. The wine list was not yet scripture. The grilled bass was not a glorious relic of the lake, but something to be chewed quickly and chased with beer. But Terrence stayed up at night to study. He laid cardstock pages and half-empty bottles on the bedroom floor, straining to distinguish one cabernet from another. He mapped the anatomy of the tongue. He dreamt of oysters and woke in a milky haze.

Hudson, on the other hand, was the kind of boy who ate fast food in the driver’s seat. He drank his coffee with three spoonfuls of sugar. He never cared for a hit of adrenaline or a complex taste. During the rush of service, Hudson longed for a corporate career, a tidy cubicle with a framed photo of his family.

“I just wish that you would take this place more seriously,” Terrence said once. “You need to learn this stuff.” They were standing in the same, private corner of the alley. Hudson, for the third time that week, had misplaced an order, and Chef screamed and threw a pan in response, calling him all kinds of names.

Hudson unrolled some noise from his throat. “And you need to lighten up.” He motioned around the kitchen, all of its cathedral glory. “This whole place,” he gestured, “is just a means to an end.”

“To me, it’s more than that.”

“It can’t last forever. You can’t work here for the rest of your life.” A backwaiter brushed past Hudson’s shoulder. He lowered his voice, but the sentiment stayed the same — his tone like the snapped sound of a rubber band. “How can you settle down in a place like this?”

Terrence and his trainee dropped the food at table 43. A filet mignon, tender and bloody and blue rare. Landlocked salmon, baked with brown sugar and served with steak fries. Angel hair pasta with steamed clams. 

When they left the table, the trainee turned over her shoulder, balancing a tray of bread plates in shaky hands. She was unpolished, Terrence knew, but she had potential. He could tell by the look in her eye. “How long have you been working here?”

“Almost forty years.”

She turned from the tray for just a second. “Wow.” She couldn’t have imagined the passing of four decades; it existed in her mind only as a hypothetical. “You must be happy here.”

It wasn’t as simple as that. There were parts of it that had never grown old: the fast and abundant money, the food, the mind-erasing stampede of service — all of the things which he loved at the beginning and continued to love until the end. It was a rush that he couldn’t have found anywhere else. It was an addiction that he had never seemed to shake. His old friends had pills and powders. Terrence had this.

Instead, he simply nodded, saying, “I am.”

Table 14 was occupied by four guests — a middle-aged couple and two teen boys. “I’ll get them drinks,” he told the girl. “Go empty your tray and check the kitchen for food.”

The trainee did as she was instructed. Terrence was certain that she would drop the tray, shove the dishes in front of a new, flat-lipped dishwasher, and meet her lover behind the bar. Maybe she would tell her boyfriend that Terrence scared her. Maybe they would sneak a shot of rum. Maybe, only under the dim, revealing light of the restaurant — a fantastical force that stripped all pretenses away — she would discover her lover’s first flaw. 

Terrence took a breath and approached the table of four. It was no different than any other night; he had done this dance a thousand times.

“Good evening, everyone.”

At one point in time, Terrence thought that he and Hudson could make it work. He lied to himself, saying that they could understand each other in spite of their differences — in spite of Hudson’s hatred of service, his immature palate, his lust for stability. But when Hudson gave his resignation from The Anchor, so too did he pack his bags and leave Terrence’s world altogether. “We want different things,” he said. “And you’ll always be loyal to that restaurant.”

In the sore and surreal years that followed their split, the boys grew in their own directions. They picked up the shattered pieces of their lives, stitching them together into different shapes, something new but vaguely familiar. Hudson got his desk job, his tie laced tightly around his neck each morning, returned to his new home at five o’clock each evening. Terrence heard through the grapevine — a vine of Concord, tart and strong — that he was doing well.

And Terrence, in those early years of his new life, did well also. He became the sounds and scents of The Anchor. He tasted subtle flavors that he’d always been told about but had never experienced for himself. “I get it now,” Terrence, one night, said to no one in particular — holding the stem of a wine glass between two fingers. A bead of chardonnay collected on his bottom lip. For the first time, he realized what it meant for a wine to be buttery. “I understand what they mean.”

From table 14, Hudson looked up at Terrence. The skin on his face had ripened, fine lines spreading around his lips. His hair sprouted gray like weeds in a garden. He wore the same cologne.

“Terrence,” he breathed.

A world of memories unleashed themselves from Terrence’s chest, banging against the surface of his skin. They showed themselves in the goosebumps on his neck.

“There’s no way that it’s really you.” Hudson was smiling. He looked like he may stand to hug Terrence, but he did not.

“It’s me.” Terrence became conscious of his hands. 

“How have you been?”

Some small and dormant part of Terrence, some sensitive spot on the back of his tongue, wanted to say all kinds of things. Wanted to shatter glass on the floor and stomp it into the carpet. Wanted to swing his arms and be dragged into the kitchen by the younger, more naive servers — ones with young hands and muscles and fantasies like he once had, who would reconvene in the beer cooler to snort white powder and mock his pain. He wanted to make a fist-shaped hole in the kitchen wall. He wanted to scream and sob and ask questions and demand answers.

But Terrence had grown up. Granted, he thought that he was grown back then — back when he knew the taste of Hudson’s mouth. Now, though, he was old enough to settle this leftover part of himself. “I’ve been good,” Terrence said. “Really good, actually.”

The man beside Hudson had clean fingernails and straight teeth. The boys at the opposite end of the table were scruffy-haired and fat-cheeked — the strong bones of someone raised on whole milk and full nights of sleep. “This is my family,” Hudson said. Terrence imagined that they lived in a three-bedroom house in the suburbs, a family dog that they took on walks each morning, a glass of boxed wine each night. He imagined that their family photo was framed on Hudson’s desk. “Everyone, this is Terrence.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” his husband said. His sons, in their adolescent shrill, said the same. The boys smiled at Terrence and Terrence smiled back. They were so young, unaware of Terrence’s mark on their father’s history. Maybe his husband was unaware also. 

“All these years and you’re still here.” Hudson’s smile was unwavering. It was like a song that Terrence had long forgotten. Terrence, though he always assumed the worst at times like this, knew that it was sincere. “I knew that you’d stick around.”

“It’s never grown old,” Terrence said. “I’m the head server now.”

In a few minutes, Hudson would order the fish and chips. He would ask for his water to be flat. Terrence would offer the oysters as an appetizer, thinking that something might have changed in him, and Hudson and his family would refuse. They would order the mussels, instead. Hudson knew nothing about their spawning. He would never learn these things, and that was okay.

It was not yet seven o’clock, but, around him, the restaurant was beginning to move at that pace. It was drippy and conniving in this way — the way a trickle transforms into a flash flood. A crowd of guests had begun gathering in the lobby. Soon, they’d be out of the lake trout. 

Terrence wondered if Hudson noticed the vertical line between his brows or the way that his knuckles had swollen — if Hudson could feel the constant, dull ache in the small of Terrence’s back.

“The head server,” Hudson echoed. “I’m happy for you.”

Terrence smiled. He and Hudson had made their choices. They found their loves, they ran to them, and they wound up in different places. “I’m happy for you, as well,” he said. He felt good knowing that he meant it.

He removed the black book from his apron pocket. Receipts and loose bills tried to pull themselves from the plastic binding. Terrence clicked the trigger of a pen. Around him, the restaurant was alive. “Can I show you the wine list?”

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