The afternoon was not going as I had hoped.

I was not in the best of spirits. I was seeking a new job, an activity that is not improved at all when the new job for which one is applying is intended to be a supplement to the job one already has. I did not like my first job. At the time, I was waiting tables. To imagine what my job was like, please do the following:

1. Put on filthy and worn out shoes that you cannot afford to replace
2. Proceed to run around your block, carrying a 10 pound weight in your left hand, while with your right hand rubbing cooking fat into your undergarments.
3. Have strangers yell at you while you do this, and periodically throw crumpled up money at you.
4. If you can find a recovering cocaine addict to heap abuse on you because he is unable to find a boyfriend, so much the better.

An additional job was needed, though, and because my husband had a “career,” with a salary and a drinking problem, it fell to me to supply the loss. Not doing so was unthinkable, as I come from a long line of cotton farmers, truck drivers, and criminals—we make ends meet.

I had arrived in this particular restaurant because they were advertising for hostess help. Although eminently qualified to wait tables, the thought of adding more of that particular delight to my waking hours was too horrifying a thought to entertain. It seemed reasonable, therefore, to split the difference. If I was qualified to serve bad Texican food at one restaurant, certainly I was able to deliver patrons safely to their table and remove salsa from menus at another.

The manager came over after I had completed my application, and after our cursory handshake he looked at my application, and then looked back at me.

I bathed him in a warm, friendly smile, carefully relaxing muscles in my face so that I would not look overly like an aggressive chimpanzee.

He looked at me some more; looked back at my application which had my married name on it, then asked, “Did your name used to be Hinklin?”

“Yes.”

Which is how I found myself across the table from someone with whom I went to high school.

That is what he told me, anyway. I did not remember him. He did not look familiar. His name did not ring a bell. We did not have the same friends. We were not in the same grade. I do not believe we had any classes together, but I suppose we might have because, as I mentioned, I would have been wholly unable to pick him out of a lineup.

He, however, remembered me. He remembered that I swam; that I had been on the dance team. He seemed to remember quite a lot about me, and of course, the more he remembered about me the more irritated he was that I remembered nothing about him. I would have thought him a stalker, had I been at all the type of girl that boys had stalked. As it was, I was stolidly unremarkable and was left to conclude that everything since this man’s 17th birthday had been an unwelcome denouement.

He implied there was something wrong in that I had not finished college. His input was as unnecessary as it was unwelcome; I knew that I should have finished with college by that time, if for no other reason than because had I done so I would not at that moment have been sitting across the table from a grown boy running an unfortunate chain restaurant.

My warm and friendly smile remained, although the strain of keeping it in place was beginning to cause some pain around my jawline.

“So, do you speak any Spanish?”

The honest answer to that question was, and remains, no. The question was, and remains, irrelevant. Spanish speakers who work in restaurants know enough English to do their jobs, and the other niceties are managed with smiling and gestures.

Tired of this strange person and his strange snit, I answered.

“Well, not really. I guess you can say I speak restaurant Spanish.”

“Restaurant Spanish? What do you mean?”

“Well, I know enough to ask for more chips and salsa on table 24, and I know when one of the cooks is trying to get me to give him a blowjob.”

Silly me, I had come to believe he would never shut up. I was wrong.