Riley nodded and made a note on her pad
before turning to the other women in the group. After a few minutes, they all managed to decide on their entrées, and Riley turned to put the order in on the system. Her phone buzzed in her pocket again and Riley cast a furtive glance across the floor. It’s not likely to be someone else calling me—I’m not that popular. She dismissed the idea of taking a quick break to answer it, deciding that she would just have to wait until things slowed down and see who it was. Probably Mom, calling to “check in” on me.
Riley focused on the touch screen, glancing down at her pad quickly as she put in the order in a series of rapid taps. One of the women at the table was apparently allergic to tomatoes; another one wanted to make sure there were no gluten-containing ingredients in her sauce. Riley had grown skeptical of exacting dietary requirements, but she had enough of a sense of self-preservation to stick to the requests that came in, even when it made the chefs mad at her; the last thing she wanted was to find herself fired because she’d neglected to put in a request, only for a patron to end up sick.
She went to pick up the plates for another table and one of the chefs poked his head out.
“Townsend, what’s with the ‘no butter’ request on the steak hollandaise? Doesn’t she know that hollandaise is basically all butter?”
“I just take the orders,” Riley said with a rueful smile. “Not my job to educate them about the hypocrisy in their wishes.”
The chef grumbled, turning back to his work, and Riley loaded up her tray to carry another table of orders out into the dining room.
She narrowly missed colliding with a couple’s five-year-old daughter, who apparently had to use the bathroom immediately—so immediately that the little girl didn’t even bother to make sure her trajectory was clear. Riley barely managed to keep the dishes on her tray as she sidestepped, breathing in sharply. She exhaled and kept her face as composed as possible, taking the last few steps to the table and smiling at all of the patrons seated there as if nothing had happened at all.
“Some people,” the man at the table said, shaking his head and glancing in the direction of the little girl.
“Why someone would want to bring their young child to an expensive restaurant like this one is beyond me,” his date said, joining him in censure.
“Thankfully I was able to make it to your table with everything intact,” Riley said, broadening her smile as she deposited the plates carefully on the table. “I’ll be right back with your wine.”
Her phone buzzed again as she strode as quickly as possible to the bar, and Riley gritted her teeth, wishing that whoever it was calling her would just leave a voicemail and let her call them back.
As she ferried the drink order and another food order to her tables, Riley began to worry that it might be something urgent—even her mother wasn’t quite that persistent when she just wanted to chat and find out how Riley was doing, and calling over and over again like that would only come up if someone were in the hospital.
She looked around for the front-of-house manager, Jill. Riley spotted the older woman as she took care of the last of her most urgent tables; everyone seated in her section had food in front of them, at least. Jill was as sharply styled as ever, her graying blonde hair swept back into a sleek bun, her makeup flawless, wearing all black with shined shoes. She managed to simultaneously stand out and blend in with the servers’ uniforms of ironed black slacks and starched white shirts with black vests and bowties.
“Jill!”
Riley hurried to stop the woman as she moved from the hostess station to the office at the back of the restaurant.
“Something wrong, Riley?” Jill asked, turning to look at her, and Riley summoned up the little bit of courage she could find in the moment.
“Someone’s blowing my phone up, and I’m worried it might be an emergency,” Riley said quickly. “Do you mind if I duck out for like two minutes, just to see what’s going on?”
Jill frowned. “We’re in the weeds, Riley; I need you turning tables over or doing side work, or we’ll all be stuck here until two in the morning.”
“Just two minutes, Jill.”
The older woman considered it for a beat, glancing around the dining room.
“Two minutes,” Jill said finally. “But don’t be shocked if everyone else on shift gives you the stink eye for it.”
Riley shook her head. “I totally get it,” she said, nodding quickly.
She cast a quick glance over the dining room and saw that for the moment at least, none of her tables needed anything. She darted through the door separating the front of house from the back of house, sprinting through the short hallway that led along the kitchen and towards the back door.
Riley caught the door as she went through it, keeping it from slamming shut and locking her out. The alley behind the restaurant reeked of cigarettes from whoever had been outside last—probably one of the chefs, Riley decided, since she hadn’t noticed any of the other servers off the floor. She slipped her hand into her pocket and took her phone out, quickly unlocking the screen. The notifications proclaimed that she had five missed calls, and Riley shook her head in disbelief. Her confusion deepened when she saw that all five of the calls were from an unknown number—someone not in her contacts, but the area code was local.
All at once Riley remembered the audition; she had put it so firmly out of her mind, convinced that there was no way she would get a part, that when things had gotten busy she had forgotten that it had even happened. Riley’s heart beat faster and her stomach twisted with dread; if it was someone from the casting department calling to ask her to come in for another reading then she was well and truly out of consideration after missing five attempted calls.
“Well, shit,” she said, frowning down at her phone. Why would they call so late at night? “I would think even the most out of touch casting director would figure that most actors have ‘real’ jobs,” Riley muttered, briefly letting her irritation at the timing of the calls overcome her disappointment at having missed them. Riley sighed and started to put her phone back into her pocket, resigned to the fact that she most likely wasn’t going to hear anything more from the production company.
Just as soon as she had the phone in her pocket, however, it began to buzz again, and Riley’s heart stuttered in her chest as she fumbled to get it back out. The same number flashed across the screen, and Riley bit back a shocked, jubilant yelp at the luck that anyone would try and call her again after getting her voicemail five times.
Riley took a quick breath to steady her voice, tapped the ‘accept’