“Is Gregory here?” Ana asked.
“No.” The hostess seemed relieved. “It’s his son’s birthday today.”
Ana’s face darkened. Before she could say anything she might regret, I said, “Thank you!” and the hostess walked away.
Then Ana held her chin up with one pointer finger and looked around the room. She shook her head. “I can’t believe he had a son.”
I scrunched my face for her. “I’m sorry, Ana.”
“And Paco’s basically dead. Look at him.”
I looked at Paco. He did look basically dead.
“And this table.” She ran her hand over the wood. “I remember when he bought this. Three hundred bucks. I told him, ‘It looks like it costs five bucks!’ All these tables are antiques.” When she looked at me then, I knew before she spoke that the plan had come to her. “Stay here. I’m going across the street.” She draped her napkin on the back of her throne. “And G is comping us lunch. So order tons of food while I’m gone. Seriously, order everything, okay?”
“Oh—”
And then she was gone.
By the time Ana reappeared with two small paper bags, I had ordered two appetizers and two entrees. “I didn’t know if you wanted pasta or fish, so I—”
“I’m not hungry. I don’t care what you got,” she said, dropping one of the paper bags into my lap and then sitting back down. “But we should order more than that.”
I opened the bag. Gorilla Glue. Ana unscrewed the cap on hers. She took the salt off our table, squirted a dollop of glue on the bottom, and then returned the salt back to its spot. Then she did the same to the salt on the table beside us. She sensed the waitress approaching before I did and returned the glue to her lap. I was amazed by her swift movements and her still hands. She was crafty, intuitive. How she’d harnessed that intuition for good rather than evil—besides this silly prank of gluing salt and pepper shakers to the tables at her ex’s restaurant, which was too silly to qualify as evil—was inspiring, and something to be proud of. Because in this moment, I could see what Ana had meant when she’d told me that she was a natural-born hustler.
“Beets and minestrone,” the waitress said, placing the dishes in front of us.
“We’d also like the lamb and the scampi and the penne with pesto, please,” Ana said.
The waitress blinked twice before taking her pen and paper out of her apron to write it down. “Your friend already ordered the scampi. Do you want another one?”
Ana flashed a smile. “We’re very hungry.”
It was obvious the waitress hated her job. She sounded like she’d just been run over when she said, “Another scampi, coming up.”
The second she turned her back, Ana got up to do two salts on nearby tables. When the woman sitting by the window looked over, Ana calmly returned to her throne.
“Nan, are you going to glue any?”
“Yes,” I said, but I didn’t move. The minestrone smelled good, and even though I was too anxious to be hungry, I was thinking about the other type of lunch this could be: the one where we just sat and ate the food we had ordered.
Ana chuckled. “Don’t do it if it makes you uncomfortable.”
And right when she said that I stood up and tiptoed to the table by the wall. My shaky hands fumbled inarticulately with the salt shaker and then I pressed too hard, releasing too much glue. One gooey dollop hit the floor. I returned the salt shaker to its place on the table. The yellow glue bubbled out around the bottom when I pressed it down. And then the waitress was coming! I tried to look innocent as I tiptoed back to my seat.
Ana was laughing. “Oh, Nan,” she said. “You’re a wreck.”
“I am not,” I said, which was what a child would say.
“I’m going to have to do most of this,” she said. “You’re going to get us caught.”
“No, I want to help.”
Ana put her hands up as if to say: Fine, you win. “Okay, Nan, whatever you want.”
I did four more tables and Ana did the rest. She became more daring along the way, and started gluing the flower vases, too. I moved the food around on each dish to make it look like we had sort of eaten it, and the waitress kept bringing out more food. At one point, she said, “Is something wrong with your meal? Meals?”
And Ana said, “Nope. And we’ll also take five slices of cheesecake, three raspberry tarts, and a crème br?lée.”
When the desserts arrived, I moved them around on the plates while watching Ana move stealthily around the restaurant, becoming even more daring still when she glued two legs of a heavy chair to the floor. Watching her was exhilarating. My heart was beating out of my chest the whole time.
When she returned again, she said, “This was the perfect time to come. No one’s here. Our waitress is outside smoking.”
Before I could respond, our waitress was walking toward us. “How was everything, ladies?” she asked, massaging a mint in her mouth.
Ana cocked her head. “It was divine.”
“Good,” the waitress said, and began stacking the plates. “I’ll be back with the check.”
“Don’t bother,” Ana said, and stood up. “Gregory is comping this meal. You can tell him Ana says hi.”
“Okay,” the waitress said, her arms full of plates. She didn’t seem to care that much about who was paying for the meal.
And then in slow motion a plate with a piece of mashed-up cheesecake on it fell to the floor and crashed in a sticky mess of mosaic pieces.
Instinctively, I bent to clean it up.
Ana said, “Let’s go. Nan, don’t do that,” and I put the single piece of broken plate I had salvaged on the table.
Ana took my hand and led me out of the restaurant, swinging our one locked hand back and forth like we were small children in a field in a movie. On the way out, she said, “Gregory is an asshole!” but the way it happened—with the first part of the sentence in a lower voice and the “asshole” much louder—the hostess thought she’d been called an asshole, and promptly yelled “Fuck you!”
I turned back with an apologetic look on my face and said, “No, no,” but before I could explain further, the hostess was flicking me off, and then I, somehow, was flicking her off right back.
Out on the street, I said, “I can’t believe I just flicked off that hostess!”
“How do you feel?” Ana swung our one locked fist higher up in the sky and then swung it all the way back.
“I don’t know!”
“Why are we screaming?!?” Ana screamed.
“I don’t know!”
Ana laughed hard. She was folded over herself, howling in the street. This was the happiest she’d been since the diagnosis, and I was glad for that. When she finally caught her breath, she said, “That was fun.”
“That was fun,” I said. And then I felt guilty. “But do you think they hate us? We broke a plate.”
“What? No. We didn’t break it. She broke it.”