Column: Missoula's Dish
The Drive Through Window
By Danielle Lattuga, 2-08-08
At the end of a busy night, I love nothing more than to sit my metric ton booty down on a bar stool, sip on a glass of wine and balance the till. The stories of the evening pass through my fingers on the tickets I’ve written for each of them: “Those two were sweet, sharing every course, clearly, madly in love. That family was funny and a little crazy—the kid drank milk like a fiend and wouldn’t touch anything green. Those guys were a little uptight, until I got food and a good bottle of wine in front of them. Oh yeah, and then there was that one table. Three of them were just fine, but he, HE was an arse. But I won’t start with that, or it will just make me angry all over again.”
This is the time of the night for unwinding, so that by the time I get home, I can actually get to sleep. All the closing tasks are done; garbages emptied, tables reset, floors swept and mopped. The restaurant slumbers in our company, satiated, clean and tucked in. This is when I am reminded why I do this job, and I learn to some degree, how well I did it on this particular night.
That night, I thought all the stories had been told. A friend and regular customer sat at the end of the bar, sipping beer while we finished up. The front door was closed, but not locked. I glanced up occasionally, to see people wandering (or stumbling) by. It wasn’t winter, so there were a lot of people out on their bikes or walking.
I had just begun to balance all of the banks with the register and I heard an odd sound. Kind of a thump, twang but nothing explosive, just weird.
“Did you guys hear that?”
“What? No.”
I was already on my feet, striding towards the front of the restaurant. As I got closer, I caught sight of a vehicle, some sort of SUV, rolling ever so casually, at me. It didn’t make sense.
“Oh my God! There’s a car coming into the restaurant.”
Plink.
The front left bumper tapped the big plate glass window and the rolling stopped.
I ran outside to make sense out of things. No one was in the car. It sat motionless to my left, a metal bike rack beneath it, bent and torn from its foundation in the cement sidewalk. To my right, there was a little gray and blue truck, a Datsun or some sort, pulled in perfectly alongside the curb, like it had been parked there, except there was steam or smoke or something curling up from the hood.
I jogged over to it, opening the passenger side door to the aroma of stale bar and two very dazed individuals. The passenger turned slowly to look at me, his blood shot eyes wandering across my face, before reaching my eyes.
“My name is Danielle. Are you guys okay?”
He smiled and slowly raised his hand, “Roger.” (Names have been changed to protect the guilty).
The front end of the truck was smashed in, from when they rear-ended the parked car that ended up in our front window.
The driver still clutched the steering wheel, her delicate hands frozen in disbelief. (I like to think it was probably just the slowed reaction time.)
“My finger hurts.”
“I’m going to come around to your side.” I left the passenger door open, so Roger could air out a little.
“What’s your name?”
“Amanda. My finger hurts.”
Her pinkie was bent at the top knuckle, back towards her wrist.
“Yeah, hon. Looks like you’re going to need a little help with that. Do you guys wanna’ come inside, it’s a little chilly out here.”
By this time, Roger was pacing on the sidewalk, rubbing his shin.
“Roger, are you okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, my leg hurts a little. I’m just going to sit on this bench for a minute. Can you give us a minute?”
“Okay guys. I will be back in a minute. You can come in and get warm if you need to.”
Friend and co-workers had already made the call and several exclamations to go along with it. They said someone would be there shortly.
“They are hammered, and her finger is totally broken, but she’s lucky that’s all.” I exhaled the words in one breath.
“I know. How is it that this happened just when there was a lull in foot traffic?”
People were starting to gather.
“Yeah, no kidding, and the glass didn’t break, and the bike I am borrowing is attached to the next wrack over.”
I was bent over with one hand on the hood of the SUV, examining how close the bumper was to the window.
“Holy! This is crazy.”
I stepped into the restaurant, picked up a pen and looked at the blur of numbers. I dropped the pen on the bar and walked back out. Roger was standing on the driver’s side, his head tucked under the doorframe, talking and swaying close to Amanda’s ear.
“Hey guys, are you sure you don’t want to come inside. It’ll be …”
“Hey! Can you give us just a minute, here?” Roger barked at me as one hand steadied him against the metal of the truck.
I stepped a little closer and looked him directly in the eye. “Don’t you get belligerent with me, mister, I am trying to help you.”
My index finger lingered just off the tip of his nose. His anger dissipated into a fearful confused look, his eyes wide and the corners of his mouth drooping slightly.
I turned on a heel and stormed back to the restaurant. “He just got belligerent with me. I’m done helping him.” My friends were leaning against the door and they laughed as I pushed through them to get back inside.
Of course a small crowd had gathered outside and in short order, an ambulance, a fire truck and two patrol cars arrived, lights blinking and bleeding into our sleeping restaurant. I plopped back down onto my stool and attempted to finish the bank, while people wandered in and out of our entryway. Instinctively, I slid the wine I’d left on the bar away from me, its base scraping against concrete like a cricket trying to sing. Then I got up, rinsed the glass and stuck it in the glass rack, like I was going to get in trouble for having half a glass of wine after work.
I couldn’t concentrate, as if it was realistic for me to think I could. So, I went back outside, told an officer that I was one of the first “on scene,” and I’d be inside if he needed anything. By that time, my friend and a co-worker were talking to a bewildered looking blond who worked next door. It was her car that almost ended up inside our restaurant and she had just purchased insurance for it the day before.
My boyfriend came running up the sidewalk. He made sure I was okay, and then said, “I am glad I went to gas up before coming here to pick you up!”
“Yeah, no kidding.” I squeezed him and rolled my eyes.
“Seriously, I was debating which I should do first. I would have parked right out front and I’ve got the dog in the car. She would have been toast.”
My stomach flopped. “You know it’s kinda wild that this is not worse than it is, and the most insane part is that that little chick behind the wheel is far too intoxicated to have any understanding of how lucky she is to have not killed anyone and to come away with only a broken pinkie.”
I was mad. I turned and walked back into the restaurant, unlatching the hook that held the door open. I still had a bank to balance.
The officer that I had spoken with followed shortly behind me.
“What can I do for you?” I rested my elbows on the counter, my head cradled in one hand.
“Who was driving?”
I started to laugh. “Are you serious? She was. She absolutely was. Why?”
“He’s trying to say that he was driving.”
“Hah. No, she was definitely the driver. That’s funny.”
“That’s what I thought, thanks. I need to get your info and a statement before I leave.”
“Yeah, that’s fine, I’m here, just trying to close up.”
If Roger hadn’t have gotten mouthy with me, I may have thought that was cute—trying to cover for his lady, but I really just thought it was stupid.
The night eventually came to a close; the till balanced perfectly, my statement recorded and the driver taken off in an ambulance and then to jail. A tow truck came and pulled the SUV off the sidewalk, the firemen got out their brooms and cleaned up the debris, and it seemed that the only signs of something amiss were the conspicuous absence of a bike rack and a small little dent in the wood sill at the base of our front window.
One of my co-workers gleefully shared the further demise of Roger’s evening as I was turning the key to lock the front door.
“He wouldn’t let the officers or the medic people help him. He was yelling at them and saying that he was fine. So, they asked him point blank if he was refusing medical help and he said, ‘Yes!’ They drove away, while he sat on the sidewalk and cried, then he went across to the gas station and was wandering around the parking lot yelling, ‘Somebody call me an ambulance, my legs are broken.’”
I always feel grateful when a potentially horrible situation ends up just being slightly bad and mostly humorous. I can’t help but try to decipher the meaning of it or what I should learn from it. In this case it was part of that “bad things happen in threes” thing that people like to say.
Two days later, I gave CPR to a Bernese Mountain Dog, unsuccessfully. Then the night following that, I witnessed these two guys attack another who was passing them on the sidewalk with his girlfriend. By then, I was seriously wondering what the universe was trying to tell me and if I should start donning a superhero cape.
“Or a tomb raider outfit,” was the eternal retort from my co-worker.
The owner of the car that almost came through our window came to work for us not long after that, and I thought that perhaps that was why it all happened (in a screwy whacked out sort of way) but that theory was blown out of the water when she left our restaurant in a far less than graceful manner.
Perhaps it had been an omen. Perhaps we should have opened a drive through window for late night wanderers. Perhaps it was just a reminder that when you work into the night, you become witness to things that don’t manifest in daylight.
For me it made me love the safe haven of a sleeping restaurant and all the stories that we choose to welcome within its walls. I just wonder how I would have felt, if the glass had broken and those little things that I hold sacred, leaked out.
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Comments
Entertaining as always! Keep it up!