Renee strode to the bar and asked brightly, “Hi. I’m here to see Luna, Luna Hernandez?”
The bartender was drying a glass with a clean white cloth. He continued the motion, but his eyes rose to meet hers. “Luna? She’s not on till later.”
“Oh. What time?”
The man stopped polishing and set the glass down somewhere behind the bar. “Are you police?”
“No. Just a . . . friend.” Renee forced a smile, and with that one small lie her posture caved, her certainty crumbled. She tried to relax her shoulders, to radiate the goodwill that a friend to Luna Hernandez would surely exhibit. She must have some friends, this unknown woman who had left Joe alone; she must even have family. Had they met Joe? Did they know that he had died? A lump rose in Renee’s throat, and she could not swallow, she could not speak, so she looked down, busying herself with her purse to hide her face from this man.
“Well,” the bartender said, and he cleared his throat. “Just a moment.” He traveled the length of the bar to check on two men drinking red wine, who shook their heads—No, nothing more, thanks—and then the bartender disappeared.
* * *
Dima pushed through the swinging chrome doors into the kitchen, where the pre-dinner service hum was just beginning to sound. A prep cook chopped red peppers in a corner, the dishwasher thrashed through a cycle. Jorge, the sous-chef, was squinting at a packing slip, crates of condiments piled in the narrow space between the walk-in cooler and the service entry.
“You seen Luna?” Dima asked him.
“No. Not yet.” Jorge gave him a long look. “Police?”
All the kitchen staff knew about the detectives who had taken Luna away, though only Rodrigo had been on the floor to see it, Rodrigo whom they all despised because he ran the waitstaff with cruel efficiency, refused to hire more busboys or change the table allotment to a more sensible, fairer arrangement. He watered down the well bottles, dealt small packets of coke from the back men’s room on Saturday nights, never including any of them in the cut. They all wished they’d been there that day to advise Luna. They knew about police, what to refuse, how to behave. I want a lawyer. This they could all say, no matter how poor the English. If it had been any of them—any save Rodrigo—they would have been able to help Luna. Their Luna, beautiful and sad, who stayed after hours to eat a meal, have a drink. They’d seen Luna age from a sixteen-year-old still talking about college to now, twenty-five and the first fine lines blooming at her eyes when she smiled. That awful night Luna had returned from the police station shaking. Jorge gave her a cup of tea and a plate of pasta; Dima covered the whole bar for the hour it took before she was ready to go out there.
Now Rodrigo came bustling in from the prep area, holding a celery stick in one hand, a clipboard in the other, chewing. “Get out there, Dima,” he said. “What are you doing back here?” A fine sheen of sweat covered Rodrigo’s forehead, and he set down the clipboard to swipe at it with his palm.
“Someone is here for Luna.” Dima hesitated to say this, but he was not a good or a fast liar.
Rodrigo rolled his eyes. “Police again?”
“No, a woman. She says she’s a friend, but she doesn’t look like a friend of Luna’s.”
“A friend? And how is this part of your job, Dima? You’re a part-time messenger for Luna now? I hope she pays you well, because if you’re not out there in ten seconds, she will be your only employer.” Rodrigo smiled benignly and bit the celery with his big, yellowed front teeth, and Dima was reminded of the TV character Bugs Bunny, the show he’d watch for hours when he was a child, just arrived in Miami from the Ukraine, when the new English words had sounded to him like gunfire, like heavy rain: a harsh staccato that hid a meaning rather than unveiled it.
Dima turned and reentered the restaurant floor, poured two more glasses of expensive cabernet for the two men in gray suits, and then returned to this tired-looking woman.
“Is Luna here?” she asked. “I have something I need to give her.”
Dima shook his head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t see her.” He shrugged and began cutting limes into neat wedges with a short, very sharp knife.
The woman exhaled. “Sorry, but what time did you say Luna was coming in?” she asked.
Dima sighed. He considered honesty his single greatest flaw. “Seven o’clock,” he answered. “You want to leave it, the thing for Luna?”
The woman shook her head. “No. I’ll wait.” She settled on a barstool and took out her phone.
“Can I get you something?”
“Gin,” she said. “I’ll have a gin and tonic.”
* * *
As Renee waited at the bar, Luna arrived for work through the back service entrance. She squeezed past the boxes of ketchup and sriracha, sidestepped the tower of just-delivered fresh white napkins and tablecloths tied with string, and then she searched inside the dry-storage room for a clean black apron, which she found and wrapped around her waist as she exited to the kitchen. She called hello to Luis, the dishwasher Riley, the waitresses Estella and Sue, and was on her way out to the bar when Jorge said her name.
“Luna, stop.” He walked around the order-up line of heat lamps, their bulbs not yet turned to hot, and met her by the doors.
“What is it?” she asked. Jorge rarely crossed into the service area; his realm was the kitchen, where he was king.
“There’s someone looking for you, Dima said. I don’t know . . .” Jorge shrugged. “Maybe just take a peek before you go out.”
“The detectives?”
“No, not police. Dima said a woman.”
A tepid flare of hope: Mariana? But Jorge saw it and shook his head. “No, not your sister.”
“Thanks, Jorge,” Luna said, and he winked, this gray-haired man, small and wrinkled, his eyes heavy with concern and affection.
Jorge returned to his post behind the order-up line, his apron fresh and white, his fingers nimble, and began the delicate process of deboning a skate. Luna pushed open the swinging door and paused, shielding herself behind the black velvet curtain that separated the restaurant from the kitchen. The bar stretched to her left, just beyond the curtain and the swinging chrome doors, the doors that divided calm from chaos, leisure from work, rich from poor, and they would swing ceaselessly—enter to the right, exit from the left—until the kitchen closed at midnight.
Dima was polishing wineglasses with studious concentration. One customer sat at the far end of the bar. Luna saw the woman in profile, her face half obscured by a phone pressed to her ear. She seemed agitated, twisting and shifting on the stool, her free hand shredding a white cocktail napkin into little rough-edged scraps. But even in this disturbed posture, the woman gave an impression of confidence and low-key affluence: two thick rings on the hand that held the phone, the precise cut of her dress, shoulder-length dark brown hair that shone and rippled as she moved. Luna recognized the woman from the photographs: it was Renee, Joe’s oldest sister.
Dima looked up and saw Luna standing there. His eyes grew wide, and he angled his head toward Renee. “I’m not here,” Luna mouthed. But Dima didn’t understand. He squinted at her, shook his big leonine head. Oh, Dima. Luna waved him over.