Down with Tina Callahan!

My employer called and said that the guy who opens—Ned, the cook—was sick.

I said, “Tina?”—because I was still half asleep, and because I have an idea that she doesn’t like hearing me call her by name.

She’s a horrible person. Tina Callahan: boo!

She called because she couldn’t get in right away—she lives in the northern suburbs—and because I’ve opened twice before. I have the key. I know the drill. Lock up behind you as soon as you’re in. Hit the lights—so early passers-by will gaze and think of returning. Take the cash tray out of its hiding place, on the bottom rack of the oven. Preheat. Do up the batter for batches of muffins in huge silver mixing bowls.

Lemon poppyseed. Chocolate chip.

I like biking downtown in the pre-dawn mooniness of frozen Hennepin Avenue. I like hearing the sparrows go nuts in the naked trembling branches of a particular tree. I like taking my ski gloves off, inside, and leaning to the counter where I make sandwiches, and picking the ice from my eyelashes, using my finger and the nail of my thumb.

I like my co-workers, too, but it’s hard to talk to them. Tina enforces an unspoken rule: look busy even when you’re not. She does this by blinking—offering little displays of being jarred by lack of bustle.

Just a horrible person.

I heard her say “Cold” as she let herself in that day.

Usually she comes in late, around ten, after the muffin and latte rush. On this day she arrived earlier, as she’d told me she would. She had to cook. She had to get lunch started.

She said “Cold” not long before seven. I looked. Seven is when we open the doors.

I heard Mattie say, “Yeah.”

I saw Ashland lifting his hand in a tight and silly wave. I had to peek out to see that. I was back in the kitchen, alone. My entrance was seconds away.

“What’s that smell?” Tina said.

“What smell?” Ashland replied.

Mattie said, “I thought I smelled something too.”

Before dawn I’d contrived to forget to remove the cash tray from where it was hidden. Now I strode out with a tray of hot muffins, nodded, and returned to the kitchen, which is dark with hanging pipes. I started washing my hands. There was no real reason for this—they were clean. But I washed them thoroughly, with quick movements and an appearance of focus. When Tina stared at me, as she would in another few seconds, after she looked in the oven, she’d see someone on task, a guy with the pleasing look of being locked into total efficiency. When she pulled out the cash tray, warped and smoldering, and examined the twenties, which burned from the outside in and were fused into little cash sandwiches, she’d see who she wanted, a young man plausibly absorbed in the details of running a café. I washed past the wrists. Rotated the forearms. Soaped the light hair. Such a nice show of washing as this Tina Callahan would never have been given.