The day after Christmas we aren’t opening
until noon.
I
told Tommy I would meet him here at 8am to help with the post-Christmas Eve
disaster cleanup.
Four
whole hours without customers!
I
arrive a little early, and receive a text from Grace that she is running late,
and Tommy is running late, so she’s on her way to unlock the shop for me; then
she’ll turn around, pick Tommy up, and bring him here.
Tommy doesn’t drive. A few months after I started working here in
2012, he let the plates on his car expire and never renewed them. It was an unreliable car that didn’t work
very well anyways, and he doesn’t really go anywhere other than home and work. He lives maybe ten minutes away from the
shop.
There are empty lugs in the
cooler that need the blood rinsed out of them.
Someone made blue cheese sauce
at some point, and when they were done, instead of putting the bowl, ladle, and
spatula in the sink, they tossed it inside one of the bloody lugs.
Tons of trays are stacked in
the old cold sink water.
There’s a pile of ground meat
on the floor in the cooler that didn’t make it from the grinder into the catch
lug.
The case is exactly the way I
left it three nights ago, minus all the orders that were picked up; none of the
fresh meat trays were wrapped, and now everything is turning brown.
The box of 60-day-old
tenderloins that our distributor gave us last week is still sitting on its side
in the cooler; Grace wants to show it to them when they drop off their next
shipment so they know she didn’t make it up.
I feel like I need a hazmat
suit instead of latex gloves and an apron.
