Mourning Shift

The staff of Buster’s Burgers and Bites sit in a vacant dining room during a pre-shift meeting. There’s a certain emotional weight to the gathering. Some of the staff stare fixedly at table 19. The table has remained vacant all week, and on it is a vase holding a bouquet of flowers. There is no plaque or note, but everyone knows why the flowers are there: This is the table Julie Nugent sat at the last time she visited the restaurant, a visit nobody realized would be her last.

It was a difficult thing to get over, for those who even could get over it. Some still relive the events that lead to this devastating loss one week ago….

Nothing seemed to go right for Julie Nugent during her lunchtime visit to Buster’s. First, the water she had ordered with no ice was brought to her table with what Julie described as “a ridiculous amount of ice”. Later in the meal, Julie was served a medium-rare burger with tomatoes after specifically ordering a medium burger with no tomatoes. As if to add insult to injury, Julie’s server failed to ask if she wanted dessert and instead presented Julie with her check even though Julie had been looking forward to trying the restaurant’s famous churro rings which Julie felt should have been comped. After receiving an updated check that included the dessert which was, in her own words, “kind of soggy”, she’d had enough.

“I’ve never had an experience this bad at a restaurant in all my life,” said Nugent, “at least not without being violently ill afterward, and it's still too early to tell on that."

The restaurant manager tried to smooth things over, but Julie Nugent’s mind had been set.

“Save your breath,” said Nugent, silencing the manager with the wave of a finger, “I will never be dining at this restaurant again, ever!”

That was one week ago. Today, at the pre-shift meeting, the wounds are still fresh.

“It still doesn’t feel real,” says server Danyel Crippen, “like I’m going to look up one day and see her walk back through that door.”

“I know, it seems hard to believe,” says busser Denis Corum, “that Jill is never coming back.”

“Julie,” says Crippen.

“Yeah, her.”

“I just keep thinking there was something more I could’ve done,” says manager Paula Harbaugh. “I mean, I could’ve comped her dessert, at the very least. It seems so petty now, but I just don’t like comping things for people when they demand it, like it kind of removes the apology from the gesture, you know?”

“It’s so strange,” says host Micha Steuber, “that one day someone could be here demanding a patio table even though the patio isn’t open and the next they’re just gone.”

“So true,” replies Crippen. “I can still hear her in my head saying we’re all a bunch of idiots who don’t know how to run a business because we switched to an all-natural ketchup. She was the only customer to even notice, and I never got a chance to tell her how special that made her.”

“I’d always know when she was in,” says line cook Vincent Ojabo, “because I’d get dishes sent back with notes like ‘fries not salty enough’ or ‘onions too caramelized’ and I’d always smile to myself as I remade her food for whatever arbitrary reason she sent it back for.”

“It’s crazy how much I miss her chewing me out over something we have no control over,” says manager Harbaugh, “and all the times she said I only worked here because I couldn't hack it at a 'real job', whatever that is. Now I’ll never get the chance to tell her that it was always the highlight of my shift.”

Harbaugh puts a hand on her face and begins to cry.

The mood is certainly sullen as other staffers share stories and memories of Julie Nugent.

One teary-eyed host recalls a time when Julie, unimpressed with that day’s specials, shouted “Well what’s so special about that? Words have meaning, you know!”. A busser describes a twinkle in Julie’s eye when she’d spill something and just watch him clean it up with no apology or attempt to help. Every server has a story they tell with a sad smile about a time when Julie complained about receiving her food exactly how she ordered it, right until the bitter end.

“I don’t think she even knew what a medium-cooked burger was supposed to be like,” says line cook Steuber, wiping away a tear.

“And I did tell her that burger came with tomatoes and she didn’t raise the issue until after she got it,” adds server Crippen, “the scamp.”

The staff share a laugh at the stories but it only masks the pain within.

“Well,” says Harbaugh, trying to shake herself out of the Julie-less funk, “there’s no use sitting here wallowing. Let’s open up for the brunch crowd.”

She moves to the door as the staffers get up and move to their stations. The first group in is a gaggle of older women, and right in the middle, oblivious to the vow she made only a week ago, is Julie Nugent.

Danyel Crippen spies her among the throng.

“Oh god,” she says, “not this bitch again!”