But here was the footage, carved into infamy thanks to our bar’s Ring security system. Charlie’s text followed next.
Charlie:Do you want to tell him? Or can I? Please? It will make my whole fucking life.
He meant Will. He meant did I want to come clean, or could he lord it over Will’s head and torture us all?
Obviously, the latter suggestion was never going to happen. But I didn’t want the first one to happen either.
Honestly, Charlie.
Me:How do you even have this?
Sometime during year one of Craft, Will had put Charlie in charge of security. It had been a consolation prize after we’d stripped him of bartending duties. But, everything at the bar was recorded and stored in the cloud. So if anything ever happened, we could just go back and look at the footage. So far, we’d been pretty lucky. A few bar brawls and a few shady employees, and one outright theft, but other than that, the cameras were mostly a deterrent.
Neither Will nor I even expected Charlie to keep looking at camera footage on a regular basis. And maybe he hadn’t been until a slow day at the end of February when I’d offered my office because he didn’t feel well.
Ugh, stupid, Eliza. That was stupid.
Charlie:Someone stole the Swharma Shop’s artificial tree. The one that lights up. Moz asked me to see if our cameras caught something. Boy, did they. Just not the tree thief.
The Shwarma Shop was on the other side of the alley from Craft. Charlie had just been being a nice neighbor. But now recorded footage existed of Jonah and me being so much more than friendly in Craft’s back alley. My gosh, I was never going to live this down.
And poor Will. If his reaction just now was any indication of how he handled stress... Well, yikes.
And I needed to quickly learn how to permanently delete something from all devices.
True to his word, Case came back in ten minutes, just as the first interviewee arrived. I turned my screen off and set my phone upside down, determined to ignore that whole mess until later. Much later. Two to three years from now, at least.
The next several hours were filled with three actual interviews, five no-shows, one call-in-sick, and one possible candidate. We were a half hour from opening for the night, and I felt like I’d just worked eighty hours in a row. Why was interviewing so soul-sucking?
More than that, why didn’t people show up for their interviews? It was fine if they decided that the job wasn’t for them, but why no text? Why was our consumer culture so inconsiderate of other people’s time and effort?
“My head hurts,” I mumbled to Case as I rested it on the table and closed my eyes.
“Mine too. That was a gigantic waste of fucking time.”
“Where were your friends?” One of his buddies had shown up, but the other two fell into the sick category and the no-show shit list.
“I think Angel is actually sick. He’s not the kind of guy who just abandons this stuff.”
“And...” I looked at my list of candidates. “Mauricio?”
“Less reliable. But a damn good cook.”
I shrugged. “Listen, if he’s a great chef, I can handle unreliable. But you’re the one who’s going to suffer. Do you want me to reach out and see if he’ll reschedule? Or do you want to cut our losses?”
He folded his arms over his chest and thought seriously about my question. Finally, he said, “Yeah, cut your losses. I’d love to open this door for him, but I’m not sure if he’ll take it seriously.” He thought about it for a sec. “Yet. He’ll get there. He’s just... young.”
I smiled, and it was the first time my lips had moved in an upward direction in hours. “Yeah? You know something about that?”
He grinned back. “As a matter of fact, I do. I mean, look at me now.”
We shuffled through our notes for a second. I knew he had to get back to the kitchen, but I didn’t want to leave this hanging over our heads. I had really been hoping for a solution today so I could figure out the rest of our staffing issues. “Then I think we can both agree the only real option here is that girl. Uh... what’s her name... Joey?” To be honest, both Case and I had been surprised when a female walked in the door. The applications had been filled out online, so the information was there for us. But with a name like Joey Daniels, both of us had wrongly assumed we were getting a dude.
“You’re kidding?” Case scoffed. “I’m sorry, but she was not the vibe.”
“What do you mean?”
“You didn’t find her... smug?”
