He's never asked why. Tonight he asks.
"I don't know what it is, Javi."
"Okay."
"I'm not being difficult. I actually don't know. I've never known. It just… it makes me feel wrong. In my body. Like my skin is on backward. And I can't explain it and I can't stop it and I've felt this way since I can remember, and I don't know why."
He's quiet. He puts a glass of water on the bar in front of me and waits while I drink it.
"Have you ever talked to someone about it?" he asks. "A therapist?"
"And say what? 'Hi, I'm Grace, and hearing Italian makes me want to crawl out of my skin for absolutely no reason'?"
"Yeah. Exactly that. That's exactly what you'd say."
"Javi, I don't even know my medical history. I don't know my birth parents' names. I don't know anything about the first thirteen years of my life. What's a therapist going to do with that?"
"Maybe help you figure out why a language makes you feel like this? Regressive therapy or something?"
"Or maybe tell me I have a weird phobia and charge me two hundred dollars an hour for the diagnosis."
He doesn't push further. He fills a second glass of water and puts it on my tray. "For you. Not the table."
I take the tray, walk back into the dining room and work the rest of the shift. I don't pass table three again. I route around it. Every single time. The man finishes his dinner, pays and leaves. I bus his table and there's nothing wrong with the table, there's nothing Italian about a table, it's a piece of wood with four legs and a candle on it, but I bus it fast and don't linger.
The rest of the night is muscle memory. I run the floor and clear tables, pour wine and make small talk with the regulars and smile at the birthday party when they leave. By the time closing comes, I'm so exhausted that Javi doesn't ask if he should walk me home. He just locks the bar and falls into step beside me.
At my door, he says, "Think about it. The therapist thing."
"Yeah."
"I mean it, Grace. Whatever this is, you don't have to carry it alone."
"Yeah, yeah. I know. Night, see you later."
Inside, I lock the door and go straight to the bathroom, turn the shower on and stand under the hot water until my body stops feeling wrong. The metallic taste is gone. The tightness across my shoulders is loosening. My finger taps the tile wall, slow, spaced, the rhythm my body goes to when the anxiety subsides.
I take my pill. I eat a handful of crackers because I haven't eaten since the staff meal at three and I can feel the emptiness, but the idea of real food makes me nauseous. I sit on my bed in the dark with wet hair and my phone in my hand, scrolling through nothing, looking at nothing.
Feeling nothing.
Javi's question is in my head. The therapist thing. I've thought about it before, years ago, in that vague way you think about things you know you'll never do. What would I even say? That I don't remember anything before thirteen and it doesn't bother me except when Italian is involved and then my body turns against me? That I take a pill every night for anxiety I can't trace to a source? That I tap my finger on everything I touch, and I don't know when I started or why?
A therapist would want a history. I don't have one. There's no story to tell, no childhood to unpack. Just a blank space, a foster family I see on holidays, a bottle of pills, a life that fits inside six blocks and a body that reacts to things my brain can't access.
I put the phone down. The apartment is dark and warm from the shower steam, and I should dry my hair but I won't because I never do and tomorrow it'll be wavy and tangled and Rosa will have something to say about it.
I think about the man at table four. Not about the Italian, not about the trigger, not about any of it. About his tattoos. The saints on his forearms, the ink that's part of him, and the writing I couldn't read. I saw it once, on the inside of his left wrist, smallletters in a script I didn't recognize. I didn't look long enough to make it out.
It didn’t look English, but maybe it was just faded. Or… knowing my luck, he’s Italian and one day he will break out into song and dance and trigger a breakdown.
That’s always the way these things go.
My brain has finally quieted and I slip into that space where I’m numb. I turn off the light and pull the blanket up, close my eyes and fall asleep thinking about the warmth of his saucer against my thumb and nothing else.
Chapter Seven: Carmelo
Javiisn'theretonight.
