The Waitress’s Statement
by Steven Horwitz
Yes, I know James.
I served him most mornings, a plain bagel and cream cheese, a decaf Americano. He almost always sat at the two-top at the window, his back against the side wall.
He was, is, well mannered, almost courtly. He said please and thank you and he actually rose slightly when I approached his table. It’s funny- I don’t know whether to talk about him in the past or present tense.
But there is something different about him. He’s agonizingly shy, diffident. And that smile. There’s nothing funny about his smile. It’s like a barbed-wire fence.
I thought, when I first met him, that he might be neurologically impaired somehow. Not unintelligent. It was more like he was half a beat behind. Somewhere on the spectrum, maybe? The odd son of wealthy parents, I thought. Manners like his don’t come cheap
We talked a little- about the weather, movies, but mostly about my career. He was really interested in my auditions. James knows and loves theater- Shakespeare and O’Neill, Moliere and Ibsen. He doesn’t seem to have much interest in anything written in the last 50 years and I don’t think he goes to theater. I got the feeling he didn’t get out much.
Six months ago, I was cast as Laura in The Glass Menagerie. It was a small production in a small theater downtown.
I knew I could use James’s mannerisms to build Laura’s character. I watched him closely. Laura, the broken keeper of delicate glass figurines, and James,seemed so similar, He never looked me in the eye when I waited on him. He stuttered slightly when he talked. His conversation was awkward, but he moved his hands gracefully, involuntarily. I knew I could use all of that.
And once a day he’d remove all of the sugar packets from the rack on the table and spread them out in different patterns. Sometimes he would make a circle of the packets and sometimes a square, a rectangle, or a trapezoid. Always a shape. And he would put one sugar cube in the middle and stare. Then he’d sweep away the pattern with the back of his hand, gently, and replace the packets.
I knew that my Laura played with her menagerie in the same way.
The production was a success. The Star Tribune reviewed us well and I was singled out. I felt a little guilty, like I had stolen James, exposed him.
When you came in so quietly and handcuffed him, when he turned to look at me as he was being led out the door, when he bowed slightly and smiled, although the thought had never crossed my mind before, I knew. Nobody had to tell me that James had killed a woman. Maybe women.
Becky, the other waitress, over there, just told me that you guys found photographs of me in his apartment—shopping for a bathing suit, kissing my boyfriend, walking with my sister. And that on his desk there was an expensive crystal unicorn with its horn snapped off.
My God, is that true?
Steven Horwitz is co-editor of two short story collections, "Twin Cities Noir" published by Akashic Books and "Amplified: Fiction By Leading Alt-Country, Indie Rock, Blues and Folk Musicians" published by Melville House. He is associated with The Minnesota Prison Writers Workshop. He lives in St Paul, Minnesota and can be reached at snhabr@gmail.com.