Free Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce Page A

talking at first, when Marie was new. Chef didn’t like it when the servers stood with their backs to the dining room so she’d step up onto the dais next to him and look out at the guests, standing properly with her hands behind her straight back, in the ready meerkat posture Chef approved. He played whole concerts for her between requests. There was a Bud Powell night and a Chick Corea night and a Hank Jones night. After a few months he started quizzing her. When she swooped by with four steaks up her arm she’d say Ray Charles or Nat Cole as she passed. More often than not she was right. He didn’t register surprise at this, only delight. He had a two-note laugh that bounced like a rimshot and cracked him into talking about her like she was a racehorse, She’s a winner, ladies and gentlemen! Look at her go! Jimmy would you put all your money on me for the next one, she’d say. You betcha, sister, you betcha, I got one comin at ya, try this on, he’d say. He ran through everything he knew of jazz, R&B, blues, and Broadway before he started in on his classical repertoire,which wasn’t a great soundtrack for The Restaurant so he meted it out slowly.
    You’re not gonna collect much hiding the tip jar under the lid like that, Chopin, she’d said once, and gone to move it out where people could see it. It was a snifter from the bar that lived on the far end of the soundboard. Ted and Ed would take it from its place there and put it up on top by the music stand, level with their heads—you looked at them, you’d see the glass there. Ed even put a twenty-dollar bill in it each night to make it look like somebody already appreciated him. But Jimmy stopped her from moving it. No, no, he said, serious, don’t. I’m just playing for you.
    She rolled her eyes at that but he meant it, a little. He never would take money from people, would act like he was unable to lift his fingers from the keys to receive it but they would set it on the music stand anyway; sometimes Hank Earl gave him nothing for Cielito Lindo, sometimes a tenner he’d stuff in the snifter with a Thankee, Billy, thankee. Once he stiff-legged it up to the dais, a man who knew his size to be potentially lethal if he stumbled and corrected that with slower movements rather than less drink. He had his glass of chardonnay in one hand and set it on the edge of the piano top by the music stand. Though it wasn’t Jimmy’s piano he didn’t need to see it treated like that, it was enough that the full-size quilted cover had been misplaced or stolen and the keys, especially in the oppressive mug of the summer months, had a film of filmy kitchen air on them. He was playing some Nina Simone right then, Mississippi Goddam, and he cut down to just that frenetic train-ride bass line so he could pick up the glass with his right hand, saying Yes sirwhat can I do you for, Mr. Jackson? to Hank Earl, who said Nothing nothing I just want—just here—give you some—preciate you you know—while he steadied himself against the piano to pull his money clip from inside his jacket and then tried to dislodge some bills from it. The bills looked new and stuck together and to save face he decided to make it appear as though he had always intended to give the piano man all of them and he dropped the entire clip in the snifter. There that’s for you, that’s for you, you’re the best, tell me your name again? It’s Jimmy! Jimmy LaRosa! But I can’t take that, don’t give me your money, I play for the music, the music and you, they already pay me! Take it back! he yelled over the music and Chef’s call for Hands! And Somebody get me Art! and the expo’s order to dale gas a la treinta y cinco and the ever-ascending elevator of sound, the heavy machine parts of three eight-hundred-degree broilers and the popping of four fryers and forty clattering pans and pots and bowls and six clicking-airlock slamming walk-in doors and a couple of microwave timer bells and hundreds of