…”her last three chemotherapy bills were sent to my office while you spent four hundred dollars a night here.”
The customer’s smirk disappeared. His name was Gregory Pace. His wife, Susan, had been coming to our restaurant for Sunday brunch for years, until she got sick. Linda, the owner, had started a small fund to help regular customers with medical bills when their insurance fell short. Susan had been the first person it ever helped. She’d always told us her husband’s business was struggling and that he was working himself to exhaustion trying to keep it afloat.
One of the men in suits was Linda’s accountant. He opened a folder and quietly laid three receipts on the table, all from our restaurant, all signed by Gregory in the past month. Then a statement from a luxury car dealership. Then a membership invoice from a golf club.
“Your wife told me you’d lost everything,” Linda said. “I believed her. I paid. And you come into my restaurant and spit in the face of a woman who visited Susan in the hospital every week.”
Gregory turned to the other diners, looking for sympathy. He didn’t find any. Several people had filmed the whole thing, including the moment he spat.
Linda then turned to her husband, Roger, my manager. “You told her to apologize?”
Roger started explaining that Gregory was an important customer. Linda cut him off. “Twenty-three years she’s worked here. She trained you when you didn’t know where the forks went. You’re not managing this restaurant anymore. She is, if she’ll take it.”
I was so stunned I just nodded.
The second man in a suit was a lawyer. He informed Gregory that the restaurant would be pressing charges for assault and that he was banned from the premises. Gregory left, red-faced, and two police officers met him in the parking lot.
The next morning, Linda and I drove together to visit Susan. We didn’t plan to tell her, but she’d already seen the video online. She was quiet for a long time. Then she said she’d suspected for a year that he was lying about money and had been too sick and too tired to fight. Linda’s lawyer helped her file for separation and get a court order for her husband to pay her medical expenses.
Susan finished treatment in the spring. She’s in remission. She came back for Sunday brunch last month, and I served her myself. She ordered the steak, medium rare, and told me it was perfect.
As for Roger, he and Linda are working things out, but he now works the kitchen line on Friday nights. He still apologizes to me about once a week.
