Four large pizzas, a fifty-dollar order, and he dumped every box on the floor in front of me and laughed.
The cook came out from the kitchen wiping his hands. He told the man to pay me.
The man swung at him. The cook caught his fist like it was nothing. Then the man’s two friends got up from their table.
Ten-forty
They didn’t hurry. They came across the room the way guys walk to the bathroom in a bar, and they stopped one on each side of him.
The skinny one had bleached hair, the yellow kind you do yourself over a sink. The other one was wide, with a brown buzz cut and an olive jacket zipped all the way up.
The man in the red jacket was still trying to get his hand back.
“I’m not paying for this trash,” he said. He said it loud, to the whole room, and the whole room was the five of us and four pizzas lying cheese side down.
Ray opened his hand. That’s all he did. The man went back a step on his heels and almost put his sneaker in a pepperoni.
“Pay the girl,” Ray said.
He said it the same way he says “order up” through the window forty times a night. Not louder. Not slower.
Then they spread out. The skinny one drifted left, toward the soda cooler. The wide one went right, around the end of the counter. The man in red stayed in front. Ray moved his feet apart a little, like somebody standing on a bus that’s about to brake.
I took the key out of the register drawer and put it in the front pocket of my jeans.
The man in red rolled his neck. Then he did something I didn’t understand at all. He dropped his hands to his sides and pushed his chin out at Ray, like he was offering it.
“Go on,” he said. “Right there. Free one.”
Ray didn’t move.
“Come on, man. You want to. Look at him, he wants to.”
The skinny one had his phone out, held sideways, the way people hold them at concerts. He wasn’t filming the pizzas. He wasn’t filming me.
He had it pointed at Ray’s hands, and Ray’s hands were in the front pocket of his apron.
The ticket in my wallet
I’ve delivered for Gina’s for two years. I started the summer after high school because it was six minutes from my mom’s apartment and Gina didn’t care that my car was really my mom’s car.
The pay is eleven an hour plus tips, and the tips are the job. On a good Friday I clear a hundred and forty. On a Tuesday in February I’ve cleared nineteen.
Gina has one rule she says out loud and a lot she doesn’t. The one she says out loud is about the drawer. On nights she isn’t there, the driver runs the front, and the drawer belongs to the driver. At close, every ticket you rang has to be in it. If it’s short, the difference comes out of your envelope on Friday. She writes it on the front in pen, with a minus sign.
Three weeks before that night, I had a delivery to the Delmar Apartments, building C, second floor. Sixty-two dollars, cash on delivery. A man opened the door about as far as a chain lets it, and an arm came out and took the boxes. Red sleeve, the shiny tracksuit kind.
“Hang on, getting the cash,” he said, and the door shut.
I stood there four minutes. I knocked. I called the number on the ticket and got a voicemail box that was full. I knocked again and a lady across the hall opened her door in a bathrobe and told me to knock somewhere else.
That Friday my envelope said MINUS 62, and Gina had stapled the delivery ticket to it so I’d know which one. The customer’s number was printed across the top. It ended in 4417.
I kept that ticket. Folded twice, in my wallet behind my license. Sixty-two dollars was two Tuesdays.
After Delmar I started doing two things. I stopped letting go of food before I had money in my hand, and I started recording. I clip my phone in the chest pocket of my jacket with the camera just over the zipper, and I hit record every time I say a total out loud. Gina said it was dramatic. By that night I had about three hundred clips of people saying “keep the change” and one of a man in a towel who wanted to pay in quarters.
Ray was the only other person at Gina’s on weeknights. He’s the cook, and as far as the front of the store goes, he might as well not exist. In two years I never saw him come through the kitchen door while there was a customer in the room. He talks to you through the pass window or he doesn’t talk. If somebody wants to complain about the crust, Ray remakes the pizza and I carry it out and take the complaint.
The day I got the MINUS 62 envelope, I was sitting in my mom’s car out back, and Ray came out to stand by the dumpster. He looked at the envelope on my dashboard and went back in without saying anything. When I went in for my first run, there was a twenty folded under the corner of the cutting board where I pick up. Nobody else had been in the kitchen.
I asked Gina about him once. She said Ray had his own place a long time ago, on Garfield Avenue, and it closed, and don’t bring it up.
That was most of what I knew. There was also a little gold trophy on the shelf over his prep table, a wrestler in a crouch with one arm snapped off, that he used to hold his pens. The base said STATE 1988. And on Sundays he did something with kids at the Y. That was all of it.
That night the order came in on the website at 9:51. Four large pepperoni, two with jalapeño, name Mike, pickup. At 10:20 the three of them came in and sat at the table by the window, and the one in red put his feet up on the chair across from him.
He looked up at the camera over the register. It’s a black plastic dome with a red light, and Gina bought it at Home Depot, and the red light runs on two AA batteries. He looked at it for a second and smiled at it, like it had told him a joke.
Ray was in the pass window. Usually when pies are in he’s at the oven or the board, moving. That night he stood in the window with both hands flat on the steel until the timer went off. Then he boxed all four himself and slid them through without looking at me.
I carried them to the counter. I said, “That’s fifty even,” and touched my chest pocket, and the man in red got up and opened the top box.
I don’t think he ever looked at the pizza.
Now Ray was standing on our side of the counter, in the dining room, with flour on his apron, and behind him the kitchen door had stopped swinging.
Gina
“Everybody see that?” the man in red said. “He put his hands on me. Dyl, you get that?”
The skinny one nodded without taking his eyes off his screen.
“That’s assault. You grabbed my hand, that’s assault. I got a witness, I got video.” He turned around to look at the empty tables, like there was a crowd at them. “Grabbed me. Over a pizza.”
“You swung at him,” I said.
“Did I?” He looked at the skinny one. “Did I, Dyl?”
Dyl didn’t answer. He took one step to the side to get a better angle on Ray.
I tried the easy thing first. “You can just go,” I said. “Just leave. Nobody has to do anything.”
“Leave?” He laughed again, the same laugh from when the boxes went over. “I’m a customer. I’m waiting on my food.” He pointed at the floor. “That’s my food. That’s disgusting. I’m not leaving till I get my food.”
The wide one, the one he called Trav, leaned on the end of the counter by the napkin dispenser, close enough to me that I could smell his gum.
The shop phone is an old white cordless with a stubby antenna that sits next to the register. I picked it up and called Gina. I didn’t use my own phone. My own phone was in my chest pocket, and it was still going.
Gina answered on the fourth ring. I could hear a TV behind her, a game show, people clapping.
“Is anybody hurt?” she said.
“No.”
“Then let them leave.”
“They won’t pay.”
“Then they won’t pay.”
“It’s my drawer,” I said.
The game show clapped. Gina didn’t say anything for a while. Then she said, “Honey, I know.”
“It’s fifty dollars, Gina.”
“Kaylee, listen to me. Hollis sent me a letter after the break-in in March. It’s on my fridge. One more police call to the premises and he doesn’t have to renew. I’m in month nine.” She stopped. “Is Ray in the kitchen?”
I looked at Ray. He was standing exactly where he’d been, hands in his apron, looking at the man in red’s face. Not his hands. His face.
“No,” I said.
It got very quiet on her end. Somebody had turned the TV off.
“I’m coming down,” Gina said. “Keep him back there if you can. What name’s on the order?”
“Mike.”
“Mike what?”
“Just Mike.”
“Look it up while I drive. Find me something.”
“Who’s that, your manager?” the man in red said, loud, toward the phone. “Tell her her cook’s a psycho. Tell her he’s on camera.”
I heard Gina’s car door slam on her end. Her keys.
“Kaylee,” she said. “Don’t you dare call anybody.”
4417
I put the cordless down on the counter.
The man in red had stepped in closer to Ray. Not swinging. Just close, the way a guy gets close in a parking lot, so their chests were maybe a foot apart. Ray’s a lot shorter than him. Ray’s fifty-five and built like a coat hanger, and the man in red is the size of a vending machine.
He put one finger on Ray’s chest, right on the apron strap, and pushed.
“Come on,” he said.
Ray rocked back an inch and came forward again.
Push. “Come on.”
Ray took it. His eyes stayed on the man’s face, going over it slowly, like you’d read the back of a check before you sign it.
“What,” the man in red said. “You know me or something?”
Ray didn’t say anything. The skinny one, Dyl, came around a little more to the left so he had them both in the frame.
I went to the tablet. It’s propped on a stand by the register, in a pink case with a cartoon strawberry on it that came with the tablet when Gina bought it used. I swiped to the order queue and tapped the 9:51.
MIKE. PICKUP. Four large. Two jalapeño. Extra ranch. A phone number.
I looked at the number a long time. Then I looked at his sleeve.
Red. Shiny. The tracksuit kind.
It’s a common jacket. Half the guys at the gas station on Ridge wear one. I told myself that while I got my wallet out of my back pocket, and while I slid the folded ticket from behind my license, and while I opened it flat on the steel counter with the side of my hand so it would stay open.
Delmar Apartments, Bldg C, 2F. Sixty-two dollars. Gina’s staple holes in the corner.
“What are you doing back there?” the man in red said. He didn’t turn around. He was still looking at Ray. “Doing your homework?”
Trav laughed through his nose.
I put the ticket down next to the tablet, so the two numbers were side by side, one on paper and one on the screen.
Same area code. Same seven digits after it. 4417, both of them.
Garfield Avenue
“You owe me sixty-two from Delmar,” I said.
That made him turn around. He looked at me, then at the ticket on the counter, which he couldn’t possibly read from there.
“From what?”
“Building C. You took the boxes through the chain and said you were getting the cash.”
He grinned. He had very white teeth, the kind you pay for. “Never been to Delmar in my life, sweetheart.”
Trav looked at him. Just for a second, a quick sideways look, and then back at the floor.
“Brandon,” Ray said.
The grin stopped.
It was the first thing Ray had said since “pay the girl.” He still hadn’t taken his hands out of his apron.
“Brandon Pruitt,” Ray said. “Garfield Avenue. The October before Covid. Six large and a two-liter. Paid with nothing.”
“Don’t know you, man.”
“You had a sling on your left arm at the deposition,” Ray said. “You swung with your right that night. Same as tonight.”
Brandon looked at him. Really looked, this time, the whole face, the eyebrows, the nose, the grey coming in over his ears.
“Your buddy had a camera that night too,” Ray said. “Taller kid. Started filming when I came over the counter. Not before.”
Dyl’s phone dipped about an inch.
“Lombardo,” Brandon said. He said it like a guy finding a twenty in his winter coat. “No way. Lombardo. Ray Lombardo.” He laughed, a real one this time. “What happened to your sign? You had that big sign with the guy throwing the dough.”
Ray said nothing.
“You’re making pizzas for somebody else now.” Brandon shook his head. “Man. Your insurance was real nice to me. You remember what they gave me?”
“I remember what it cost,” Ray said.
“So you know how this goes.” Brandon pointed up at the black dome over the register without looking at it. “That’s fake, by the way. Battery light. I checked it out last week. So the only video in here is Dyl’s, and Dyl’s video starts whenever I want it to start.” He stepped right back up into Ray’s face. “That’s how it went last time. You came over the counter and Dyl hit record.”
I looked at Ray’s hands, still in the apron pocket, and at the fist he’d caught instead of anything else he could have done with it.
I looked at the four boxes on the floor. Nobody had even opened the other three. He’d opened one lid and swept all of them off. He hadn’t come in hungry.
He’d ordered fifty dollars of pizza from a store with a fake camera and a cook who never came out front, and the whole time, the thing he was buying was Ray.
“Last time it was your restaurant, Ray,” Brandon said. “What’ve you got now? A job?”
The table by the window
I unclipped my phone from my pocket and held it up with the screen facing out.
The red dot was going. The timer under it said 14:52.
“It’s been on since I said fifty,” I said.
Nobody moved. The soda cooler kicked on and hummed.
“You dumped them,” I said. “You swung first. You just said the insurance part.”
Brandon stared at the phone like it was a gun somebody had left on the table.
“That’s illegal,” he said. “You can’t record people without telling them. That’s a felony.”
“It’s a store.”
“Okay.” He put his hands up, palms out, the friendliest he’d been all night. “Okay. Look. Give it here, we walk. Nobody pays anybody, nobody calls anybody, everybody goes home. That’s fair. That’s more than fair. Your boss doesn’t want cops, I heard you on the phone. I’m doing her a favor.”
“Pay me,” I said.
“Sweetheart.”
“A hundred and twelve. Fifty for tonight. Sixty-two for Delmar.”
He looked at me for a long second, and then he stopped smiling for good.
“Dyl,” he said. “Get the phone.”
Dyl came fast, around Ray’s left side, reaching for me over the counter. Ray ducked under his arm and turned, and Dyl went over Ray’s hip like a bag of flour coming off the truck. He landed flat on his back on the tile, between two of the boxes, and all the air went out of him in one sound. His phone skidded under the soda cooler.
Trav grabbed Ray from the side, a fist in the apron and a hand on his shoulder. Ray turned inside it somehow, and then he was loose and Trav wasn’t holding anything, and Ray put both hands on Trav’s chest and shoved. Trav went backward over two of the red plastic chairs. They went flat with him, all three at once, and the noise was like a stack of trays going over.
Brandon came last. He came with his head down, running, the way you’d go through a door. Ray caught his arm, stepped in, and put him down on his back across the little table by the window, the same one he’d had his feet up on. The table went over sideways and Brandon went with it, onto the floor.
Then it was very quiet again.
All three of them were on their backs among the pizza boxes. Dyl was looking at the ceiling, breathing like he’d just come up from the deep end. Trav had a chair leg under one shoulder and didn’t seem to want to move it. Brandon had ranch on his jacket.
Ray was breathing a little hard. He’s fifty-five. He hadn’t thrown a single punch, and my phone had all of it.
He looked down at Brandon.
“Now pay the girl,” Ray said.
Brandon lay there. Then he got his wallet out without sitting up, holding it over his face, and pulled out two twenties.
“Trav,” he said.
Trav dug in his jeans and came up with a ten and some ones and threw them toward me. Dyl had eleven dollars, crumpled, and a gift card he tried to give me that I didn’t take. I picked it all up off the floor and counted it on the counter.
“It’s a hundred and four,” I said.
“That’s it,” Brandon said. “That’s everything. Swear to God.”
“You’re eight short.”
“So I owe you eight.” He sat up slowly. “Delete it. Come on. You got paid. We’re square.”
“No.”
“Then what was the point of this?”
“Go,” Ray said.
They went. Dyl got down on his stomach and fished his phone out from under the cooler first. The bell on the door rang behind them.
I rang in the fifty and put it in the drawer. The other fifty-four I folded and put in my jacket. Ray was already picking up the chairs.
I stopped the recording. Twenty-one minutes, eight seconds. I sent it to my mom, who’d be asleep, and then to myself, and then I dialed 911.
Gina’s headlights came across the window while it was ringing. She came in with her coat over her pajamas and stopped just inside the door. She looked at the table on its side, and the chairs, and the pizza, and then at Ray, standing in her dining room with a chair in each hand.
“Who are you on with?” she said.
“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency,” said the phone.
“Hang up, Kaylee.”
“He’s going to file,” I said. I held the phone against my shoulder. “Tomorrow, or next week. He’ll say Ray came over the counter and beat him up, and Dyl’s video will start right when Ray threw him. That’s what he did on Garfield.”
Gina looked at Ray. It was the first time I’d seen her not know what to say.
“Let her,” Ray said.
“Ray. Hollis.”
“Let her.”
The dispatcher said ma’am, are you there. Gina took her coat off and put it back on.
“Then leave your key,” she said.
I took the drawer key out of my jeans pocket and set it on the counter next to the Delmar ticket. Then I gave the dispatcher the address and went out the front door to wait on the curb.
Sunday
Two officers came, a man and a woman. The woman watched all twenty-one minutes standing up, in the parking lot, with the volume all the way up. She took the Delmar ticket in a little plastic bag and wrote down the 4417 and the name Ray gave her. She said there might be other stores. She didn’t say which ones.
That was three weeks ago. As far as Ray knows, no letter has come to Gina’s from anybody’s lawyer. Hollis hasn’t said anything either way. Gina’s still open. I drive past it.
I drive for Tony’s now, out by the highway. Ten-fifty an hour and the tips are worse, because Tony’s mostly does office lunches and offices tip like it hurts them. Tony has a real camera over his register. I checked. My mom used the fifty-four on the light bill and didn’t ask where it came from.
My wallet feels thinner without the ticket in it. That’s stupid, it was one piece of paper.
On Sunday an order came in for four large cheese, pickup changed to delivery, to the side door at the Y on Kemper Street. Name: Ray.
The side door goes straight into a gym with blue mats taped together on the floor. There were maybe a dozen kids on them, eight or nine years old, rolling around in pairs, and Ray in grey sweatpants walking between them with a whistle he wasn’t using. No apron. It was the first time I’d ever seen his arms.
He saw me and came over to the door. A kid followed him the whole way, asking if it was pepperoni.
“Cheese,” Ray said. “Go sit down.”
I held the boxes. My phone was in my chest pocket, and I’d already said the total out loud, out of habit. Ray looked at the pocket, and then at me, and took a folded wad of bills out of his sweatpants.
He didn’t let go of the money until I’d let go of the boxes. Then he put the bills in my hand and closed my fingers over them.
“Count it,” he said.
“Twenty, forty, fifty,” I said, into my pocket, “sixty, seventy.”
If you’ve ever stood at a counter knowing the money was coming out of your own pocket either way, there are more nights like this one waiting below.
For more stories where an ordinary day takes a sharp turn, read about a landlord’s nephew who changed the locks and the men who picked a fight with Grandpa. And for a quieter kind of drama, there’s the biker with a stuffed rabbit.
