"that'll be twenty-three thrity-sex, ma'm," i chirp to the saggy bitch standing in her doorway before me. i offer the stack of pizza-and-boxed-salad to her and she accepts, placing it out of sight. when she brandishes a fifty from her pocket, my heart drops.
"i want 23 dollars back please, the rest is for you," grumbles she, knowing perfectly well the only way she could break my balls any further is by opening her large 'roni and complaining about the individual size of each of the pieces of her sliced meat, or maybe studying her caesar salad and lamenting dramatically the ratio of rye croutons to white. come on, a fifty?!
i know, as a fact, that there is no way i have more than five or six crumpled ones in my wallet, hastily borrowed from the register back at hq before i left. to make the customer's paying experience as fluid and painless as possible. yeah, right.
nevertheless, i put on a show for my new friend by opening my wallet and flipping through the small reserve of ones, as if perhaps the money mated in secrecy and produced a darling baby twenty, coming in at 10.3 pounds. relatives would comment on the baby's chunkiness, and note the possession of its father's nose. soon enough it got mixed up with the wrong crowd and landed itself in the slammer. figures.
i break the news to her in a hushed and mournful tone, like i just delivered a pizza to a funeral. hey, not a bad idea.
at first all i'm met with is this ominous blank stare, and her eyes were honestly unreadable over the fleshy puffiness under her eyes. but i'm not that dumb, and i know what will follow will not be favorable towards me. at all.
she starts. she yammers on about a fifty is all she had, she's having a horrible day, she's been getting pizzas from supino's for x years and this has never happened to her, etc. i want to tell her, hey lady, i'm 17, i have a crappy car, i pay for gas in increments of five dollars, and probably bum more ciggarrettes than i buy. how much damn money do you expect in my wallet?! but, i don't.
instead, i take the lashing with dignity. head down, i imagine opening her pizza box and slamming the cheesy, meaty delicacy into her face. she'd be picking pepperoni out of her hair for weeks.
i zone back in, and i can hear her complaints start to die down. i expend my full repetoire of apologies and offer to return to supino's and head all the way back to her small mansion in middleton with her change. she declines. so, i left with my 27 dollar tip.
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