The Waitress Read Online Free Page A

face,’ muttered Katie back. ‘Give the guy a break.’
    They both whizzed back round, coffees in hands, smiles on lips and continued with the queue until it had finished and the last train from Porter’s Green to the city had left (the 8.54: only two minutes late, right platform, but minus two carriages), its commuters stuffed into each others’ armpits, dreaming of Friday.
    The sudden dip in custom on a Monday morning was usually Katie’s lowest point of the week. This was when she had time to face the reality of her working day. Alec would approach them and, summoning up a spirit of excitement and eagerness for the week ahead, would command the same thing every single Monday morning.
    ‘Right. First day of the week girls, first day of the week. Here we go. Salads out front, chip oil frying in back, make your boss a nice cup of coffee.’
    And Sukie and Katie would reply the same thing every single Monday morning.
    ‘Make it yourself, you lazy bastard,’ from Sukie.
    ‘You’ve got hands, haven’t you?’ from Katie.
    And Alec would make himself a cup of coffee, while expressing his doubts over their parentage with imagination and spirit.
    Today, though, Katie did not feel swamped by the usual onslaught of misery and failure. Today, the rudeness of the commuters, the miserable fug of the café and the dismal attempts at leadership from Alec had the opposite effect – all because of what had happened to her late on Friday afternoon.
    For she had had an epiphany. She was going to become an educational psychologist.
    It all happened during a double-shift that had gone so painfully slowly that she thought she must have actually died and gone to hell. She’d started chatting to a customer. It wasn’t the done thing – it was hard to chat freely with Alec around – but he’d been oppressing someone in the kitchen at the time and the customer had been at table 18, right by the door, so it had felt a fairly safe risk.
    The woman had had a quiet Friday at work and had popped in for a quick coffee before getting home to a house full of overtired children and an underpaid nanny. She’d started chatting to Katie about the weather and somehow Katie had found herself telling her that she was considering becoming a teacher. This thought had occurred to her only the week before, after she’d seen a reality TV show about an inner city school where a teacher had got locked in the girls’ toilets and had escaped through a window. It seemed like an adventurous job. It just so happened that the woman had been a teacher once, a while ago, before she’d started training to be an educational psychologist. Once you’d been a teacher for two years, all you needed was a masters degree and voilà! An educational psychologist. Much better for pulling at parties, the woman told Katie, and better still, you didn’t have to wait for a bell to go to the toilet.
    Katie was reborn. Not only did she already have the requisite psychology degree (from Oxford no less) but she’d always liked children. They liked her too – she had an affinity with them. By the time she had deposited the warmed croissant on a plate and taken it to the woman, Katie’s new future was set; restaurant franchises were a dim and distant memory. This woman was
meant
to come into the café that day, and she, Katie Simmonds, had been
meant
to see that TV programme the week before. It was destiny.
    So here she was, starting the first week of the rest of her life. Which was why today, The Café’s usual Monday morning depression didn’t seep into her bones and numb her; instead it reminded her – as if she’d already mentally escaped this place – of what she’d left behind.
    ‘Table 8 wants serving.’
    Katie turned to Alec, who was still sitting by the till, the steam from his coffee cup mingling with the smoke from his hand-rolled cigarette. He nodded briefly over at table 8. He always sat in the near corner by the till because he said it gave him a good