“Rodents and roaches and flies: oh my! Rodents and roaches and flies …”

“Don’t even joke about it,” Jake growled. “It’s not funny. No one needs to hear.” He stood at the counter whisking olive oil into balsamic vinegar and garlic, and he glowered at Deborah over his shoulder while his left hand steadied the bowl and his right arm twirled from the elbow. He always started the next day’s vinaigrette before they shut down for the night. It was their closing ritual: Jake at the whisk while Deborah pushed the big broom.

“We’re practically alone now,” she said. The wait-staff was gone for the day; only Jorge and Paco were still around, and they were emptying the last load of dishes from the plastic trays to the open overhead shelves. Deborah glanced from the two young men to her aging grumpy partner. Paco was string-muscled and small but Jorge was a six and a half foot hunk, full-necked, broad-chested, fine-pored. Deborah thought about young masculine vigor, and she wondered. There was Jake, growing a slight paunch that pulled his weak lower spine forward so he stood sway-backed at the counter. Sprouting gray hair from his ears while he lost it off his head. Getting unrulier in the eyebrows while he got tamer in the pants. “Look,” she declared. “It could be worse. The exterminator told me some places have rats so bold they ride the broom! And roaches may creep people out, but they’re actually clean – they haul away their dead.”

“Tell that to the customers … No. Don’t,” Jake reconsidered quickly. Deborah was a good hostess, an outgoing warm hospitable greeter. But the same liveliness that charmed most of their patrons came with a directness that sometimes surprised them; he wouldn’t put it past his wife to actually joke about cockroaches while escorting a party to a table.

“I know we have a problem,” she said seriously. “But we’re viable. I mean, we’re working on the pest thing, and as soon as we get a stable staff …”

“Yeah. Sure.” Jake coughed out the words sardonically. “We are so far from okay that it isn’t even in sight.” His face showed disgusted despair. He turned from the steel work counter and didn’t notice the cockroach ambling toward the vat of vinaigrette. “If we don’t get our act together and start serving the main courses before the customers have forgotten the starters, we’re doomed. And the repeated inspections are disruptive; you can’t argue about that. We’re starting to get the wrong kind of rep.”

Jake turned to Deborah as he covered the vinaigrette, so he didn’t see the roach become an unwitting prisoner of the dressing container. He wasn’t aware of all the desperate scrabbling that went on beneath the cover, like the race-around of a decapitated chicken, and he didn’t notice when the insect finally stopped trying to push out of the heavy cover and went quiescent within the acetic fumes. He was aware instead of wiping his hands on the front of his apron, walking toward wife-with-broom, insisting: “If we could just get on the right side of that Daddy Warbucks dude: get him to invest enough so we could add staff…”

“He’s got a reservation for lunch tomorrow.”

“Really? With the blonde?”

“Uh-huh. And his name is Campbell.”

Troy Campbell was a big money man around town. He owned acres of real estate and made a hobby of investing in small businesses. He ate at their little bistro often, and Jake had the idea, the fantasy according to Deborah, that Campbell could be talked into investing in them. Deborah pointed out that Campbell put money in small companies, yes, but only the type that could go public and create more wealth for him. Their restaurant wasn’t that kind of venture.

“Well, I say we try to impress the guy tomorrow. We create an occasion to sell ourselves.”

“I don’t think we should count on it.” Deborah spoke without her customary optimism. “When he’s here with that woman he’s into her; he’s not going to be receptive to a business discussion.”

“Let’s see how it goes. Let’s try to get his meal served right.”

They closed up their kitchen and followed Jorge and Paco out of the place. Unknowingly they left the trapped roach to suffer alone in the vinaigrette vat, while all the other roaches and rats had the nighttime run of the place.

Cockroach dreams. No words. Stiff like a carapace, brown like balsamic vinaigrette. No thoughts. Legs moving antenna ranging pushing pulling agitating no-escape quiet-now. While Jake and Deborah sexless shared a bed, the roach in the vinaigrette vat bided under the rim of the cover. While Troy Campbell smoked a cigar in his study and considered forty year-old Karen Montgomery, and wondered how after their tantalizing phone conversations and recent provocative e-mails he could take it to the next phase, the cockroach waited unaware that it waited, for morning and the restaurant preparations.

(continued on Wednesday)