Page 7 of Locked Down In Watch Hill
Of course, that was all from a different time, when running a restaurant was the dream of many. When globally, nations weren’t commiserating and mourning an unprecedented attack on their lives and livelihood.
Now, I was sure Kyle was happy to have kept his doors open.
Still, it was all interesting during a time when so much wasn’t, when the push and pull of normal life seemed paused forever, when people openly wondered if things would ever get back to normal and what life would be like once the vaccines had wide distribution and the virus faded from the daily headlines.
I drank the last of my red wine and poured another. When I finished with that, I friended and followed Kyle on all the social media platforms we shared.
Why not? Didn’t we all want to connect?
FOUR
KYLE
In a lot of ways, thepandemic had given life a rhythm, one different from life before, one that would probably look different than life after.
Most days I got up, went for a three-mile run, or did forty minutes of weightlifting with the small set I’d purchased during an online fire sale when lockdowns and quarantines began. I’d get to the pizzeria around ten after stopping two or three times a week for coffee at the makeshift takeout window for Already Perked. They had also struggled during business restrictions, and I wanted to make sure they would be around when this was over. Small businesses like ours made Watch Hill a desirable community, a little slice of suburban heaven tucked around the bend of the Little Miami River. It would be a shame to lose a business like theirs.
Drink in hand, I’d often put in twelve hours or so at the pizzeria before heading home to crash in front of whatever streaming series people were tweeting about that week. Get up. Work out. Coffee. Work. TV. Repeat.
Sometimes I amazed myself at how much I’d gotten used to the banal expectations of this life. Before the virus struck, I hated nights at home, and lived for the evenings I spent with friends crawling through downtown bars and traveling “on the cheap” at a moment’s notice. I ran half marathons and trained for a triathlon. I canceled plans on people arbitrarily and thought life would always continue as just as it was, all laid out in front of me. I never thought twice about the fragility of it.
But now things were different. And it only took a microscopic pathogen to make me feel that way.
I sank into my chair behind the desk that occupied the small office in the back of the pizzeria. Once the space had been an extra closet, but I converted it in the spring when I realized I got more work done here than I did at my townhouse. It still amazed me how much administrative work came with running a pizza joint. Keeping it going meant doing so much more than just slapping tomato sauce on uncooked crusts.
It had been another long day, but I was grateful. Business was picking up, and I wondered if word was spreading about the menu changes I had made. I implemented them a few weeks before the first round of quarantining started, I hadn’t done a whole lot of marketing, but over the last few months, I noticed and uptick in repeat customers and new traffic.
If this keeps up, I’ll have to hire more people. Soon.
I shook the mouse to wake up the laptop on the desk. An Excel spreadsheet chronicling food costs awaited me, and I needed to update it with costs from the last month, then move on to the sales chart behind it. But instead, I closed the program and opened my web browser. Nothing like mindless article reading and social media scrolling to pass the time.
And three connection requests on three platforms awaited me, all from Ashley.
I sat up in the chair, moved closer to the screen, and opened the first one, a general Facebook profile with a photo of her smiling back at me, her hair tumbling around her shoulders, a woven headband with small rhinestones across her forehead, and red lipstick across her mouth. Thank God I hadn’t followed through with my previous New Year’s resolution and deleted my account. Hanging on to it for nostalgia’s sake had proven fortuitous in many ways.
I scrolled through Ashley’s previous profile photos and old posts. She stopped updating her account regularly in 2018, but what little she still shared gave me a window into her life. Plus, l liked the fact that she’d bothered to friend me on the account. And on the others that I’d bothered roping myself into over the years. Even though I saw people regularly through the store, it was good to see her. Talk to her. Look into her world, if only momentarily. I couldn’t exactly ask her to go for a cup of coffee and hadn’t thought further than that. But I liked her. Maybe the conversation we’d shared made as much impression on her as it did on me.
