Every shift at the bistro began the same way. I would push through the side entrance at 4:45 in the afternoon with my apron already tied, check the reservation sheet, trade a few words with Jenna at the host stand, and then start moving through the dining room with the particular sound my prosthetic made on the polished hardwood floors. Click, thud. Click, thud. The sound was not loud, not in any absolute sense, but in a restaurant where people paid extra for soft lighting and a careful kind of quiet, any irregular sound was noticeable, and mine was as irregular as they came.

After four years I had learned, mostly, to ignore the stares. Or I had learned to behave as though I were ignoring them, which amounts to the same thing in practice. Someone would glance up from their menu when I crossed the room, their eyes dropping instinctively to the leg and then lifting again with the slightly overcompensating neutrality of a person trying to demonstrate that they were not staring. I let them. You could not run a restaurant floor while also managing other people’s discomfort about your body, so I had made a policy of treating my own leg as a simple fact of the environment, as unremarkable as the ambient jazz or the bread baskets, and I found that most people, given a few minutes, arrived at the same conclusion.

The socket had been rubbing raw for two weeks. I needed an adjustment, which required an appointment, which required a morning off, which I had not yet managed to arrange because the bistro was short-staffed and Eden’s school had sent home three notices about the upcoming field trip and the payment deadline was the following Friday. On a double-shift night, the socket problem presented itself mainly as a steady fire that started somewhere under my left ribs and moved down through my hip with every step, something I had learned to track without particularly responding to, the way you learn to track low-grade discomfort when the alternative is stopping.

Marco was at the line when I came in, and he leaned through the kitchen window as I passed. “Full house tonight, Alex. I already moved your setup for Table Six.”
“I didn’t ask you to do that.”“Six is a pain and you’re on doubles. Consider it a gift.”

I told him I was fine and he gave me the look he gave me whenever I said I was fine, which was a look that communicated that he knew perfectly well I was not fine and had simply accepted that I would say so anyway. He was a good line cook and a decent human being and he had seen me on enough difficult nights to know when I was managing and when I was managing badly, and I did not usually tell him the difference because the line between sympathy and pity is thin and I had spent four years keeping myself on the right side of it.