The Back Room

The back room of the Blue Plate had been many things in its life. A storage room. A staff room. A place where Gus kept a broken pinball machine he swore he would fix one day. For one terrible winter in the nineties, according to Bev, it had been a karaoke room.

Since the first Tuesday of July, it had been a classroom.

Gus had pushed the onion sacks against one wall and the potato boxes against the other. Marco had carried in eleven chairs from three different decades: four red diner chairs, two plastic garden chairs, a wooden chair from a church sale, and a leather office chair with one broken wheel that everybody fought to avoid. Daniel, Grace's cousin, now a full-time cook, had cleaned the little window so thoroughly that you could finally see the alley behind the restaurant, which was not an improvement.

And on the wall, where Room 4 had once had a whiteboard, there was now the menu board from the old breakfast counter. Under the words TODAY'S SPECIAL, someone had written in chalk: SPEAKING TASK 2.

The whole room smelled of onions. Nobody minded. Frank said it helped people remember vocabulary.