WORKS ON DIGITAL PAPER

Inspired by MLusk of Weather Records

He turns around right away.  He had picked up the tray with his double wrap bean taco and the soft shell beef taco, turned to walk to his table near the door, and now he's spun back around.  I catch the whole act out of the corner of my eye.
"Do you want some sauce?"
"Um, yeah."
He says it with a little accent over the yeah, to intone, I surmise, that I should have put the sauce on the tray in the first place; as if who would eat a taco without sauce?
I fill up the little plastic cup with the sauce in the squeezy container and put it on the outstretched tray.
A minute later the owner walks up from the rear dining room where he'd been watching the Giants on the flat screen.
"Toddy."
"Yeah."
"Come on, I've asked you before, just call it hot sauce."
"Oh, right, yeah, I forget.  It's just more like ketchup. I forget."
"You don't forget. You know.  And it makes me feel stupid to have to bring it up all the time.  But it makes a difference.  You don't come into a Mexican restaurant to eat some generic sauce.  People want hot sauce."
He says all this pretty fast.  Pretty low-tone, if you know what I mean.  He hasn't looked over his shoulder to see what's going on in the game. Eli Manning just threw an interception.  I calculate this fact, calculating the bad mood the owner will be in because he had to remind me to call the ketchup hot sauce again and now the Giants might lose.  The significance of this transaction is not lost on me. But still.
"If people come into a Mexican food place for the sauce, the hot sauce, then why don't we just put it on their tray right off the bat, so they don't have to ask for it?  Then I don't even have to say a thing."
"Toddy."
Toddy is the name I give people when I meet them. Todd just sounds so, you know, formal.
"Yeah?"
"You're fired."