What the Dishwasher Left

There’s a guy on my line named Marcus, his first job here was as a dishwasher two summers back, and inside a year he was moved up to prep, then line, and somewhere in that stretch he turned into the actual reason half of what I read shows up on my shelf instead of me buying it. He doesn’t know he’s doing it. He just clears stuff out of his life the way you clear a station at the end of service, whatever’s still sitting there when the ticket rail’s empty goes in a bag for the car or gets set on the shelf above the coffee machine, and half the time I’m the one who ends up with it.

He’s the one who left Never Let Me Go up there, dog eared, no jacket, never said a word about it, and I still don’t know the etiquette of a book that’s handed down without anybody actually handing it down, I just found it on a slow Tuesday close and read the whole thing in three nights. Took me two months to even ask him about it and he barely remembered leaving it, said his sister gave it to him and he didn’t finish it, figured somebody in the kitchen would.

That’s basically the whole supply chain. Snow Crash came from a coworker who put the paperback in my hands and told me I owed it to myself. Cloudspire came from a line cook who unloaded it on me cheap because he’d overbought on the Kickstarter and needed the shelf space more than the game. None of these people are shopping for me. They’re just offloading, the same pile as busted tools and half a stack of wood and whatever else clutters a garage, the way you offload a case of tomatoes about to turn, get it out of the walk-in before it becomes somebody’s problem at inventory.

I used to feel a little strange about it, like my shelf was just ragtag hand-me-downs, like I was catching whatever nobody else wanted. Then I did the math on it, actual math, and most of what’s on that shelf came home the way hand-me-downs come home, handed off, left behind, dumped on me at the bar two blocks from work where the after-shift table lives. Almost nothing on it came from me walking into a store with a list. My reading log and my game shelf are basically a record of what my coworkers didn’t want to deal with anymore.

Marcus doesn’t read much himself, he told me once, he just picks things up and puts them down again, a book’s a book to him until it isn’t. But he’s got an eye for what I’ll actually finish, better than I do half the time. He hasn’t been wrong yet. The pencil case fights and the missing cassette tape in that Ishiguro book, I wouldn’t have found that on my own, wouldn’t have known to look for it. Same with the game, I’d heard Cloudspire’s name enough at the bar to be curious but never would’ve dropped the money myself, and a case of shrink-wrapped expansion boxes just showing up cheap is a different kind of yes than clicking buy.

There’s something in it about how a kitchen actually runs, too, everybody covering everybody’s gaps without being asked, somebody grabs the ticket you can’t get to, somebody clears your station when you’re buried on the fryer. The books and games just ride along on the same current. I don’t go looking for what’s next most weeks. I wait for whatever gets left on the shelf, and so far it’s a better system than the one where I pick.