ABSTRACT
It was six to eight months prior to Terence's purchase of the gun that the restaurant began to integrate waitresses into the personnel. Over the next year or so, the floor staff was supposed to eventually evolve into one made up of all women with the exception of the floor captain. It was still during the early weeks of the new staff, however, when Terence began finding gifts in his locker. First there was a black lace and red satin garter. Terence pinned it to the bulletin board in case it had been put into the wrong locker, so the owner could claim it. But the 139flowers he found in his locker were more of a problem—they were taken from the vases on the tables. Each time that he found a single red rosebud threaded through the vents in his locker door, he found a table on the floor with an empty vase, so he always put the flower back where it belonged. Terence spread the word through the busboys that the waitresses could take the roses off the tables each night after the restaurant was closed, but not before. But on the whole, he thought—admittedly on retrospect—the atmosphere with the new waitresses seemed, for the first several weeks, amiable and unstressed.
