New coworker.

Suddenly on the schedule there appeared this new coworker who was working tons of shifts, and since they went from zero to sixty, I had just assumed it was a student or something who had been gone and was now back.

Then, when I finally work with them, it's a (chubby) (Thai) woman around my age, who tells me that she had come to the U.S. over a year ago to work at her aunt and uncle's restaurant on the East Coast, but "it's very sad," it burned down because of a fire in an apartment in the building, and though they had insurance, they've never been able to find comparable rent since, since it was a place with a non-profit corporate landlord who gave low rents to encourage business in this one particular part of that city, and with everything else you can look at, it's more than double the rent, plus substantial utility increases.

And, her aunt and uncle are working at a different restaurant now, and she went to yet another one, but there you had to do everything from hosting to serving to some light cooking to butchering up the meat in the back, which she didn't like, so when she heard through (Thai) circles that the restaurant where I work needed help, she decided to try something different and move, and so she's here now, and is living in the same house as the one (older) (Thai) manager who's a whiz at phones.

The other day all three of us worked a dinner shift and it got slow, so I offered to both of them the chance to go home early, and the one manager said she couldn't because the owners rely on her to do some end-of-the-night paperwork, but my new coworker leapt at it.

And, the next time we worked, she thanked me, since she said that she knew that she lost some tip money by leaving early, but she was having a bad period that day and her stomach hurt and she just wanted to go home.

She also always talks about reading novels on her day off, and the other day when I asked her what she was reading, her hand leapt up to cover her mouth and she started laughing and she was like, "Oh, I can't say, I'm so embarrassed," so I was like, "Romance novels?", and she was like, "Yes, romance novels."

"That's cool," I was like, and I told her about my how my one (skeptical) (Mexican) coworker from my last job in the city that I used to live in read a ton, and like forty percent of what she read was romance novels.