The woman behind the counter looked confusedly at the bun and meat that lay steaming before her. An older man, with gray thinning hair and thin-rimmed glasses that formed silver circles around his eyes was scolding her through his thick accent.
“No tomato, no queso. You get that? No queso! You…I told you!” The hamburger was wrong. He scolded her further when he saw a baked potato on the counter, white and steaming, but devoid of cheese. “What I tell you?” her boss said with apprehensive fury, “Queso! I tell you put the queso on and you…I tell you this!” The woman looked at the potato and nonchalantly placed melted cheese on it before the customer arrived. She seemed like a respectable woman. A woman who should have been doing something dignified. She was not stupid. She knew that making a potato without queso didn’t matter, whether the old white-mustachioed man did or not.
I received my order. It was a triple hamburger, without mayonnaise and without cheese. I happily sauntered to my lonely, sticky, plastic seat. I opened my sandwich to find yellow goo overflowing from beneath the bun and seeping onto the three patties of firmly pressed meat. I reluctantly decided to request a replacement. I hate cheese. I said to the old man, in the most polite way I possibly could, that I believed that this was cheese on my sandwich.
“How could you do this?! How many time I tell you no queso! I tell you no queso and you put the queso! What are you doing?!”
I stood in horror. She tried to mutter something. She obviously did not know the English equivalent of what she was trying to say. She stuttered something in a low, timid voice. A man beside me with a dark tan, mustached face said, “Mustard.” The woman agreed. She pointed and testified with exasperation, “Mustard!!” It was.
“I’m sorry!” I said repeatedly, scurrying back from whence I came.
“Well, you put too much,” the old man said.
I ate my meal quietly. Normally an upbeat, talkative person, I sat thinking; guiltily chewing at the fact that I desperately wanted to tell the woman I was sorry. I wanted to have the nerve to march up to her and apologize with as much sorrow as I could possibly muster. It wasn’t a big deal, I thought to myself. No one else I knew felt like this when asking for their orders to be corrected. Perhaps it was a sense of respect that flourished inside of me. I had seen the look in her eye, the one that took the old man’s bickering in stride. She had a sense of dignity and pride that didn’t belong in a fast-food visor. I wanted her to know that I respected her for being something I admire: composed in the face of pressure.
As she brushed passed me to walk outside, I kicked myself for not having the courage to apologize.