He was the stalker she first met while she was still being
stalked by somebody else, a good-hearted chef, she said, who had allowed her to
become manager when the job she had applied for was as a bartender, a man
she cared for even though she said she
sometimes feared for her life, reading his threatening texts over and over as
if passages from The Bible, responding just often enough to keep him going,
even when she claimed she wanted him to stop.
“He lives in Brooklyn” she told me. “But he works just on
the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel.”
This implied if he had enough left to pay the toll, he could
get at her.
He was hardly her first stalker or her worst. She was still
shaking off a woman stalker when she applied at his swanky restaurant where he
served as chef. She hoped to learn enough from him to become a chef herself,
starting at serving tables and mixing drinks, not with the aim to manage, she
said, but to move up the ladder, having the misfortune of a romantic entanglement
with him, he claimed was love, when she didn’t
- a rough road of petty skirmishes and mismanagement that put him and
the restaurant on the road to ruin, leaving her with fewer tips and a need to
find some better occupation. She said I broke her heart to leave. It certainly
broke his, starting him stalking her the day she quit, and she said she’s scared
the stalking may never cease.
She reported him to the local cops, yet still felt a little
sorry for him, calling him “good-hearted” if also deluded, sometimes reading
things in his texts that weren’t really there, though one thing is for certain,
he is desperate to have her back, and won’t stop until he’s succeeded.
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