A couple of months ago, I met up with my friend Dorothy. We’d been very close back when we worked at Friday’s together, she as a bartender and I as a waitress, but we hadn’t seen each other in a long time. Maybe three years, since just after her son was born and I quit. She got in touch through Facebook and suggested we meet up at the old joint in Las Condes, now an Italian restaurant. “To remember the old days,” said her message. Not “the good old days” or “the times we had.” For her, that period was characterized only by the fact that it had been left behind long ago. I thought I could read a certain detachment in her words that I found odd, but when it came down to it I agreed—that was indeed the best way to define those days.

I’ve never hated a job as much as I hated being a waitress at Friday’s. Even so, the afternoon we met up and I saw how the place had changed, I felt nostalgia. The enormous oak bar no longer existed, nor did the propeller that hung over it, or the canoe in the middle of the room, the antiques, the bronze railings, the striped red-and-white tablecloths, the Tiffany lamps. I felt confused. I had cleaned all those things with irritation and deliberate negligence, and here I was now, missing them.

Dorothy was waiting for me, sitting at a table with the menu in her hand. I knelt down beside her the way waiters used to at Friday’s in order to create intimacy with the customers, and with that ridiculously fun voice put on to transmit the American spirit, I told her: “Thank God it’s Friday.”

She smiled a little uncomfortably.

She looked very pretty, different from how I remembered her. She was thinner and her black hair was cut in a bob with bangs, and she wore a vintage blue dress that fit her perfectly.

I told her so:

“You look adorable.”

“You look the same,” she replied. I guess my expression revealed a certain displeasure, because she immediately backpedaled, saying: “I mean, you’re as pretty as ever. As pretty as you always were.”

We started catching each other up on our lives. I wasn’t particularly satisfied with my present, and I replied with ambiguities and avoided certain subjects. The tricky thing for me, the embarrassing thing, was revealing my generalized failure, especially considering the haughty and idealistic young woman I was when I met Dorothy.