Can You Manage?

Dinner was served. The first course was canned grapefruit segments served in one of those battered silver dishes. The second was humorously called soup. Then came the pièce de résistance, turkey and ham. I turned around to look at the oval serving dish. On it were little piles of paper-thin slices of turkey on paper-thin slices of ham, set on a suspicious substance which was, presumably, stuffing. The meat looked as if it had been carved at dawn. Every now and then someone in the kitchen had taken pity on it and poured gravy over. The marks of several receding tides were visible.
When I turned, my eyes met the waitress’s: fiftyish, pure Dublin, tight blond hair, well-groomed, had seen it all, would not say “No” to a drop of gin. She murmured, “Yes sir, wouldn’t it sicken you”.
Those few words turned a disaster into an event.