After a string of unseasonably warm spring days that had Chicagoans draping jackets over their shoulders and whistling as they walked to work, things took a turn. The temperature dropped. Clouds the color and size of battleships arrived from Canada. Snow began to fall. I was off from the restaurant two days off in a row—Sunday and Monday. I spent my snowbound mini-vacation in my low-ceilinged apartment reading novels on my futon, working my way through a video game titled The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past, and listening to the electric baseboard heater in my apartment tick like a cartoon bomb. The few times I decided to venture into the spring blizzard either to purchase more beer or to stop at the Melrose to enjoy a Denver Omelet—which for my money was the greatest omelet in the world—it felt like the city had been evacuated. I broke trail through the drifts on the sidewalk as I left my building’s front door, and when I returned my footprints were the only footprints on the walk.

When I woke up the next morning, the snow had stopped. Icicles shagged the building across the way. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. My face had a pinched, angry quality—which was what always happened when I stayed up reading after midnight. I got dressed. Then I took my reading face and headed to the snowbound bus-stop on North Broadway.

Something had happened at the Club. A disgruntled former employee—a golf pro with a hair-trigger temper—gained access to the Club after-hours and left an impressive bowel movement straddling the centerline of one of the Club’s high-gloss handball courts. The event was recorded on the Club’s security cameras from several cinematic angles. The golf pro had been arrested in his South Side apartment. The Club was prosecuting to the fullest extent of the law.

In the name of preventing future security breaches, Nancy decreed that every East River Club employee was to be issued a proper photo I.D. A makeshift picture-taking station was set up in the employee break room. The station was manned by two people: a rotund man working the camera and a tall string-bean of a girl holding a clipboard to her chest. I’d never seen the girl before. Her uniform—navy blazer, skirt cut just above the knee, hair pulled back into a clean ponytail, rictal smile stretched across her face—identified her as a rarified employee informally known as a “Nancy’s Girl.”

“Nancy’s Girls” did Nancy’s bidding. They tended to be milk-fed, long-legged Midwestern girls—former prom queens from cow-towns. They welcomed Club members as they arrived each morning, their teeth sparkling (Nancy had upgraded their insurance to include dental) and eyes shining. They gave leisurely tours of the Club’s world-class facilities to prospective members. If a member forgot his locker combination, one of Nancy’s Girls would take care of it. They lived behind a little door, just off the lobby. They drove Nancy’s Audi to the wash-and-wax and picked up her dry cleaning on the way back. Rumors circulated in the employee locker room that Nancy’s Girls offered services of a more lurid nature to select members. We collectively groaned whenever these rumors circulated, secretly hoping they were true. The Girls usually ate in a small pack in the employee break room, pushing pieces of undressed kale around their plates with the tines of their forks as they whispered together. They were frightening as individuals. In a group they became something awful. Wherever they went, together or alone, they broke hearts and destroyed hopes. If you were looking for a Nancy’s Girl, all one had to do was follow the string of doubled over middled-aged men, hands on their knees, in a state of having to take stock of their lives.

Nancy’s Girls were such a threat to my moment to moment wellbeing that I’d developed the ability to edit them out of my periphery at the Club. This string-bean, however, I could not ignore. When it was my turn to step in front of the camera, she asked my name. When I told her, her eyebrows arched. Her rictal smile became more genuine. “I’ve heard of you,” she said. “You’re the one who spilled the bottle of wine on Mrs. Evans.”

I confessed that it was me. “Only it was a glass, not a bottle,” I corrected. Then I assured her that my ability to transport glasses of wine had improved quite a bit since then. Then I realized that I was holding my own in a conversation with a Nancy’s Girl and I nearly had a coronary. Her teeth sparkled. Her eyes shone. Just then the string-bean did something terrifying: she leaned in close. I’d never been so close to a Nancy’s Girl before. In fact, this was the closest I’d been to any girl since I crossed the Chicago city limits. Her long neck gave off a warm cinnamon smell. I had to repress a ridiculous urge to pull on her ponytail. She entered my personal space, her mouth drawing close to my ear. My heart-rate soared. I steadied myself against the wall behind me. I glanced down her shirt and noticed that underneath her blazer was a pair of really nice boobs. I winced involuntarily as she came closer, certain that she was going to hurt me somehow. Her breath was hot on my ear. “Don’t tell anybody,” she said in a low voice, “but we’re grateful for what you did. If you ask me, that witch Mrs. Evans deserves to have wine spilled on her every day of her selfish little life.”

Then she placed an open hand against my chest—surely she must have felt my rabbity heart against her palm—and shoved me backwards into the path of the camera. It was my turn to have my security photo taken. The rotund man was about to snap my picture when the string-bean said, “Wait.” She stepped into the path of the camera with me. She took two of her fingers and put them into her mouth. Then she used the saliva-coated fingers to push a stray hank of hair off my forehead. The whole thing happened so quickly that I didn’t have a chance to react. I loathed having my hair touched more than anything in the world. But right then, at that moment, the string-bean could have done anything to me—she could have drawn a curly villain’s mustache under my nose with her ballpoint pen; she could have lifted my wallet and pocketed the $9 I had in it; or, in the world I very much wanted to live in, she could have used her long, saliva-coated fingers to undo my belt buckle.

The string-bean surveyed my repaired hairline and apparently liked what she saw. Then she said, “I’m Beth,” and backed away.

The camera’s flash exploded, leaving me blinded and staggering. The next day before my lunch shift, Mr. Galanti distributed our Club I.D.’s. He looked at my I.D., looked at me, then looked at my I.D. again. “This doesn’t look like you at all,” he said. He handed the I.D. to me.

He was right. It did not look like me. My cheeks and forehead were flushed. I was doing something that I rarely ever did in photos: I was smiling. And this was no ordinary smile. It was a big, goony, utterly unselfconscious smile—the kind I didn’t even know my face was capable of. Captured on film was the exact moment when I realized that Beth was the Chicago girl I’d been waiting for all along. This Nancy’s Girl was the one for me. Reynaldo snatched the I.D. out of my hands. “Let me see that,” he said. “My God. Look at you. Look at that face. Either this boy has fallen in love or somebody is tickling his butt-hole with a feather.”