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“Chelsea! Hey!” The words blurted out from the steaming kitchen as Chelsea rushed past, en route to her ten-top by the window. She yanked herself around to find her boss, Marty, in the doorway, his eyes stern. Chelsea’s heart burst wildly. Had she done something wrong?
“What’s up?”
“We need you to take the three-top by the bar,” he told her.
“Ugh, I’m so swamped right now,” Chelsea groaned. She adjusted the tray on her palm and staggered the slightest bit. The drinks on the tray sloshed dangerously, but they remained within the confines of their glasses. Thank goodness.
“Everyone’s swamped, but you told me you need the money,” Marty told her.
Chelsea swallowed the lump in her throat. “All right. Yeah. I’ll take ‘em.”
“Good girl.”
Chelsea resented when he called her that. She grumbled to herself as she swept toward the window with the heavy tray. Her bicep bulged beneath as she stretched out the tray onto the edge of one end of the table and greeted the party with a bright smile. Every move she made, every word she spewed would all add up to the tip they inevitably gave at the end of their “high-end, experiential” dinner. This place in Manhattan, Tiny Tim’s, had nothing at all to do with the diner she’d spent the previous several years serving at. It was the big leagues and it made her sick.
“Big night tonight!” one of the men at the table hollered to her. He was the head of the large family. Clearly, the one who would pay the bill at the end, and Chelsea forced a huge all-American girl smile for him.
“Yeah! What are you celebrating tonight?”
“We’ve got our daughter here going to NYU,” the man said as he beamed at the girl beside him proudly. “She started a few weeks ago and already turned in an A paper.”
“Dad...” The girl’s cheeks flushed crimson with annoyance. “You don’t have to tell every person we run into about the paper.”
“Hey, a Dad can brag. I’m just proud of our girl, is all,” the man returned.
“I think it’s great you celebrate things like that,” Chelsea said.
“I’m sure your father does the same!” the man returned.
Chelsea passively agreed, then headed off to greet that three-top near the bar. Her legs were quick as lightning, muscular and trained from years of waitressing. She felt herself recommending various cocktails — always the most expensive ones, of course, and ensuring that each guest was greeted warmly. By the time she returned to the kitchen, her five-top’s dinner was served, and she had to hustle back out and dot the finely plated salmons, steaks, and portions of pasta out across the white tablecloth without skipping a beat.
As her legs hustled her back to the kitchen, the man’s words rolled around her mind again. “I’m sure your father does the same.” Well, no. He didn’t. Tyler had left Martha’s Vineyard when Chelsea had been thirteen years old and in the wake of that, he’d gone off, started a new life in Boston, and subsequently forgotten about her.
Now, his girlfriend was pregnant. Chelsea was poised to be a big sister for the first time in her life, at the idiotic age of nineteen. What kind of relationship would that be? She would be twenty-nine when the girl was ten. Thirty-nine when the girl was twenty. She pictured herself at forty, taking out this non-existent girl for her first legal drink. “This is my big sister,” the girl would say and Chelsea would grin that forty-year-old grin and feel just about as stupid as ever. “And this is the girl my father decided to raise properly,” she would probably think.
Or maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she would love that girl to bits. Maybe she would bring color and energy to her life in ways she couldn’t comprehend. But optimism couldn’t fully find her, not then. Not when she was so busy at Tiny Tim’s and very, very unsure if she would find her way to closing time.
Toward eleven-thirty at night, Chelsea managed to find a two-minute window to pee. This was a rare thing indeed. She had trained herself like a dog to wait to head to the restroom until the last possible moment. Once in the bathroom, she lifted her phone for the first time and discovered three text messages from the outside world. When Tiny Tim’s got too frantic, she sometimes felt that the rest of Manhattan, of New York, of the greater United States of America, didn’t exist at all. All there was were new food tickets, hungry guests, and an angry boss who frequently gave her a once over with his eyes that made her spine shiver.
Two of the texts were from Xavier, her boyfriend.
XAVIER: I’ll be out late tonight. I told Gavin I’d help him with his app.
XAVIER: I hope it’s not as wild tonight at TTs, but I know that’s wishful thinking. And I know we need the money. Just know that I love you, okay?
The next text was from her mother.
MOM: Today, I greeted a super ritzy couple with melted cheese on my shirt. I hope your day is better than mine. Love you! :)
Chelsea giggled inwardly. For reasons she couldn’t fully comprehend, she had begun to think of the island and her mother much differently since her departure. For years, all she had wanted was to run out of that place and build a life of her own. Now that she and Xavier lived in their dank Brooklyn apartment, dealt with a bad landlord, and had rough jobs of their own, she wasn’t fully sure why she had wanted to trade in the glittering waters, bright blue skies and white sandy beaches. She’d had a reason, hadn’t she?
After she closed out her final table for the night, Chelsea counted up her tips — a whopping 377 dollars in five hours, which wasn’t bad anywhere else, but this was New York City, and there was rent to pay. Still, it made her laugh to remember her piddling tips at the diner. Usually, she left the place with fifty bucks, tops. When she had been sixteen, fifty bucks had felt like one million dollars, give or take.
Chelsea took the subway home. It was just past one in the morning, but in the city that never sleeps, that mattered very little in terms of how busy the train was. She stood and gripped the handle overhead as the train jerked her to and fro. A woman at the far end of the train wore a bright pink boa and ticked her finger to the left and right as though she wanted to warn Chelsea of something.
Chelsea was sometimes overjoyed with the city. This was true. She remembered those first few days with Xavier before either of them had nabbed their jobs when they’d explored as much of the city as possible, hungry for every nook and cranny and every potential story. They were still too young to check out the various bars, unfortunately, but they spent their money at coffee shops and watched old New Yorkers as they met one another and chatted over cigarettes outside.
“Maybe that will be us one day,” Chelsea had said to Xavier.
“Smokers?”
“No! No. Just — we’ll have so many stories of being in the city for so long. We’ll feel like this place really belongs to us.”
Xavier had considered this. After a long sip of coffee, he had replied, “I think I want that. I wonder what we’ll think of the Vineyard after being away for so long.”
“Maybe it will feel like just a distant dream of the past.”
Chelsea got off the train and walked with her hands shoved into her pockets back toward their apartment in Brooklyn. The streets were relatively busy; people rushed in and out of bars and hollered for their friends. Girls were dressed in incredible ways — long legs swept down toward their high heels, and tight dresses hugged gorgeous curves. Chelsea wondered if she would one day count herself among them. Maybe she, too, would go to NYU or another school in the city if she ever got up the courage to apply. Her mother certainly wanted that for her. Her SAT scores had been pretty good, in fact. Chelsea just hadn’t known what to do with them.
When Chelsea reached her apartment building, she saw a scary sight: a dark figure that looked like a middle-aged man, who sat on the stoop. She stopped about ten feet away and took in the full view of him. He had his arms wrapped around his knees, and his head was bent forward. He eased back and forth like a crying child. It was clear he’d been drinking. She could practically smell the alcohol coming off of him. But when he lifted his head, as though he sensed her presence, she recognized him all the more.
It was her father. It was Tyler.
“Dad?” Shock wasn’t a strong enough word for it. She gaped at him — at the man who had taught her how to ride a bicycle and helped her with her arithmetic homework. It had to be him, but it was as though this was the beginning of a horrible nightmare.
Tyler tried to stand, but his knees clacked together and he collapsed on the stoop again. Chelsea hustled up to him and extended a hand. It was a funny thing. Only a moment before, she had assumed he was a predator, someone with the potential to hurt her. Now, his hand slid into hers and she guided him into the building and then up two sets of stairs, into her apartment. She couldn’t ask questions on the street.
Once inside, Tyler grumbled and mumbled mostly to himself. He swatted at his coat and then collapsed at the edge of the couch, a second-hand thing she and Tyler had found at the far end of the block, deposited by someone who had moved on with his life.
Chelsea acted quickly. She was still in waitress mode. She filled a large glass of water and passed it to her father and instructed him to drink it. He took a slight sip and then coughed. She crossed her arms over her chest and wondered what the heck to do next.
“Dad, what are you doing here?” she asked, hands-on-hips clearly annoyed.
Tyler swiped a hand over his mouth. He looked at her with big, gaping eyes — eyes that gave her no conclusion.
“Dad, why aren’t you in Boston?”
He shook his head somberly. It was clear he didn’t know at that moment.
Chelsea returned to the kitchen counter. Her hands shook as she lifted her phone and texted Xavier.
CHELSEA: You need to get home. Right now.
CHELSEA: My dad is here for some reason. He’s wasted. I’ve never seen him like this.
CHELSEA: I’m scared.
Almost immediately, Xavier texted back.
XAVIER: Leaving now.
XAVIER: Call the cops if you need to.
CHELSEA: No! He’s my dad.
Chelsea spun around again to find that her father had drawn his legs up onto the couch. He still wore his shoes. A snore slipped out from his throat as he sank into darkness. His hair was strewn out across the couch pillow. She wasn’t sure why her heart swelled with love for him then. He was the first sign of home she had seen in weeks.
Slowly and methodically, Chelsea untied his shoelaces and placed his shoes near the door, alongside her and Xavier’s. She then placed a quilt over his legs and adjusted it over his chest. She stood near the kitchen, shivering until Xavier arrived home about twenty minutes later. When he saw her, she fell into his arms and wept. It had been a hell of a night.