The next morning, after I got out of the shower and came back to my room, Alma was sitting on my bed.
“What’s up?” I asked her.
“Do you think that I could get a job at the restaurant? As a waitress?” she asked me.
“Maybe in a few years, Al,” I said, drying off my hair. “You’re kind of young. Trust me, having a job isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
“Yeah, but I’ve been thinking about running away to Hollywood in a couple of years to become an actress,” she said. “It’d be good to have some skills, like waiting tables. I’ll probably need to make ends meet for a few weeks, until I’m discovered. God knows I don’t want to end up like Peg Entwhistle.”
“Who’s Peg Entwhistle?”
“Oh, just a tragic ingenue from the thirties,” she said. “She couldn’t catch a break, so she climbed up to the Hollywood sign and—ack!” She crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue, holding an imaginary noose above her neck.
“Yoinks,” I said.
“Yoinks indeed, but what did she expect? Who the hell is going to hire someone called Peg Entwhistle? She might as well have called herself Velma Turnipgarden. I’m going to stick with my original stage name.”
“Oh yes,” I said, “Betsy Worthington. Well, in a couple of years, I’ll put in a good word with Denise. In the meantime, enjoy the free ride while you can, Betsy.”
“Can you guys come down here?” Mom called from downstairs.
“I have some news,” she said when we were sitting down. “Your dad’s going to be home at the end of the month.”
“What?” said Alma. “That’s awesome!”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I thought his contract lasted till Christmas.”
“Well, that’s the thing,” she said. “His company is laying off a bunch of people, so it’s not really good news.”
Great, I thought, another opportunity for him to lecture me about the importance of education. Same old story, blah, blah, blah.
“He gets to come home for the rest of the summer though!” said Alma. “That’s good news!”
“Yes, that will be nice, for sure,” my mom said, reaching over to run her fingers through Alma’s hair.
“Mom!” Alma said. “‘Take your stinkin’ paws off me, you damn dirty ape!’”
“He’s very impressed that you’re working so hard at the restaurant, Dan,” Mom said, turning to me.
“Oh yeah? Cool.” It actually was cool. For once in my life, I could prove I was thinking about my future. So far, I’d only had one payday, but I’d put most of it in the bank, and I planned to keep saving. By the time Dad came home, I’d have a few hundred bucks. I was sure he’d have lots of ideas about how I should spend it.
WHEN I ARRIVED at the restaurant for my shift later that day, Denise was giving a tour of the place to a couple of people. One of them was a university student named Ken who I recognized as a DCHS grad from a couple of years earlier. He was taller than me and well built, with an earring and bleached tips. Denise introduced him to everyone, and he barely glanced at me and JP other than to give us a quick nod. I noticed that he was a lot friendlier to Lisa, cracking cheesy jokes and reaching out to touch her on the arm a couple of times.
The other server turned out to be Maisie Thomas.
“Hey, Maisie! I didn’t know you were going to be working here,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s awesome, hey? I’m super excited!” She giggled. “It’s going to be a super fun summer!”
Behind Maisie’s back, Lisa caught my eye and raised her eyebrows, smirking. I really liked Maisie and figured she’d be great with customers, but I had a feeling that she wasn’t really Lisa’s kind of person.
My suspicions were confirmed a bit later when Lisa came into the kitchen to help me polish some silverware. “So are you like, super best friends with Anne of Green Gables back there?” she asked.
“You mean Maisie?” I shrugged. “I don’t really hang out with her or anything. She’s really nice though.”
“Nice,” said Lisa. “Nice is what people say when they can’t come up with a better word to describe someone. Maybe you mean boring. Or dumb.”
“I didn’t say that!” I said, surprised at her suddenly nasty tone. Then she snapped back to her normal self, laughing and flicking a dishcloth at me.
“Don’t get your knickers in a knot, I’m sure she’s a really sweet person. You and I just have a lot more in common.”
Denise yelled to us through the window to come out to the parking lot, and I followed Lisa outside, wondering what she’d meant. Was she jealous of Maisie? I decided to take it as a promising sign.
Denise and JP had hung the new sign over the door, a colorful painting of a sunset with The Sandbar painted above it. JP passed out plastic cups, and Denise walked around filling them with sparkling wine.
Denise raised her glass and said, “To a lucky first season. Let’s hope it all works out!” We clinked our glasses and cheered, and then JP clapped his hands sharply, twice.
“All right. We gotta get goin’ or there won’t be any food for the people.”
We snapped into action, and soon I was in the kitchen tying on an apron, facing a deep sink full of soapy water and a counter that was ready to be stacked with greasy dishes.
By the time the restaurant had been open for a couple of hours, I was already wondering what I’d gotten myself into. To begin with, the place was packed, and although Lisa, Maisie and Ken were all waiting tables, it seemed as if they couldn’t get to people fast enough. Denise was doing triple duty, trying to pick up the slack in the dining room, running in to help in the kitchen whenever she had a second, and ringing customers through at the front counter.
The orders came piling into the kitchen in an endless stream, and soon enough the dishes followed. For every carefully arranged plate that was taken away, it seemed as if three came back piled high with garbage. More than once, I had to force myself not to gag as I scraped chicken bones, congealed piles of cold pasta, even spit-out pieces of gum into a revolting pile in the garbage can next to the sink. I did my best to keep up, but it was a tough battle, and I didn’t really know what I was doing. Denise had promised to give me a lesson, but we’d been so busy, she hadn’t gotten around to it. Thankfully, JP was totally cool under pressure, and he helped me stay on track by calling firm, clear orders in my direction.
“I’m gonna need two fry pans and a big stainless bowl in a couple of minutes!”
Before I knew it, I was up to my eyeballs in dirty dishes. I had just started to get a routine going, stacking dirty plates and dinnerware to the left of the sink and pots and pans and cooking tools to the right, when Denise marched up behind me, picked up a huge pile of dishes and dumped them all into the sink. Then she reached around me, grabbed a bunch of pots and tossed them in as well.
“You’re wasting time, Danny. This isn’t rocket science. You take the pots and pans, you drop them in the water as fast as they come, you scrub, you hustle them back to JP’s station. You take plates and glasses, you give them a quick rinse, you throw them in the dishwasher, you repeat. Capiche?”
I nodded, and she stalked away. I dropped my head, focusing on the water as I furiously scrubbed at the dishes, taking out my frustrations on the grease. It wasn’t like I’d done this kind of thing before, and she sure hadn’t given me much of an intro. I didn’t have time to think about it, though, and so I tried to just keep getting stuff to JP as he needed it.
Unfortunately, it was easier said than done. The dishes kept coming at me twice as fast as I could wash them. Although he stayed calm, I could see that JP was trying to keep things moving and that every time he had to stop to wait for dishes, it ruined his flow.
The only enjoyable thing about the kitchen in full work mode was the smell. One mouth-watering aroma after another wafted by me from JP’s workspace near the stove. Whenever possible, I tried to turn around and see what he was doing, but I was so busy that I only managed to grab a few glimpses: chicken on rice, smothered with a yellow sauce—curry, maybe?—and topped with chopped nuts and a sprig of herbs; steaks with a pan sauce and a pile of potatoes under a teepee of green beans; golden seared scallops covered with finely diced mangos. I wished I could just stand next to JP and watch what he was doing, instead of being stuck in the disgusting dish pit.
Lisa came into the kitchen and stuck her head over my shoulder.
“Having fun?” she asked.
“What does it look like?” I said. “This sucks.”
She laughed. “You’ll be fine, don’t worry. Nobody out there is complaining. I don’t think anyone in this town has ever eaten real food before. They don’t mind waiting for clean dishes.”
Ken wasn’t as accommodating. Every time he had to wait for an order because the dishes weren’t ready, he stood behind me with his arms crossed, sighing deeply. The only thing it accomplished was to make me tense. At one point, while waiting impatiently for four orders of mussels, he actually reached behind me and grabbed plates from my drying rack.
“Get it together, guy,” he growled. “You’d think you never washed a dish before in your life.” I had a feeling he and I weren’t going to be best friends.
The next few hours were about as much fun as a nail in the forehead, but eventually things quieted down a bit, and the pile of dirty dishes diminished. JP stepped outside to grab a smoke while there were no orders on the line, and when he stepped back into the kitchen, the dish pit was clean for the first time all evening.
“Look at you, kid. Maybe you’ve got some skills after all.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” I said. As much as I appreciated him trying to make me feel better, I felt like a total loser. I should have been faster…better…more efficient. If I couldn’t even do this right, it was no wonder I couldn’t figure out what to do with my life.
Finally the last customers left, the door was locked, and the servers finished clearing the dining room. While I washed the last few pots and pans, Lisa and Maisie hung out in the kitchen, laughing at JP’s jokes. Ken had taken off immediately after work.
Denise came in from tallying up the night’s receipts and sidled up next to me at the sink.
“This is why I wanted JP to come work for me,” she told me, tilting her head toward them. “Not only is JP a damn good chef, he can make the most insane kitchen a fun place to work.” She slapped me on the back. “Don’t worry, Dan. You’ll get better as time goes on. It’s all about the learning curve, buddy.”
She yelled across the kitchen. “All right, guys, that was a good first night, and we only had a few fires to put out. Now everyone go home and get some sleep. We’re going to do it all again tomorrow.”