“Kill them with kindness. Or cheesiness.” I flash her a test grin. “Got it.”
“Sometimes the rowdy ones get a little grabby,” she says, flipping on the tap water. She fills a plastic pitcher and cups and sets them on the prep counter. “If you smack them straight away, they usually back off. You can also try the tray-in-the-lap maneuver, but that takes some practice, and—”
“We training for food service or self-defense here?” I cross my arms over my chest.
“There’s a fine line, Hud.”
“This gig gets better by the minute.”
Dani shrugs. “You get used to it.”
I return her easy smile, but the words drop into my stomach like overcooked biscuits. You get used to it. According to the crazy, bug-eating guys on those survival shows, human beings are the most adaptable creatures on earth—we can get used to just about anything. Doesn’t mean it’s okay. I mean, who wants to get used to eating grubs and collecting maple leaves for toilet paper? No thanks.
“Hold this.” She passes me an empty serving tray. “I’ll load you up with waters, and you balance it. Ready for a cup?”
“A whole plastic cup of water? Hold me back!”
Trick laughs behind us, dropping a pile of stir-fry veggies onto the grill. “You taking bets on this, Dani?”
“Definitely.”
“Put me down for seven,” he says, squirting oil onto the veggies with a loud hiss. “I lose, I’ll make your favorite tonight. I win, you empty the grease traps.”
“You’re on,” she says.
I sigh and steady the tray with both arms extended beneath it, elbows bent, fingers curled up over the edge. “Just load me up so we can get this over with.”
“But you’re not holding it right. You have to—”
“It’s not brain surgery, Dani. Come on.”
She shakes her head and sets down one cup first, then another, followed by the water pitcher. “So far so good?”
“Keep it coming,” I say.
Dani gives me two more cups, a half smile creeping across her mouth as she holds another one over the tray.
“Hit me,” I say, and she drops it. A millisecond later, the tray, the pitcher, and all five cups crash to the floor.
“Ooh! Why’d you play me like that, sweetheart?” Trick stomps his foot and curses over the grill as water streams down my legs into a sad little puddle on the floor. Honestly, if this awful dress were any shorter, I’d have to change my underwear.
My so-called best friend laughs as she kneels to pick up the cups. “Looks like I’m gettin’ corned beef hash for dinner tonight,” she says. “That’s what’s up.”
“Just sat a party of ten.” Marianne, the resident Hurley Girl lifer who’s been here almost as long as the diner itself, makes the announcement from the kitchen doorway. When she sees my predicament, her heavy bosom bounces with laughter. “Learning the tray, huh? On the shoulder, honey, not the arms. Put your back into it.”
“You people are full of helpful advice.” I grab a clean dish towel from the shelf and mop up my legs, then the floor. “You set me up!”
“Yep. You just lost your tray-dropping virginity,” Dani says. “Congrats.” She loads up her tray with fresh waters, in actual glasses this time, and hefts it onto her shoulder, nodding for me to follow her to the dining room. Earl gives me an encouraging double thumbs-up as we pass, and I relax, just a little.
“The good news is there aren’t any games tonight,” Dani says. “Sports equals booze, and that’s bad news, especially if the home teams lose. Remember that.”
“Booze, lose, bad news. What else?”
“Watch and learn, Hurley Girl.”
After my near drowning in the kitchen, I put the sarcasm on simmer as she delivers the water to that ten-top. We listen in as Marianne expertly takes their orders, Dani schooling me in the background on side dish substitutions, specials, and upselling with appetizers and desserts. She shows me how to prep the salads and mix Coke and Sprite to make fake ginger ale that satisfies all but the most discerning customers. Marianne walks me through sidework and plate presentation and coupons, and then we revisit the tray thing, practicing until I can finally carry it without causing another tidal wave. The dinner rush slows, and after helping me with a particularly rowdy table—the regular Sunday night gathering of the Watonka Sassy Seniors Knitting Club—Dani and Marianne unleash me on my first solo table.
“I’ve got a date with a plate of corned beef hash,” Dani says. “Scream if you need anything.” She vanishes into the kitchen, and I approach the booth, pen poised against the order pad.
The woman doesn’t look up from the menu when she requests a Cobb salad and unsweetened tea, but the girls do, sitting across from her and snickering like everything is just the funniest joke ever. They’re both in blue-and-silver Watonka Middle School hoodies, sitting so close together that I can’t tell where one’s arm ends and the other’s begins.
“Two Cokes, please,” one of them says. The other girl giggles, and I almost do, too. But then they order the tuna melt platter to share, and I swallow hard through the tightness in my throat, desperate to shutter the rush of memories.
Kara Shipley. Me. Our skate bags stacked across from us as our moms chatted over coffee at the counter. This was our booth. The tuna melt was our order.
I run my thumb over the table’s broken corner, remembering one of our last meals together. A lifetime ago. It was a celebratory tuna melt—Dad had registered me for regionals, and we’d just heard that we’d be competing at the Empire Games with some of our fellow Bisonettes.
“I think I’m in love with Will Harper,” Kara confessed that night, picking at the chipped corner. “As soon as we start high school, I’m totally asking him out.”
I smiled and clinked my loganberry glass to hers, wishing her luck. She threw a French fry at me and I caught it in my mouth, and though we’d both already landed our double axels, we cheered and clapped like catching that fry was the most incredible stunt anyone had ever performed.
“How could you do it?” Kara demanded the morning after the Empire event, after the dust had settled and she’d called to talk. She knew I’d screwed up on purpose—we were practically sisters, and there was no other explanation. “If you didn’t want to compete, you could’ve let someone else have the chance.”
I wanted to explain, but the words weren’t there. Maybe Mom had swept them into the dresser drawer with the proof that my father was having an affair. Maybe they were already packed away in his suitcase, saving him a seat on the plane that would take him out west. Maybe the words to explain why I’d thrown away the one thing I’d loved and worked so hard for just didn’t exist.
Her breath was heavy through the phone and I meant to tell her how sorry I was, but even those words got jumbled inside, knotting up in my throat on the way out. I couldn’t even give her a simple apology, and after a long, uncomfortable silence, she finally hung up.
Weeks blurred into months, and then it was the end of summer, our last weekend before high school. For the first time in history, I wasn’t busy with preseason skate stuff during Joelle Woodard’s annual summer bash. It didn’t matter that Joelle and I weren’t friends. It was the kind of free-for-all where no one needed an invite, so I put on a miniskirt and some body glitter left over from my skater glam stuff. I was ready for a do-over—the kind I never got in competitions. It was supposed to be a fresh start without Kara, but suddenly there she was, dressed in a bright green sundress with eyelet trim on the bottom that floated above her tanned knees as she walked down the basement stairs, a can of root beer in her right hand, her left on the railing. I remember it was root beer and not Coke or orange because she dropped it when she saw me stepping out of the make-out closet with Will Harper, and from that moment on, the smell of root beer would always remind me of her face, crumpled and confused, her head hung low above that bright green dress like a flower crushed on its stem.