Bittersweet (9 page)

“Oh, Hudson!” Mom fusses with my collar, making a show of it in front of
Dani and the whole entire diner. “Don’t you look
adorable
!”

I tug at the bottom of the lavender zip-up dress. If I tried to wear this thing to school, Principal Ramirez would personally escort me home just so she could slap my mother for letting me out in public so scantily clad. But tonight? I’m a Hurley Girl—says so in fancy pink letters over my left boob.

“Big step, baby. I’m so proud of you.” She wraps me in a hug, her hair tickling my cheek. I blame myself, really. If only I’d been better about attending those spring flings and winter formals, she wouldn’t feel compelled to gush over my first day on the job.

“No pictures,” I say before she gets any ideas.

“I think you’re beautiful,” an old man at the counter—one of our Sunday night fixtures—says. He smiles gently and sets down his empty mug, tapping the counter three times. Mom grabs the coffeepot for a refill.

“You passed the Earl test,” she says as she pours him a fresh cup.

“Ma, he says that to anyone who still has their own teeth. No offense, Earl.”

“None taken,” he says. “But you got your own hair, too, so you’re twice as pretty.”

“See?” Mom says. “You’ll do great tonight. Just great.”

Yeah, just great. Just awesome. Just … kill me.

“Ready, Hurley Girl?” Dani asks.

I tug once more on the dress and take a deep breath.
Only for a little while. Just until things get back on track.
“Let’s do this.”

“The basic rule is to smile a lot,” she says, leading me into the kitchen. “Even when you feel like choking someone, keep on smilin’. The minute you show them you’re pissed, you lose.”

“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.

Soon after, she dismissed the closet scene and asked Will out, just like she told me she would that night at the diner. They got together, and I buried my shame in a bowl of cupcake batter. The Hurley’s kitchen was a safe place to be; I was finally good at something else. I could forget about Will and Kara. I could erase Lola Capriani and the private lessons Mom could no longer afford and all of the promises that died when my father left, and I could focus instead on making people fat and happy.

I’ve been doing it ever since.

While Trick works on my order, I take five at the counter with my
Scarlet Letter
homework, a mug of hot chocolate, and one of our best sellers—caramel apple granola cupcakes, a.k.a. Tree Huggers. Two seats over, Earl counts out a stack of dimes from one of those paper rolls you get at the bank, pulls his cardigan tight over his shoulders, and winks at me, hair and eyes and face as gray as the sky. “See ya next time, Dolly Madison.”

I walk him to the front door and watch him leave, his footprints making uneven holes in the snow-covered parking lot. Behind his little blue sedan, the I-190 overpass glitters with red and white orbs in the distance, the lights of a thousand cars zooming along to some other destination, Watonka no more than an exit with
FOOD-GAS-HOSPITAL
, just like the sign says. A crumbling smokestack horizon wedged between the city of Buffalo and its southern suburbs. Exurban, we’re called.
Ex. Former. No longer.

Dani joins me at the door, nudging my shoulder with hers. “You’re a million miles away over here.”

I shrug and press my forehead against the glass. Outside, Earl flicks on his wipers and coaxes the car out of the lot. With my fingertip I draw an
X
in the frost on the glass over the spot where he used to be.
Ex. Former. No longer.

Dani follows my gaze past the highway. “I know you don’t love the new arrangement, but you’re doing great tonight. Don’t fade on me now—even on slow nights, we have to stick together. You remember what happened with Carly, right?”

“She’s the reason I’m wearing this lovely dress,” I say. “No offense.”

“None taken. I rock this thing and you know it.” She shakes her hips a little.

“Doesn’t count. You could make a Hefty bag look hot.”

“True. But enough about me. You’ve been acting funny all weekend. What are you dodging?” The smile vanishes from her reflection in the glass and something hazy passes over her face, gray and sad like a cloudless snowstorm.

I reach into my apron pocket and pull out the letter, wrinkled from all the times I’ve read and refolded it, carrying it with me ever since it passed from Bug’s anthrax detector to my hands.

“Read this,” I whisper, keeping an eye out for Mom.

She looks over the letter. “Capriani … she was your coach, right?”

“Yeah. Mom was still paying off my lessons after we moved—we must be on an old mailing list.”

“Is this the invitation you unmentioned last night?”

I nod.

“Fifty grand? That’s pretty sick, Hud.” Dani folds up the letter and hands it back to me, her eyes soft and glassy. “I know you skate at Fillmore sometimes, but I didn’t know it was like
that
.”

“Honestly? Neither did I. But when I heard about this competition, it was like … I don’t know. Like I could finally have a chance to
do
something with my life, even if Mom can’t afford college and my father …” His latest e-mail scrolls through my head, sent this morning from a rest stop near the Grand Canyon. God’s country, he called it. The soul of the world. “My father just isn’t here.”

A gust of wind blows across the near-empty parking lot. Snow clouds funnel and swirl beneath the lampposts, and a string of taillights beads along the overpass.

“The thing is,” I continue, “when Josh asked me to skate with him yesterday, I thought about what it would be like to do it again for an audience—even one person—and I freaked. I don’t think I’m cut out for it anymore.”

“What? Hudson, you have to find a way to make this happen. Your whole face lights up when you talk about skating. Look.” She touches my reflection in the glass, and I smile, seeing for just a moment what she sees. Nervousness, yes. But hope. Excitement, too.