The Bermudez Triangle (25 page)

“I can use someone to fill some time on the fifteenth of February. I’ve got a forty-five-minute slot that’s empty. You’ll get
a third of the door. That would probably be about fifty bucks or so.”

“Definitely. We’ll do it.”

“What’s your band’s name?”

“Angry Maxwell.”

She felt ridiculous identifying herself as part of “Angry Maxwell,” yet she knew that all band names sounded asinine until the band got famous. At that point there was a magical transformation, and even the most ill-conceived names took on a veneer of cool.

“Angry … Maxwell …” He wrote it into a calendar square in pencil. “Contact name and number?”

Avery provided hers.

“Okay. So you’ll go on from seven until quarter of eight. Get here about an hour ahead of time to set up. And no ‘Piano Man,’ all right?”

“No ‘Piano Man,”’ she said. “Promise.”

Avery lit a cigarette and triumphantly walked back toward Broadway, already putting a song list together in her mind.

Just as she came to the Army and Navy, Nina stepped out of a store just a few doors down. It took Avery a moment to register that it was Nina because her hair, which had always either been up in the buns or pigtails, was free. Not just free—shorter. The strands were about four or five inches long, and they flew loose around her head like a lion’s mane. It was
diva hair.

They both stopped and looked at each other. It was the first time they’d really come face-to-face in almost four weeks. Avery hadn’t
counted the time until now. Four weeks. That was unbelievably strange, but it was right.

“Your hair,” she sputtered. Not the brightest comment, but really all that needed to be said.

“I just cut it,” Nina replied, without much enthusiasm.

“It’s incredible,” Avery said. “I wish I had hair that could do things like that.”

“Thanks.”

“How’s life?”

“Good. Busy”

“You want to get a coffee or something?” Avery asked brightly. Suddenly, seeing Nina in front of her, she realized how much she missed her. Except it wasn’t like she was realizing something new but finally naming some kind of nagging ache that had been bothering her for a long time.

“Sorry,” Nina said quickly. “I have to go.”

“Are you okay?”

“Fine,” Nina said distractedly. She clearly wasn’t okay. Her eyes were red, and she kept looking away. Avery had known that things were messed up—they hadn’t even spent Christmas or New Year’s together. Avery had been so deep in her own head that she hadn’t known what to say to Nina. But now she wanted Nina to tell her what was going on. She wanted to sit down with her, to give her a hug, to do all of the normal things.

“Neen?” she said. “What’s up?”

Nina hit a button on her key chain and turned off the alarm of
her car. She hesitated for a moment, as if she was going to explain, and then she just shook her head.

“I have to go,” she said again, “I’ll see you later.”

As she watched Nina get in her car and drive off, Avery felt a terrible sinking feeling. It wiped out any happiness that getting the gig had provided. Somewhere in her head, she’d always thought that even though they’d fought, things couldn’t really be big-time bad between her and Nina. But they were big-time bad. In fact, Avery realized, they might even be over.

That was so unthinkable that she had to sit down because her legs had begun to shake.

Friday night marked
the start of something else new and horrible at P.J. Mortimer’s: Irish nachos. They were just normal nachos, except the chips were green and the chili topping was made with (big surprise) Guinness, which made it a very deep brown. They were topped with a white jack cheese and an orange cheddar cheese to reflect the colors of the Irish flag. The result was so nauseating that Mel couldn’t look down when she took them out to people’s tables.

It was crowded, as most Friday nights were. Unfortunately, both the kitchen and the floor were understaffed because of a flu outbreak. There were no pauses to even talk to other people for a minute. She and Parker brushed past each other a dozen times or more, barely noticing the other’s presence.

“I wish I got the flu,” Mel grumbled as they met up for a moment in the pantry.

Parker, nodded grimly. He was struggling with a large canister of pickles, which was almost entirely empty. He cringed as he plunged his arm into the pickle liquid and fished around for the last remaining spear. When he pulled it out, his arm was completely dripping with greenish juice.

“Tonight’s one of those nights,” he said. “It’s only going to get worse. I can feel it.”

About an hour later Parker was proven right.

As Mel was taking an order from a particularly large office party, there was a loud noise—a massive intake of breath. She turned around to see a strange sight. Parker appeared to be flying through the air, his tray whizzing in front of him like a Frisbee. Three Cokes hung in the air at once, side by side, before plunging down. The nacho baskets skidded across the floor. The hamburgers and buns escaped the scene by rolling under chairs and tables. People yelped as they were hit with soda and ice and food.

It was so catastrophic that it brought all of P. J. Mortimer’s to a standstill.

When the last plate had stopped spinning and there was a suitable pause, applause broke out at some tables. Parker got up stiffly. He made a short bow to the people who were cheering, but he didn’t smile. At first he bent down like he was going to start cleaning up, but he just grabbed his tray and walked slowly back toward the pantry.

When Mel got there, he was at the sink, peeling hot cheese and beans from his arms as he ran them under water.

“Are you burned?” Mel asked.

“No,” he growled.

“What happened?”

“I got tripped.”

He turned up the water for a moment, wiping down his arms hard. Mel
handed him a few paper towels. Bob appeared in the pantry doorway.

“What the hell happened?” he said.

“I got tripped.”

“Shit, Parker …”

“I know…. I know….”

Mel wondered if Bob was actually going to ask how Parker
was.
That would have been nice.

“You can’t go out on the floor like that,” he said instead.

“Yeah, no kidding.”

“Someone’s going to have to take your tables.”

Parker leaned against the black-and-white tiles on the pantry walls as if the wind had been kicked out of him a second time.

“Just do your side work,” Bob said. “Mel, take 25.”

“Side work?” Parker said incredulously.

“It has to be done.” Bob shrugged an apology that didn’t seem very sincere. “Sorry.”

“I can’t close out my tables and get my tips, but I can sit back here and roll silverware,” Parker said as Bob headed back out to the floor. “Great …”

He sank down onto an overturned pickle canister and pulled a few green nacho chips off his shirt. Mel stood there next to him, not sure how to help.

“Just do me a favor,” he said.

“What?”

“Don’t tell Nina this happened.”

Mel had never seen Parker embarrassed or agitated before. His face was flushed a deep red, and he looked small and young. She wanted to wrap him in a huge hug, but that didn’t seem like the right thing to do. Not to Parker, anyway. He would know that it was pity, and maybe pity wasn’t good. She leaned against the wall near him and flicked a piece of food out of his thick hair.

“This is good,” he said, trying to recover. “I can say I was in a fight. It was kind of a fight, right? Makes me look manly. Strong like bull.”

Mel smiled weakly. She wished he didn’t feel like he had to keep up a good face in front of her.

Maybe a
tiny
hug. No.

“Go on,” he said, nodding at the pantry door. “It’s fine. Go get the damage report, soldier.”

When Mel went back out on the floor, she found that the whole restaurant was in a heightened state. The crash made people louder, had customers chatting to their neighbors at other tables. None of Mel’s customers had been physically affected by the flying objects, so she helped some other waiters get their customers cleaned up. Bob was jogging from table to table, spooning out apologies and comps.

“Bring some seltzer here,” he snapped at her as she passed him.

“Okay …”

Mel headed for the bar. As she did so, she passed the spot where Parker had fallen. The busboys were all over it, like a containment team. Right
next to them was a table full of guys who were laughing hysterically. Mel felt her fury rising and made sure to keep her eyes averted.

“Hey,” one of them called.

Mel turned, her Guinness pins clacking loudly together as she spun.

“I have a question,” one of the guys said. He looked vaguely familiar.

“Okay.”

“Do you have a liquor license?”

She stood there, baffled by the question (the answer was obviously yes since they had a bar there). Then she suddenly realized that two of them were from the day at the lake. Obviously these were the guys who tripped Parker. They were all leering at her.

“
Liq … uor
license,” the guy said slowly, with a very deliberate pause in the middle of the word. “Don’t you have one of those?”

Mel stared at him for a second, sounding out the syllables in her head. She shuddered as the meaning sank in. A deep feeling of disgust and shame spread all over her, making her body cold and turning her stomach. This was one of those times she needed to be Avery—she would kill these guys. It wouldn’t matter to her that she was an employee here and that confronting these assholes might jeopardize her job. But she wasn’t Avery; she was Mel. Mel never had the right thing to say, and she did care that she was a waitress. Never in her life had she felt so useless and small.

She turned around, forgetting about the seltzer, and went straight back to the pantry. The table broke into riotous laughter.

Parker was standing next to one of the huge plastic trash cans, still trying to clean himself off. She came up on the other side of it and looked at him.

“What?” he said.

Mel couldn’t answer. She could only shiver in anger and embarrassment. Parker stopped what he was doing.

“Did they say something to you?” he asked.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“What did they say?”

She shook her head. She couldn’t repeat it. It was vile. They had tried to make her disgusting. Parker stopped what he was doing for a minute and leaned over the trash.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You can’t blame them for being inbred.”

“I know.”

Two of the bussers came in with dishpans full of the remnants of the accident. Mel moved aside so that they could get in. They threw Parker up-and-down glances as they dropped off their load onto the dirty dish cart. Mel looked down at the pile of broken food bits and trash.

The idea came to her instantly. It was unlike any impulse she’d ever had, but the circumstances fueled her. She grabbed a plate from the prep rack and slammed it down on the counter. Pulling over the dish cart, she managed to recover a few chunks of nacho that were still glued together by the cheese. Using a spoon, she
scooped out some of the topping that was sitting in a puddle of brown liquid (most likely Coke).

“What are you doing?” Parker said, coming up behind her and watching over her shoulder.

“Get me those chips you just put in the trash,” she said.

From a rack of dirty dishes she cobbled together portions of guacamole and sour cream. Parker added in the trash chips. Together they quickly did an artistic arrangement of the pile, and they managed to turn it into a very convincing order of Irish nachos.

“We need something else,” she said. “Something really hideous.”

“Hideous,” Parker said, looking around. “That shouldn’t be hard.”

He picked up the dish cart and tilted it slightly, examining its contents.

“Here we go,” he said, pouring some brownish liquid that had accumulated at the bottom onto the nachos. “Special sauce.”

“Perfect,” Mel said, smiling.

They nuked it for a few seconds to bring it back up to temperature. They decorated the edges of the plate with some shredded lettuce remnants that sat in the bottom of a bin in the corner, waiting to be disposed of.

When another server came into the pantry, Mel grabbed her by the sleeve and threw her a pathetic look.

“I’m stuck here for a minute,” she said. “Can you do me a favor? Take this out to 27, that table full of guys? Tell them it’s compliments of Mortimer’s because of the accident.”

They watched the Franken-nachos making their way out to the infamous table.

“You have responded to my brainwashing excellently,” Parker said with a smirk. Then he looked at Mel with a sense of genuine pride. “I am deeply impressed.”

Parker waited around for Mel to finish her shift since he was driving her home. After the nachos he felt much better about the whole thing and made up songs about silverware (a tune called “My Name Is Spoony McForkenknife” was her favorite) as he did his side work. They were both surprised to see Nina’s car waiting in the parking lot when they came out.

“Can I tell her about the nachos?” Mel asked. “I swear I’ll leave out the other part.”

Before Parker could answer, Nina opened her car door and stepped out. The nachos were temporarily forgotten.

“Your hair,” Mel said.

Nina reached up and grabbed at a handful of what remained of her locks, running it through her fist.

Parker seemed transfixed by Nina’s new diva look. It took him a moment to remember that he was covered in food stains. He stuck his hands in his pockets and drew his coat tightly around himself in a sudden, batlike gesture.

“Hey” Nina said. She looked like she was trying to smile, but the smile quickly turned into a grimace. “Can I talk to you for a second?”

Nina’s voice was breaking. Parker shot a glance in Mel’s direction.

“What is it?” Mel asked.

Nina just shook her head and started crying. She turned and put her face against the car window. Mel hurried up behind her and took her by the shoulders.

“Tell me,” she said.

Nina couldn’t answer.