Bittersweet Page 6

  “That bad?”

  “I’m working on a plan to turn it around.” Her so-called reassuring grin looks like it hurts, and it reminds me of that day in her bedroom before the Empire Games. Big night tonight, baby. Let’s get moving!

  “You gonna let me in on this plan?” I fill a pastry bag with the sunshine-colored icing. I know from years of overheard arguments that selling the place is not an option. It was the only thing besides me and Bug that she wanted out of the split, and she got it, free and clear. Lump sum settlement, the lawyers called it. The house got sold, the mortgage on Hurley’s got paid off, and Dad got to check out, no strings attached.

  “We have to cut back hours,” she says. “We’ll stay open late after the Sabres and Bills games, but otherwise we’ll close a little earlier. And what about your cupcakes? Can we put some more variety out there, something special for the holidays? Might give us another jump.”

  “Easy enough. I’ll have Dani take some new pictures for the sample book, too.” Okay, so I misjudged the urgency. Shorter hours, a few extra cupcakes to get us back in the black, no biggie. “Don’t worry, Ma. We’ll be fine.”

  “Thanks, baby.” She sighs again and looks at the clock, the second hand making everything seem like a final countdown.

  “Mom?”

  “We’re not replacing Carly,” she announces, fast and blurry like she just talked herself into it. “Things are too tight right now. These new girls want the same benefits the big chains offer, and I can’t do that. I’m sorry, Hudson.” She looks at me and waits for it to sink in, and when it does, the pastry bag slips from my hands and hits the counter, squirting out a blob of orange-yellow goo.

  “I know you don’t have direct waitressing experience,” she continues, “but you’re a fast learner, and you’ll have lots of help. Dani and Marianne are strong. Nat’s good, too, and she’ll be back full time after her nursing exams. I can’t give you much more than minimum for an hourly, but you’ll make good tips….” She finally meets my eyes, her reassuring grin utterly failing to convince me. “You might actually like it.”

  Waitressing? I shake my head. I can’t do what Dani does—talk to all those people, be friendly and perky as they order her around and drop food on the floor and demand refills and discounts and more, more, more. I can’t deal with lousy tippers and picky eaters and adults who try to order off the kiddie menu. I know she loves waitressing, but she’s always been a front-of-the-house kind of girl, all smiles and big eyes, bad stuff rolling off her shoulders like kids sledding down a steep hill.

  Mom frowns, still watching me closely, and my throat tightens up. No matter how much time I put in at the ovens of Hurley’s, no matter how many cupcakes I ice, I’ve always held on to one simple fact: Baking is the one thing Mom never did. She was the waitress who got promoted to manager, the manager who became the owner, the owner who gives a little more of her life to that place every day. She’s always joked about leaving me the family business, but I never took it seriously. How could I? All this time, as long as I was just baking, my destiny could be separate from hers. Parallel, never overlapping. Close, but not the same.

  “I don’t want to waitress.” My voice cracks. “I like my cupcakes.”

  “We’ll find a way for you to do both.” Mom shuffles the papers on the table again, tapping them against the edge three times. “We have to pull together on this.”

  I take a deep breath and reassemble the pastry bag. Pulling together. If only that strategy applied three years ago.

  “You’re young, Hudson.” Mom flashes the everything’s-gonna-be-just-fine smile again. “A little more hard work won’t kill you.”

  “You can’t prove that. Look at all those people from the steel mill with black lung.”

  “You won’t get lung disease from waiting tables.”

  “No, but I might get carpal tunnel from carrying the trays, and back problems, and …”

  “And if I had another choice, I’d take it.”

  I squeeze a spiral of bright orange icing onto a waiting cupcake, turning it to cover all the edges. Squeeze and turn. Squeeze and turn.

  “It’s only for a little while,” Mom says. “Just until things get back on track. And look at the bright side—it’s a chance for you to finally learn some other aspects of the business. I was younger than you when I got my start, remember?”

  Squeeze and turn. Squeeze and turn.

  “Hudson, please?” she asks, softer than before. “I really need your help with this—at least on Sunday to Wednesday dinners. Right now the diner is the only thing paying Mrs. Ferris for the roof over our heads.”

  Guilt. Guilt. Guilt. Pass the freakin’ butter.

  “Speaking of paying Mrs. Ferris,” I say, “you know you owe me forty bucks, right?”

  Mom stands, her shoulders slumped. I can almost feel the ache in her bones, radiating out through her skin. Her eyes are red and puffy, dark-circled as if she hasn’t slept in days. I know she just wants to kiss me good night and crawl between the cool sheets of her bed, but quickly, quietly, she digs two tens from her purse and hands them over. “I’ll get the rest for you tomorrow, okay?”

  “Fine.” I stuff the money into my pocket and go back to icing the cupcakes.

  “Can I … you want some help?” she asks.

  Yes. I want some help getting out of this job, out of this apartment, out of this place. I want some help figuring out what to do with my life. I want some help believing that there’s more to it than unclogging toilets and inventorying milk and sorting money from a drawer that’s always just short of enough.

  I hand her the box of animal crackers. “I need all the lions, tigers, and bears in separate piles. Um, please.”

  She dumps the box into a bowl and picks through the crackers, snacking on the ones with missing limbs. While we work, she hums an old Bob Dylan tune, and the melody reminds me of this time we got stranded in the diner during a blizzard, us and Bug, and Dad couldn’t get to us because there was a citywide driving ban. We were there for two days, and without its usual crowds and smells, the place took on a kind of magic. We had all the food we needed and slept sideways in the big booths with the heat cranked up. On the second morning, the wind settled down and Mom took us outside to make a snowman in the parking lot. It had a carrot nose and cut potatoes for eyes and a Hurley’s apron tied around the middle. Later, when our noses froze and our fingers ached, Mom made us hot chocolate with scoops of vanilla ice cream and sang that Dylan song as Bug and I drank out of the pink-and-white diner mugs and took turns twirling around the floor, collapsing when we got too dizzy.

  … without your love, I’d be nowhere at all. I’d be lost if not for you …

  The plows came that night, digging us out so we could finally drive home. I remember watching them mow into our snowman, his raw potato eyes browning in the open air. I wished we could stay snowed in for one more night, but school was set to reopen the following morning and so would Hurley’s, and besides, my father was probably worried.

  It was the last blizzard he ever saw.

  I look up and catch my mother watching me over the counter, animal crackers separated on a plate before her, and my heart cracks right down the middle. The left half knows that look on her face from the months following their divorce—her anxiety and worry. All that desperation. The quiet regret, wishing she could have done better for us, wishing the one who really owed us the big fat apology was still around to say it.

  But the right side of my heart looks at the lines in her face and sees the map of my future. Today I take the waitress gig. Next I’ll be managing the schedule. Then in a few years or a decade or maybe even two, I’ll inherit the restaurant. Cement my crowning achievement as Beth Avery’s daughter, the proud-but-struggling new owner and sometimes-cupcake-baker of a forgettable old diner off the I-190, a pair of scuffed-up ice skates dangling from a hook in the staff closet, a bittersweet memento of another life.

  I used to believe that figure skating was m
y way out, my first-class, one-way ticket to all the good things in the world. “Mom and I didn’t have the talent and opportunities you have, kiddo,” Dad told me more than once. “If you stay focused, you can skate your way to the top. You can be the queen of everything. You just have to want it bad enough.”

  For a long time after he left, I didn’t want it. And now that I’m finally ready to want something again, it’s too late. I’m afraid to skate in front of people. I’m giving up the last of my free time to work at my mother’s diner. Queen of everything? Please. Every one of my chances is gone, and here I remain, stuck outside of Buffalo, the chicken wing capital of the world, queen of nothing but a few zany cupcakes.

  “Okay, Ma.” I swipe a lion cracker through the sunshine-colored icing and bite off his head. “I’ll do it. But Sunday to Wednesday nights blow. After tomorrow, I want better shifts.”

  She smiles, and the deep lines in her face vanish, temporarily changing the map of my future to a broad, blank canvas. “You got it, baby.”

  Chapter Five

  Opportunity Knocks You on Your Butt Cakes

  Vanilla cupcakes baked over a blend of chopped pineapples, butter, and brown sugar inverted on a warm plate and served with vanilla bean ice cream

  “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.