“Yes, yes, give it to me!” Perry shouts. “What’s your favorite, Lib?”
“The, uh, toffee pudding.”
“The sticky toffee pudding, you mean. We’ll alllllll have it.”
“Great,” I say, tone brisk and back-to-business. “Three toffee puddings.”
“And more sangria.”
“Sure.”
“And Libby?”
“Yes?”
“It better be the stickiest, best toffee pudding I’ve ever tasted,” he says, reaching out to give me a sideways squeeze, “otherwise I’m going to come after you with my mousse tower.”
Ugh. I might vomit. On purpose. On him.
But honestly I’m scared by the look in his eyes and so the best I can manage is to laugh, as if by laughing I can erase it. I laugh as if he’s hilarious and then wrench myself out of his grasp, and finally make a beeline for the service area.
My laugh turns into a strangled sound as soon as I’m out of view, and I come to a full stop just as Dev enters from the opposite side.
“What’s wrong?” he says, stopping short at the sight of me. “Are you sick?”
“No, it’s just Perry.”
“Still about the salad?”
“No, still about the being a disgusting, butt-grabbing pervert,” I say.
Poor Dev is very proper, so he nearly chokes. He’s probably never even said the word “butt” out loud. He’s also almost as new at running a restaurant as I am at serving in one.
“Did you mean to say . . . ?”
“That he grabbed my butt? Yes.”
“Gracious me,” Dev says.
“Honestly, that’s the least of it.”
I tell him the rest and he listens with a mounting horror and embarrassment that almost makes me feel guilty for putting him through this.
“I knew he was sometimes inappropriate, but I didn’t realize the extent of it. You should not have to deal with this type of behavior,” Dev says, with a flustered exhale. “I’m very sorry.”
“Thank you,” I say, so relieved that he’s listened and believed me, and feeling proud of myself for doing the thing everyone always says you should do—talk to someone who can help—and having it actually work out.
“What should we do?”
“Do?” Dev says.
“I’d rather not go back out there.”
The sudden change of expression on Dev’s face at this comment is almost comical—he looks totally panicked.
“Not go? We are understaffed and your section’s been a disaster all evening!”
“But . . .”
“Who is going to serve all of those tables? Yes, Perry is behaving poorly, but this is all jokes. He is not going to hurt you. He has a wife!”
“What? Wife? What’s that got to do with it?”
“If you’re truly worried, I can have Kyle walk you out after your shift, or even accompany you home.”
Have Kyle accompany me home.
Awesome.
“Don’t worry,” Dev says, in what he obviously thinks is a reassuring tone, “everything is fine.”
And then he leaves, and I stand there blinking.
Everything is fine.
Right.
Silly me.
Yes, my legs are shaking and I feel like I’ve been slimed, but there’s a job to do. I trudge back to the computer to put in the orders for the desserts and sangria.
When I get to the bar a couple of minutes later, Nita is quartering the oranges for the sangria. “We need to get Perry’s keys from him,” she says.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Not at all. He shouldn’t be driving.”
“I am not playing ‘find-my-keys-they’re-in-my-pants’ with Perry.”
Nita lets out a choking laugh, and says, “Eww.”
“Seriously, no way. I’m not doing that.”
“Okay, relax. I’ll ask one of the guys to help. Just . . . tell them we’ll pay for a taxi,” she says, and sets the finished pitcher of sangria in front of me.
“Are we going to pay his mortgage, too? Maybe buy him a car? Will someone have to jerk him off to get him out of here?”
“Ew. Whoa. What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing,” I say, taking the sangria. “Everything’s fine!”
And then . . . well, I’m not entirely clear about what happens then.
First I am marching with grim determination back to the patio, and Perry. And there is his face, and the other two faces, all of them flushed and leering as they greet me. The desserts have arrived in record time, and Perry is spooning the sticky toffee pudding into his mouth with relish. For a gross moment things go slow motion and all I can see is his tongue, lizarding out to the spoon, and I’m thinking that I’ll never be able to eat sticky toffee pudding again, and how, between that and the mousse tower comment, that’s two desserts Perry has ruined for me. And then he’s grinning, saying something about how I’m really lucky he likes it.
Meanwhile, I’m looking at his empty glass, trying to figure out how to refill it without getting too close to him because I’ve had just about enough of his hands on me for one night. Almost like he can read my mind, he smirks, then picks up his glass and places it farther away, where I’ll have to lean all the way over the table to reach it.
Later it will occur to me that I could have just made him pour it himself. Later I will have lots of smarty-pants ideas about how I could have handled this differently. But I’m stressed and creeped out and really pissed off, and the only thing I can think of right now is how exposed I will be, balanced over the table trying not to spill.
And all of a sudden I’m pouring the sangria, not into Perry’s glass, not into any glass, but onto Perry.
Onto his head, his chest, his shoulders, and finally his lap.
I’m seeing chunks of the orange Nita just sliced bouncing down him, and the fruity liquid soaking his nether region.
And I’m hearing the sound of ice cubes as they hit the floor.
And I’m feeling words roaring out of me, though I don’t even know what they are.
And there’s Perry’s face, and all the faces, shocked, and finally silent.
And it’s incredible.
For a moment I feel incredible, I feel amazing, I feel like everything finally is fine.
And then I remember.
Life.
My future.
All the reasons I needed this job.
Shit.
THREE
MONTHS
EARLIER . . .
2
THINKING BUT NOT SAYING
I am sitting at the table in our rarely used dining room on a bitter-cold January evening. My mom has set out the wedding china and the fancy candles that have never been lit.
Something is going on.
That Mom, Dad, and I are eating together at all is unusual, but there’s also a lot of smiling. An unreasonable amount of smiling. At me. This, combined with the fact that Mom got all teary before dinner and told me she loved me, and Dad has combed his hair and is wearing jeans and a nice shirt instead of his usual rumpled sweats, is making me very nervous. I’m on alert and at the same time smiling back so hard my face muscles are starting to cramp up.
Then Dad throws his napkin down like it’s a gauntlet and says, “I’ve figured it out.”
Mom’s smile freezes. In fact her entire body goes as still as her carefully shellacked helmet of golden-brown hair.
“Figured what out, Dad?” I say.
“I’ve figured out where we went wrong with Jack!”
Uh-oh. My brother Jack is not a good subject—not since he dropped out of pre-med and ran off to Greece with no explanation, taking the remainder of his education money with him.
That was two and a
half years ago, only a couple of months after Dad got fired from his real estate brokerage and embarked on his looking-for-employment/festering-miserably-in-the-basement career, which was then made more miserable by Jack’s defection to Greece.
There was a lot of ranting (Dad) and weeping (Mom), and then they stopped all contact with Jack and started referring to him in the past tense, as if he died.
Things have been a tad grim since then.
“Uh, what about Jack?” I say in a quiet, carefully neutral voice.
“We spoiled him,” Dad says, both arms flying up in one of his signature declamatory gestures. “We gave him too much, helped him too much, complimented him too much.”
Sure, Jack bailed on his entire life due to being over-complimented, I think but do not say, because while it could be considered a positive change that Dad’s so animated, when he gets like this it’s best not to fuel the fire. This means I do a lot of thinking-but-not-saying. I may, in fact, be the champion of thinking-but-not-saying.
“We spoiled him and it ruined him,” Dad continues. “There’s even a name for it—‘entitlement disease’—and I’m telling you, it’s an epidemic. Your mother and I worked for everything we have. Paid our own way. Meanwhile, everyone in your generation would fall apart if they didn’t have the latest iPhone.”
Right. My cell phone is ancient and Dad is the one who gets a new one every year, even in this past year when both Mom and I worked more paid hours than he did. No point saying that either, though—it would just cause him to launch into defending whatever his latest money-making scheme is these days: staging houses, becoming a city planner (when we live nowhere near the city), studying for his brokerage license so he can open his own company and run his old brokerage out of town, media consulting . . . Each idea is pursued with manic intensity for a few weeks before he abandons it and descends into weeks of moping and binge-watching apocalyptic television.
“We’re not going to make the same mistake with you,” he’s saying. “And the fact is, your mother and I need to start thinking of ourselves, about maximizing our investment here.”
“What investment? Where?”
“Here! This house. You just turned eighteen, you’re almost finished with high school, you need your independence. And meanwhile, we could be pulling in thousands of dollars per month if we Airbnb your room. With all the tourists that come to Pine Ridge for the weekend, it could be a gold mine.”
“My room?”
“Yes!”
“A gold mine?”
“Darn right! And Jack’s room, too. I don’t need to have my office in there. I’ll set myself up in the kitchen.”
My mom seems to pale at this, which means she’s now frozen and pasty-white.
“I’m thinking end of June, so we can catch the summer tourists,” Dad rolls on. “And we’ll need to spruce it up. Same as Jack’s room. Get some nice bedding, couple of fancy pillows, and I’ve got a line on one of those luggage racks, where people put their suitcases! Give ’em that authentic hotel feeling.”
I’m still not getting it—I’m too busy trying to imagine how any part of our house could ever have an “authentic hotel feeling.”
“We’ll need all your stuff out of there by the end of June,” Dad’s saying. “You’re going to have to take your tchotchkes, the stuff from all your abandoned sports and hobbies, your boy band posters—”
Yes, I have abandoned some hobbies, but I have zero boy band posters. This fact is easily provable by walking twenty steps down the hallway to my room, and he also knows it, and even still I don’t say it.
“We might keep that cool mobile you made, since it’s white, but those navy walls, Lib? They’ll have to go.”
I am most certainly not giving him my origami star mobile—not when he’s getting rid of my beautiful walls.
“Tourists want light,” Dad is saying. “They want soothing. Not dark walls and stars everywhere.”
My room. The only totally “me” place on earth. He’s going to de-Libby it.
“Things change, Lib. And the thing is, your mom and I have between us a pretty cool combination of abilities that we can leverage, plus the house itself. I have my realtor experience and your mom’s got her customer service skills from the Inn, and the timing is perfect because you need to leap from the nest.”
“But . . .” I’m starting to catch on to the central point, finally, “where am I supposed to leap to?”
“You,” Dad says, pointing a finger at me, “are going to start building some character! Increasing your resilience, and your work ethic! You’re going to get a job and start looking for an apartment. Either that or you can start paying the Airbnb fees starting July 1st. I’ll warn you, though, I’m going to charge you at-market rates, and I already know I can get five hundred bucks for a weekend!”
Five hundred? Our town may be dripping with Victorian charm, but our too-dark, bunker-like split-level house is not. The idea of anyone wanting to pay that kind of money to stay with my parents, any money at all really, is hilarious.
But I’m not laughing.
“Isn’t it wasteful for me to be paying rent over the summer when I’m going to have the cost of tuition and somewhere to live in the fall?” I ask carefully.
All of a sudden Dad goes from bombastic to squirmy, and Mom starts strangling a cloth napkin.
Uh-oh. Something’s wrong. Something else.
“Did you . . . you’ve applied to some schools, right?” Mom says.
“Yes. To six schools. The deadline was just a few days ago.”
“And you applied for scholarships as well?” she asks.
“Of course. I’ll get some money, but it’s only a few hundred here, a couple of thousand there. I’m not going to get a full ride anywhere. But Dad showed me the statement for the education fund just a few months ago—last August maybe?—and there’s enough in there that, with some scholarship money, and if I work every summer, I should be fine.”
Suddenly neither of them will meet my eyes.
“Guys, what’s going on?”
“Tell her,” Dad says to Mom.
“No!” Mom says with shockingly uncharacteristic sharpness, and then gets up out of her chair and starts backing away from the table. “You tell her.”
For a second Dad looks from Mom to me, open despair in his expression, but then he scowls and lifts his chin with familiar belligerence, and says, “We got a little behind on some of our payments—”
“A little!” Mom mutters, shaking her head in a way that tells me this is recent news to her as well.
“Okay, more than a little,” Dad says, without looking at her, “and we needed to take that money out.”
“The education money?”
“Yes.”
Mom has been edging her way, crumple-faced, toward the kitchen doorway. Now she disappears through it entirely.
“I promise you,” Dad barrels on, “this is a blessing in disguise. You’ll value an education you paid for yourself far more than one that’s just handed to you. And maybe this’ll make you realize you should study something useful, not this flaky art history stuff.”
“Museum studies. And I—”
“Whatever. Waste of money.”
“It’s not!” I say, in a more strident voice than is wise given that there’s no point trying to explain this to him—how for the longest time my dream was to be an artist, but how after tons of hard work that started feeling like banging my head against a wall, I realized that I don’t have the talent. I’m good at making stuff but I’m not the real deal when it comes to painting and drawing, and no amount of “believe in yourself” slogans will change that. Plus, I don’t enjoy instability, and I’m not sure I have the temperament for toiling in obscurity.
Still, it was a loss. But then I went to my first big city museum on a school trip and was clued in about
all the other art-related jobs that exist—art historian, curator, exhibition designer—and suddenly I had a path forward that made sense. Dad helped me transform my room after that, but he never really understood the rest of it.
So all I can do now is repeat, “It’s not a waste of money.”
“That’s the sort of courses girls used to take back in the day when they were only going to college to catch a husband. If you think about it, in saving you from this fate, I’m actually being a feminist! After all we didn’t raise you to be a housewife or some kind of socialite.”
“S-socialite?” My head is spinning with the bizarre and terrible turn this conversation is taking. I want to say to him that the point of feminism would be that the choice is mine, not his. I want to grab my lifetime of good report cards and wave them in his face. I want to tell him that I look at his life, and Mom’s and die inside at the thought of staying in this town and becoming like them—that I want to run like hell from here, and learn and grow and do something, lead a life that means something.
I want to say all these things, but they are still not the point. Dad has a way of confusing me about what the point actually is, to the degree that I shut down completely. Even when my future is at stake, which it clearly is.
“One day when you’re successful and independent,” he’s saying, “and you haven’t flaked out and squandered thousands of dollars your family painstakingly saved to go live like a wastrel on some Mediterranean island, dashing everyone’s hopes and throwing away your future—”
“But Dad,” I finally manage to say, hating myself for the pleading in my tone, “I’m not Jack, I’m not going to do that!”
“Damn right you’re not!” Dad roars. “And when you haven’t, you’ll be able to look back and realize we did you a favor. You’ll know you did it on your own and you owe nothing to anyone.”
Least of all you!
Dad glares at me, and I stare back, furious and despairing and trying desperately to think of something to say that will change his mind, the situation, both.
And then the lights go out and Mom sails out of the kitchen, happy face freakishly restored, and carrying a cake.
He Must Like You Page 2
