Way to Go

by Tom Ryan

  Mom poured herself a cup of tea and sat down at the table across from me.

  “So what are we going to do about this?” she asked me.

  “I don’t know. Ground me, I guess?”

  “I might have a better idea.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your dad has been suggesting for a while that it’s time you got a job. I didn’t think it was necessary, but now I’m starting to think it’s a good idea.”

  Typical of my old man to decide what was best for me without my input.

  “A job?” I asked. I’d always figured I’d get one after high school to help pay for university or whatever, but it had never occurred to me that I should get one any sooner. It wasn’t like Deep Cove was crawling with jobs.

  She went on. “I don’t like the idea of you bumming around town all summer, getting into trouble just because there isn’t anything better to do. Anyway, it turns out that I might have a lead for you.”

  “What do you mean, a lead?” I asked skeptically.

  “You know the Burger Shack?” she asked.

  “It’s closed!”

  “I know that, but it’s not going to stay closed for long; it’s just not going to be the Burger Shack anymore. I ran into an old high school classmate of mine the other day, Denise Turner. She’s back in town, and she’s bought the building. She plans on turning it into a restaurant.”

  “It’s already a restaurant.”

  “I mean a real restaurant, with tables and chairs and a patio. With an actual menu. Not just burgers and fries. Anyway, she’s cleaning the place out, and she’s looking for some help so she can open as soon as possible.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What kind of stuff would I be doing?”

  “First you’d be helping get the place ready, but she told me that she’d be willing to hire you on after that to help out. Maybe you’ll wait tables, or help in the kitchen, who knows? You’ll learn a lot. Denise has worked in some great restaurants. What do you think?”

  “I guess so,” I said. It didn’t sound like a great idea to me, but I wasn’t really in a position to argue.

  “Hey, it’s not the end of the world. Your father and I both had jobs in high school. Don’t you think it could be kind of fun to do something different for the summer?”

  “Yeah. Sure. I guess.”

  “Well, I’ll give Denise a call in a while, and if it still sounds good to her, I’ll drive you down there to meet her this week.”

  “Okay,” I said miserably, imagining the reaction I’d get from the guys.

  “Danny,” she said, “I know you think this is going to wreck your summer, but honestly, some of my best memories come from when I used to wait tables. This could turn out to be a great experience.”

  I nodded, trying not to look too upset. It was hard to look on the bright side when the long lazy summer I’d been looking forward to had just disappeared.

  I called Jay from my room.

  “What the hell happened last night?” he asked.

  “What do you think happened? Did you see the cop car?”

  “Yeah, I noticed the lights, so I got the hell out of there. I waited outside in the yard for almost an hour, but when you didn’t come back, I figured you must have been busted.”

  “Yep.”

  “Did you tell your mom?” he asked.

  “Yeah, and get this. I have to get a job.”

  “What? No way!” he said.

  “Way.”

  “Hang on a second,” he said. I heard muffled voices, and all of a sudden Kierce—the last person I wanted to talk to—was on the line.

  “Hey, buddy,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  “I can’t believe my dad busted you. That totally sucks!”

  “Yeah. At least he gave me a ride home.”

  “Listen, D-Man, I’m really sorry about last night. I shouldn’t have said that shit. It’s none of my business if you don’t want to mess around with Michelle.”

  “S’all right.”

  “Seriously! I didn’t mean to be such an asshole. I was just looking out for you, dude. Some guys in the locker room said some shit a couple of times. You know what hockey players are like. They think you’re some kind of fag if you aren’t banging a new girl every week. Anyway, I stood up for you, man, ’cause I know you aren’t a fag. I just want you to get some action once in a while, Dan! Are we cool?”

  My stomach flipped every time he said fag, but all I said was, “Yeah, we’re cool.”

  “Sweet, man. Anyway, my old man is totally breathing down my neck. He won’t believe me when I tell him I wasn’t drinking with you last night. That’s kind of the funniest part of the whole thing.”

  “What is?” I asked.

  “In a million years, who’d have thought you’d ever be considered a bad influence?”

  After I hung up, I lay on my bed and stared at the wall. I’d been listening to people shoot their mouths off about fags and queers and fruits since we were kids. That kind of stupid jock talk was as normal as someone asking you to pass the salt. But this was different. This was personal.

  I’d always thought I was doing a pretty good job of flying under the radar. Apparently not. Kierce might have been a total asshole at the party, but he was right about one thing. I needed to put the rumors to rest.

  FIVE

  A couple of days later, as we drove to the restaurant to meet Denise, my mom told me a bit about my new boss.

  “She was a lot of fun, kind of a bad influence. She was always getting us to skip class and do crazy stuff. We thought we were a bunch of rebels.” She laughed, as if remembering something funny.

  I glanced over and tried to imagine my mom as a rebel. I pictured her with a mohawk and a leather jacket instead of a perm and a quilted vest and turtleneck. It was hilarious to think about, but not very believable.

  “Why have I never met her?” I asked.

  “Well, she’s been gone for a long time, since right after high school. She didn’t get along very well with her parents, and I don’t think Deep Cove was big enough for her.”

  “How come?”

  “Not everyone can stand living in a small town. There’s a lot of gossip, and not many opportunities.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  She gave me a funny look but didn’t say anything else as we pulled into the parking lot of what had been the Burger Shack. She parked next to a pickup truck piled high with old tables, chairs and other junk from the restaurant. The Burger Shack sign—an orange and purple monstrosity with a dancing hamburger painted on it—sat broken in two on top of the heap of garbage.

  The front door was locked, but we could hear some kind of commotion inside, so we walked around to the back of the building. A tall thin man who looked to be in his forties was leaning against the wall smoking a cigarette.

  “ ’Ow’s it going?” he asked in a thick French accent.

  “Very well, thanks,” my mom replied. “Is Denise around?”

  “Denise is in the back, in the kitchen. If you wanna call it that.”

  We headed inside. The place was a mess, and the only thing that indicated it had ever been the Burger Shack was the orange paint on the walls. From behind the swinging door that led to the kitchen, we heard a loud crash.

  “Shit!” somebody yelled. I followed my mom through the door and toward the voice.

  The kitchen was a lot cleaner than the dining room, but it still looked like a tornado had hit it. Large kitchen appliances, still wrapped in plastic, stood next to a pile of open cardboard boxes that appeared to be full of plain white dishes. Standing in the middle of the chaos was a stocky woman with curly brown hair held down by a Red Sox cap. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a ratty old T-shirt that said Kiss the Cook. She looked up and marched over to us as we came in.

  “Good to see ya, Mary,” she said, reaching over to give my mom a quick hug and slapping her on the back. She turned to me. “You must be Danny. I’m Denise.”
She held out her hand and almost crushed mine when we shook.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “So your old lady here tells me that you’re up for a bit of a challenge, eh?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Well, you can start by cleaning out the toilets. There should be a toothbrush on one of the sinks back there.”

  I stayed where I was and glanced at Mom, shocked. Toilet? With a toothbrush? Denise let out a huge burst of cackling laughter and slapped me on the back. Hard. “I’m just busting your balls, my man!”

  My mom also seemed to find it really funny. I shot her a dirty look as she left.

  “So here’s the deal,” Denise told me as she led me back into the dining room. “I want to open this place as soon as we can get all our shit together, which is gonna mean a lot of long days between now and then. Are you up for it?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, for sure.”

  “Good stuff. First order of business is to get the kitchen organized, and then we’re gonna clean and paint the rest of the place from top to bottom. When we’re through, I want it to look like a totally new restaurant.”

  I looked around and took in the piles of garbage scattered around the room, the grimy windows, the filthy floor. I must have looked skeptical.

  “Don’t worry, Dan,” she said. “We’ll just have to do our best and hope that’s good enough.”

  The guy who’d been smoking when we came in was Jean Pierre, who told me he preferred JP. He was a friend of Denise’s from Montreal, and despite his grubby appearance, he was a classically trained chef.

  “Denise knows that I wouldn’t come to the middle of nowhere for anyone else in the world,” he said as he stood back and directed us as we dragged shelving units around the kitchen. “Especially with what she’s paying me!”

  “Quit your bitchin’, old man,” she said. “This is the first vacation you’ve had in ten years.”

  “Vacation? Ha! Slaving over a hot stove in some godforsaken town with the worst wine selection east of Montreal is not a vacation,” he said. “And she’s too cheap to hire me a sous chef!”

  “What’s a sous chef?” I asked.

  “A sous chef is the person who does all the kitchen work while the chef stands around feeling very important,” said Denise.

  “A sous chef,” said JP, ignoring her, “is a chef’s assistant. His second-in-command. A sous chef helps with prep work, salads, desserts. Anything the chef needs. A very important position; too bad Denise doesn’t see it that way. The woman will be the death of me, mark my words.”

  We dragged the final shelf into place, and he stood in the middle of the kitchen with one hand on his hip and the other one scratching his chin, slowly moving in a circle, checking it all out.

  “This will do for now,” he said. “It’s not perfect, but it will do.”

  Denise told me that after she left Deep Cove, she waited tables for a long time before eventually working her way up to restaurant manager. She’d lived and worked in lots of different cities, including Montreal, where she’d met JP, and New York, which she assured me was as extraordinary as I imagined.

  “Restaurant work can be a real pain in the ass,” she said, “but some people are born for it, and I guess I’m one of them.”

  “What made you decide to open your own place?” I asked her as we unpacked boxes full of bowls and mixers and bizarre utensils.

  “When my mom died last year,” she told me, “I came home to take care of her things, and believe it or not, I realized that I actually missed Deep Cove.”

  “Really?” I asked. If you’d lived in New York or Montreal, wouldn’t Deep Cove be about the last place you would want to live?

  “Yeah, it definitely surprised the shit out of me,” she said, “but when you get a bit older, you see things differently. Anyway, I heard the Burger Shack building was for sale, so I pulled together my savings and bought the place. My friends all told me they were worried I was making the decision too quickly.”

  “No, we said you were crazy,” JP said without looking up.

  “Yeah, well, you came with me, monsieur, so who’s crazier? The crazy woman, or the man who follows her?”

  JP just grunted and went back to arranging cookbooks on the shelf above his workspace.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “sometimes you just have to go with your gut. I was looking for a change, and this seemed like the right thing to do. Opening a restaurant isn’t easy though. If JP wasn’t here, I don’t know how I’d keep it all together.”

  “So when we open, will I be waiting tables?” I asked.

  I heard JP chuckle across the kitchen, and Denise smiled and shook her head.

  “I hate to break it to you, buddy, but I’m gonna need you in the kitchen. You, my friend, are going to be occupying one of the most important positions in any restaurant, the heart and soul of any successful operation.” She looked up and smirked at JP. “You’re going to be the head dishwasher.”

  It wasn’t my dream job—I had no idea what that was yet—but I figured that I had to start somewhere. Denise told me that once the place was open, I’d have more time off, but until then, I was going to be busy all the time. It didn’t bother me. I was making money and learning a lot about the business from watching Denise and JP.

  Having no free time was also a good excuse to avoid Kierce. I was still pretty pissed off at him, and ever since the party, I couldn’t stop wondering whether everyone else in Deep Cove thought I was gay.

  It was so confusing. Being gay was the last thing on earth that I wanted, but my body refused to cooperate with my brain. I had to figure something out. I wasn’t religious, so “praying the gay away” wasn’t going to work, but I’d heard about places that claimed to be able to fix someone like me—make me “not gay.” From the little I knew of these camps and clinics, they were expensive, and most of them were in the southern States. How would I explain that to my parents? Hey, Mom and Dad, I think I have the hots for Johnny Depp. Can you give me five thousand bucks so I can go to Camp Homobegone in Alabama?

  The simplest, most obvious solution was something I could do on my own. I needed to find a hot girl and get her to help me change. This was much easier said than done. In my head, I ran through a list of all the single girls I knew.

  Michelle Donaldson. Obviously out of the question.

  Anna Hobbes. Too wispy.

  Diana Grant. Too breasty.

  Charlaine MacIntosh. Too aggressive.

  Maisie Thomas. Too giggly.

  I ruled out one girl after another. I’d known all of them for most of my life, and I’d literally never had one sexual thought about any of them. I was not off to a good start. I knew what I had to do, but I was missing the right girl to help me do it. So to speak.

  SIX

  A few days after I started working, my mom dropped me off early at the restaurant. I was the only one there, since Denise and JP were out of town picking up a truckload of tables and chairs. The night before, Denise had given me a key and asked me to paint the trim in the dining room.

  I started a pot of coffee. While I waited for it to brew, I examined the intriguing array of supplies that JP had carefully unpacked from a stack of sturdy plastic containers and arranged neatly on a large shelving unit at the back of the kitchen. Denise had made it clear to me that I shouldn’t touch anything on those shelves. “That’s JP’s pantry stock from Montreal. He’ll slice your fingers off if you mess with his system.”

  I decided that what JP didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, and I rooted around in his supplies, being careful to put things back exactly as I’d found them. Some of it was familiar to me—bags of rice and boxes of pasta, large cans of tomatoes from Italy, jars of black olives.

  A lot of things, though, I’d never heard of. Inside a battered old tin box, I found several bags stuffed with dried peppers of different sizes and colors. There were thick tubes of yellow paste called polenta, and little bottles of coriander, saffron, tarragon and garam masala. I
examined jars full of marinated artichoke hearts and pickled capers. I unscrewed a tiny bottle of white truffle oil and sniffed; it was like nothing I’d ever smelled, pungent and sweet. I wondered what you used it for and why the bottle was so small.

  The coffee stopped dripping. As I poured myself a cup, I heard a vehicle pull into the parking lot on the other side of the building. I walked back through the dining room to look out the window and saw that an old beater of a hatchback had pulled up near the front door. Someone was bent over, rummaging around in the backseat.

  A girl stood up, holding a huge quilted cloth bag, and slammed the car door shut. She was almost my height, with a long wavy mass of reddish-brown hair that was held back with an elastic. As she swayed up to the front door, I ducked back from the window, trying to act casual as she walked into the restaurant.

  She was beautiful. Tall and willowy with pale, lightly freckled skin. She was wearing cut-off jeans and sandals with leather straps that were tied up past her ankles. A lacy shirt, embroidered with flowers, was knotted over a green tank top. I saw the edge of a tattoo—it looked like a green rose—peeking up from behind the back collar of her shirt. Dozens of bangles jingled on her wrist, and her fingers flashed with big gaudy rings. She looked to be around my age, but nothing about her was familiar. She was clearly unlike any of the girls I knew from Deep Cove. She took a quick look around and then turned to me, her shimmering pale-green eyes staring right into mine.

  “This is the place, huh?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Danny. I work here, with Denise. For Denise.”

  “What a coincidence. So do I.”

  She walked over to the counter and dropped her bag, then wandered into the kitchen. I followed her and watched as she poured herself a coffee.

  “Denise told me that this place was kind of grubby,” she said, looking around. “No shit. So what are we supposed to be doing today anyway?”

  I didn’t understand; Denise hadn’t mentioned anything about some strange girl showing up to work. “I’m supposed to paint the trim in the dining room,” I told her.