“Where are you from, Hans? I hear an accent,” Mom said, perfectly aware of every single detail about him and where he was from. Good job, Mom. I looked at her and smiled.
“I’m from Germany,” he said with a smile that almost made Mom blush too, even though she was over thirty-five.
“Well, I’m American,” Mom said with a thick American accent, throwing her head back, laughing.
“And I’m der Vater,” Dad said, trying to speak German with a really bad German accent. Oh my God. Dad was even lamer than me.
Hans smiled. “Ah, du sprechts deutch?” he said, in real German, I guess.
“Um.” Dad looked up from his gluing station and smiled a goofy smile. “Nah, not really.”
“Well, you could have fooled me.” Hans looked at me, smiling. He grabbed a big box from the floor and started to load the individual food bags into it. He accidentally touched my hand as I leaned over for the stickers. Instantly, my legs weakened. I looked up and caught Mom’s eyes. She smiled and raised an eyebrow at Dad. Dad turned and looked at me in that overbearing parental kind of way. Cut it out, I tried to say with a sticker and restricted body language. They both smiled and looked at each other.
“We tried humor once. It didn’t work,” Dad continued in his bad imitation of German.
“Sorry. What?” Hans looked at Dad.
“Well, it’s a long story,” I explained to Hans, “and we’ve already heard it way too many times,” I said, looking at Dad with a warning.
“A good story never gets old,” Dad announced, and I knew exactly what that meant; he was about to tell the story again—for the one hundred and fiftieth time. I guess, finally with a true German in the audience, he just couldn’t resist telling the story about the German client. Again.
When he was younger and still trying to figure out what to do with his life, Dad had somehow ended up as a bell boy slash copywriter apprentice at some big advertising firm in New York. One day, all of the big guns representing one of the agency’s biggest clients—a huge German automobile brand—were coming in for lunch and the presentation of a new ad campaign.
“Everyone had been working for weeks and weeks, and it was one of those kill-or-be-killed moments. Everybody was nervous as hell and there were already rumors around the office that one-third of the agency’s employees would be sacked if we lost this client. Anyway, the day came and somehow I ended up being in on the presentation. I guess due to my Power Point skills. I was a rather Power Point Yoda back then,” Dad said proudly.
“A Power Point Yoda?” Hans stopped packing and looked at me.
“A master, a pro,” I helped. “Dad has a Star Wars reference for pretty much everything.” Quickly, I looked away again. I was really trying hard not to look at him for too long, thinking of all the different stages of flushing at the same time. Man, I was only making it worse.
“Well,” Dad continued, “we had made a fantastic campaign with a touch of heart and sublime intelligent humor, and we were all very excited to show it. But after we had finished the presentation and showed the big wigs all the different ads and media, the tentative budget, yada yada yada, we all just sat there in total silence. The taller one, definitely the one in charge, lit a funny-looking cigarette, took one long drag and looked at us. And then he said—with the strongest German accent I’ve ever heard, ‘We tried humor once. It didn’t work.’ Man, we all just sat there staring at each other. I guess we somewhat expected him to laugh next, say it was a joke, and then give us the real feedback, the good feedback. But that was it. That was the freaking feedback.” Dad took a bag and glued it together and handed it to me.
“What happened then?” Hans said, almost sounding all good ol’ American compared to the tall one in Dad’s story.
“Well, we lost the client and I lost my job.”
“Surprise,” Mom pitched in from her plastic heating center.
“Ha ha ha. Very funny. Can’t you come up with something better than that?” he said, pointing a bag at her.
“Well, I tried humor once, but it didn’t work,” Mom replied with her version of German, which, honestly, was even worse than Dad’s.
Now everyone at the other end of the table was laughing.
The older woman with heavy glasses, sitting next to Mom, leaned over to the skinny guy on her left side. “Excuse me,” she said with a mixture of a Scottish and German accent, “Can I please get another bag? Bitte.” She looked at Dad on the other side of the table and flaunted a set of really crooked teeth.
“Of course, mein frau,” the skinny guy next to her replied in yet another poor version of a German accent. Now everyone was pretending to speak German.
I looked at Hans. He was just staring at all these strange people speaking “Ger-merican”. He smiled.
“Sie sind alles ganz verrückt,” he said in actual German (I think). He looked at me and smiled. “They are all freaking crazy.” He pointed at Mom and Dad who were both swearing (in English) at the same time for overheating yet another plastic bag. “Are they always like this?”
I nodded. “Last night they actually spoke funny French through the entire dinner because we were having beef borgengion.”
“And the night before, Señor,” Mom yelled from her glue station, “we all habla español.”
“Taco time,” Dad explained in plain English and burned yet another bag.
WHEN OUR TWO-HOUR SHIFT was over, we had been all around the speaking world twice, we had packed over six hundred bags of food, I had exchanged about a hundred looks with Mom and Dad, and Hans had touched my hand, accidently, six times (of course I was counting).
“We’ll just go ahead, El,” Mom said, staring at the little cute curls on the back of Hans’s neck. “We need to go to the restroom before we go.” Mom stood up and took off her plastic gloves.
“I don’t have to go.” Dad shrugged his shoulders and looked at her.
“Yes, you do, Butcher Louis,” Mom said in her bossy voice, nodding toward me and Hans, making eyes at Dad at the same time.
Oh my God, couldn’t she just write it on a Post-it and stick it to my forehead? Thank God Hans had his back to us, busy getting something from his bag.
“Oh yes we do,” she repeated. “Nice to meet you, Hans.”
Hans turned to Mom.
“And you as well.” He offered his hand and smiled. “Wiedersehen.” Mom shook his hand and beamed. Dad leaned over and did the same, but with a simple nod instead of a smile. He looked like he was about to say something (probably with a German accent gone wrong) but decided against it. Thank God. Instead he just kissed me gently on my forehead and waved as they left for the restroom.
“Is this your first time?” Hans jumped up on the table and sat critically close to me and I prayed for control over my facial color once again.
As in, my first time falling in love at first sight? First time falling in love with a German dude? First time falling in love, period? “First time what?”
“First time volunteering.” He laughed. “Are you always this distracted?”
I smiled and looked at him for a second and a half.
“Well, yes and no,” I said, my eyes now fixed on my feet. “I mean no, it’s not my first. Mom and Dad have been dragging me along since I was this tall.” I held out my arm trying to demonstrate the size of a little three-year-old Ella.
He smiled. “Cool.”
“And yes, I’m always this distracted. It is a family added value, Dad says.”
“Cool,” he said again.
“You don’t do much volunteering in Germany?”
“I guess so, but it was never in, um, my way or however you say it in English?” He offered a perfect, wide, George-Clooney-meets-Brad-Pitt-Ocean’s-Eleven smile, and I blushed for the umpteenth time that day, which I swear made him smile even more (this time like bad boy Colin Farrell).
He jumped off the table. “You know, a few of us are going to hang out tonight celebrating the million.”
“The, um, million?”
“Yes, hello!” He made a gesture toward the end of the room, toward the thousands of boxes piled up on the floor. “One million meals, right? That’s why we’re here.”
“Oh yeah, that, um, sure.” Oh. My. God. Focus! Focus! The only thing I was able to focus on were all of those cute little flirtatious blond curls and, of course, how to stop my hands from shaking. I had to pull it together. I took a deep breath and exhaled silently. My name is Ella. I live in Seattle. It rains. It rains. It rains.
“Is that a yes?”
I looked down at my shaky hands, nodded, and smiled.
“Good.” He pulled out his cell phone and asked me, again very politely, for my cell number. After three poor attempts I finally got the numbers right, and while typing in my numbers, he said that he would call me later. He tossed his cell in his bag and smiled. “Bye, Ella.” He leaned over and placed a soft kiss on my cheek.
In a ragged breath I whispered, “Bye,” as I stood on legs as soft as caramel, watching him walk away in his sexy European jeans. Then it hit me: I had been wearing that silly hat the entire time, kisses on the cheek and all. I had been flaunting the butcher look the entire afternoon.
The minute he turned the corner, I ran as fast as I could for the restroom mirror, and there I was, looking like a complete moron with a face as red as a fire truck and a silly see-through hat. He’s never going to call me.
“Oh, there you are.” Mom’s face ducked out from under one of the stall doors. “Saved by the very red-faced daughter. Could you please go fetch me some paper?”
I grabbed her some paper towels hanging by the sink and passed them on. “Here you go.”
“Thanks. What happened?” I could almost see her smiling through the restroom door.
“He kissed me on the cheek, and then he asked me for my phone number.”
“Whoa, in that order?”
“No. Does it matter? He’s probably not going to call anyway.” I took off my hat and looked in the mirror again. I didn’t know which was actually worse; the see-through-hat look or the bad hat hair underneath it. I tossed the hat in the bin.
“Of course, it matters. If he kissed you after, he’ll call. If he kissed you before, he won’t.”
“He got my number. Then he kissed me.”
“He’ll call,” Mom said, followed by something else lost in the flushing sound of the toilet.
SHE WAS RIGHT. HE DID. About five minutes later, when I was leaving the restroom, looking for Mom and Dad.
“Is this later?” he said in his cute German accent.
“I guess,” I said, laughing. How cute. How original.
“Well, hi there,” he said, “can you just hold on a sec?”
“Uh-huh.”
He was talking to someone else, and I used the time to go over my sparse wardrobe options and to imagine myself with this German beauty, walking barefoot in the sand at some exotic beach, holding hands in the moonlight.
“Hello, are you there?”
“I am.” On Maui with you.
“We are meeting at nine at a place called Oddfellows Café. It’s in Capitol Hill, at 10th I think. Do you know the place?”
“Yes, of course.” Of course, I didn’t.
“Well, I guess I’ll see you at nine then.”
“Sure.” I had to bite my tongue not to add a tiny “Hasta la vista, baby,” returning his authentic Schwarzenegger accent. We hung up and I looked up; Mom and Dad were sitting right next to the escalator, waiting with anticipation.
“Hans?” Mom said, smiling.
I nodded.
“I told you he’d call.”
I nodded.
“As always, your mother is the wisest person I know.” Dad wrapped his arm around her proudly. “My wife,” he announced to a couple passing by. “My wife,” he repeated to an old woman with a big furry hat, looking weird back at him. He looked at me and smiled. “Did you see the hat on that tiny woman’s head? It was, like, humongous. She could hardly keep her head up.” He tilted his head to one side and started walking sideways with big silly steps. He got on the escalator, still with his head hanging over one shoulder.
Mom smiled at me. “Let’s not tell him before we get home.”
I waved at Dad and smiled. He was still wearing the butcher´s hat, waving like mad from the top of the escalator.
The kiss
“Why on earth would you say you know the place, when it’s pretty obvious you have no fucking clue?” Dad turned the car around for the fifth time.
“Frank, pardon your French,” Mom yelled from the backseat.
“Oui oui,” Dad said, tipping his imaginary cap.
Oh boy, we are back to the whole accent theme. “Please Mom, don’t get him started.”
Mom huffed from the back seat.
“And guys, I’m just going to check out the scene by myself for a while when we get there, okay? I don’t want to look like some loser who has nothing to do but hang out with her parents all night.”
“Hey!” Mom protested.
“Thanks,” Dad said from the front, pretending to sulk.
“Well, you guys know what I mean. Hey, I’m seventeen, almost eighteen, and I’ve never...”
“Been kissed?” Dad suggested.
“Or worse,” Mom yelled from behind Dad.
I turned and looked at Mom. “I was about to say that I’ve never been out there, in downtown Seattle. On my own.” I pointed out the window.
“Oh,” Mom said with a goofy smile.
“Oh,” Dad said, excitement clear in his eyes, looking at Mom in the rearview mirror. “I guess someone in the car is thinking in those terms.” He raised an eyebrow and smiled at her.
But the truth is, I was actually thinking in those terms, too. Ever since I had laid my eyes on the German goody bag, I hadn’t stopped thinking about kissing and touching his cute Anglo-Saxon face, which was not only the most beautiful face I had ever seen but also the most well-proportioned. It was actually so perfect that it had reminded me of this documentary I had watched years earlier about the universal code of beauty. The narrator revealed that the secret to a perfect face is symmetry. Apparently, symmetry equals beauty. I was surprised to find out that most faces, in fact, have two very different halves. It was quite scary how symmetric Hans’s face appeared to me now. No wonder I had to remind myself not to keep staring at him all the time.
Dad took another turn, and just as I was about to give up all hope on the European symmetry case study, there he was, standing in front of the Oddfellows Café, staring at his cell, looking extremely handsome. My cell beeped. “Where are you?”
I smiled and pulled down the window. “Here,” I yelled.
He looked up and beamed. Dad honked the horn and waved.
I turned toward him. “Dad, no German, okay?”
“Jawohl, mein fuhrer.” He saluted me.
“Dad!!!”
“Okay, okay, I won’t.”
I got out of the car, and as I was walking toward Hans, I almost tumbled over a sign, nailed into the ground. It said, “Get your free eye exam today.” I looked up and smiled, already blushing.
“I guess someone is trying to tell me something.” Why does my voice sound so weird?
“Hi, Hans,” Mom and Dad yelled at the same time, in sync, and waved.
Hans waved back. “Hi, Mr. and Mrs. Jensen.”
Mom got out of the car and jumped in the front seat. “Oh God, Hans, please don’t call us that,” she said, leaning out of the window. We are not that old.” She smiled, banged on the roof and looked at Dad. “Let’s go, hon. We finally got rid of that little monster. Now we can go have some fun.” She smiled and blew me a kiss. Dad honked the horn a few too many times, and they were off—leaving me all alone with Hans and his symmetrical face.
“Are your parents always like that?”
“Like what?” I looked at him but not long enough.
“Like really fun?”
“I gues
s.”
“You wanna go inside?” He gestured toward the door. “Or we could stay out here? It’s nice and warm out tonight.”
I nodded and looked up at the darkening sky and then took a deep breath, fixing my eyes on him. “Thanks for the house, by the way. It was really ... cute and, um, paper-ish.” I’m such a dork. I’m such a dork. I’m such a dork.
“Paper-ish?” he asked, smiling. “Never heard that word before. Is that actually a word?”
“No,” I said, averting my eyes to a car passing by.
“But, um, I’m really happy you liked it.” He looked down and kicked at a can lying on the street. He missed. “See, I was reading this really boring book about the functionality of public buildings, and I decided to create my own little building instead. I’m an architect student,” he explained. “It’s what I do,” he added with his cute accent. He cocked his head to the side and looked at me and smiled.
“Making houses or trying to impress girls with your architectural skills?” I held my breath. Did I just say that? Where was all this cockiness coming from? I was beginning to sound a lot like Mom. Was this how she made all of her instant friends?
“Both,” he said with a wide smile. He sat down on the pavement with his legs crossed and gestured for me to sit next to him. We both sat there, watching the late-afternoon downtown traffic.
“So ... what’s your story?”
“What?”
“I mean...” He looked down at his feet and smiled. “I heard that from some movie, but, um, that’s not how you say it, right? You gotta help me out here; this is my real first date in Seattle. What’s next?” His eyes met mine and a heat rose up inside me that I’d never felt before.
“I don’t know. It’s mine too.”
“First date?”
“Well, in the state of Washington,” I said, lying. “This is the last state on my dating list,” I added, obviously trying to sound way more confident than I was as I bit down on my quivering lip. I looked down at my lap. My legs were shaking even more than my lips.
He offered me a warm smile and grabbed my hand, which almost made me jump back. Immediately, my palm became moist and I wondered if it would slide right out his grasp.
Lost in Seattle (The Miss Apple Pants series, #2) Page 17
