I spotted her in the restaurant through a window. She and another waitress filled ketchup bottles behind a counter.
Right away my hands started to sweat. My heart beat like a bongo. I hoped that my face wasn’t getting splotchy, which sometimes happens when I get nervous. Or embarrassed. Or when I eat walnuts. Easy, Quentin, I told myself. You’re just delivering a message. That’s all. You’re not talking to a girl. You’re speaking for your client.
Both waitresses had their backs turned as I walked up to the white picnic tables. I figured Melissa would like as much privacy as possible when I delivered the message, so I moved to the table farthest from the building. I sat down and tried to look casual.
A waitress spotted me and came out of the restaurant, a paper menu in one hand. She wasn’t Melissa. She looked as old as my mom, with her hair tied up and tucked under her cap and white sneakers on her feet. She walked all the way to my end of the picnic area and slapped the menu down on the table. “What’ll it be for you?” she asked.
My hand only shook a little as I reached for the menu. “Um … actually I was hoping I could see Melissa.”
The waitress smirked. “Oh. I see.”
Not likely. She turned and walked back into the restaurant. I brought the menu up and peeked over the top. She was talking to Melissa, pointing toward me. Melissa nodded and headed out the door.
As she came closer, my mouth went dry. It felt like my tongue had turned into a gym sock. But I timed it perfectly so that I looked up from the menu just as she arrived.
She smiled at me, a cute smile, one you might flash at a three-year-old. “I know you,” she said. “You’re one of Robbie McFallen’s friends.”
I nodded smoothly. “Yeah, that’s me.”
She pulled out her order notepad. “So what can I get you?”
I cleared my throat. “Actually I was hoping I could talk to you for a few minutes.” I pointed to the bench on the other side of the table.
She dropped her smile. “I’m kinda working right now.”
“You really need to hear what I have to tell you.”
Melissa studied me for a minute, shot a glance at the restaurant window, and stepped closer. She didn’t sit down. “Make it quick.”
Here was my chance. All I needed to do was say the line, pat her on the shoulder, and walk away, twenty dollars richer. But as she locked eyes with me—hers deep brown with a raised eyebrow—my mouth just couldn’t form the words. So I stalled. Small talk.
“So how long have you been working here?” I asked.
That seemed to throw her off, and she relaxed a little. “Almost a year. Are you looking for a job?”
“No, not really.” So much for small talk. There was only one other thing I knew about Melissa, and I figured it might point us in the right direction. “And, uh, how long have you been dating Marcus McFallen?”
Now she looked confused. “Seven months and two weeks. Why? What is this about?”
Seven months and two weeks! Marcus had been dating this girl for over half a year and was now sending someone else to end it. What a jerk. I pushed the thought from my mind. Focus.
I took a deep breath. “Melissa, I have some bad news.”
Her face flooded with concern. “Has something happened to Marcus?”
“Marcus is breaking up with you.” The sentence jumped out of my mouth on its own, which was good, because I didn’t think I could have said it otherwise. The guilt was starting to get to me.
Melissa stared at me for a full minute. Then she sank into the bench across from me. “He sent you to tell me that?”
I nodded slowly, trying to look sympathetic. To be honest, I was expecting more of a reaction from her. Tears, for example. Or at least angry fists shaking curses to the sky and Marcus McFallen. Her eyes weren’t even moist.
In fact, she laughed. A hard laugh that was lemon sour in the middle. “I love Marcus, but who knows why. That boy has no backbone.” She put her elbows on the table and placed her chin in her hands. “I just can’t believe that he … well, no, I can believe that, too.”
The guilt quickly drained away, making a sucking sound in my ears like the last of the bathtub water. That had been a lot easier than I’d expected. I’d found a private setting, I’d given her the message without tripping over my tongue, and she didn’t even need to cry on my shoulder.
She suddenly looked up at me. “Did he pay you to do this?”
I also hadn’t expected that. I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. How was I supposed to respond?
She saved me the trouble. Shaking her head, she said, “Well, at least he was willing to cough up some money for me. Must have been worth it to him.”
Melissa stood. She straightened her apron and pulled out her order pad and pencil. For a moment I thought she was going to ask me for my order, like nothing had happened. Instead she said, “Here’s some free advice for you, little messenger. Someday, if you break up with a girl of your own, you’re going to want to use flowers and chocolates. Flowers at least say, ‘Thanks for the memories.’ And chocolates, well, you don’t want to leave a girl completely alone.”
Then she turned and walked back into the restaurant.
Maybe I hadn’t watched enough chick flicks, or maybe I had a heart of concrete. Maybe I was even more clueless about girls than I knew. I think most other people would have watched her walk away and felt a little pang of remorse, or at least felt sorry for her. But she’d taken it so well that I didn’t feel any of that. Instead I thought about her free advice. My mind started working like a mechanic welding together a new differential case. The next time I break up with a girl … flowers … chocolates …
Twenty dollars in my pocket.
I wasn’t sure how—yet—but this had some real potential.
Chapter 4
I thought about ordering a burger right there at the Burger Joint, since they do have the best hamburgers around. But I didn’t want to call out the other waitress again, and I sure couldn’t order from Melissa. Instead, I hiked down to McDonald’s and got a Big Mac and three cheeseburgers, to go. And an order of large fries. I had money to burn, after all. Then I made my way over to Mick’s where I knew Mom would still be cranking away. It wasn’t dinnertime yet, but a hot burger early was better than a cold burger on time.
Mom’s been a mechanic for years, having grown up with five car-crazy brothers. She was getting paid to work in a garage even before she graduated from high school, and even after she and Dad got married. But when I was born, she quit. She could have gotten someone to watch me, but she said she didn’t want to come home to her baby with her hands smelling like grease and her fingernails looking like charcoal crescent moons.
But when Dad up and left, she put her coveralls on and headed back to the garage. Mick offered her a good salary and all the hours she wanted if she would work the night shift. She didn’t like the idea of leaving me alone for so long in the evening, but we worked it out. Like garage bay dinners, for example.
I strolled into the bay where Mom was working on a Subaru up on a hydraulic lift. Looked like a muffler problem. “Hey, Mom. I brought dinner.”
She stuck her head out around the edge of the car. “You brought dinner? What for? We’ve got stuff in the freezer.”
I walked over to the little table in the corner of the bay and laid down a fresh sheet of newspaper. The comics section. I brought out the burgers and the large carton of fries, stacked up the ketchup packets, and placed a napkin on each side of the table.
Mom was still under the Subaru, so I stepped into the empty garage office and used the office phone to dial Marcus’s cell.
“Marcus,” he said after two rings.
“This is Quentin. It’s done.”
“How’d she take it?” he asked eagerly.
“Well, she didn’t cry.”
“She didn’t? That’s good, right?”
“Uh, sure,” I said.
“Thanks, man. You saved my life.”
>
I hung up the phone and went back out to our dinner table in the garage bay. Marcus was happy, Melissa wasn’t crying, and I was eating cheeseburgers. Not bad for a day’s work.
Mom finally got to a stopping point and came out from under the car. She turned to the sink next to the table and filled her grimy hands full of orange-scented pumice soap. She glanced over at the table. “What’s the occasion? And where’d you get the money for that feast?”
“You don’t need an occasion to eat hamburgers. And I told you before that Rob’s brother is paying me to help him out with some stuff.”
“I don’t remember you mentioning getting paid.” She gave me a glance from her mom-eyes. “You’re not doing his homework for him, are you?”
I laughed. “Mom, he’s a junior in high school. I’m thirteen.”
She scrubbed hard under the running water. “Yes, but it’s Marcus McFallen. Even in his high school classes you could pull better grades than he does.”
“I just thought you might like something besides microwave burritos for dinner. But I can eat yours, too, if you don’t want it.”
Mom wiped her hands on a shop towel and ruffled my hair with her charcoal crescent fingernails. “Thanks for thinking of me.” She sat down in front of the Big Mac. “Who’s turn today?”
“Yours. I picked ‘human cloning’ yesterday.”
“That’s right.” She thought for a moment. “Let’s go with … chocolate bars.”
“Butterfinger,” I said, my mouth half-full of cheeseburger. “That’s my favorite. Yours is the plain old Hershey’s bar, right?”
“Yep.”
“I’ve heard, though, that American chocolate is waxy. You have to taste European chocolate to get the real chocolate experience.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Don’t know. On TV maybe.”
“Hmmph.” Mom looked thoughtful. “I wonder why that is. Don’t cocoa beans come from South America? Why don’t South Americans have the best chocolate?”
“And we’re closer to South America than Europe is. So you’d think that our chocolate would at least be better than Europe’s.”
“Well,” said Mom, “we’ll have to find an imports store some time and experiment.”
Then we chewed in silence for a moment. But only for a moment.
When Dad left and Mom started working, we didn’t have a lot of time to spend together in the evenings. Mom didn’t want to waste our time together by eating in silence or getting one-word responses about my school day. So we came up with the Garage Bay Dinner Conversation game. Just two rules: take turns picking the topic, and everybody has to participate. Some topics work out better than others, but mostly we get to laugh a lot and talk a lot, which is probably more than most families do with their plates in front of the TV.
“Why is a plain Hershey’s bar your favorite?” I asked. “I mean, there’s no peanuts, no caramel, no crunchies. Just chocolate.”
“Waxy chocolate, apparently.” She winked at me. “You really want to know?”
I nodded.
“It was actually your Uncle Ethan’s favorite candy bar. I don’t know why it was his favorite. He just likes plain things. But when he was in the Navy, I’d send him a big package of Hershey’s bars twice a month. He’d keep them in his footlocker and make them last until the next package came. He liked his Hershey’s bars, and I liked sending them.
“But Ethan noticed that someone was getting into his footlocker and eating his chocolate. He couldn’t figure out who it was, and he didn’t want to make a big announcement about it. So he wrote to me and had me get a bunch of chocolate ex-lax bars for him. Then I took the wrappers off the Hershey’s bars and wrapped them around the ex-lax bars.”
“What’s ex-lax?” I asked.
“It’s a medicine that makes you poop. It looks and tastes just like chocolate.”
I laughed. What would they think of next?
“Anyway,” she continued, “I wrapped up the ex-lax so they looked like Hershey’s bars and sent them off like I always did. Ethan later wrote and said two of his shipmates spent three days in the head before they finally figured out what had happened to them.”
By then I was laughing so hard I couldn’t swallow my fries. Mom laughed, too.
“So when I eat a Hershey’s bar, I think of Ethan. I guess that’s why I like them.”
I paused in my laughing to take a breath. “So do they still sell chocolate ex-lax?”
Mom gave me a warning look. “I’m not going to answer that. By the way, Abby called to remind you of her art show tonight.”
“Like she’s given me a chance to forget in the past two weeks,” I said as I crumpled up my burger wrappings.
“It seems like she’s always so busy,” Mom said. “I’m surprised she has time to do everything.”
“Yeah, that’s Abby.”
“Does she hang out with anyone besides you and Rob?”
“What do you mean? We’re her best friends. Why would she want to hang out with anyone besides us?”
“No, I mean, is she seeing anyone?”
I shot her a look of disbelief. “Mom! She’s not even fourteen yet. Why would she be seeing anyone?”
“Just curious. I don’t know when kids these days start pairing up. Abby’s the ambitious type. I could see her being interested in that.”
“Trust me, Mom. Nothing is further from her mind. All she’s thought about for six weeks now is the art show. And if I don’t get going, I’m going to be late. Then I won’t hear the end of that for another six weeks.”
I tossed my trash and hit the sidewalk. Even as I heard the clanking of tools in the garage bay echo across the street, I couldn’t help but wonder why Mom was asking those kinds of questions about my best friend. Abby going out with somebody would have been as ridiculous as me having a girlfriend. Sure, there were kids in our classes who did that, but Abby? Me? I laughed out loud. Where did Mom come up with this stuff?
I turned down Robles Drive and headed for our apartment in the cool evening air.
Chapter 5
I found the only button-up shirt I owned under my bed. It was a little wrinkly, but it smelled okay, so I put it on. Rob met me out on the sidewalk. He wore slacks, a collared shirt, and a navy blue bow tie.
“What’s with the tie?” I asked. “Abby didn’t say anything about wearing a tie, did she?” She had given Rob and me specific instructions for the event, right down to what we were supposed to wear.
“No. But I told Marcus I was going to a cultural event and he let me wear it. I tried to talk him into letting me wear the shiny vest that matches it, but he said I already looked like a geek.”
“Sounds like good brotherly advice.”
Rob fingered the bow tie. “Do you think it’s too much?”
“Rob, you’re asking me about clothes? I’m not even sure if I wore matching socks yesterday.”
“Yeah, I don’t think you did.”
As we headed down the street, Rob quietly pulled the bow tie from his collar and stuffed it into his pocket when he thought I wasn’t looking. I tried not to smile.
“Hey, how’d that thing with Melissa go?” Rob asked.
“Mission accomplished. Not too many tears. You missed out on an easy twenty bucks.”
Rob shrugged.
It didn’t take long to walk down to the community center. It didn’t take long to walk to a lot of places in our part of town, although to get to the east side was a different story. Our side of town still had a small-time feel to it: big enough that you didn’t know all the kids you passed on the street, but small enough that their moms probably knew your mom. But the east side had a bunch of new subdivisions and business areas that kept growing and growing. They had opened a new middle school the year before, and filled all the nooks and crannies at the high school with portables. There were people everywhere.
“What are all these people doing here?” Rob asked. Dozens and dozens of people milled around
the front lawn of the community center, shaking hands and talking. They were dressed in coats and ties or fancy gowns—and each one of them was way older than my mom. It looked like bingo night for the rich and famous.
I rubbed my hands down the front of my shirt, trying to smooth out the wrinkles. “Maybe Abby didn’t tell us quite enough about what we were supposed to wear tonight.”
Rob smiled as he pulled the navy blue bow tie out of his pocket and clipped it back onto his collar.
We worked our way to the front entrance, clinging to the building to make ourselves as invisible as possible.
“Are you sure we’re in the right place?” Rob asked after an older lady wearing too much makeup patted him on the head as she walked by.
“Well, isn’t it usually old people that like to go to art galleries?”
“Quentin! Rob!” As we neared the front entrance, Abby hurried toward us. She wore a soft purple dress and her shoes had little heels on them. I’d never seen her wear shoes with heels on them before.
Abby grinned as she grabbed each of us by an arm. “Can you believe this? The community center got double-booked somehow. The Sixty-Five-Plus Club is having their annual social tonight, and lucky for us they loved the idea of having their social at our show. Isn’t that awesome? They’re expecting over two hundred guests—and they’ll all see our artwork. Come on!”
Abby’s energy practically shot through her fingertips into my arm. I couldn’t help but smile to see her so excited. She was like a bag of microwave popcorn when she got like that. Just press START and watch her go.
We passed through the foyer and into the main hall of the community center. It wasn’t a huge place—I doubted the whole Sixty-Five-Plus Club could have all fit, even if it hadn’t been set up like an art gallery. Moveable half walls blocked off sections of the hall into several smaller rooms to display the artwork. People—not all of them old, I was glad to see—moved slowly between the walls. At the front of the room sat half-a-dozen refreshment tables stacked full of sugar, fat, frosting, and whatever the other food groups are. They were like heavy cargo ships ripe for plunder.
The Heartbreak Messenger Page 2
