Black Ember

by Ruby Laska

  “Yes,” Caryn said firmly. “I can start today.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Zane was mashed between Chase and Jimmy in the jump seat of Matthew’s battered red pickup. The guest of honor rode shotgun and his future sister-in-law drove while treating them to an uninterrupted torrent of un-asked-for advice.

  “Don’t forget to drink at least one glass of water for every ounce of alcohol you consume,” she fretted as she pulled into Buddy’s parking lot.

  “You already said that,” Jimmy pointed out.

  “Well, I’m saying it again. Remember that salted food will bloat you, and we all want to look our best for photos, don’t we?”

  “Right,” Matthew said, opening the door the minute she rolled to a stop and jumping out. “Thanks Deneen, love you, bye.”

  The rest of them beat their own hasty exit. Zane followed Matthew into the bar, hoping that Deneen wouldn’t have second thoughts and pursue them. She had interrupted their dinner to take pictures and make sure they weren’t getting too rowdy and then insisted on driving them to the bar, even though they had already been planning to get a ride from a friend.

  Women, Zane thought as his eyes adjusted to the dim lighting in the tavern. Buddy’s was doing a brisk Thursday night business, every seat at the bar taken and most of the tables as well. There was Opal, rushing around with a tray full of drinks, while Turk mixed drinks and wiped down the bar as though he had an extra set of hands.

  “Are you drinking or just looking?” a female voice demanded behind him. “Because I don’t have all day.”

  He turned to find himself staring at a woman with enough piercings in her face to set off a metal detector. Besides the hoops in her nose and eyebrows, she sported clips on both ears and a leather choker studded with brass nailheads. Her thick eyeliner had smudged, and her lipstick was a garish purple.

  “Excuse me,” Zane said coolly. Naturally, his friends had moved through the bar to a table near the back, leaving him here to deal with the hostile biker chick. “I wasn’t aware that I was in your way.”

  “You’re not,” she snapped. “I’m taking your order.” When he still didn’t respond, she added with a roll of her eyes, “I’m the new waitress.”

  “Oh,” Zane said, surprised. Buddy had told him just the other day that he’d pretty much given up on finding another waitress unless he could compete with the signing bonus that The Black Swan was offering or the hourly wages that Wal-Mart was paying. Evidently, he’d had to settle for an incompetent and unfriendly candidate instead. “Well, then, I guess I’ll take a beer. No, wait, make that a couple of pitchers, to that table back there.”

  He pointed to the back of the bar, but she was already gone, threading her way toward the bar. Jimmy watched her ass sway as she moved, thinking it was a damn shame that such a fine body was inhabited by such an unpleasant personality.

  At their table, Chase was telling the story of how Jimmy came to join the football team during their junior year of high school. The story had already been told once earlier in the evening while they were enjoying massive rib eye steaks and baked potatoes at DuBonnet’s.

  This second, drunker version of the Jimmy story went off on a wandering tangent punctuated by hoots of derision and comments that had nothing to do with the subject, but everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves, and that was what mattered. But when Chase changed the subject to a discussion of which of their middle school teachers had been the hottest, and the surly biker chick waitress still hadn’t shown up with the pitchers, Zane decided to go see what the problem was.

  He spotted Opal, the waitress who had been working at Buddy’s ever since it opened, moving among the tables with a tray, dropping off a drink here and a tart remark there. Despite her age, Zane was pretty sure Opal could handle the place by herself on an ordinary night, but on weekends, the locals came out in force. Unlike the oilmen who frequented the bars in town seven nights a week, most of the folks who came to Buddy’s had been doing so before the oil boom ever started, and would be here long after it was over. There were ranchers and delivery men and truckers, cops and firemen and shop owners and even the mayor once in a while. The locals had been suspicious of the bunkhouse crew at first, but after a few months of beer and darts and small talk, Zane and his roommates had started to blend in. And now that Chase’s girlfriend Regina, a country music talent scout who lived in Nashville, was booking acts a couple of times a month, people seemed to have forgotten that they were ever outsiders.

  There was no live music tonight, though. Buddy had canceled all performances until he could find enough help to serve every thirsty customer. And it was a good thing, too, because from the looks of it, the bartender was being taxed to his limit.

  “Hey, Turk,” Zane called over the shoulders of the customers lining the bar waiting for their drinks. “I can see you’ve got your hands full, but our waitress seems to have forgotten our pitchers.”

  “I don't guess you mean Opal,” Turk scowled as he slapped a drink down in front of an older gentleman and pocketed the tip left by another customer.

  “No, it was the new girl. The, ah, forceful one.”

  “That’d be Carrie, aka Barracuda. Opal hired her this afternoon, though I think she’s beginning to have second thoughts. Opal tried to train her during happy hour and the gal didn’t even know what a well drink was. She said she was experienced, but that’s got to be a bald-faced lie because she didn’t even know how to write up a tab. By the time we got the basics drilled into her, place was filling up.” Turk shrugged. “And it’s been pretty much like this ever since.”

  “Huh. Buddy did say he was getting pretty desperate to find someone…”

  “Yeah, he really wants to keep his weekends free for Melanie, but if this chick doesn’t work out he won’t have any choice but to come in and help out.” Turk grabbed a couple of plastic pitchers from a cabinet and pulled the taps to fill them, angling the pitchers expertly to get the perfect foamy head on top. “Between you and me, Buddy could have hired Bullet, and he would have done a better job than that girl.” Turk’s old hunting dog was a regular fixture at the bar on slow nights; Turk had trained him to carry checks to customers, though he couldn’t be trusted around the popcorn and pretzels.

  “I heard that.”

  Zane turned to see the waitress elbowing her way to the bar. A faint sheen of perspiration shone on her forehead, and her hair looked even more disheveled than it had earlier. One of the buttons on her shirt had fallen off, revealing the skull design on the tank top underneath. Most bizarrely, rivulets of some dark brown liquid were tracing their way down her face and neck, staining the neckline of the tank top. It almost looked like she’d poured a glass of prune juice over her head—which, given the heat generated by the press of bodies, might not be the worst idea in the world.

  “Well, if you heard that, Barracuda, what stopped you from hearing that table in back wondering where their order was?” Turk groused. He pushed the pitchers across the bar at Zane, who started digging in his pocket for his wallet.

  Barracuda-slash-Carrie turned and glared at Zane. “Did you call me over to your table?”

  “Well, no, not technically,” Zane said, peeling off a handful of bills. “I sort of thought we’d do our chatting when you brought our drinks.”

  “I was getting to that,” she snapped. “As you can probably see, there are a lot of customers here.”

  “It might help if you didn’t keep messing up the orders,” Turk said, pushing the bills back at Zane. “Don’t worry pal, this round’s on the house. To make up for our employee issue.”

  The waitress stood up straighter, her eyes narrowing. “The only employee issue I can see here is that there aren’t enough staff. And, you’ve got a lousy business model if you’re giving product away.”

  She turned and stalked off toward a four-top where three men and a woman were belting out an old Willie Nelson tune along with the jukebox.

  “Man,” Zane said. “I don’t s
uppose Buddy knows about this yet.”

  “He knows Opal hired someone,” Turk said, his irritation giving way to worry, his leathery forehead creased. Zane knew that despite his long hair and beard, leather vest and tattoos, Turk cared deeply about his boss, who had served with him in Iraq. “But he doesn’t know what she’s gotten us into. And I’m not inclined to tell him until Monday…”

  “Yeah, I understand,” Zane said. “Anything I can do?”

  Turk snorted a laugh, already moving down the bar. “Two problems with that. First, you’re none too steady on your feet, son, and second, unlike Barracuda, you ain’t near pretty enough to make up for sucking at your job.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Caryn watched the tall, lanky customer head back to the table where his friends waited, sloshing beer the whole way. Beer which, Opal had made clear, Caryn would be mopping up before she clocked out for the night.

  She hadn’t exactly forgotten the group in the back; as she struggled to catch up on her tables’ orders, she just kept putting off bringing them their beer. It wasn’t anything personal, but she’d overheard them say they were celebrating a bachelor party, and that brought up some rather tender memories.

  Of course, the dark-haired, handsome cowboy good-naturedly trading barbs with his friends—the groom du jour—was nothing like Nathanial. For one thing, his spine wasn’t fused stick-straight, and for another his shirt probably didn’t have a three-digit price tag, and—

  “Galloping gorgons!” Caryn exclaimed, the phrase she and her therapist had agreed she would use to interrupt thoughts that were going in the wrong direction. Which was to say, back toward her disastrous failed engagement. Caryn had been trying to distract herself by re-reading the Harry Potter series at the time, and Hagrid’s colorful vocabulary was the first thing to come to mind when the therapist suggested she choose a phrase.

  “Excuse me, darlin’?” asked a wide, short man wearing a uniform shirt bearing a logo for a snack food company. Caryn wondered why he couldn’t be bothered to change out of his work clothes before stepping out for the night, then reminded herself that she wasn’t versed in the local customs.

  “Uh, nothing,” she said.

  “I could swear you said ‘galloping gorgons,’” the man said. “Reason I ask is, I’m reading The Sorcerer’s Stone to my nephew on my days off. The little fella can’t get enough of that stuff. Course then again, neither can I.”

  He chuckled, and Caryn relaxed. She’d endured a few whistles and leers this evening, but most of the clientele at her bio-dad’s bar seemed genial and harmless.

  “Saw you talkin’ to Zane,” the man continued. “Now, there’s a smart one.”

  “Oh, is that his name,” Caryn said, loading her tray with the drinks Turk had lined up on the bar. “I didn’t really catch it.”

  She kept her eyes focused on the tray, afraid that the customer would see the interest in her eyes. Well, she was only human wasn’t she? Even back in New York, Zane’s model-worthy face, those pale gray eyes, the way his jeans molded precisely to his very nice rear end, would draw attention. Maybe especially in New York. Caryn had to admit that there was something irresistible about the local men: they were sun-browned, wore jeans faded and washed until they fit perfectly, and had the kind of muscles that came from hard work, not from the gym.

  “Yep. He’s part of that crew that came up from Arkansas last year to work on the rigs. Now they’ve made it through a Dakota winter, I imagine we’ll never get rid of ’em.” He chuckled again at his own joke before ambling off to watch a pool game.

  Caryn stared off at the table for a moment. Arkansas…one of the many states, along with North Dakota, that she’d never visited. Her mother’s idea of a vacation featured see-and-be-seen hot spots like Miami and Vale and Nantucket. And once Caryn started dating Nathanial, they tended to focus on destinations where he could ski or sail. That left out the nation’s midsection, an omission Caryn seemed destined to make up for now, after three decades of not knowing what she was missing.

  She focused on attending to her customers, who were beginning to settle up and make their way out into the warm June evening. When there was finally a lull, Opal leaned against the bar and dabbed at her forehead with a handkerchief.

  “How are you making out, sweetie?” she asked, patting her apron pocket where she stashed tips, the coins jingling.

  “Oh, I’m not sure,” Caryn said. All evening long, she’d dumped the wadded bills and coins into her skirt pocket, unable to take the time to count.

  “Well here, let’s take a look.”

  Opal began smoothing out the bills and stacking coins while Turk set a club soda with lime in front of her without being asked. Caryn thought about asking him for one, too, but he hadn’t been very friendly all evening and she didn’t want to alienate him further by presuming.

  The two women counted in silence for a moment, then Opal folded the stack of bills and put them in her wallet, and swiped the coins back into her apron pocket. Wiping her hands on a bar rag, she said, “A hundred eighty and change. You?”

  Caryn had been trying to square up her own smaller stack of bills, but at the figure Opal named, she stopped and gaped. “Seriously? I only made thirty-two dollars.”

  Opal exchanged a look at Turk, who burst out laughing before wandering down the bar, shaking his head. Opal looked like she was having trouble keeping her mirth to herself. Dabbing at her chin delicately, she said, “Well, I think I might have had more tables than you.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Caryn mumbled. She was surprised how much it stung, to have failed at her first night as a cocktail waitress. She’d done her best, and she thought she’d been pretty successful, considering it was her first time—she hadn’t dropped any drinks, she’d made accurate change, and she’d thanked every patron, no matter how rude or drunk. Sure, Turk had been annoyed with her from the start, especially when he’d had to re-do a couple orders she got wrong, and Opal’s patience had worn thin when she neglected the customers she kept forgetting were seated in her section. But she eventually had gotten to everyone—well, except the guys in back—and she thought she’d improved over the course of the long evening.

  “I’ll do better tomorrow,” she added in a quiet voice as she shoved the money in her pocket.

  “About that,” Opal said, not meeting her eyes. “Listen, sweetie. You gave it a good effort, you really did. Only I’m not sure you’re really cut out for this work.”

  Caryn’s heart sank. Was she really about to be fired? It wasn’t just humiliating, it shook her confidence to the core. The only other job Caryn had had, before starting her design business, was an internship that her stepfather got her at his studio’s New York offices, where the staff treated her with kid gloves and refused to assign her any tasks more challenging than proofing interoffice memos. She’d received only rave reviews from every teacher, colleague, and employee she’d ever had, and she was proud of the business she had built with her hard work. But she never forgot that it was her stepfather’s money that had paid to launch the business, and her mother’s friends who’d supported her by buying her early collections. Even though she’d repaid Randall’s loan within two years, and had customers all over the globe, she’d never shaken the feeling that she’d been handed the job instead of working for it. Without Georgia and Randall’s help, she’d still be struggling.

  Deep in her heart, Caryn had always wondered who she would have been without their help. Well, now she was getting a chance to find out—and she’d failed almost before she’d started.

  After the sleepless night, the long flight, and the exhausting shift, what Caryn really wanted to do was sink to the floor and have a good cry. But this was supposed to be a journey of discovery.

  For most of her life, the thought of her biological father had filled Caryn with a complicated mixture of anger and longing. Only now that she was thirty years old had she begun to understand just how much his absence had affected her.

  Bein
g the stepdaughter of a movie star had its compensations, but it had its drawbacks, too, especially since she wasn’t the extrovert her mother was. Georgia never tired of the attention showered on her by the paparazzi and the press, even now, a decade after her divorce from Randall. She had parlayed her fame and generous settlement into a philanthropic empire, and no one enjoyed the social whirl that went along with her life more than she did.

  Georgia hadn’t been a bad mother, but she certainly hadn’t been a conventional one, either. Caryn’s earliest memories were of her mother dressing her up to go out in Beverly Hills and Hollywood. Even as a little girl, Caryn understood that the well-dressed men who paid attention to her mother factored in their future. A relationship with a minor soap opera star led to an introduction to a European director who in turn introduced Georgia to a famous, if decades-older, film actor. By the time Caryn was in grade school, Georgia’s relentless social climbing had finally paid off, and she hit the big time.

  Randall Carver in person was not the brooding, handsome screen hero that the rest of America knew. To Georgia he was a ticket to the life she’d always wanted for herself and her daughter; to Caryn he was, finally, a man she could start to think of as “Dad.” He came to her recitals and softball games when he was in town; he paid for her to switch from public school to an exclusive private academy. Even after he left Georgia for a twenty-two-year-old swimsuit model (she had been only two years older than Caryn) he continued to take her to lunch every few weeks. She received tickets to all of his premiers and invitations to every holiday at the home he now shared with his young wife and infant twins. And of course he paid for her college tuition and arranged a trust into which he had transferred enough money that she would never have to work unless she wanted to.