Smart Mouth Waitress (Romantic Comedy) (Life in Saltwater City)

by Dalya Moon

  The three white people in the kitchen looked back and forth at each other. None of us could disagree.

  Donny said, “White people like Wes Anderson movies, farmer's markets, and,” he looked right at Courtney, “Asian girls.”

  She took a little curtsy.

  Toph said, “White people like brunch, and Portlandia.”

  Normally, I'd stick around and play Stuff White People Like, but I wanted to get home and look at those sketches of Cooper.

  As I stood by the back door, I said, “I love you guys,” to my coworkers.

  They all made disgusted faces, as was the norm.

  Chapter 19

  Back at home, after I took a good look at the sketches I'd made of Cooper, I started dinner.

  A couple of weeks into looking after dinner almost every night, most girls my age would have been serving frozen dinners and toast, but I'd kept up my end of the bargain with my parents.

  I actually enjoy cooking, especially if I can experiment with the recipes. My mother's had me help with the cooking since I was old enough to safely reach the stove, back when we lived in Dunbar. The first thing I made was preserves, using fresh figs from the tree in our back yard. Both of our houses have had fig trees, so it's hard for me to believe other people don't have yummy fresh figs in the summer.

  That Tuesday night, I made what we call Stolen Soup.

  One weekend afternoon, Mom and I had some incredible soup at a cafe, so she used the phone on her camera to take a picture of the ingredients, which were on a card next to the specials. The card was probably there to help people with allergies, not to give away the recipe, so we had a cackle over our criminal activity. The proportions weren't listed on the card, of course, but we'd experimented at home and concocted a soup that was even better than the cafe's.

  Stolen Soup:

  2 cans of black beans, drained but not rinsed

  1 can corn niblets

  1 fried onion

  sliced carrots (as many as you like)

  Cover with chicken stock and cook until the carrots are soft, then add:

  3 cups of chopped, cooked chicken

  1 can diced tomato

  Season to taste with:

  1-2 garlic cloves

  freshly-grated ginger

  1 tsp curry powder

  2 tbsp peanut butter (secret ingredient!)

  1 tbsp soy sauce

  1 tbsp honey

  1 tbsp dijon mustard (another secret!)

  My Stolen Soup that night turned out magnificent, as always. Dad wrinkled his nose and said it was “gumbo, not soup,” like he always does.

  As we were digging into the soup, made with a minimal number of carrot slices to keep Dad and Garnet happy, all three of our phones buzzed or rang with incoming messages.

  “Mommy,” I said.

  “Mommy!” Garnet cried, and we all raced to get our phones out.

  As I read the message, an emotion came over me that made my stomach feel bloated, like I'd never be hungry again. I pushed my bowl of soup away in disgust.

  To my surprise, Garnet started to cry. He didn't just cry little tears down his cheeks, either. He bawled, his mouth turned down in a grimace, sobs coming out of him.

  This set me off, and pretty soon the two of us were blubbering.

  The text was, indeed, from our mother, and she'd said she was staying in LA for “at least another month.”

  My father set his phone on the table and finished eating his soup.

  “This is better than how your mother makes it,” he said of the soup, which only set off Garnet's wails again.

  I said, “Dad! That's all you've got to say?”

  “I just live here,” he said, clearing his bowl and spoon away into the dishwasher.

  Garnet wiped his nose and face with his shirt. “Dad! You can't let her do this to us.”

  “Your mother's a free spirit,” Dad said, his voice eerily calm. “She can't soar with the eagles if she's stuck here with us turkeys.”

  “Spring break's coming up,” I said to my brother, trying to sound upbeat for his benefit. “We can check for a seat sale and fly down there for a visit. I've got some money saved up. What do you think of that?”

  “She doesn't want her children there,” Dad said.

  Angrily, I yelled at him, “She didn't say that! Don't make it worse than it has to be!”

  Without answering me, he took a few steps toward his computer den, then turned and went in the direction of the front door. I heard his keys jingle, then the front door slammed shut.

  I tried to grab Garnet for a hug, but he pulled away.

  As he sulked, I tried to reassure him. “We can talk about everything when Dad gets back from his drive.”

  “Talking doesn't do anything,” Garnet said.

  “Now you sound exactly like Dad.”

  “Yeah? Well you sound exactly like Mom, and I'm not very happy with her right now.”

  “No shit. Me neither.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “I don't need you. I can take care of myself.”

  I pointed to my chest, stunned by the hate in his face. “Who are you talking to? I'm not Mom. Don't be mad at me.”

  “You made her go,” he said.

  “Uh, no way! Like she listens to anything I say!”

  “You're dead to me,” he said, pushing past me to look in the fridge.

  I was dead to him?

  Thinking about his hateful words, I wanted to grab him by the arm and smack his freckled little face, slapping away that bad attitude.

  He grabbed a can of Coke from the fridge and took it up to his room.

  I looked at the text message from my mother, searching for information that wasn't there. She cited a “creative breakthrough,” whatever that meant. I didn't have to be a mind-reader to know my father was assuming the worst, and that the “creative breakthrough” involved some attractive keyboard player who had a key to her room.

  At the risk of painting our family in a trashy light, I should mention there was a time Garnet's paternity was questioned. His face shape didn't match anyone on Dad's side of the family, and my father sent away some hair samples to one of those mail-order DNA places. It seems ridiculous now, when you see the two of them next to each other, but a few years ago, Garnet had more of a baby face and he didn't look like anyone in the family. We'd joked about him getting switched at the hospital.

  The good news was the test came back showing my father was Garnet's biological parent. The bad news was, despite being so careful about having the results mailed to him at his work place, Dad used their shared credit card. Mom googled the mysterious name on the statement and figured things out on her own.

  My father made it so much worse for himself by lying and saying the test was for someone at work. Then he yelled a bunch and stormed out of the house.

  Dad gets worked up sometimes with the yelling, when he goes into overreaction mode instead of avoidance. He scares me when he gets like that, because he's not himself anymore, like when someone's really drunk, or sleepwalking. His eyes are open, and he's seeing you, but it's not him. It's the Anger Monster.

  After the credit card showdown, which took place on a Saturday morning during an otherwise-normal pancake breakfast, things were different in the house.

  Dad slept downstairs on the sectional sofa for almost three weeks—long enough for me and my brother to assume it was the New Order of Things—until one day I came home from school and discovered my father and mother giggling in the big downstairs bathroom, the sounds of splashing coming from the tub.

  Thus ended the Paternity Incident of 2009, which I'd assumed would be their one and only low point.

  Until she sent the message about staying in LA for another month.

  I got tired of pacing downstairs and went up to my room, taking the front stairs so I wouldn't go past my brother's door.

  I looked at all of my mother's clothes in my laundry hamper. The opportunity-spotting part of my brain lit up. Another month
of doing laundry and cooking dinner? That hadn't been part of our original agreement. Even at minimum wage, that extra month of work had to work out to some serious money.

  I pulled out my phone and angrily stabbed the screen to send a message to my mother: When available, please call to discuss $ compensation for housework.

  She didn't call, but messaged me immediately with: When available, please call to discuss $ for rental of bedroom.

  Oh, yes she did.

  Well played, Mom. Well played.

  That was when I got the buckets of paint out of my bedroom closet, hunted down the brushes and painting supplies, and started painting my room. Garnet heard the noises and came to investigate.

  I said, “I thought I was dead to you.”

  “I'm a kid. I don't mean stuff I say.”

  “You hurt my feelings.”

  He frowned. “No I didn't.”

  “You're not the baby anymore. You've grown two inches this year. Your innocent kid routine isn't going to cut it.”

  He seemed genuinely troubled by this revelation. “What should I do?”

  “Learn to apologize.”

  He ruffled his hair with one hand, looking sheepish. “I'm sorry I said that stuff. I miss Mom.”

  “I miss her too,” I said. “But while she's gone, I'm going to do some things, like finally paint this room.”

  His eyes got wide. “Can I paint my room too?” he asked.

  If one painted room would annoy my mother, two would push her to madness. I nodded. “Yes, you can. You have my permission.”

  He jumped up and down. Honestly, you've never seen a boy so excited about interior decoration. “I'm going to paint it black,” he said.

  “As well you should. But you have to help me with my room tonight, and we'll do yours tomorrow.”

  He picked up a brush. “Mom would never let us do this.”

  “I know. That's what makes it so fun.”

  He immediately slopped a big droplet of paint on the hardwood. “Oops,” he said.

  “You're a big boy. Go get some paper towel and clean it up.”

  He pointed at me. “Bro! Right! I'll do that.”

  My father got back from his drive and stopped in to see what we were doing. I expected him to turn away in disgust, ignoring the problem, or possibly overreact with a little screaming. What I didn't expect was support.

  “I never liked the pink,” he said.

  We didn't ask my father for permission to paint Garnet's room, because I figured it was better to beg for forgiveness and have a cool room in the color you love than ask and get turned down.

  Sometimes it's better to take what you want.

  The next day, after work I went by the paint store near our house and paid for Garnet's paint out of my own account. The man at the counter kept repeating to me that the charcoal color was meant only for trim or accents, and not an entire room.

  “My brother is fifteen,” I said. “Can you imagine how cool this is going to make him with his friends?”

  The man shook his head and loaded the paint into the shaker.

  The idea of the paint had cheered Garnet right up. None of us had discussed the bad news about my mother staying away an additional month.

  Putting a smile on my brother's face was a great use of forty dollars. Plus, it would really piss off my mother. All for forty bucks.

  Wednesday night we finished painting my room and started painting Garnet's, doing just the edging. On Thursday night we did three full coats of nearly-black charcoal on his walls.

  One unexpected bonus of the project was we discovered the source of the smell in Garnet's room.

  It wasn't so much one source as two: a pile of liquid that may have been a banana, plus a furry thing in the closet that may have been a living furry thing, or a sandwich. Whatever the furry thing was, we scooped it up with a dustbin and didn't check for bones.

  When our work was done, Garnet's black bedroom was a thing of striking beauty. Our house has thick, white molding and window trim, plus extra-deep crown molding where the wall meets the ceiling. We left the trim and Garnet's ceiling white—a specific Benjamin Moore shade of white that Mom paid a designer to pick out—so his room didn't look so much like the blackness of outer space as it did a smart-looking tuxedo. After we put his framed sports jerseys back on the wall, covering the biggest expanses of black, the wall color didn't seem that unusual, to my disappointment.

  I said, “It looks so awesome, I wonder if Mom will have a hard time hating this.”

  “No, she's going to freak,” he said reassuringly.

  Even though we were done painting, I had gotten comfortable hanging out in Garnet's room, and I lingered there, looking at his paperback books while he used his laptop, sitting on his bed cross-legged and propping the laptop up with a beanbag-like laptop pillow my parents originally bought for me to use. Several of the paperbacks on his shelf had originally been mine as well.

  “It's been fun hanging out with you,” I said.

  “Kyle wanted to help me paint, but I haven't told him yet that the you-know-what is gone.”

  “Do you think he would have wanted to smoke them tonight?”

  Garnet shrugged. In my head, I heard one of those TV-special messages for parents. Talk to your kids about drugs!

  I get it, I said back to the voice. I'am talking to my kid about drugs, even though he's not my kid. We'd also had our little heart-to-heart about sex not even a week earlier. I was pretty much the best parent ever, considering I was only three years older than the little sweat gland.

  “How many times did you guys smoke up?” I asked as I casually pulled out one of his Harry Potter books. I wondered if the book was the one we all stood in line outside the book store for, to buy at midnight. Dad had taken us, and he'd had the night of his life, hanging out with all the other Dads his age, enjoying the costumes and fun.

  How quickly we had gone from lining up for books to talking about drugs.

  “Just once, but it didn't do anything,” Garnet said.

  “Promise me something,” I said, remembering my session with the eyebrow piercer, when she'd made me promise not to go under a piercing gun again. “Promise you won't smoke up again until after you're eighteen, when your brain isn't developing. When I was your age, one of the boys at school went psychotic because of pot.”

  Garnet blew air out of his mouth noisily. “Yeah right.”

  “I'm not lying. They'll never know if he was going to develop schizophrenia on his own, but the marijuana sure didn't help,” I said.

  Garnet closed his laptop and stared at me silently. “Is Uncle Jeff schizophrenic?”

  “We're not sure what he is,” I said. “Hey, don't look so sad. You can drink all the beer you can get your hands on, and I won't say a word. Just stay away from the hard stuff.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  A pleasant feeling came over me.

  I was so proud of my conversation with my brother, I almost wished my mother had been there to see it. She would also hate the charcoal-black walls. That made me smile.

  My brain shivered with the little I'm-forgetting-something feeling I get when I haven't checked for text messages in several hours, so I pulled out my phone.

  “That's odd,” I said.

  Garnet didn't look up from his computer.

  I sat down next to him on his bed. I had a friend request from the last person I'd expected to friend me. Actually, the request wasn't Courtney's girlfriend Britain, so I guess that would make it the second-to-last person.

  Sunshine Cooper had sent me a friend request. Bubbling with curiosity, I accepted, and ran to my room to look at all her photos on my laptop.

  As I was enlarging some pictures of her, looking for evidence of any flaws in her creamy skin, I got an instant message from her.

  Sunshine: How do I know you?

  Me: You're the one who requested me.

  Sunshine: I know. You looked familiar and Facebook suggested. Who are you?
<
br />   Who was I? Besides the girl who liked her ex-boyfriend and also her brother?

  Me: I'm the smart mouth waitress from The Whistle.

  She disappeared, logging off. Anticipating a rapid un-friending, I quickly right-clicked on a bunch of her photos, saving them to my desktop for future analysis. Before she had dyed her hair blue, pierced her eyebrow, and got the cute swirly tattoo on the one eyebrow, she'd looked like a regular girl you'd know from school. She looked like a Chloe or a Jenny.

  Her profile showed she was going to beauty school, and planning to work in TV and film. “Lucky you,” I said to my laptop screen, even though I knew I could go to beauty school if I wanted.

  I had liked the idea of that type of work, until we had career day at school and I attended a session with a working hair stylist. The woman had talked for several minutes about her neck, back, and foot pain. She then moved on to even less inspiring topics, such as inhaling toxic hair-straightening chemicals.

  That particular career fair, all the people I picked seemed depressed and miserable at their jobs. I guess you'd have to be unhappy, to leave your work to go to a high school and talk about your career.

  I wished people would have been more up-front about the salary. If they do tell you, it's the annual wage, and you have to divide it a couple times to figure out what the pay is per hour. If I were setting up a career day, I'd put the hourly wages next to the name of the career, right there on the sign-up sheet. Wouldn't that be useful?

  On my screen, Sunshine hadn't reappeared. I was ready to go to bed, early so I wouldn't sleep in Friday and waste my day off by being unconscious through it, but my stomach was doing flip-flops over the idea of Sunshine logging back in to talk to me. How could I sleep?

  I even had a little story concocted about what she might have been doing!

  Maybe she wanted to get Marc back for herself, so she wanted me out of the picture, with her super-hot brother.

  You know how you like an idea so much you convince yourself it must be true? That was how I felt that night about the whole Marc and Cooper situation.