by Laila Lalami
After a few days working at the restaurant, I found that I could take care of all my duties and still have time to run to the store for supplies or to the bank for quarters and nickels. Still, I had forgotten how physically taxing food service was, how much my feet could swell or my arms ache from a single day’s labor. How did Veronica do it? Or Rafi? By the end of my shift, when my only thought was of how long it would take me to get to the cabin and collapse on one of the porch chairs with a beer, they still looked as fresh as they had when they started their day.
But the best at this line of work was Marty. I could never keep up with him. He had his own set of habits, too, like carrying extra straws in his apron pocket so he wouldn’t have to walk back to the wait station every time a customer asked for one. Without needing to be told, he changed the channel on the stereo when the music got too loud for an elderly couple, or lowered the shade when the afternoon sun streaming through the windows made a toddler squint. He knew several of our customers by name and talked to them like old friends. He would close the restaurant every night, and when I opened it in the morning, I would find that he had given me a head start by restocking the jam caddies or refilling the sugar dispensers.
Late one morning, while I was at the wait station with the paper napkins I had just bought on my run to Costco, Marty left the cash register and came to talk to me. “Miss Guerraoui,” he said, taking off his glasses and letting them dangle from their retainer, “are you taking over from your mother?”
“I’m just trying to help out.”
“I see.”
“If I missed something, let me know.”
“As a matter of fact, there is something.”
“What is it?”
“Your father promised me a raise last year, but we had to replace the freezer and he told me it had to wait. Then a couple of months ago, he ordered that fancy new sign you see outside, so I brought up the raise again and he said he’d do it. But then he passed away and now, who knows what’s happening?” He swept his hand in a gesture that took in the entire restaurant. “I’m not even sure who’s in charge around here.”
I swallowed. “I’m in charge.”
“So you’re gonna give me that raise your father promised? Twenty-one dollars an hour, that’s what we agreed on. Twenty-one.”
“That makes sense,” I said cautiously. “I’ll talk to my mom about it.”
Marty gave me a disappointed smile, as if he suspected all along that this would be the answer, and went back to the cash register. I retreated to the back office, wondering how I would bring this up to my mother. I had a good notion of what she might say—that this was my problem now, she never wanted to have a restaurant, we should sell this place as soon as possible. It would set off another argument about the future. Then again, every conversation with my mother ended in an argument about the future.
For the past few days, I had been thinking of how best to use the insurance settlement my father had left me. It was an enormous amount of money, and I had already used some of it to pay off my student loans, but it wasn’t enough to buy the restaurant outright. If I wanted to keep it, I would have to buy out my sister and somehow convince my mother to hold on to her share. And there were other expenses I had to consider as well: the back door of the diner needed a new lock, the dining room could use another coat of paint, and the menus had to be updated. Holding on to the restaurant meant having employees and keeping track of timecards and deciding on raises and a million other responsibilities.
But if I agreed to sell, my share of the proceeds combined with what remained of the life insurance money would easily buy me four years in the Bay Area. Twice that long if I stayed in the Mojave. I would finally have the time and the means to work on my music. I could afford to travel to music festivals, take master classes if I wanted, or just stay home and work. It was an incredible gift that my father had given me. The only thing that made it less sweet was that Anderson Baker would succeed in running my father out of town. That, I couldn’t accept. Even though selling the restaurant and walking away made plenty of sense, a part of me stubbornly wanted to hold on to it.
Jeremy
Aside from a couple of walks around the neighborhood, Nora said no whenever I asked her if she wanted to leave the cabin, go out for a meal or a movie with me. I didn’t press her. Years in the service had taught me the value of patience. I’d learned to wait for an order, wait for a signal, wait for an air drop, wait for a pickup, wait for the bathroom, wait for the phone, wait for my deployment to end. So I considered it progress when she agreed to come to dinner at my house one night. I drove straight to the Stater Brothers after work to pick up a few groceries and was reducing the sauce for the chicken when the doorbell rang. She was wearing a red sundress with tiny straps that I immediately imagined sliding off her shoulders later. I stepped aside to let her in and closed the door behind us. She stood in my living room, taking it all in: the blue couch I’d inherited from Ashley and Tommy after they upgraded their furniture; the big stereo I’d bought with my combat pay and that no longer looked as impressive as it had when I returned home; the game controller on the floor. Her eye lingered on the Iraqi banknote pinned to the corkboard by the sliding door. I brought out the bouquet of peonies I’d bought for her. “What’s the occasion?” she asked, with genuine surprise.
“They’re in season,” I said, suddenly too embarrassed to admit that I was trying to turn a homemade meal into a proper date. I kissed her, the bouquet squished between us, its sprigs of lavender and green berries brushing up against our necks. “Do you want to take them home, or should I put them in water?”
“Let’s have them out. They smell so good.”
I emptied a canister of spaghetti and filled it with water, then put the peonies in it. I set it on the counter, where we’d be able to see it from the dining room. “Are you hungry?”
“Famished.”
“Good. I made a lot of food.”
She stood against the counter, watching me. “Who taught you how to cook?”
“I taught myself, after my mom died.” I held up a spoonful of the chicken sauce. “Here, have a taste.”
Her eyes widened.
“Too much salt?”
“No. It’s perfect.”
I carried the dishes to the table. In the two years I’d lived in this house, I’d never used the dimmer on the light switch in my dining room, but now I lowered it to an intimate level before I sat down across from her. For the first time I saw her eat, no, devour all the food on her plate—the chicken, the side of potatoes, two pieces of the French bread I’d almost taken out of my cart at the store because I didn’t think she’d eat it, the green beans, everything—and the more she ate the more she smiled and the more she smiled the happier I felt.
She told me about her day. A big group of women bikers had stopped by the restaurant for brunch, and the place had been so busy she’d had to get some folding chairs from the storage room, but afterward there was a long lull. She’d checked her email and found a personal rejection from a music festival in San Francisco, which thrilled her. I found this confusing, until she explained that she usually received form rejections, and getting a personal note with a few words of encouragement meant a great deal to her. It restored some of her confidence in her work. “What about you?” she asked.
“It was just an ordinary day,” I said. I tried not to think about work, if I could help it. A woman in Twentynine Palms reported that her son had stabbed her Chihuahua and she feared he might do it again. When I got to the house, I found her in the front yard, cradling the dog in her arms like a baby, its hind legs wrapped in blue bandage. Her son was in his room listening to music, she said, or what he called music, and also he didn’t have a job. She led the way inside, across an olive-green carpet covered with urine stains, to the son’s bedroom. He jumped up the moment he saw me. “You called the cops on me?” he
yelled. It took a good fifteen minutes to get his side of the story, which was that he had nothing to do with that fucking Chihuahua and that it had probably gotten cut by stepping on a razor the mother had left lying around. “Look around you, man. This house look clean to you?” he asked. The mother huffed, “A razor? I don’t have a razor. I’m not the one who shaves in this house.” While they argued, I watched and waited. It would have been hard not to notice the son’s skinny arms, his dilated pupils, the twitching of his hands as he talked. Sure enough, a pat-down turned up a couple of ounces of crystal meth. But as soon as I arrested the kid, the mother turned on me. She begged and cried and threatened, then followed me to the cruiser with the Chihuahua whimpering in her arms. When I put the kid in the back, the dog suddenly revived and, baring its teeth and snapping its jaws, tried to lunge at me. I told the woman to restrain her Chihuahua, but instead she released it and it flew at the cruiser window, then went sliding down to the ground, scratching the siding. And still it didn’t stop barking.
“Sounds kind of surreal,” Nora said.
“That’s how it is,” I said. The surreal was ordinary and the ordinary was surreal. “Ready for some dessert?” I took the pan of chocolate brownies from the oven. I’d made them from a box, but I added a swirl of whipped cream to each plate before I brought them out to the table. Not too bad, I thought, and with a hint of vanilla, too. But she wasn’t eating hers. “You don’t like brownies?”
“I do, but I’m stuffed,” she said, patting her stomach. “If I eat anything else, it might end up on my thighs.”
I laughed, then I saw that she was serious. “Come over here for a minute,” I said, pushing back my chair so she could sit on my lap. I held her close, running my hand along her legs and around her hips. “Your thighs are beautiful.” I moved my hand to her chest. “But my favorite part of you is this.”
“My breasts?”
“Your heart.”
Our eyes met. She looked away. “Don’t say things like that, Jeremy.”
“Why?”
“It’s going to make this complicated.”
“This is already complicated.”
Outside, the crickets were singing, a nighttime serenade I hadn’t paid much attention to until now, as I waited for her to speak. When she finally looked at me, I saw that she was appraising me in a new way. Something was being decided in that moment between us. I rested my head in the crook of her neck, but the doorbell rang, and I had to go answer it.
“Dude. Where you been? You’re late.”
Fierro was on my doorstep in a T-shirt, jeans, and the baseball cap he usually wore to the gun range. I was irritated at him for interrupting my dinner, at myself for forgetting that I’d agreed to go with him, and again at him for reminding me of my commitment. “Shit. I totally forgot.” Though I stood in the doorway, he walked past me, somehow alert to the smell of food and flowers and female presence. I followed him into the dining room, a strange knot forming in my chest. In one fluid motion, Nora stood up from the table and pulled up the strap of her dress, which had fallen down her shoulder.
“I didn’t know you had company,” Fierro said.
Nora smiled at Fierro and Fierro smiled at Nora and they both looked at me.
“Sorry,” I said. “Nora, this is Bryan Fierro. Bryan, this is Nora Guerraoui.”
“It’s lovely to meet you,” she said, offering her hand.
“Nice to meet you, too.”
“That’s a cool shirt.”
“You like Kyuss?” Fierro said with a grin. “I love ’em. I saw Josh Homme in concert a couple of years ago in Palm Springs. He was fantastic. I wanna go again when he comes to Vegas in October.”
“Maybe we can go to the range tomorrow night instead,” I said.
“You ever seen Homme in concert?” Fierro asked.
“No,” Nora said. “But I bet he’s great.”
“Dude. He’s awesome.”
“I read somewhere that he has a new band with John Paul Jones?”
“That’s right, they did Coachella two years ago.”
“Listen, man. We can go to the range tomorrow.”
Fierro glanced at me with irritation. “They have the Tuesday night special. And I want to try out my new Glock.”
“It’s all right,” Nora said, reaching for her purse. “I was just leaving.”
But I didn’t want her to leave. I wanted her to stay and talk to me and spend the night with me, holding on to me in her sleep. I wanted Fierro to leave and stop being so needy and get on with his life. As she made her way out, I followed, carefully closing the door after us. Outside, the weather had cooled; she shivered in her sundress.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I completely forgot he was coming.”
“It’s fine, really.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“Oh, and Kyuss?”
She laughed. “What? I was trying to be nice.”
I kissed her goodbye, then watched her get into her hybrid and pull silently out of the driveway. When I walked back inside, I found Fierro standing at the sink, eating a chicken drumstick he’d taken straight from the pan. I cleared the dinner plates and started loading the dishwasher, moving with practiced efficiency in my narrow kitchen.
Fierro turned away from the sink. “Dude. She’s smokin’ hot. Where’d you pick her up? I know it’s not at the gym. I never seen her there before.”
“I didn’t pick her up. Let’s go to Rod & Gun. I don’t want to drive all the way out to Twentynine Palms tonight.”
“She picked you up? Wow.”
“Nobody picked anybody up. Rod & Gun?”
“Rod & Gun closes early. She Mexican?”
“No. Let’s go to Pistol & Rifle, then.”
“Huh. She kinda looks Mexican.”
“She’s not.”
“What is she, then?”
“Moroccan.”
“Moroccan,” he repeated, as though it were a word he had never heard before. “Did you fuck her?”
Ordinarily, I would’ve said yes. I was not above bragging. In some deep, dark corner of myself, I was still a fat seventeen-year-old that none of the girls wanted—and somehow the opposite, too, a fit nineteen-year-old on home leave who all the girls suddenly noticed. Hell, yes, I would’ve said. I fucked her on this table right here. Twice. You should’ve seen the tits on this one, or that one gives fantastic head. But whatever it was I had with Nora was not the same. It was old, and yet it was new. It was muddled in a way that felt so different I didn’t want to talk about her, least of all with Fierro. I turned away and started wiping down the countertops. “I can drive to the range. But wash your hands. I don’t want your paw prints everywhere.”
Fierro squeezed some dish soap into his hands and turned the tap on. With a glance over his shoulder, he said, “Tell me you weren’t just sitting here talking to her about books or some shit. Tell me you fucked her.”
I walked past him to the bedroom, where I unlocked the safe and took out my gun. When I turned around, Fierro was standing in the doorway. He grabbed on to the doorframe bar and did a set of five pull-ups, just for the hell of it. Then he dropped down, fixed his eyes on me, and broke into a wide smile. “You fucked her, didn’t you? Good for you, dude.” He thumped me on the arm. “Now let’s go shoot some guns.”
* * *
—
A lot of people wanted to take advantage of the Tuesday night special, it turned out; the range was so packed and we had to wait our turn. The fluorescent lights cast a yellow glare on the vinyl flooring and the smell of men and guns and synthetic gear hung in the air. From the loudspeaker came an announcement that a lane was available for Casey. Fierro cracked his knuckles while we waited, and I leaned back in my seat and thought about how readily Nora had offered to leave when she found out I wa
s supposed to go to the gun range. The truth was, I couldn’t picture her in a place like this, either.
“Did I tell you Johnnie got caught masturbating in the towel section last weekend?” Fierro said suddenly. “He got fired. Which means Dexter gets to be supervisor. Which means I get to be department manager.”
“You got a promotion?”
“It just kinda happened. They could’ve picked Frank for the job, but they picked me. I don’t really know why.”
“Doesn’t matter. When something good happens to you, go for it. Don’t ask why. Just enjoy it. Congrats.”
“Thanks, dude. ’Preciate it.”
“See? That support group is helping you.”
He made a little whistling sound, a strange mannerism he’d picked up from Fletcher. After a minute, he turned to me again. “Hey, did I tell you I heard from Sarge? He started a beekeeping business.”
“Beekeeping?” I said, more out of surprise than interest.
“Yup. He’s got a place near Waynesboro. Seems he’s doing well.”
Fierro really looked up to Sergeant Fletcher. I did, too, in the beginning. The first time I saw him, he was standing in the brightness of a January morning with his hands on his hips, waiting for us to get in formation. He had very delicate features—brown eyes, a small nose, perfect teeth—which seemed oddly out of place in a barracks full of men who did their best to look tough. At all times, he remained calm. He never got worked up, never even raised his voice. He was from Fairfax County, Virginia. The kind of place where kids grow up with fencing lessons, math tutors, trips to the botanical gardens. Doctor dad, lawyer mom. How someone like him had ended up in the Marines, no one knew. Something about a brawl at a country club when he was a senior in high school, but that sounded to me like nothing more than barracks gossip. He’d already served in Afghanistan and now here he was in Iraq, with three stripes on his right sleeve. In the beginning he seemed aloof, whether because of his upbringing or his experience, I wasn’t sure. And it got worse when there was a reshuffling from the higher-ups and Lieutenant Carter was assigned to the platoon. The lieutenant was everything Fletcher wasn’t: average-looking, funny, approachable, always willing to play Halo or Call of Duty with the men after they got back to base. And he never minded when he lost a game to a grunt.