Somewhere Between Bitter and Sweet

by Laekan Zea Kemp

  A guy half Angel’s size with a pathetic excuse for a mustache follows behind him. He’s wearing a bright green bandana and a tool belt slung over his hips that’s full of various utensils and plastic containers filled with different colored sauces.

  “Xander, this is Lucas. You’re gonna hang with him today.”

  He holds out a hand and I shake it, my own coming back sticky.

  “I’ll just leave you two to get acquainted.”

  Lucas looks me up and down for a good thirty seconds, then smiles. “Listen, I like you. I think you’ve got a real future here, and if you stick with me, you’ll be just fine.” He leads me back toward the kitchen. “There’s just a few things you need to know first. Now,” he lowers his voice, “the big doof that introduced us, that’s the boss’s oldest son, aka our manager.”

  “Manager?” I stop. “Seriously?”

  Lucas rolls his eyes. “Yeah, don’t get me started on that one. The good thing is he doesn’t give you shit when you’re late.”

  Lucas leads me around to the prepping stations. He points out two guys with the same black hair, both chopping onions with the same methodical crunch and swipe.

  “The Medranos. Completely identical except for Aarón’s… Well, let’s just say he got electrocuted when he was still just a dish boy and he’s never been the same since. Idiot was trying to plug in the radio after scrubbing down a plate. Whole place lost power.”

  We move past the prep station to the washroom, a small alcove with four sinks, two of them already piled high with dishes. The scrawny kid with braces snaps on some gloves. He reaches for one of the plates, and Lucas pulls me back behind the wall so he can’t see us. Then we both watch him pick off some old food and toss it into his mouth. My stomach turns.

  “And how many times has he been electrocuted?” I ask.

  Lucas sighs. “Who knows? That’s Struggles.”

  My brow furrows. “Struggles?”

  “Yeah, because he always looks like he’s struggling to live.”

  Struggles takes another bite off the dirty plate.

  Or struggling to die.

  Lucas waves me forward. “That’s Chelo.” He points out the girl with the frizzy topknot.

  “I think she growled at me earlier.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about her. She growls at everybody. Partly why she doesn’t work front of house anymore.”

  “Partly?” I ask. “What’s the other part?”

  Lucas looks me dead in the eye. “You don’t want to know.” He nods to the tall guy next to her. “That’s Sang. Been here so long he’s practically a Prado. Their families are tight, and Sang will snitch you out in a heartbeat to prove it, so don’t get on his bad side.” Two pretty girls walk by, stealing Lucas’s focus. “Andrea and Mari,” he says, his voice low. “Both waitresses and both total bitches.”

  I want to ask why, but I sort of suspect it’s probably just because they won’t sleep with him, which has bruised his outrageously inflated ego. I could tell Lucas was sort of a creep from the moment I met him, and the side-eye he’s getting from Andrea and Mari only confirms my suspicions.

  He slides over to them, gross smirk on his face. “Ladies, have you met my friend here? Uh,” he leans toward me, “what’s your name again?”

  “Xander.”

  “Right. Xander. New guy.”

  “Yeah,” Andrea says, unamused. “We saw him.”

  There’s an awkward pause, the girls waiting for Lucas to say something worth their time and Lucas probably waiting for me to do the same.

  “Oh well, then… I guess we’ll catch you later.…” Lucas pulls me around the corner. “Christ, man, I thought a guy like you would have some kind of game.”

  “A guy like me?”

  “Yeah, you know,” he waves his hands, “pretty.” He shakes his head. “Forget it.” He starts toward the kitchen and then immediately throws himself back against the wall. “Oh shit.”

  “What is it?”

  “Pen.” He peers around the corner again. “Oh no, and she’s got her Rosie the Retributioner face on.”

  I remember the girl in the bathroom with her red bandana.

  “Who’s Pen?”

  “Pen, also known as Penelope Prado, also known as Nacho’s oldest daughter, also known as Head Bitch in Charge.”

  “I thought you said Angel was the manager.”

  “Yeah, and who do you think manages him?”

  I remember the quake in her voice, the tears on her face. “Come on, she can’t be that scary.”

  Lucas is still clutching the wall, fingernails digging into the grout as he watches Pen from across the room.

  I nudge him. “Can she?”

  “Sometimes she can be… almost pleasant,” he forces out. “But tonight’s her last night. The old man fired her this morning.”

  “His own daughter?”

  “Apparently she lied to them about going to school. For an entire semester.” He averts his gaze. “Shit. Here she comes.”

  Pen rounds the corner, those bright-red lips leading the way. She purses them, eyeing Lucas and me, and it reminds me of the sweet seam along a cherry. Until she opens her mouth.

  “For fuck’s sake, Lucas. We’ve got thirty new orders. Where the hell have you been?”

  “Just showing the new guy around.…” He takes one long step out of reach. “That’s all.”

  “His shift started half an hour ago. I’m pretty sure you’ve covered it by now.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” He throws up his hands. “We’re going.”

  She crosses her arms in response, watching us the entire way back to Lucas’s station. Lucas turns to me, about to say something, when a horn blares. I reach for my ears and see a guy with blond hair gripping an air horn.

  “That’s Java,” Lucas yells.

  “Let me guess,” I yell back. “Deaf?”

  “Only in his right ear.”

  The drumming of Angel’s tongs clashes with the horn and then everyone is yelling. Angel races around the kitchen in this strange half gallop, half dance, banging on equipment, slapping people on the back of the head.

  “You know what that means, fuckers! We’ve got a rush!”

  He finally makes it back to the grill, the rest of the room in a flurry. People run back and forth from their stations, grabbing bowls and rags and spices. Angel switches on the stereo, and in all the chaos I can hear the first line of “Suavemente,” Elvis Crespo wailing about besos and wanting to feel sus labios.

  Suddenly, every instrument has a culinary utensil equivalent. Angel takes care of the drums while Chelo, who I hadn’t realized could manage more than a growl, takes care of vocals. She screams into her spoon, switching between the one in the refried beans and the one in the mole verde. Lucas plays some strange version of the xylophone on the condiments strapped to his waist, and the guy with the air horn does a power slide straight into Pen’s legs. He puckers his lips at her and she swats him with a wet rag.

  “Ready for your crash course?” Lucas asks.

  I strain over the music. “Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.”

  Lucas winks and hands me a pair of tongs. “Angel grills, we plate. Basically, we’re two rungs above Struggles over there.”

  Steaming meat slides in our direction, Lucas leading it onto a plate before glancing up at the ticket. He reaches for his belt, covering the meat in some orange sauce and then using his gloved hands to load it with toppings from the trays in front of us. There’s cilantro, onions, lime wedges, corn salsa, avocados, and chili peppers. Ten different kinds of salsa, all marked with different colored tape that read either PUSSIES, NIÑOS, BADASS MOFOS, or LOCO. I assume they’re heat indexes, and when Lucas tells me to fill some plastic cups with a few milds, I reach for the salsa marked PUSSIES.

  “Whoa, careful.” Lucas points to a bottle out of sight.

  I pull it to the front and it reads GABACHOS.

  “Pen…” Lucas taps the salsa I reached for first. “Took off
ense to the labels. Now Pussies is the hottest salsa we have.” He dares to glance at her.

  She’s chucking a plate of enchiladas into the trash and spewing something hateful in Angel’s direction.

  “What did you mean by two rungs?” I ask.

  Lucas nods around the kitchen. “Well, you’ve got your dish boys, like Struggles, who are last in the pecking order.” He gestures to the identical twins. “Then you’ve got veggie prep. Then you’ve got platers, like us.” He points to the burners next to the grills, each one topped with a huge steaming pot. “Right there’s your special teams, and then on the grills you’ve got your starting lineup. Fish, then pork, then poultry.” He points at three guys to the right of Angel, their heads shaved, tattoos bleeding out from their buzz cuts. “And Angel’s the quarterback. He takes care of the most important food group—the red meat.”

  “Nice analogy.”

  He smiles, stopping to wipe his nose on his sleeve.

  I notice Pen breaking off some fresh cilantro into one of the pots on the stovetop.

  “And what’s Pen do?” I ask.

  “Everything. Almost the entire menu is from that big, bossy, beautiful head of hers.”

  She shoves Angel to the side and checks the meat on his grill. She says something about an order coming back too well-done and he just sighs, elbowing her out of the way.

  “And they’re still firing her?”

  “I give it two weeks. Tops,” Lucas says. “They’ll beg her to come back. Or maybe she’ll just sue her dad for, I don’t know, copyright infringement for all of her recipes, and then they’ll have to close the place down and none of us will have to step foot in this godforsaken dive ever again.”

  “You don’t like working here?” I worry for a second about what exactly I’ve gotten myself into.

  “I don’t really like work in general.” He laughs.

  “Then why do it?”

  He nods to the stack of plates to my left and I reach for one.

  “Got to. I’ve got three younger sisters and… well, my dad can’t exactly work”—his voice is suddenly flat—“since he’s sort of dead.”

  Porcelain shatters, cutting through every sound in the entire kitchen. People stop what they’re doing, turning to stare, and I know that my show of confidence earlier in the night has officially been erased. This is who they’ll remember.

  I kneel, scooping the pieces into the hem of my shirt. “I’m sorry.” I don’t know if I’m apologizing for the plate or for what Lucas just said. Maybe both.

  A pair of bright-red Vans step into my field of vision. I look up and Pen is holding a broom. She hands me the dustpan.

  “I got it. Thanks.” I scrape up the last pieces and feel a sting.

  “Shit.” Pen scans the room. “Can somebody get a towel?”

  Lucas hands her the rag hanging from his waist.

  She rolls her eyes. “A clean one?”

  Angel hands her a blue towel and some hydrogen peroxide. I dump the broken plate in the trash and try not to drip on the tile as Pen leads me back to the employee bathroom. She holds my hand over the sink and then she pours the peroxide over the wound.

  “Sting?”

  I shake my head and she pours some more, wound fizzing.

  “Wait here,” she says, the door shutting behind her.

  I try not to look at myself in the mirror, but after a few seconds I have to. My heavy breaths smear the glass, and I wait for Lucas’s words to rise up through the fog. A premonition. The answer to a question I used to be too afraid to ask. A question that has consumed me for the past six months, ever since I finally felt strong enough, angry enough to start looking again. For my father’s new life. For his body.

  My mother wasn’t the only one who disappeared. He left us first when I was just barely old enough to remember. To miss him. Hearing my mother say goodbye had cauterized those wounds. But the ones my father left behind were still wide open. Festering.

  And in that festering, my fears told a story with only two possible endings—that my father was alive and wanted nothing to do with me, or that he was dead and the past decade of searching didn’t matter.

  Pen pushes back through the door. “Here.” She presses a bandage over the cut, blood already showing dark through the padding. She puts the gauze between her teeth, ripping it, and then she leads it around my palm, twisting until it’s tight.

  I don’t realize I’m not blinking until everything blurs, smearing her face and mouth, which is just inches from my skin, her breath brushing the tips of my fingers. She lets go of me and seems to pause too, her eyes somewhere between expectant and hesitant.

  “Thanks.”

  I linger. I should get back to Lucas and his plates and his toppings bar. But I don’t want to go. And it isn’t just because once I do I’ll look like a total jackass.

  “You should, I mean, we should get back.” Pen throws the door open without looking at me, and then she’s lost in the shuffle of the kitchen, her carefulness suddenly gone as she shoves one of the buzz cuts out of the way and tears the tongs out of his hand.

  I reach for the apron closest to me, tying it around my waist.

  “The rush is finally dying down,” Lucas says, not acknowledging what just happened. I’m relieved. “We have some time to run through a few of these dishes a little slower if you want.”

  Lucas pulls down a plate, loading it up with some refried beans and rice before showing me how much meat to load into each taco.

  I try to pay attention, to memorize the measurements, the placement of the food. But I keep glancing over my shoulder. I keep looking for Pen. Because I’m still not sure which version is the real one—the girl in the bathroom who wrapped my bleeding hand or the girl who makes the special teams shudder every time she walks by.

  She orbits the room, checking orders, tasting the food, breathing down people’s necks, casting strange looks in my direction. I focus back on the plate in front of me.

  “You got that?” Lucas eyes me, waiting.

  “Yeah.”

  He narrows his gaze over my shoulder. Pen is looking back. She scratches at her arm before heading out to the front.

  Lucas faces me again. “Oh no.”

  I ignore him, fumbling with the tortilla I’m holding.

  “Oh, hell no.”

  “What?” I keep my voice low, hoping he’ll do the same.

  “Don’t go there, man.”

  “Go where?”

  “You know where. Trust me on this one. You do not want to mess with Pen.”

  “I’m just,” I keep my voice cool, “making tacos.”

  “Yeah.” He slams another tortilla into my hand. “And you keep making those tacos.”

  By the end of the night I make one hundred and twenty-six tacos, my fingertips blistered from the heat of the comal. Then I walk home on numb legs, every step on that empty street making my ears ring.

  Halfway down the block, lights swell behind me. I spot the side of the police cruiser, every muscle stunned. The window clicks, rolling down slowly.

  “First day done.” Officer Solis smiles. “Need a ride home?”

  It takes me a moment to shake off the fear.

  He sees it too. “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”

  I open the door, sliding inside. “It’s okay. I’m just exhausted.”

  He laughs. “That’s what I like to hear. So, tell me all about it. Was it what you expected?”

  I look down at my food-stained clothes, sweat sticking the grime to my skin. “Uh, not exactly.”

  “Let me guess.” He cocks his head. “Better?”

  I remember the cut on my hand, the wound making it stiff. Then I remember Pen.

  “Definitely better,” I say.

  “That’s good.” He turns down my street.

  “Thank you.…” I stare into the floorboard. “Again.”

  He pulls into the driveway. “Don’t mention it.”

  There are a million things Officer So
lis has told me not to mention. Like the time he pulled me out of a scuffle during gym class when he was still the student resource officer at my high school. Or the time he dropped a few dollars on the floor at the convenience store and pretended like they were mine. Then there was the month he drove my abuelo back and forth from his doctor’s appointments because his bronchitis was getting bad and I wasn’t old enough to drive. He used to buy me lunch in the hospital cafeteria while we waited.

  He’s kept a close eye on me ever since he found out from one of the counselors at the school that I was undocumented. His parents used to be undocumented too, until he sponsored them and they became legal citizens. Because of some stupid rule—something called a derivative—my abuelo can’t do the same for me, and I don’t exactly have any “immediate relative relationships” to speak of at the moment.

  But Officer Solis has always treated me like family.

  “You know, I really think this is going to be good for you, Xander. A chance to finally feel settled here.”

  In return for all that he’s done for me, all he’s ever wanted was for me to feel like I belong. But I’ve been undocumented for so long, it’s hard to shake the feeling that I’m not always welcome. Or safe.

  Officer Solis puts the car in park, dims the lights so they don’t wake up my abuelo. Then he pulls a business card from his shirt pocket. “Have you told him that you’re looking again?” He doesn’t hand it to me, waiting for an answer.

  “Not yet.”

  “But you will.”

  I swallow, trying to imagine that conversation causing my abuelo anything but pain.

  “It’s his son, Xander.”

  “And he’s my father.”

  Officer Solis exhales. “You’re right, but their history’s much longer.” He nods to the front door. “And that man’s raised you like his own. You owe him the truth for that reason if nothing else.” He hands me the card. “Just… do this the right way.”

  “Is there one?”

  He looks at me. “Always.”

  4

  Pen

  MY MOTHER IS WAITING for me in the kitchen when I wake up. Just like I knew she’d be.

  My last shift at the restaurant ended at 2:00 AM, but I stayed late, helping Angel get things ready for the morning. Something I would have saved for the next day if there were going to be a next day. But there won’t be.