by C. J. Birch
“Huh.” Hayley crumpled her napkin. Across the street a woman in an oversized blue raincoat pushed a shopping cart overflowing with cans and bottles. The wind kept whipping at the tarp covering the top. As she turned into the gates of the park, her cart caught on a bump and overturned, spilling cans and bottles everywhere.
Hayley sipped her latte, watching the poor woman scramble to pick everything up before the wind caught them and took them away.
A woman with a red umbrella stopped to help. She was in a skirt and ankle boots. All Hayley could see as she bent to pick up a can was long, tanned legs poking from beneath her umbrella, which she’d turned to the side to reveal its heart shape. It was encouraging to see that some people in the city had compassion. So far that hadn’t been Hayley’s experience. It wasn’t that they didn’t care. It was more that they didn’t want to show the weakness of caring, in case it was rejected. One thing for certain, very few people put themselves out there, too afraid they’d look foolish. Every single person she’d encountered so far appeared more worried about their reputation than giving a shit.
Hayley sat mesmerized for a few moments before drawing her attention back to Kalini, who was caught up in giving advice. One thing was for sure—people weren’t afraid of giving advice.
* * *
Lauren swept into Greta’s with a gush of wind and rain, her uniform soaked from helping a woman pick up a cart full of empties. Living above the diner had its perks, especially in winter. She usually dashed down the alley in nothing more than a sweater. Today, when she saw the woman struggling, she’d crossed the street.
Lauren hated how indifferent this city was. She’d lived here her whole life, and the only time people came together was during a crisis. Her dad was always saying meanness was a disease that could only be cured with an act of kindness. So if she wanted people to be nicer, it started with her.
Vic sat at one of the booths doing a crossword puzzle. She raked her fingers through spiky red hair, tugging the ends as she contemplated the clues. The beats of Daft Punk filtered from the kitchen. She shook her umbrella and hung it on a hook near the door, nodding to one of the regulars at the end of the bar on her way to the back.
Ezra was showing their newest hire around the kitchen. Lauren grabbed a towel from a stack near the freezer and wiped her uniform down, contemplating going back upstairs and changing before her shift. Ezra caught her eye above the head of the new line cook, whose name she could never remember. His eyebrows rose high into his forehead, a classic sign he was unhappy in his current task. Last night she’d listened to him complain about how stupid this new guy was.
As always, Ezra was dressed as if he were about to hit the clubs. His tight black V-neck conformed to his torso, sculpting his muscles like shrink wrap. His black jeans were clean and tight, proving Ezra didn’t have an ounce of fat on his body, and the black beanie he wore covered his ears and neatly trimmed blond hair.
The man standing next to him was a lesson in contrasts. He’d shoved his shaggy brown hair into a hairnet, but most of the back had fallen out. His baggy jeans hung low, with grass stains on the knees. He was the third line cook they’d gone through after Pete quit. He was hired last week, and this was only the second time he’d been able to work.
Ezra was explaining the different stations as he retied his crisp white apron. “Orders come in here. When it’s dead like now, the servers will just shout their orders, but when it gets busy, we ask that they write them down and attach them to the carousel.” His eyes widened at Lauren as he said this. She had a bad habit of forgetting to write hers down.
The new cook bobbed his head, obviously processing, then looked up at the carousel. “So…the orders come in here? And then what happens?” Ezra pursed his lips. He’d told Lauren he suspected the new guy was on drugs or medication, because it took forever to get a sentence out of him. He paused every few words.
“We prepare the orders,” said Ezra, grabbing a rag and wiping down an already pristine counter. “That’s—that’s your whole job. Line cook. We just spent twenty minutes going over that part.”
More head-bobbing. “Right…okay.”
Ten minutes later, Ezra slid into a booth across from Lauren, who was refilling napkin dispensers. “He needs to go, Lauren. The guy is seriously deficient in the brains department. I just spent the last five minutes explaining what a spatula was.”
“What’s his name again?”
“Does it matter? He’s dead weight. Anyone working with him will spend most of their time practicing fire prevention.”
Lauren pointed a finger to the back. “And you left him alone in there?”
Ezra waved her off. “I’ve got him counting plates.” Lauren raised her eyebrows. “It’s keeping him busy until you can go back there and fire his ass. I’d rather work the dinner shift on my own than have him in there with me.”
Lauren groaned. As she saw it, she had two choices. She could trust Ezra and fire this new guy, which would put Ezra in a good mood, and that always made working with him easier. It meant they’d be rushed all night and might suffer some tips because of it. And she’d have to start looking for yet another line cook.
Or she could keep this new guy on, which would piss Ezra off, and they’d probably be just as rushed if Ezra was right. And that’s what it came down to. Did she trust Ezra’s opinion?
Lauren tightened her ponytail and squared her shoulders. She hated firing people. “Call Theo. See if he can come in,” she said. It was a long shot. Theo rarely agreed to work when called last-minute, but it was better to ask than assume. A bit more wisdom from her dad there.
Ezra clapped once. “Awesome. Thank you.”
* * *
That night, her last night with a roof over her head, Hayley pulled out her laptop to create her fallback résumé. She hadn’t had a lot of experience looking for jobs. She’d spent most of her life working at her parents’ grocery store. It wasn’t very big, not like the super chains outside of Casper Falls, but it was big enough for the essentials like produce and eggs and milk. They had a bakery section with fresh bread delivered every morning. It was boring as hell and the best incentive to get out on her own.
Now, after less than a month here, she’d already failed. She hadn’t told her parents what had happened. She couldn’t face her mom’s fake cheer or her dad’s disapproving silence. And she didn’t want them to worry. She’d phoned her sister Hannah instead, who was always one to wash the glitter off the second she got home.
“You should tell them.” Hannah’s voice was firm. Someone screamed in the background. It sounded like two kids fighting over a toy.
“Where are you?”
“At the clinic. I hate keeping secrets for you. I suck at it.”
“Why are you at the clinic? Is something wrong?”
“Derek and I are getting an ultrasound. Well,” she paused, probably looking over at Derek as she said this. “I’m getting the ultrasound, and Derek is here to make sure I don’t ask what the sex is.” Hannah was just over four months pregnant with their first baby, and Hayley had almost decided not to come here until after the baby was born. But she knew if she hadn’t left, then she never would have. Yet after what had happened with Violet, she’d needed to get away.
“Oh my God. I can’t believe I’m missing this. You’ll have to send me all the pictures.”
“You could just come home, and then you wouldn’t miss any of it.”
Hayley pulled the covers over her head and sank lower on the bed. “I can’t, Han. I need to do this, even if it sucks and I have to get a crappy job again. I can’t come home a failure.”
More screaming. “I know. I do. I get it. You’ve always needed to find a bigger pond. And I want you to. But I keep thinking you’ll get your fill and move back home.”
Home. It might be home to Hannah, because she had a great life there. She was a dental hygienist with a husband, a house, and two dogs. And now she was expecting a baby. She might be older than
Hayley by three years, but she’d always known what she wanted. Hayley envied her that. At twenty-eight, Hayley still had no idea what she wanted to do with her life, only that she didn’t want to live it out in Casper Falls as the gay younger sister of one of the most popular graduates of Casper Falls Secondary School.
As shitty as her first month had been, it was also the most exciting of her life. Everything here was amazing—the noise, the controlled chaos, the extravagance of choice. She lived within walking distance of three pizza places, a sushi place—which was questionable—a Mexican restaurant, two Indian restaurants, and the best shawarma place she’d ever eaten at. There were bars and clubs and cafes and bookstores, old game shops. She’d almost bought a retro Super Nintendo until she realized their TV wouldn’t connect to it. And by tomorrow she wouldn’t own a TV, so it was for the best.
“I think I’m hooked, Han.”
She spent the rest of the grey afternoon building a new resume topped with bullshit. She’d print some off tomorrow. Kalini had mentioned that if she was applying for restaurant or retail jobs, it was best to show up in person with a real live copy of your resume. At least this way she’d get to see a lot more of the city. If she’d been working this whole time, she’d have a very narrow view of the neighbourhoods. It wasn’t much of a silver lining, but she’d take it.
Chapter Four
Lauren taped the LINE COOK WANTED sign back up in the front window. It had so much previous tape on it, she was starting to wonder if the sign was bad luck. The soft humming coming from the kitchen made her smile. When she’d told Ramiro about the new cook, he’d shrugged and said they’d find someone better this week. She hoped that was true, for going through the hiring process was painful.
The rain and drizzle from yesterday had given up, and the sky warmed with the approaching sun. The bell above the door chimed, and Luna, their youngest server, strolled in, stuffing the last of a breakfast wrap in her mouth. Lauren noticed the logo on the front of the dark-brown paper.
“Where did you get that?”
Luna tucked the paper in her bag and shrugged. “Down the street somewhere.”
“Grnds?”
Luna slipped her jacket off and hung it on her hook in the back. She pulled her long platinum hair into a top bun and switched into her running shoes. “Can’t remember.” Luna was a terrible liar, not because she was into honesty, but because she usually didn’t care enough to try to be convincing.
“Ramiro, did you hear that? Grnds is selling breakfast wraps. They’ve expanded into actual food.”
Ramiro stopped humming for a second. “They any good?”
Luna shrugged. “It’s all the same thing, isn’t it?” She pulled out a piece of gum and stuck it into her mouth.
“No gum-chewing in the front,” said Lauren as Luna passed by and smiled in her overly-sweet-it-must-be-fake way.
“I don’t want to smell like egg. I’ll get rid of it before anyone sees.”
Lauren rolled her eyes and said in a voice only for Ramiro, “She drives me nuts.”
Luna folded an apron around her waist and stuffed her order pad into the front pocket. She’d worked here for just over a year now, but to Lauren it felt like a million. Luna came in on time, mostly, and did a good job, but something wasn’t quite genuine about her.
“Waffles,” Luna shouted through the order window. “Hold the fruit. And a cluck-and-grunt flop ’em with whiskey down.”
Ramiro set to work pulling the waffle batter out of the fridge and pouring it into the waffle iron. “What are you really worried about? Most cafés have breakfast items.”
“Sure, bagels and those horrible breakfast sandwiches at Starbucks, but nothing actually good.”
Ramiro slapped four pieces of bacon on the griddle and grabbed two pieces of rye toast and placed them in the toaster. “They may take some of our to-go business, but we could get one of those fancy espresso machines so we can pull some of their hipster business our way.”
“Aaron will never go for that.”
“Not to worry, sweetums.” He gave her a side hug, making sure to keep his clean hands free of her uniform. “We’ve been here forty years. We’re a staple in this neighbourhood. People love us.” He waved a spatula at her. “Plus our food is better than Hipster Dan’s over there.”
“Don’t call me sweetums,” she said as she shoved him playfully toward the griddle.
It wasn’t so much that she was worried Grnds would take some of their business; they’d already done that. Greta’s had been steadily losing customers to them since they opened two years ago, but not enough to do any real damage. She was worried about Aaron. He was already paranoid about how much money they were pulling in and was going to go ballistic when he found out about this.
Lauren tightened her apron and headed to the front. The place was picking up for the morning rush. In the next two hours the seats at the front counter had a line—always a good sign. As soon as one customer got up to leave, another would sit down. And the booths were always full. There were only the five of them, and Luna was good at turnover. Lauren had to give her that. She might not like her attitude sometimes, but Luna was a great server.
As breakfast died down and they finally had a moment to breathe, Lauren could almost believe Ramiro. They’d be fine.
* * *
“Sorry. We’re not hiring at the moment.” It was the same thing Hayley had heard from over a dozen places that morning. She gave them her fake smile and walked out. She’d been looking for hostess jobs, since they didn’t involve math skills or anything more than being able to take reservations and deal with seating people. She suspected her blue hair was yet again the culprit. Yet again she nixed the idea of dying it to conform to others’ expectations. She’d come to the city partially because she’d expected people would just accept her as is. This was who she was, and she didn’t feel like she had to change in order to fit in.
She had to broaden her search. Most of the places were hiring line cooks more than servers or hostesses. Maybe she could get hired as a cook somewhere. She’d never worked a grill, but how hard could it be? She was a fast learner. She’d spent her whole life watching her mom and grandma in the kitchen and knew a lot more about cooking and baking than she did about managing someone else’s schedule. And as Kalini said, everyone lied on their resumes. The trick to keeping the job was backing up those lies with competence, which Hayley knew she had. She could wing it for a week while she picked up the specifics of the job—no problem.
She stopped in at Grnds to grab a table to fix her resume. By the time she was done with this process she’d probably have five different ones, depending on what she was looking for. The place was cramped, and the only spot was at one of the window stools. Didn’t people work in this city? Maybe not. Maybe everyone was like her, in constant search mode. It still didn’t explain how they paid for things.
She decided to save money by getting a plain coffee and the cheapest thing on the food menu, a piece of day-old banana bread. This would be her breakfast and lunch, so she took small bites to ration it.
Once she’d added a few items of relevant work experience to her resume, she saved it to her USB drive and headed over to the Sanderson library to print off ten copies.
Hayley wanted to find a place in walking distance of her new digs so she didn’t have to take transit anywhere. It would save her six bucks a day, and keeping her spending down right now was everything. The place she’d found to stay wasn’t great. In fact, it was downright horrible.
The Palace Arms, a short-stay hotel, rented rooms by the hour. The neon hourly rate sign had drawn her attention in the first place, although the building itself was hard to miss. The brick was painted a light pink, and it had turrets, like a castle. At one point in history it had probably been upscale, but unfortunately for Hayley, that was probably a century or two before she was born.
Her room smelled like mildew and stale beer. The paint was stained with nicotine, and the window di
dn’t have curtains, which meant the streetlight outside illuminated the room all night, but it was dry and cheap, two things Hayley desperately needed at that moment. She kept telling herself that as soon as she found a job, she could start saving up to find some place better, although at this point, almost anything was better.
With her fresh resumes still warm from the printer, Hayley headed into the autumn afternoon.
* * *
Lucy stuck her head into the kitchen. “Aaron’s here.”
“Rats.” Lauren flicked her finger into the bathroom sink. Blood flecks splattered the white porcelain. “Why does he always show up during a rush?” She wrapped some toilet paper around the cut on her finger, and it quickly turned red. “Stupid one-ply.” She grabbed the roll and wrapped it several times around her finger. When it looked like a giant moth cocoon, she popped open the first-aid kit and searched for a Band-Aid. They desperately needed a resupply. The only Band-Aids she could find were Star Wars. No doubt Theo had been the last to make a supply run. She discarded the mass of one-ply into the trash and wrapped the scowling face of Chewbacca around her index finger.
Aaron was sitting at a stool at the end of the bar, taking up valuable real estate. He was dressed in a dark-grey suit that cost more than Lauren’s entire wardrobe, dumping sugar into a coffee. A silver tie was thrown over one shoulder to keep it from dipping into his mug.
Lauren had known Aaron since he was in his late teens, and besides the clothes, not much had changed. He’d always had an air about him that he was better than others. What made it worse was that he tried to fit in, make it appear like he belonged in a diner wearing a two-thousand-dollar suit.
When he spotted Lauren he turned toward her, creating a screech so loud the entire diner stopped for a second.
Lauren pointed at the stool. “You’ve been promising me for months you’d have that fixed. I had a kid in here yesterday who sat there for an hour twisting back and forth. At least five people left because of it.”