by Inman Majors
She paused to look at herself in the glass door, wondering how she’d gotten to this point. How exactly. But here she was. There was no getting around that. And if she wanted her own place and to avoid Uncle Doozy and his somnambulant mess hall, she had to start making—and saving—some serious money right now. Maybe she wouldn’t need two thousand. Maybe fifteen hundred would stake her to a new place. Even a thousand. Feeling a tad better about things, she stuck out her tongue at the fretting reflection, took a deep breath, then reached around for a quick backside adjustment. It was time to earn some dough.
“You know that’s my section,” Barbo said.
“Yes,” said Penelope, “I do. But they told Carrie they wanted me as their server and she accidentally sat them with me. You know she can’t remember the sections.”
“Well, that’s my section. Has been for eight years.”
“I know that, Barbo. I couldn’t care less if I wait on them. I’m just telling you they asked for me.”
“I’m window section. That’s my section. I don’t mess with other people’s sections.”
Penelope was about to say that she didn’t mess with other people’s sections either, especially not the gold mine that was the window section, but knew she was wasting her breath. Barbo wasn’t a conquering dictator, but what landmass she’d won fair and square after eight years of Coonskins battle, she planned to keep. Penelope could respect that.
Unfortunately, the restaurant was bursting at the seams—a girls’ softball team had de-bussed in the parking lot and a young couple with a little girl was just sitting down in her section as well. Penelope felt she was in some danger of getting in the weeds.
“How about this?” she said. “You take the table but explain why.”
Barbo shook her graying hair to this.
“Okay, I’ll take the table and you get my next one.”
“I don’t work the floor.”
It’s floor up there too, you dingbat, Penelope wanted to shout. But she knew that in Barbo’s mind, those three steps up to the window section, where customers had a once-in-a-lifetime view of the parking lot and the traffic on Lee Highway, were not to be trifled with. And now Cobb Salad was raising his tea glass for the third time, smilingly, but raising it nonetheless, and Carrie had just seated a softball family of five in her section and they were hungry-looking people.
A large portion of her wanted to tell Barbo to stick it. The other portion weighed the fact that Barbo was pushing sixty and still waiting tables and a creature of adamant habit.
“Okay. I’ll handle it. You take the table and I’ll tell them why.”
This answer appeased the Coonskins veteran and she whisked off to the kitchen for the necessary basket of peanuts.
How Penelope hated those stupid peanuts. Or, more specifically, the shells, which customers were encouraged to gleefully throw all about the floor. This was what customers liked best about Coonskins. Apparently, if you decorated the walls with coonskin caps and a few replica flintlock rifles with names like Old Betsy and Old Tick Licker, then scattered stuffed raccoons and foxes on every available ledge, what you ended up with was a veritable frontier roadhouse smack dab in the middle of a strip mall. And nothing, nothing at all, said roadhouse like a shitload of peanut shells all over the floor.
So kicking a few out of her way en route, she grabbed a pitcher of tea off the ledge where it had been guarded by an albino fox, topped off Cobb Salad with a smiling sorry to keep you waiting, and went to Barbo’s window section where the only two guys in suits in the restaurant were sitting. They were out-of-towners and had tipped her twenty bucks on a fifty-dollar tab two days before. Why Carrie couldn’t remember whose section was whose was beyond her.
“Hey guys,” Penelope said. “Sorry I can’t wait on you today. This isn’t my section.”
“Yeah, but we asked for you,” the silver-haired guy said.
“I know. But our hostess gets a little distracted sometimes. You know how teenagers are.”
Saying this, she glanced over her shoulder to the hostess stand where Carrie was currently texting and chomping gum and ignoring the elderly couple waiting to be seated.
“Which one is your section?” said the other fellow. “We’re not in a hurry.”
Penelope pointed down below, where the famished-looking softball family, all five of them, had turned to glare at her. She really needed to get a move on. Cobb Salad would need more croutons any minute now.
“Where those ladies are leaving?”
Penelope looked. Sure enough, her two-top was standing and shuffling the last of their peanut shells from the table to the floor, as if this was not just roadhouse custom, but the polite thing to do.
“Yes,” said Penelope, “but I have to run.”
“We’re going to grab that table,” said the silver-haired dude, rising.
This was trouble with Barbo, Penelope knew, but she had to go. She refused to get swamped this early in her shift.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll see you down there.”
“How bout some more peanuts,” said the burly, pink-faced father of the softball family, fairly shoving the empty basket, their third, into Penelope’s midsection.
The restaurant was teeming now, with ten or so people waiting to be seated. The softball players had mostly pushed their plates to the middle and were now talking or texting or refixing their ponytails under their caps. It was a cap-heavy crowd to be sure, with fully every softball father and about half the mothers donning the requisite Coonskins headwear.
Unfortunately for this softball family, the kitchen had lost their order, and they were none too pleased about the missing steak sandwiches or the AWOL curly cheese fries ordered a full thirty minutes before.
“I’ll fill this right up,” Penelope said. “And ask the kitchen to try to hurry. I’m really sorry about your order. They’re usually pretty on top of things.”
“That’s what they all say,” said the mother, who was wearing a T-shirt that bragged Elkton Softball Girls Go Long. The father smiled gruffly through his beard, and the two softball girls rolled their eyes and took long straw slurps of their Mello Yello. The youngest at the table, a boy about Theo’s age, threw a full peanut right past Penelope onto the floor then glanced around the table, smirking, as the rest of his family made a show of pretending to stifle laughs.
“I’ll be right back,” said Penelope, turning to leave.
As she did, a peanut hit her right on her denim-flat booty. The little pipsqueak in the Jeff Gordon hat had just plonked her, much to the amusement of his family. One of the girls sounded like she’d sprayed Mello Yello snorting at his antics, but Penelope didn’t turn to look. She couldn’t get rid of this family fast enough.
As she walked into the kitchen, one of the line cooks hollered out: “Eighty-six steak sandwiches.”
What? How did a roadhouse run out of steak? It was like running out of mixed martial arts on the seven televisions jammed in every cranny not occupied by a stuffed North American mammal.
“What do you mean?” Penelope said. “I’ve got five people who are already pissed waiting on them.”
“We’re out of the small sirloins,” the cook said, keeping his spatula on the grill and flipping other cuts of beef in a way that would have made sleepwalking Uncle Doozy proud. Penelope looked closely at the young cook and realized he looked less stoned than usual, maybe not stoned at all. And his hat was nearly straight on his head. Penelope found both these developments odd.
“Can’t we just use other steaks?”
“Nope. Not according to Marty. It’s burgers or a full-price sirloin for the rest of the day. Sorry, P.”
So saying, he slapped meat on several plates and turned up the volume on the country song playing on the radio. His strangely clear eyes were forlorn and Penelope knew he was dearly missing his work buzz. She checked the other two cooks, and they too looked sad and straight, just like the caps on their heads, which were usually jauntily askew. What was
going on? First no steak sandwiches and then unstoned cooks? Maybe that was why they’d misplaced her order. Their work brains were all fuzzy with sobriety.
“You can have these three, P,” said the cook, placing three steak sandwiches on the grill. “Last three in the house.”
“Thanks,” said Penelope. “But I need them quick.”
“They ordered them medium-well.”
Of course they did. Penelope wanted to bemoan the missing two sandwiches and to complain about the softball family, but knew the cooks didn’t give a rat’s ass about the customers. They were just faceless food-gobblers, never seen, never considered. Penelope was starting to think maybe the cooks had it all figured out.
It was then that a tiny tap came on her shoulder, and she turned to find Carrie, the hostess, standing behind her.
“Derrick said you could have his night shift. He’s got a date. With me.”
“That’s great,” said Penelope. Saturday nights were usually good for a hundred to one-fifty.
“I know,” said Carrie. “He is so hot.”
Penelope ignored this and was estimating just how badly her hair was going to smell after a double when the following question was asked:
“Hey, do you know where I can get some pot?”
This brought her out of her meditations on stinky follicles. Did she know where Carrie could get some pot? Of course she did. The HHR lived in a cannabis jungle, where the grow lights burned Vegas style, 24/7.
“No, don’t be ridiculous,” Penelope said. “Why do you ask?”
“Because the whole town is dry.”
“Well, I assumed that. By why did you think I would know about weed?”
“I don’t know. You just seemed like you were one of those cool moms who maybe smoked a little sometime. Maybe because you said you liked the idea of me getting a septum ring. My mom would never say that.”
“I don’t remember saying that. I thought I said it sounded painful.”
“No, you said it would be cool and adventurous.”
Penelope doubted this, but maybe she had. Carrie often followed her around while she tried to work, and she found herself nodding to things without really listening.
“My mom was pretty pissed when I told her you thought the septum ring was a good idea. She asked if you were a pothead or something.”
Carrie laughed at the irony of this, both she and her mom thinking of Penelope as a ganja queen when that evidently wasn’t the case.
“Listen, Carrie, I’m in the weeds. I don’t have time to talk.”
“In the weeds, I wish.”
“You have to let me work.”
“Okay, that’s cool,” said Carrie, walking over to tell the cooks that even pot-mom Penelope wasn’t currently holding. When she got there, she reached into a basket of cheesy curly fries that was up on the ledge—the softball family’s cheesy fries—and took a big goopy handful. Then she seemed to remember something and turned, smiling, to Penelope:
“Oh, and Barbo’s really pissed at you.”
9
After delivering hot fudge sundaes to the couple with the young girl, Penelope stood at the grill, waiting for the steak sandwiches and thinking about her many tables and their levels of satisfaction. She’d also been turning over a phrase Carrie had used: cool mom.
At first she’d been pleased, despite herself, emphasizing in her mind the first of the two words. But now it was the second word that kept rearing its ugly head. Cool MOM? Didn’t that just equal uncool? Weren’t cool moms the ones who kept trying to dress like their daughters? Mom by itself was bad enough. Did the whole restaurant staff think of her as mom-ish? Like Barbo, basically? The two old warhorses of Coonskins?
To heck with that. She was cool, no qualifier needed. She could find pot in like five minutes if she needed. The HHR never went dry. And shirtless young men were contacting her out of the blue, as were older ones in cardigans on LoveSynch. Cool mom, her ass. She was straight cool.
She had just about talked herself into feeling hip despite the denimed butt and the hair smelling of cheesy fried etcetera when she felt another tap on her shoulder. She turned to find a motherly face that no one in the world had ever asked for pot.
“We need to talk,” Barbo said.
“I can’t right now,” said Penelope as she reached for the third steak sandwich, which had finally appeared in the window. “I have to get these out to A-9.”
“Those guys in suits moved out of my section.”
“I know, Barbo. I’m sorry. But that was thirty minutes ago. Why are you just now mentioning it?”
“I was doing my job, taking care of my customers, and I just now got the time. Those guys should have been mine. They were in the window section.”
“Barbo, I’m sorry. I really am. You can have my next table if you want it.”
“I just want the tables in the window section. I don’t mess with other people’s sections.”
“I don’t either,” said Penelope, picking up her tray and trying to maneuver around her aggrieved colleague.
Unfortunately, Barbo made a quick countermove, like a wily boxer cutting off the ring. This sudden movement, quicker of foot than one would have imagined from the gray-haired doyenne, caught Penelope off balance and she let the tray lurch for a moment in her haste to be around Barbo and rid of the peanut-throwing softball team. Off slid the medium-well small sirloins packed onto buttery French bread. Off slid the curly cheese fries recently pawed by Carrie. All to land in a clutter at Barbo’s lizard skin boots.
“Damn it, Barbo, damn it to hell,” Penelope said, flinging the now-empty tray sideways, where it clattered on the floor. “Look what you made me do.”
“I didn’t make you do a thing, thank you very much. But I will talk to Marty about being cussed at by a junior waitperson.”
Penelope stared at the mess in front of her, saying without realizing it: “There are no junior waitpeople. We’re all just servers. And no one cares about that stupid window section but you.”
Barbo flinched when she heard this, then turned in a huff and clickety-clacked her way to Marty’s office.
Now the cooks were gaping at Penelope, and Carrie’s eyes were bugged wide. Penelope wasn’t sure if the shocked reactions were because of the profanity directed at the respected elder of the staff or the comment about the sacrosanct window section, but apparently she’d entered uncharted Coonskins territory. She knew this because the song “Country Boy Party” had just come on the radio and not one person had hollered to turn it up.
She stood amid the broken plates and spilled beef, wondering whether she should clean up the mess first or go back out to her tables. Maybe Marty would comp the softball family’s lunch for the botched order. She started to walk toward his office, but there was Barbo waving her hands and jerking her head back toward the kitchen. Ray, one of the cooks, came from behind the line with a broom and dustpan. His pale face in the straight-billed baseball cap looked especially young and unstoned up close, and Penelope had a vision of him helping an old lady down the aisle in church.
“I’ll get this, P,” he said, starting to sweep but unable to look Penelope in the eye.
Penelope realized that she was in for it and felt a twang of poignancy for the young cook in front of her, so sweet to be cleaning up for her. On the radio, “Country Boy Party” was just getting going:
Pull down the tailgate and ice the keg
Them rowdy boys got some hollow legs
But Ray, the cook, wasn’t singing along like usual. He was truly mourning his lack of a workday buzz. Perhaps she should call the HHR on his behalf—on behalf of the whole kitchen staff. It was like a morgue in here, like an accounting office, and she hated to think of them going weedless behind the grill for another day. What would Kid Rock think if he walked into the kitchen right now and saw all those baseball caps facing stiffly forward like they were a bunch of country club brats? Talk about loss of street cred.
Dancing Daisy Dukes, sway
ing Elly Mays
They won’t ask for your dossier
No doubt about it, her mojo had been off from the moment she walked past the first stuffed raccoon at Coonskins. Whether it was James being hot for teacher that was to blame or the encounter with her mother’s trendy box, she didn’t know. Either way, there was nothing to do but face the music out in section A. She thanked Ray with a pat on the shoulder, grabbed a fresh basket of peanuts, and walked out of the kitchen to the chorus of “Country Boy Party”:
Yes it’s a risqué soiree
Kissing au francais
Country girl parfait
Look at them sashay
The softball family was shooting her daggers when she came through the swinging doors and Cobb Salad was waving his empty glass for a refill, but it was the businessmen’s table where she headed first. After clearing their plates, she grabbed the pitcher of tea and veered toward Cobb Salad, wondering, not for the first time, about the vastness of his bladder. As she approached, pitcher in one hand, conciliatory peanut basket for the softball family in the other, a nut came flying across her face. She flinched but refused to look. Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she’d seen the mother cock her arm and fire, but couldn’t be sure. It might have been the daughter. They both had pretty good angles on her. Regardless, there was no doubting the throwing arms of Table A-9. The flying nut had whizzed by with velocity to spare before knocking the window in Barbo’s section with a solid thud, loud enough to startle a few customers who’d been intently watching the television over the bar, where one man in his underwear was applying a chokehold to another man in his underwear.
“Hey waitress!” someone behind her shouted.
It was the softball dad. The moment had come. For once she regretted not having more tea to fill for Cobb Salad, six more croutons to make his salad absolutely perfect. She made her way over with the fresh basket of peanut ammo like an anchor on her arm.