Running on Empty

by Don Aker

  Clarence studied Ethan for a moment. “So you never done this before?”

  “Nope,” said Ethan, shaking his head. “But how hard can it be?”

  Lil returned with a pen and notepad in her hand, and Clarence winked at her. “A real crackerjack, this guy.”

  “We’ll see.” She handed the pen and notepad to Ethan. “I figured you’d probably wanna pass on the apron,” she said, grinning.

  He grinned in return. “You figured right.”

  “I’ll give you this section for now, okay?” She gestured toward a group of six tables, including the booth Clarence sat in. “Everything you need to know is on the menu except for the special.” She pointed to the small blackboard to the left of the kitchen doors on which someone had chalked—in surprisingly elegant handwriting—Liver and Onions, along with the price. “For now,” she continued, “just take the orders, bus the tables, and keep the food comin’. I’ll look after the cash register for you. I can show you how that works another time. If there is another time,” she added.

  “Thanks,” said Ethan.

  “Be gentle, Clarence,” she warned the heavy-set guy, then moved off, stopping to fill an elderly man’s water glass.

  “So,” Ethan said to Clarence, “what can I get you today?”

  “My usual.”

  Great, thought Ethan. A wiseass. “And what’s that?”

  “The number four.”

  Lifting the menu from its metal stand on the table, Ethan scanned it. “Uh, I see we got three number fours. You here for breakfast, lunch, or dinner?”

  “I’m workin’ the night shift over at the hospital. Whaddya think?”

  “Clarence,” said Lil from the other side of the diner. “Give the guy a break.”

  “Just showin’ him the ropes,” Clarence replied. “He asked me how hard it could be.”

  “He’ll find that out soon enough,” she said, nodding toward the kitchen.

  Clarence guffawed, his laughter sounding like it came from the bottom of a barrel, both of his chins dancing again. “You sure got that right, Lil.” He turned to Ethan. “Gimme the Rib-Eye with extra fries, coleslaw, and a side of mayo. And a Diet Coke.”

  Yeah, thought Ethan as he wrote down the order. The diet drink makes it the heart-healthy choice. You and Big Ben Cleveland must be on the same program. He turned toward the kitchen.

  “You forgettin’ somethin’?” asked Clarence.

  Ethan stopped. “What?”

  “How I like my steak.”

  Ethan forced a smile. “How would you like your steak?”

  “Close to mooin’.”

  “Put down ‘rare,’” said Lil, who had just come out of the kitchen with a plate in her hand. She frowned at Clarence, who raised his hands in surrender.

  Ethan pushed through the batwing doors and found himself in a kitchen that had obviously seen better decades but was unexpectedly tidy. Scarred tiles checkerboarded the floor between a long white countertop and a row of stainless-steel appliances, each nicked and gouged but all scrubbed clean. They included a griddle the size of a small table, two ovens stacked one above the other, a deep fryer, two microwaves, eight gas burners, a fridge and upright freezer, an enormous contraption that Ethan assumed was a dishwasher, and two sinks. Open shelves lining the opposite wall held an assortment of pots and pans as well as plates, saucers, cups, and glasses, and several large bowls on the countertop were filled with ingredients and condiments. And in the middle of it all stood Ike Turner, flipping eggs on the griddle before dropping what looked like hand-cut potatoes into the deep fryer.

  “I’ve got an order,” said Ethan, tearing the paper from his notepad.

  The cook grunted, nodding toward a length of string looped between two tiny pulleys hanging above the counter. Dangling from it were two similar pieces of paper. “Goes there,” he said.

  Seeing the other two orders hanging from metal clips, Ethan scanned the countertop. He saw some of the same clips in a plastic container, pulled one out, fastened the paper to it, and hung it from the string.

  Ike sighed profoundly. “Ever heard of ‘First come, first served’?”

  Ethan nodded.

  The cook lifted Ethan’s order off the string and hung it to the left of the other two, advancing the string toward the right. “Got it?” he demanded.

  “Got it,” said Ethan.

  Ike’s eyes suddenly narrowed. “What the hell’s that?” he asked, pointing at what Ethan had written.

  Ethan shrugged. “The guy’s order.”

  “This here an eight?”

  “A four.”

  “And he wants it raw?”

  “Rare.”

  “With a man?”

  “A side of mayo.”

  The cook tore the paper from the clip, crumpled it, and tossed it at Ethan, bouncing it off his forehead before Ethan could react. “Can’t cook what I can’t read, numbskull.”

  Ethan flushed. “Looked clear enough to me.”

  Ike took two broad steps forward, and although he was at least four inches shorter, his physical presence seemed magnified as he glared up into Ethan’s face. “Let’s get one thing straight right now,” he snarled. “I don’t give a rat’s ass how anything looks to you. This is my kitchen and I’m king, got that? If I tell you to cross your legs and shit salmon, you’d better goddamn do it.”

  Flushing even more deeply, Ethan fought the urge to tell the king where he could shove his crown. “Got it,” he replied.

  “You’d better,” continued Ike, “if you wanna keep workin’ here. I got zero time for slackers, fancy boy. Now write me the goddamn order so I can read it.”

  Fancy boy! Ethan fumed as he opened his notepad, rewriting the order with exaggerated care. He tore off the page and hung it carefully to the left of the other two on the string. “Happy?” he asked.

  Ike looked as if he was going to backhand him, and Ethan nearly flinched. “Oh, we got a long road ahead of us before I even get in the neighbourhood of happy,” the cook growled.

  Ethan just shrugged and turned to leave.

  “You forgettin’ somethin’?” Ike nodded at the crumpled paper on the floor.

  Ethan gaped at it. “I’m not the one who—”

  “You don’t walk away from a mess,” Ike growled. “Not in my kitchen.”

  Seething, Ethan stooped to pick up the paper, thinking about the mom-and-tot swims at Harbourside that had been such a pain in the ass. Not once during all those Saturday mornings had any of the moms—or any of their snot-nosed brats—pissed him off as much as this prick.

  Back in the dining area, he could tell from the looks on everyone’s faces that they’d been listening to the exchange in the kitchen. Lil and a couple of the old guys gave him sympathetic smiles, but Clarence uncorked another of his guffaws. “So how hard can it be?” he snorted.

  Chapter 6

  You got chutzpah, kid, Lil had told him. Four hours later, Ethan was pretty sure that whatever chutzpah he might have had was now gone, along with the feeling in most of his toes. In fact, all he was really conscious of below his waist was an ache that began in his arches and spread to his ass. Allie had told him he should dress up a little when he applied for jobs, so along with a sport shirt and a pair of dress pants, he was wearing the patent leather shoes his father had bought him for his cousin’s wedding that summer, and those wingtips had been tight to begin with. They were now at least half a size too small, and man, was he paying for it. He could feel a stickiness in his socks that probably meant his blisters were bleeding.

  Not that he’d had a moment to check them. Lil had been right about the gawkers. The destroyer and the cruise liners had brought waves of people down to the harbour, all seeming to need to eat at the same time—and non-stop. Ethan suspected that hungry tourists with big money probably went to the more expensive restaurants along the waterfront. The Chow Down, on the other hand, seemed to attract every oddball, cheapskate, and family with kids under five. Kids who screeched at
their parents, upset their food, balled up the pages of the colouring books Lil kept on hand, and threw the crayons Ethan brought them in Styrofoam cups. Reaching down for a stub of Burnt Sienna that looked like it had been gnawed on, he could understand why some species ate their young. In fact, by the middle of the afternoon, he’d begun to wonder why the human race hadn’t died out long ago. If the odds were heavy in favour of producing kids like the demon spawn he’d been serving, who would want to take the chance? As much as Ethan loved risk—hell, it kept the blood pumping and let you know you were actually alive—he doubted he had the cojones for that gamble. The last four hours—no, he thought, glancing at his watch, make that four hours and nine minutes—had been a hell of a lot more effective than any of those ass-numbing lectures on birth control he’d sat through in school, and he had new respect for Raye’s ability to keep those Applegate hellions in line.

  Dropping the crayon back into its cup, Ethan began clearing the table. As he stacked the dirty dishes onto his tray, he uncovered the tip the father of that freak show had left him—two lousy bucks. Math had always come easily to Ethan, and a quick mental calculation told him he hadn’t even been tipped five per cent on the before-tax total. And that wasn’t the lowest he’d gotten. Some people had left him a buck, and a few hadn’t tipped him at all.

  One reason, he realized, was that he lacked Selena’s considerable assets. Some of the oddballs had even asked about her, clearly annoyed those impressive tits had moved on to Alberta. But it wasn’t only his flat chest that undercut his efforts. He’d mixed up orders, dropped a tray of dirty dishes, smashing everything but the cutlery (he’d mistakenly pushed through the left batwing door instead of the right just as Lil was coming out), and upset a glass of ice water into a woman’s lap. She stormed out shouting that she’d never darken The Chow Down’s doorway again if he was serving there. Ethan was surprised that Lil hadn’t fired him on the spot, but she’d just shrugged her shoulders and told him there were orders up in the kitchen. Ike mostly glowered at him before turning his eyes toward the ceiling as if silently counting to ten. The few times he did speak, it was only to snarl at Ethan about what he was doing wrong, which was pretty much everything. Ethan had bitten back so many replies that his jaws ached nearly as much as his feet.

  “Could we get some service over here?”

  Ethan turned to see a large, burgundy-haired woman glaring at him from the booth by the window that his buddy Clarence had sat in hours earlier. Despite having given Ethan a hard time, Clarence had left him the biggest tip so far—four bucks—along with some information. “You know what tip stands for?” Clarence had asked. When Ethan shook his head, he’d told him, “It’s short for ‘to improve performance.’ You got no place to go but up, kid.”

  “Be right there,” Ethan said to the burgundy-haired woman as he finished wiping off the table, then carried the tray of dirty dishes toward the kitchen, trying not to wince with each step. They’d gone through a ton of dishes that afternoon, and Ike’s assistant had certainly earned whatever The Chow Down was paying him.

  Lil had introduced the assistant simply as Rake. Ethan didn’t know if that was the guy’s real name or just some handle he’d picked up, but Ethan guessed the latter because, in his late fifties or so, Rake was as thin as any garden tool and had about as many hairs on his head as the tines on the business end of one. Besides doing prep work for Ike, one of his jobs was to keep the clean dishes coming, which he did. Something he didn’t do was talk. He’d barely nodded when Lil had introduced him, and Ethan hadn’t heard him say a single word during any of the times he’d been in the kitchen.

  “Here’s another one,” Ethan said to Rake as he set the full tray beside the dishwasher. He grabbed an empty one, loaded it with clean cutlery and paper napkins, and hurried back out to the dining area. An hour earlier, they’d gotten so busy that Lil had given him a few more tables to serve, and all of them were now occupied as he headed toward the burgundy-haired woman. Across from her sat a man half her size, the expression on his face a lot like the one Ethan probably wore each time he had to return to the kitchen.

  The woman was drumming her fingers on the tabletop, the rapid clacking of her long fingernails, like miniature gunfire, audible even above the surrounding chatter. “We’ve been sitting here for almost fifteen minutes!” she spat.

  Liar, thought Ethan, who’d seen the couple come in less than five minutes before. “Welcome to The Chow Down,” he said, the greeting now as automatic as breathing. “You had a chance to look at the menu?”

  “What do you think we’ve been doing all this time?” she asked. He couldn’t place her accent. American Midwest maybe? For all he knew, though, she could have come from Musquodoboit Harbour on the Eastern Shore.

  “Sorry,” he said, swallowing the sudden urge to upset her ice water. “It’s been crazy here all afternoon.” He held out his notepad, now noticeably thinner than when Lil had first given it to him. “What can I get you?”

  As he wrote down their order—she wanted the Garden Salad while her male companion chose the Mile-High Burger, probably praying for a heart attack to put him out of his misery—Ethan’s mind wandered back over the last four hours. Rude customers like this burgundy nightmare hadn’t been the worst of Ethan’s afternoon. Nor had poor tips, aching feet, or even tongue-lashings from Ike. The lowest point had come when he realized that the largest group he’d waited on—one he’d pulled a couple tables together in order to seat—had stiffed him. Which meant that the cost of three All Day Breakfasts, two Tuna Melts With Fries, a Chicken Alfredo With Garlic Toast, and a Seafood Platter Supreme was coming out of his own pocket. Combined with the cost of the dishes he’d broken, Ethan might end the day owing more money than he’d earned, measly tips included.

  His latest order in hand, he headed to the kitchen and was just clipping the paper to the string when his cellphone vibrated. Easing it out of his pocket, he saw Allie’s name on the display. He knew better than to let Ike see him answer it, of course, but at that moment he needed to hear the voice of someone who actually gave a shit about him.

  “Where’ve you been? How’d the interviews go?” she asked him. The phone tucked between his ear and his shoulder as he reached for two plates waiting under the warming lamp, Ethan could barely hear her voice over the clatter of cutlery and the rattle of pans.

  “I got a job,” he told her. “A place called The Chow Down.”

  “That’s great!” she said. “When do you start?”

  But before he could answer, one of the plates in his hands shifted and he watched an All Day Breakfast slide off the chipped porcelain and hurtle floorward. Bracing himself for another roar from Ike, he felt the cell shift along his neck and it, too, fell, landing squarely in the middle of Eggs Over Easy. It didn’t even bounce.

  “Thanks for picking me up, man,” said Ethan as he slid into Seth’s ancient yellow VW Beetle. A huge Love Bug decal had once adorned its hood, but the car’s previous owner had altered it with Day-Glo paint so it now read Love Buggery, which suited Seth Wheaton just fine. “I couldn’t’ve faced that bus.” The ache Ethan felt earlier in his feet and legs had migrated to his back, and there was a knot between his shoulder blades the size of a fist. No shift at the Harbourside Pool had ever left him feeling like this.

  “No problem, buddy,” said Seth as he pulled the car into traffic, the Beetle backfiring twice. “You look like crap.”

  “Believe it or not,” Ethan muttered, “I feel worse than I look.”

  Seth grinned. “So what was it like?”

  “Not as glamorous as you might think,” Ethan replied drily, recounting some of the afternoon’s humiliations.

  “How’d you do moneywise?”

  “I owe them nineteen dollars and change.”

  Seth laughed, then stopped when he saw the look on Ethan’s face. “How—?”

  “I tend to drop stuff,” he mumbled, unlacing his wingtips and gingerly sliding one of them off. He was right—the h
eel of his once-grey sock was now brown with dried blood. He reached down to rub his foot but then thought better of it. He didn’t want to start things flowing again.

  Early-evening traffic was heavy as the Beetle coughed to a stop and Seth waited to turn onto Morris Street, scanning for an opening before swinging the car out. The engine hesitated, so Seth floored it, the Beetle belching blue smoke as it laboured forward. “Look on the bright side,” he said. “At least you got a day’s experience. Maybe that’ll help.”

  “Help what?” asked Ethan.

  “When you apply somewhere else.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “You got fired, right?”

  “Actually,” said Ethan, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a piece of paper, “I got a schedule.” He unfolded it to show a calendar page with dates circled in red and times written beside them. “I’m working again tomorrow.”

  Seth’s eyes widened. “It’ll take that long to work off what you owe? Just how bad are you, man?”

  Ethan shook his head. “Lil, she’s the person who interviewed me, she gave me the job. She actually wants me back.”

  “Why? Comic relief?”

  “Lil says most people start out like I did,” said Ethan, then grinned sheepishly. “Maybe not exactly like I did, but not great. Anyway, she says I’ll get better with experience.” He reached behind him, massaging his lower back. “One thing’s for sure. I can’t get any worse.”

  Chapter 7

  “We need to talk,” Jack Palmer said when Ethan limped through the front door. No “Hello” or “Hi,” or even “Hey.” Just We need to talk.

  Looking into the living room through the wide archway flanked by marble columns, Ethan saw his father sitting in a wingback chair. He’d obviously been waiting for him, and Ethan wondered for how long. Hoped it was hours.

  Music played through hidden speakers wirelessly connected to their entertainment system. As usual, his old man was listening to ‘70s rock. Jack and Raye Palmer both loved “oldies,” although Ethan thought “mouldies” was more accurate. Despite the low volume, he recognized Jackson Browne, who was often at the top of his father’s playlist. This time the rocker was singing “You Love the Thunder” and, judging from the look on his father’s face, Ethan figured thunder was in the immediate forecast.