She, Myself & I

by Whitney Gaskell

  “I guess I should. I know I probably sound crazy to you. I sound crazy even to myself,” Paige said. “I think it must be work stress.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m used to crazy women. I grew up in this family, after all,” I said. “But look, we really should get going. I can’t be late for work.”

  “Sometimes I really envy you, Mick. You’re on the cusp of this incredible new life and embarking on a new career, and you get this one last summer of freedom and zero responsibility. That must be so . . . liberating,” Paige said, completely ignoring what I’d just said about getting to work on time. It was eerily like something Mom would do, but I refrained from pointing this out to Paige. She seemed pretty fragile, and comparisons to Mom might drive her over the edge.

  “Erm, I guess,” I said, trying to shrug off the stabs of guilt, wondering if I should just tell Paige the truth. It would feel so good to tell someone, to not keep the secret swallowed up inside. But I hesitated. Of my two sisters, Paige would almost certainly make me tell our parents. Immediately. No, if I was going to confess, it would have to be to Sophie. “I don’t think I’d call waitressing ‘invigorating.’ It’s actually pretty tedious. And they hate it when you’re late,” I said instead.

  “Tedious? Really? I guess. Kevin’s nice, though, don’t you think? Zack and I had dinner with him and Scott on Friday.”

  “Wasn’t it weird for you to double-date with your ex-husband? And his boyfriend?”

  “No. I know it should be, but it wasn’t. I think it feels less weird than it would be to go out with Scott and another woman,” Paige said. “And it’s hard not to love Kevin. He’s a sweetheart.”

  “Yeah, he really is. And much nicer than the head chef,” I said, without meaning to bring up Oliver, who seemed to be sidling into my thoughts too often for comfort.

  “Kevin told me about him. Told me he was glad you were staying away from him,” Paige said.

  All senses went on high alert. “What? Why would he say that?”

  Paige shrugged. “It wasn’t a big deal. He just mentioned that the chef has a reputation of being a womanizer and has been known to target pretty waitresses. He just said he was glad you weren’t among the hunted.”

  “Maybe Oliver doesn’t think I’m pretty,” I said.

  “Come off it, you’re gorgeous. He probably just knows he doesn’t have a chance with you. You’re too smart to get involved with a guy like that,” Paige said.

  Yeah, that must be it, I thought. I’m just too damned smart.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  My first few weeks at Versa were exhausting. Each shift was a whirlwind, and although I tried to keep my mistakes to a minimum, I still made plenty. Like the time I didn’t realize the couple sitting ignored at table four were mine. Or when I put in a party’s entire order at the same time, which meant their entrées came out at the same time as their starters. Or when I turned a corner too quickly and slipped, spilling two glasses of red wine down the front of my formerly pristine white shirt.

  But I learned quickly. I learned how to move gracefully through the dining room with a tray balanced on my shoulder, and how to scan my tables, assessing and anticipating the patrons’ needs. I retrieved bottles of wine, filled bread baskets with piping-hot rosemary-infused rolls, and whisked away credit cards as soon as they were snapped into the leather billfolds. I befriended Calla, the zaftig hostess, so that she’d steer higher-tipping parties into my section (businessmen always tipped the most, senior citizens the least, and Calla took great pleasure in sitting the latter at Adam’s tables).

  And I watched Oliver. I wasn’t even sure I liked him, and I certainly resented how he indulged his bad moods by stalking around the kitchen, barking orders at his underlings (we all quickly learned that the curled-lip grin would signal a good night, the dark scowl a bad one). But despite this, I was uncomfortably aware of Oliver, of where he stood, whom he talked to, the way he shrugged his white chef’s jacket on just before he turned his focused attention to the food.

  But other than occasionally being the target of the pre-shift specials quiz, Oliver didn’t pay much attention to me. The rest of the cook staff would tease and flirt with the waitresses, but once the kitchen got busy, Oliver was always too immersed in his work to talk to any of us, even Sarah, who found every excuse she could to fling her skinny body into his path. Instead, he chopped, tasted, stirred, and sautéed, spinning out dish after tantalizing dish. I kept hoping that I’d learn from watching him, but his movements were too quick, too subtle for me to follow.

  One night, after I’d cashed out and was counting how much I’d made in tips, Adam tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Need a ride home?” he asked.

  My lack of a car was starting to become a problem. The other servers were friendly enough, but I knew they were getting sick of my mooching rides, and Opal now rolled her eyes whenever I approached her at the end of a shift. So while I didn’t relish having to deal with Adam for even the relatively short ride home, I didn’t have much of a choice.

  “Um. Yeah. That would be great,” I said, mustering up a half-smile for him.

  “Come on, my car’s out back.”

  I trailed after Adam through the kitchen. Rob, one of the line cooks, noticed us leaving.

  “What do we have here? Love in the workplace?” he said, leering.

  I opened my mouth to protest, but then I saw that Adam was shrugging with false modesty. Oh no. Did Adam think that this ride home was some sort of a date? My first thought was Oliver, and I quickly looked around, hoping he wasn’t there to see Adam and me leaving together. But when I glanced into his office, Oliver was sitting there with his feet up on his metal desk and the phone to his ear. He was looking right at me, eyebrows raised.

  “No,” I said as loudly and clearly as I could. “Adam and I aren’t seeing one another, he’s just giving me a ride home.”

  “Right, that’s what they all say,” Rob said, laughing. Justin, one of the other line cooks, cackled appreciatively.

  I glanced back at Oliver, but he was no longer looking at me.

  Shit.

  “How have you been enjoying your job, Michaela?” Adam asked.

  I glanced at him. One of my friends in high school insisted that men always look sexier when driving stick-shift cars. I wish she could have been here with me now, because short of an extreme makeover, nothing could have made Adam more attractive, and certainly not his manual-transmission baby blue Civic.

  “Mickey,” I said. No one calls me Michaela.

  “You’re settling in all right?”

  “Yup. I’m doing great.”

  “Good. Because if you need anything—a shift off or if one of the kitchen guys is bothering you—let me know, and I’ll take care of it for you,” Adam said.

  In my peripheral vision, I could see his ferretlike eyes seeking me out. I turned away, staring out the window at the storefronts, all closed and dark with the exception of a bar so crowded, people were spilling out of the open doors. In front, a young blonde woman wearing a T-shirt with Greek letters embroidered on the front was leaning over, hands braced against her knees, puking on the curb.

  “Sure. Thanks,” I said.

  I could sense that Adam was leading up to asking me out, and I was hoping that by keeping my voice flat, my demeanor cool, I could squelch the impulse before he said anything. And for a few minutes, I thought that my strategy had worked. The rest of the drive home was mostly quiet, other than Billy Joel’s “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” playing on the radio and my occasional direction of “Turn here” or “It’s the parking lot up ahead on the right.”

  Adam pulled up in front of my building. A light rain had started to fall, and he flicked his wipers on. They squeaked rhythmically back and forth. As soon as the car jerked to a stop, I hit the button on my seat belt and had one hand on the door latch.

  “Thanks for the ride home,” I said.

  “Anytime. In fact, there’s something I wanted to as
k you,” Adam said.

  My heart sank. We weren’t going to avoid this after all. I looked over at him. His face was partially lit by the parking lot lights, giving his oily skin a ghastly yellowish pall.

  “Can it wait until tomorrow? Because I’m exhausted,” I said, feigning a loud yawn.

  “I was wondering if you’d be interested in going to see that new space alien movie with me on Monday,” Adam said.

  “Um. I don’t think that would be a very good idea,” I said. “I mean, you’re sort of my boss. I don’t think it would be professional for us to get involved.”

  “I checked the employee manual, and there isn’t a policy forbidding the waitstaff from dating. Although, you’re right, I am your superior, so maybe I should check with Mr. Kramer, the owner. You know, I don’t mean this to be sexual harassment or anything,” he said self-importantly.

  “Oh, I know, I know,” I assured him.

  “Okay. It’s no big deal. I just thought . . . well, okay.”

  “Thanks for the ride,” I said, opening the door, and swinging my legs out. I couldn’t get away fast enough, wanting to leave the scene before Adam figured out that my excuse had been a poorly disguised rejection.

  “Sure,” I heard him say, before I swung the door shut and hurried toward my building.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  “Adam’s such an asshole,” Sarah muttered under her breath while we worked side by side setting the tables. We draped them with stiff white linens and lined up the flatware, shining now that Opal and Caitlin had polished the water spots off it. Sarah’s small, sharp features were pinched with irritation, and her dark hair swung as she moved. We were supposed to wear it up while we worked, but I’d noticed that Sarah left it down until the diners arrived. When she flirted with Oliver, she liked to twirl one of the locks between her fingers, or toss it back over her shoulders in a casually calculated way.

  “Why? What’s going on?” I asked.

  “He just posted a notice saying that no one’s leaving after a shift until he personally inspects all of the service stations and okays them. Power-hungry little prick,” she said, banging down empty water goblets so hard I was surprised they didn’t shatter. She glanced up at me. “He always pulls this crap when he’s in a bad mood. I guess you shot him down last night, huh?”

  “What? How did you know . . . oh,” I said, remembering Kevin’s warning about how gossipy the restaurant world was. “Nothing happened. He just drove me home, and that was it.”

  “Don’t look so surprised, Adam always hits on the new waitresses. He thinks that if he keeps throwing his shit out, it’s got to eventually stick somewhere. Did he try to kiss you?”

  “No! Why?”

  “I let him kiss me when I first started here. It was awful, it felt like there was a slug rooting around in my mouth,” she said.

  “Ew!”

  “I know. But I was worried that if I didn’t, he’d stick me with a bad shift. That was before I found out that Oliver’s the one who handles the waitstaff schedules, and so when Adam cornered me in the walk-in freezer, I told him if he ever tried to touch me again, I’d kick him in the nuts. He’s barely spoken to me since,” she said gleefully.

  “So . . . what’s going on with you and Oliver?” I asked.

  “Why? What did Caitlin tell you?” Sarah hissed. She reeled around and stared at me. “I’m going to kill her!”

  “Nothing, she didn’t tell me anything. I’ve just seen the two of you together, and you seem . . . friendly,” I said innocently.

  “Do you think he likes me? He flirts a lot, but he hasn’t asked me out yet. I keep hoping that he will,” Sarah said. “Oh God, don’t tell anyone. Caitlin’s the only one who knows. Do you think anyone else knows I like him?”

  Everyone knows, I thought. It’s so obvious. But, interestingly, Kevin was wrong. Oliver doesn’t hit on all of the waitresses.

  “No, I doubt it. I thought maybe you were just good friends,” I assured her.

  At the end of my shift, Adam made a big show of pointing out that the extra napkins in my station weren’t folded just so, and that one of the saltshakers needed to be filled up, and that I’d forgotten to empty a water pitcher. By the time I ran back and forth, fixing these and a half dozen other transgressions, I realized that Opal, Sarah, and the others had already left for the evening.

  Shit, I thought. Shit, shit, shit.

  I pushed the swinging door into the kitchen and saw Adam heading out the back. I considered and quickly discarded the idea of asking him for another ride, and hung back until I saw the back door close behind him.

  I’d rather walk home, I thought, although my feet ached at the prospect.

  But it seemed to be my only choice. The kitchen was deserted. Even the dishwasher—a sweet, quiet teenage boy—had left.

  “You’re still here,” a voice commented.

  I spun around and saw Oliver standing in the door to his office. He was wearing a navy blue V-neck T-shirt and his white chef’s pants and was holding a bottle of beer in his hand.

  “Yeah. I was just about to go,” I said.

  “You want a beer before you leave?”

  “Um. Sure. Why not,” I said, and Oliver stepped back inside his office. I assumed that I was supposed to follow him, but I hesitated for a minute. He’d been sort of moody during dinner, which muted the usual mischievous atmosphere in the kitchen, and I was afraid that he was going to yell at me. Or fire me. Or both. I tried to remember—had I screwed up more than usual tonight? I’d brought a plate of lamb chops back to him, because the customer had insisted they were too raw.

  “They’re perfect. You’re supposed to eat them rare,” Oliver had snapped, but he tossed them back into the sauté pan for a few minutes and then handed the plate back to me without further comment.

  But that wasn’t my fault, was it? Or did he take it as my criticizing him?

  “Are you coming?” Oliver called, and so I stepped into his office.

  He was sitting behind a steel desk that reminded me of the indestructible ones my high school teachers had used.

  “Take a seat,” he said. He popped the cap off of a bottle of Amstel Light and pushed it across the desk to me. I grabbed it and dropped into the visitor’s chair.

  “Thanks,” I said, and took a long draw.

  “Your boyfriend left without you?” Oliver asked.

  “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “I thought you left with Adam last night.”

  “He was just driving me home. I don’t have a car. But there’s nothing going on between us,” I said.

  Oliver looked at me for a few beats longer than I was comfortable with, appraising me with his dark eyes, and I wondered if he thought I was lying. Maybe that’s why he asked me in here, I thought. Maybe he just wanted to find out what was going on within the waitstaff ranks.

  “Good. That kid’s a putz,” he finally said. He shook his head and drank some beer.

  I laughed and tried to relax—it didn’t seem like he was planning to fire me after all—but being this close to Oliver filled me with nervous energy. I looked around his office and saw some framed awards and diplomas on the wall, between the pair of frosted windows.

  “Where did you go to school?” I asked.

  “Paris. Le Cordon Bleu,” Oliver said.

  “I’m in the process of applying to the Culinary Institute of America,” I said.

  Oliver’s eyebrows went up. “You want to be a chef?”

  “Yes. I mean, I think I do. Do you think . . . should I try to go to school in France instead?” I asked anxiously, not wanting to screw up my career before it even began.

  Oliver shrugged and took another drink. “It doesn’t matter so much. But I wouldn’t rush off to school if I were you. I’d take a year, try to get some apprentice work, and see how you like it. If it still seems like a good fit, then go next year.”

  “Really? Because I thought you couldn’t get any work in a kitchen until after
you graduate from culinary school.”

  “Probably not paid work, no. But you should be working back in the kitchen, not up front in the dining room. Take whatever tasks are given to you, and if you’re lucky, you’ll find a chef who’s willing to take you under his wing as an apprentice,” Oliver said.

  The thought of not going to culinary school—a path that I’d been clinging to as an acceptable and responsible alternative to medical school—scared me. And if I told my parents I was giving up Brown Medical School to be an unpaid kitchen lackey, I imagined it wouldn’t go over well.

  “You need a ride home?” Oliver asked abruptly.

  All thoughts of parents and career vanished from my thoughts, and my breath caught in my throat as I nodded. I was going to be alone. With him. In a car. We were alone now, but it was basically still just work, in the brightly lit office among indestructible industrial furnishings. But being in a car at night, seated just inches away from one another, was far more intimate.

  “Okay, let’s go,” he said.

  We walked into the kitchen and dropped our bottles—his empty, mine still half full—into the large green plastic trash can, and then I followed him outside. His BMW was parked right by the back door, and after he unlocked the doors with his remote key, I slid into the passenger seat, praying that the stink of kitchen smoke and sweat wasn’t clinging to my hair and body.

  I gave Oliver directions to Paige’s apartment, and he pulled out, driving with the same efficient, silky motions that he used while cooking.

  “Do you like Austin?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “It’s all right.”

  “You used to live in Miami, right?”

  He nodded, but didn’t say anything, so I, too, lapsed into silence, my feeble attempts at conversation having so dismally failed. Thankfully, the drive was short, and within moments, he stopped in front of my building.

  “Thanks for the ride,” I said.

  “Do you have any plans tomorrow night?” Oliver asked.