“What is it?”
“Your father promised me a raise last year, but we had to replace the freezer and he told me it had to wait. Then a couple of months ago, he ordered that fancy new sign you see outside, so I brought up the raise again and he said he’d do it. But then he passed away and now, who knows what’s happening?” He swept his hand in a gesture that took in the entire restaurant. “I’m not even sure who’s in charge around here.”
I swallowed. “I’m in charge.”
“So you’re gonna give me that raise your father promised? Twenty-one dollars an hour, that’s what we agreed on. Twenty-one.”
“That makes sense,” I said cautiously. “I’ll talk to my mom about it.”
Marty gave me a disappointed smile, as if he suspected all along that this would be the answer, and went back to the cash register. I retreated to the back office, wondering how I would bring this up to my mother. I had a good notion of what she might say—that this was my problem now, she never wanted to have a restaurant, we should sell this place as soon as possible. It would set off another argument about the future. Then again, every conversation with my mother ended in an argument about the future.
For the past few days, I had been thinking of how best to use the insurance settlement my father had left me. It was an enormous amount of money, and I had already used some of it to pay off my student loans, but it wasn’t enough to buy the restaurant outright. If I wanted to keep it, I would have to buy out my sister and somehow convince my mother to hold on to her share. And there were other expenses I had to consider as well: the back door of the diner needed a new lock, the dining room could use another coat of paint, and the menus had to be updated. Holding on to the restaurant meant having employees and keeping track of timecards and deciding on raises and a million other responsibilities.
But if I agreed to sell, my share of the proceeds combined with what remained of the life insurance money would easily buy me four years in the Bay Area. Twice that long if I stayed in the Mojave. I would finally have the time and the means to work on my music. I could afford to travel to music festivals, take master classes if I wanted, or just stay home and work. It was an incredible gift that my father had given me. The only thing that made it less sweet was that Anderson Baker would succeed in running my father out of town. That, I couldn’t accept. Even though selling the restaurant and walking away made plenty of sense, a part of me stubbornly wanted to hold on to it.
Jeremy
Aside from a couple of walks around the neighborhood, Nora said no whenever I asked her if she wanted to leave the cabin, go out for a meal or a movie with me. I didn’t press her. Years in the service had taught me the value of patience. I’d learned to wait for an order, wait for a signal, wait for an air drop, wait for a pickup, wait for the bathroom, wait for the phone, wait for my deployment to end. So I considered it progress when she agreed to come to dinner at my house one night. I drove straight to the Stater Brothers after work to pick up a few groceries and was reducing the sauce for the chicken when the doorbell rang. She was wearing a red sundress with tiny straps that I immediately imagined sliding off her shoulders later. I stepped aside to let her in and closed the door behind us. She stood in my living room, taking it all in: the blue couch I’d inherited from Ashley and Tommy after they upgraded their furniture; the big stereo I’d bought with my combat pay and that no longer looked as impressive as it had when I returned home; the game controller on the floor. Her eye lingered on the Iraqi banknote pinned to the corkboard by the sliding door. I brought out the bouquet of peonies I’d bought for her. “What’s the occasion?” she asked, with genuine surprise.
“They’re in season,” I said, suddenly too embarrassed to admit that I was trying to turn a homemade meal into a proper date. I kissed her, the bouquet squished between us, its sprigs of lavender and green berries brushing up against our necks. “Do you want to take them home, or should I put them in water?”
“Let’s have them out. They smell so good.”
I emptied a canister of spaghetti and filled it with water, then put the peonies in it. I set it on the counter, where we’d be able to see it from the dining room. “Are you hungry?”
“Famished.”
“Good. I made a lot of food.”
She stood against the counter, watching me. “Who taught you how to cook?”
“I taught myself, after my mom died.” I held up a spoonful of the chicken sauce. “Here, have a taste.”
Her eyes widened.
“Too much salt?”
“No. It’s perfect.”
I carried the dishes to the table. In the two years I’d lived in this house, I’d never used the dimmer on the light switch in my dining room, but now I lowered it to an intimate level before I sat down across from her. For the first time I saw her eat, no, devour all the food on her plate—the chicken, the side of potatoes, two pieces of the French bread I’d almost taken out of my cart at the store because I didn’t think she’d eat it, the green beans, everything—and the more she ate the more she smiled and the more she smiled the happier I felt.
She told me about her day. A big group of women bikers had stopped by the restaurant for brunch, and the place had been so busy she’d had to get some folding chairs from the storage room, but afterward there was a long lull. She’d checked her email and found a personal rejection from a music festival in San Francisco, which thrilled her. I found this confusing, until she explained that she usually received form rejections, and getting a personal note with a few words of encouragement meant a great deal to her. It restored some of her confidence in her work. “What about you?” she asked.
“It was just an ordinary day,” I said. I tried not to think about work, if I could help it. A woman in Twentynine Palms reported that her son had stabbed her Chihuahua and she feared he might do it again. When I got to the house, I found her in the front yard, cradling the dog in her arms like a baby, its hind legs wrapped in blue bandage. Her son was in his room listening to music, she said, or what he called music, and also he didn’t have a job. She led the way inside, across an olive-green carpet covered with urine stains, to the son’s bedroom. He jumped up the moment he saw me. “You called the cops on me?” he yelled. It took a good fifteen minutes to get his side of the story, which was that he had nothing to do with that fucking Chihuahua and that it had probably gotten cut by stepping on a razor the mother had left lying around. “Look around you, man. This house look clean to you?” he asked. The mother huffed, “A razor? I don’t have a razor. I’m not the one who shaves in this house.” While they argued, I watched and waited. It would have been hard not to notice the son’s skinny arms, his dilated pupils, the twitching of his hands as he talked. Sure enough, a pat-down turned up a couple of ounces of crystal meth. But as soon as I arrested the kid, the mother turned on me. She begged and cried and threatened, then followed me to the cruiser with the Chihuahua whimpering in her arms. When I put the kid in the back, the dog suddenly revived and, baring its teeth and snapping its jaws, tried to lunge at me. I told the woman to restrain her Chihuahua, but instead she released it and it flew at the cruiser window, then went sliding down to the ground, scratching the siding. And still it didn’t stop barking.
“Sounds kind of surreal,” Nora said.