Loo squeezed the candy in her hand harder. She knew Hawley was mad at her for sneaking out and going to Dogtown. But she had not been expecting anything like this.
Principal Gunderson opened a drawer and took out a clean, folded apron. He slid the apron across the desk, and at once it revealed itself to be the source of the fishy odor. Even then Loo knew that nothing would ever wash out the scent of scales and guts. Its stink seemed to be woven directly into the cloth.
“Your mother was always reckless with her life. I hope you won’t be.”
Loo stared at the balding, middle-aged man sitting behind the desk. It was hard to believe that Lily and Principal Gunderson had ever breathed the same air.
When she got home Loo did her best to change her father’s mind. She tried arguing and promises and even slammed the door to her room but Hawley would not budge.
“If you’re old enough to go out partying you’re old enough to have a job,” he said. “And I still want you there on the mudflats every weekend, helping me bring in the clams.”
Loo shoved her hands into her front pockets. She wondered what Hawley would think if he knew that she had her mother’s gloves hidden there.
She felt fierce, holding this secret that her father did not know. Loo found herself savoring the details, sliding the lace over her fingers, and poring over the album that Mabel Ridge had given her late at night. The pages were pasted with clippings about Lily’s death. A short notice from a police blotter about a missing woman. A few articles about the Forest Service helping search the lake for her body. Others about her being found. A prayer card with an excerpt from the Book of Wisdom. Then Lily’s obituary from the local paper in Olympus. An accident, they all said. A terrible, tragic accident. At night Loo read the pages over and over, until the phrases floated through her mind like lyrics from a song. Young mother, morning swim, dragnet, search and rescue, loving husband and infant daughter left behind.
Hawley had become more agitated since the night Loo went missing. He paced the house, checking the locks, then got into his truck and disappeared for hours. He even smelled different, his sweat taking on a more acrid tone, the stench of it filling up the laundry basket. He drove Loo to school. He drove her home. And he cleaned his guns more furiously than ever. He seemed to sense that something had changed, but she didn’t want to tell him about Mabel Ridge yet, so she kept the book hidden from him, just like the gloves she was fingering now in her pocket.
“I get it,” Loo said. “You’re teaching me a lesson.”
“Supporting yourself isn’t a lesson. It’s reality.”
“You don’t work for anyone. You don’t have a real job.”
Hawley grabbed the stinking apron off the table and threw it at her.
“You,” he said. “You’re my job.”
—
AT THE SAWTOOTH Loo spent her time cleaning and setting the tables, answering every ding-ding of the chefs, holding plates with the side of her hand, the crook of her arm, the edge of her shoulder, filling and refilling glasses of water, washing dishes in a body-length rubber apron, hauling ice from the cellar and helping drunken captains tie their motorboats at the dock outside. She learned to wipe the corners of plates before picking them up, and to carry them by the edges; she learned to wash wineglasses with burning-hot water, not soap; she learned to never ask the chef if he could do a special order unless he had smoked a joint within the past hour; she learned to carry bouillabaisse by itself, or risk spilling it all over the customers; she learned to sidestep “accidental” butt grabs and boob brushes, ignore lustful, drunken stares and smile away propositions by men old enough to be her grandfather; and she learned to curb the hate that flushed through her veins and made her want to slam plates of food into customers’ faces, slam the waitresses into the walls, slam the hand of the sous-chef who had tweaked her nipple—a joke, a joke—over and over in the freezer door until his fingers were cut in two.
The Sawtooth was owned by the entire Gunderson family, including Principal Gunderson, whose father had passed down the establishment to his six sons. Hawley provided the clams and mussels, but the fish and lobsters and crabs served were all caught by the Gunderson brothers—who would drag their catch in the back door still alive and take turns bashing it with a club. Then they would go home to their families. But Principal Gunderson had no family. His wife had left him for an Outward Bound instructor, and so he acted as general manager for the Sawtooth, opening the restaurant each morning and then returning after school for the night shift. On weekends he sat in a corner booth and drank coffee and did the books.
Food runners and bar-backs got tipped out by the waitstaff. At the end of the night, when the final customers were persuaded to leave, and Principal Gunderson rang through credit cards, and everyone from the back of the house and the front of the house was sitting exhausted at the bar, covered with food and the smell of food, fingernails thick with oil and grease, smoking and drinking too much to be driving, Loo waited for the waitresses to count their money and decide how much they would give her. It was supposed to be ten percent. More, if she’d helped them out especially. Usually Loo got tipped her proper share. Unless Mary Titus was working.
The fishing widow looked the same as she had bleeding in Loo’s bathtub, small and childlike but her face lined with middle age, her body slick with patchouli oil and covered in beaded jewelry, a hippie skirt around her waist and a tank top with no bra and the same dark tufts of hair poking from beneath her armpits. On the day Loo started as a food runner, Mary Titus went straight to Principal Gunderson, then returned carrying a fistful of forks. She said, “You’ve got him fooled, but not me.” Then she walked over to the coffee station, where the other waitresses were gathered, and showed off the stitches in the back of her head.
“Mary says you tried to kill her,” said Agnes, the tallest of the waitresses, after Loo had refilled her breadbasket. The hair on top of her head was dyed pink and the sides were orange. A metal stud pierced her lower lip.
“It was an accident,” said Loo.
Agnes ate one of the shrimp on her surf and turf. She smelled of Vaseline and paint thinner. “That’s what my boyfriend said. Now I’m pregnant again.”
“Boy or girl?” Loo asked.
Agnes clicked the metal stud in her lip against her teeth.
“Neither,” she said.