Crush du Jour (11 page)

“Of course,” I said, sounding desperate and breathless. “And, you know, after that I can totally help you clean the rest of this up—”

“No, no,” he said. His voice was highpitched and mildly frantic. He wanted me gone from the scene of the crime. That much was obvious. I was supremely embarrassed.

Oh, man. I was toxic. I was a toxic waitress.

Could a toxic waitress ever morph, butterfly-like, into a less-toxic girlfriend?

I shook my head. I was the last person to answer that question. And anyway, this was definitely not the time to be dwelling on my doomed love for Seth. The closest I’d get
to his body—tonight, if not forever—was that kitchen crash test.

I darted off to punch his orders back in. The heat was really and truly on tonight, and I had to step up my game before things reached a boiling point.

It didn’t take long to send Seth’s orders through to the kitchen; I’m actually much better at a keyboard than a sideboard. I’d popped my head inside to explain what happened. No one was all that pleased with me, but they were too busy to do more than grunt disapprovingly while sautéing, mixing, and saucing mechanically (and maniacally).

I bumped into Callie—for once, not in the literal sense of the word, but actually merely brushed past her—on my way back to the front of the house (restaurant-speak for where the tables are). I braced myself for an onslaught of snark, but, still overwhelmed, she barely glanced at me.

“You’ve got a two-top. Just seated,” she said, motioning toward table three. She made a face like she smelled sour milk. “Total freakshow.”

Great. A weirdo. The last thing I needed tonight. Hadn’t I already fulfilled my quota
of embarrassment for the evening? For my life?

Seth’s order was taken care of, and our mess had been cleaned (busboys: the true unsung heroes of the restaurant industry). Somewhere in the middle of all the chaos, I’d managed to get bread plates, water, and drink orders to my tables. It was finally time to tackle the wild card over at table three.

I quickly knotted my hair into a tiny ponytail and took a deep breath. Some meditation might have helped, but I doubted that this was the time to channel my inner Buddhist. I picked up my freshly wiped tray, exhaled, and at last turned toward table three.

And nearly fainted dead away.

Callie was right about the customer. Weird wasn’t even the word. On the spectrum between “regular person” and “funhouse attraction,” based on her appearance alone, she was inching swiftly and steadily away from the safety zone.

She sat unself-consciously by herself, thumbing idly through a magazine. I couldn’t see from where I stood what she was reading, but I couldn’t have missed her glasses in the dark: They were oversized
pink plastic rims the likes of which Carrie Donovan only dreamed about. Her hair shot out from her face in a thick shock of bright copper curls. Her lipstick—a shade best described as “Bozo Red #1,” extended well beyond her lip line, even though her mouth was closed, and it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that some had smudged onto her front teeth. She wore a green corduroy jumper that was about three sizes too big for her, and around her neck she’d strung a chain of oversized, multicolored plastic beads.

I knew this woman. Her name was Audrey.

And she was my mother.

Blindsided did not describe how I felt. When I realized that my mother was in the restaurant, in full review costume, it was as if the walls had shrunk inward to the point that they encased me, arms pinned at my sides. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. Time stood still, and everyone and everything in the room ground to a halt, like the gears had been soaked in pesto aioli and left out to rust.

I couldn’t wait on my own mother. Not like this. She was a reviewer. A reviewer
who already had plenty of her own ideas about this place. I certainly wasn’t going to make it any better. And besides, wasn’t there some law about this, like how doctors aren’t supposed to operate on members of their own family?

But I
had
to wait on my mother. If I explained to anyone about the family clause, I’d blow her cover. That was out of the question, for sure.

I couldn’t foist her table off on anyone else under flimsy, false pretenses, because there
wasn’t
anyone else who wasn’t buried. Swapping tables right now would only gum up the works further, and I wasn’t exactly known for helping to keep Hype running in a smoothly (extra-virgin olive)-oiled fashion.

I had no choice. I had to step up. I mean,
really
step up. I had to be efficient, competent, and cheerful. I had to be good at my job. Better than good. Tonight, I had to rise to the cream of the waitress crop.

And
I had to be totally objective about the whole thing.

This all was definitely going to go down the tubes faster than a fallen soufflé.

Positive thinking
, I instructed myself firmly.
Raindrops on roses and red sour jacks
and other things that are the opposite of doom and disaster
.

I pasted the brightest smile I could onto my face and perky’d my way over to my mother’s—I mean,
Audrey’s
—table.

To her credit, my mom didn’t even flinch when she saw me. It had to surprise her to find me here.

“Hi there, how are you tonight?” I asked.

“Great, thank you,” she said pleasantly. As if this entire exchange weren’t surreal enough, she’d managed to disguise even her voice, drawling in a slow, steady tone that sounded nothing like my actual mother. I suppose that should have helped me to disassociate; instead, it freaked me out. Where was that dry-goods pantry rift in the timespace continuum when you needed it?

“Would you like to hear our specials for tonight?” There was no going back. I had to keep moving. I was like a shark. A shark wearing lime-green Pumas.

“That would be lovely,” she replied.

I looked down at my pad, where the specials should have been written. They weren’t there. I must have ripped the top sheet off my pad earlier. How? Why?

I paused. “Let me just go check on those
for you, okay?” I was almost proud of myself. From the tone of my voice, you would never even have known that I was rapidly melting into a cold little puddle of chocolate pudding.

“Sure. Oh, and actually”—she held out her water glass brightly—”if I could maybe get another glass that’s clean?”

I leaned forward to inspect hers. Sure enough, it was adorned with greasy lipstick prints along the rim.

I struggled not to react to the big-time grossness of her water glass as I took it back from her.

“Of course,” I said, smiling like I’d been hit with a dose of horse tranquilizers. I was a Stepford waitress. I was feeling no pain. “Just a moment.”

The specials were stone crab claws served in a fennel consommé, braised short ribs, and a dark chocolate espresso mousse. Audrey decided to try them all (I had insider knowledge that she had tried all the signature dishes on her first visit), and I tossed a sprig of fresh parsley in her soup in a shameless attempt to score a few extra points.

Now, you know I wasn’t thrilled to be at work on a night as busy as this, and it would not be untrue to add that waiting on my costumed mother was terrifying on the level of being asked to deliver an oral presentation in class stark naked. But I have to say, once I got over the initial shock of seeing Mom spackled in clown makeup, I got things together pretty quickly. I found her a sparkly clean water glass, I opened a bottle of wine for her without sending the cork shooting across the room or smacking myself in the chin with the corkscrew, and I even poured the fennel consommé from a mod little blown-glass pitcher into the bowl of stone crabs without depositing a single drop into my mothers lap.

Yay, me. With any luck, I could count on a decent tip from Audrey. Seeing as how we were blood relatives and all.

It wasn’t until we got to the dessert course that things began to unravel.

Dark chocolate espresso mousse. I mean, yum, right? It’s chocolaty, it’s creamy, and it’s got a sugar level that’ll send you bouncing off home. If you liked chocolate, and you liked coffee (which my Energizer Bunny mom really, really did), it was clearly the way to go.

It was 10:13 when I took the mousse over to Audrey’s table. I knew this precisely because I had been checking my watch feverishly ever since I’d sent Seth sprawling three hours before. From the moment I’d bodychecked the like of my life, and all throughout a meal that was totally formative as far as Hype’s reputation was concerned, all I’d thought about was making it through the shift.

And I had. After my first two fiascos, I had. I’d gotten everyone’s orders right, I hadn’t spilled drinks, I hadn’t neglected anyone’s table for too long. I smiled. I cleared efficiently. I remembered the specials.

Yeah, I’d done all that—especially the specials. After choking at Audrey’s table, I’d learned the specials upside down, inside out, and down cold. I even knew down to the millisecond when the kitchen had served the last stone crab.

But what I hadn’t done was learn the individual ingredients in all the dishes.

“Here’s your mousse,” I said brightly, laying my mother’s dessert in front of her with its accompanying porcelain bowl of old-fashioned whipped heavy cream. I smiled beatifically. She thanked me.

And took a bite.

When the mousse hit my mother’s ohso-sharpened palate, the reaction was instantaneous. Her eyes half closed and she smiled, even through her mouthful. Her entire face seemed to relax, and she gave herself over to what I knew had to be complete decadence.

And then, suddenly, she sat up straight.

A flush began at her throat and crawled its way up her neck. Her eyes began to water. She coughed, first softly, and then with increasing force. She bent over the table, bracing against it with her palms. Her chair rocked.

People were starting to stare, though for once, I couldn’t care less. But given the circumstances, it was not a particularly refreshing change of pace. Had I poisoned my mother?

For the second time that evening, I froze. My mother. Was choking. At Hype. In a fright wig. Which was starting to slip off of her head.

This was a vortex of wrongness. There was no more wrong this moment could be. I closed my eyes to steady myself against a wave of nausea.

“Laine!”

It was Seth, proving yet again that he was way quicker on his feet than I was. He dashed toward my mother with a pitcher of water. He refilled her glass and crouched down next to her.

“Are you choking?” he asked.

She shook her head, still heaving fitfully. He pushed her water glass toward her, and she took it gratefully. He patted at her back while her coughs died down to a low sputtering.

It was like someone had pressed the play button on the DVD player. I darted to her side.

“Mom?” I asked, my voice sounding foreign and quavery to my own ears. “Are you all right?”

She gulped at her water glass.

“What was in the mousse?” she asked, her voice raspy and unsteady.

I shook my head in utter ignorance. “Chocolate. Espresso. Moussey things?”

I heard a throat clear and looked up.

It was Seth’s father. A mix of emotions played across his face. None of them looked very warm or fuzzy.

“Ah,” he began tentatively, “there was also some ground hazelnut.”

Hazelnut!

Like, the one thing in the world that my mother was allergic to. One bite was fine, if uncomfortable and embarrassing. But if she had eaten any more of that mousse? The vortex of wrongness would have threatened to swallow Hype whole.

I felt faint again. I
had
poisoned my mother. For real.

At her job. At
my
job.

Oh, boy.

Slowly, my mother stood up from the table and stretched. She reached up with resignation and pulled her wig off of her head, running her fingers through her hair to shake it out.

Impulsively, I threw my arms around her.

“I’m so sorry,” I murmured, my face pressed into her neck. “You know that was an accident.”

Understatement. A massively, gigantically, overly understated understatement.

She leaned down and kissed the top of my head.

“Of course, Laine. It’s okay.” She rubbed at my shoulders. “I’m okay.”

“Um, Laine?”

I looked up to find Seth peering at me in confusion.

“This is your mom?” Um, yeah.

I could see where he’d be perplexed, seeing as how I’d spent half the evening catering to my mother without acting as though I’d ever met her before. My mother who happened to be dressed like a runaway circus freak.

Yeah, that might seem a little strange to someone who wasn’t clued in.

But before I had a chance to explain, Seth’s father stepped forward. With a look of wary recognition, he extended a hand to my mother to shake.

“Madison Harper?” he asked, his voice betraying his disbelief.

Seth’s jaw dropped open. He whipped his head around to gape at me.

I couldn’t bear the weight of his gaze. I dropped my eyes to the ground and refused to look up.

My mother smiled, straightened her shoulders, and reached out to take Seth’s father’s hand in her own.

“Hi,” she said. “Yes, I’m Madison Harper, from the
Philadelphia Tribune”