The girl was already skating away, and I had a nice view of her curvy rear end.
“Cadence,” she called over her shoulder. “Cadence Erikson.”
Erikson. The owners of the diner. Had I just met the owner’s daughter?
I shrugged and went in through the double doors, intrigued by pretty, mouthy Cadence and ready to see her again soon.
I walked into a hot, chaotic clusterfuck unlike anything I had ever seen. People in white aprons were running baskets of sizzling fries and spatulas with hamburgers and hotdogs covered in sauerkraut back and forth, setting them on red trays and beating on a silver bell until it looked like it was going to explode.
A balding man with bulgy eyes noticed me.
“Who are you?” he asked brusquely.
“Saxon Maclean.” I offered my hand.
He eyed my outstretched hand uncertainly, then shook a limp, wet-fish shake. “The coke head? Tony doesn’t tolerate drugs.”
“I know.” I felt my back go up a little. Did everyone know why I was here? Jesus Christ.
“Aprons over there. Get one on. Hurry up, I’ve got three minutes to teach you before the next batch of fries come out. I’m Dan. Jesus, Brian, flip those burgers before they’re charred for God’s sake! Please tell me they were supposed to be well done?” He pushed past a spacey-looking guy flipping burgers and led me to a long stainless steel table with a huge box at the end. He grabbed a handle and pulled up, lifting the box, which was, in fact, an industrial dishwasher.
“Put the cups and silverware and plates in the trays, slide them in here, close it all the way and they get washed. It’s magic!” He shook his hands and rolled his eyes. “Anything you can’t wash in there, throw it in the sink and we do it later. When the trays come out of the dishwasher, put them there.” He pointed to another low stainless shelf where girls in outfits like Cadence’s and guys in black pants and white t-shirts with the sleeves rolled were picking up food. “When it’s slow, take the trays out front and fill up the glasses and silverware under the counters. Questions?”
I shook my head. This was going to be fucking great. Magic!
A busboy in a white apron came over and slammed a full bucket down on the stainless tray.
“Hey, I’m Will,” the guy said. He was skinny and blonde. “You must be the crackhead.”
“Saxon,” I said through gritted teeth.
“Well, we’re on shift together, so hey.” He checked out the ass of one of the waitresses who leaned over to get her pen. “I’ll help bring the dishes out when I can, man. Gotta go. Oh, and load quick. One of the dumbass new girls dropped a tray of glasses so we’re low on them.” He grabbed a clean bucket, and I looked dubiously at what was left in the dirty bucket he had dropped.
Maybe I’ve lived a little bit of a privileged life, but I never gave much thought to what happened once I ate my hamburger at some shitty little diner. It never occurred to me that some poor jerkoff in some shitty back corner was going to have to paw through my ketchup-soaked napkins, scrape my half- eaten food into the garbage, and pick through partially-melted sundae remains for lost silverware. I never thought about how a job can be fairly easy, but so freaking boring you could poke your own eyes out with said lost silverware. And I never thought I could work around a good fifty people and feel like I was stranded in the middle of goddamn nowhere without a soul to talk to. At least there was angry death metal playing in the back. It suited my mood to a tee.
But I was mostly just feeling sorry for myself. My life had started a pretty steady downward spiral a few months back, and it didn’t seem like working at this shithole diner was going to make anything look up. In fact I would have thought that I might have hit a kind of rock bottom, except I didn’t want to jinx myself.
By the end of my shift (which was ten hours long; in at two, out at midnight), my arms ached from carrying trays of hot glasses, I was covered up to my elbows in chocolate syrup embedded with tiny pieces of candy that typically gets sprinkled on ice cream, bits of relish and mustard, splatters of soda and milkshake, and a million other unidentifiable things. I kept my section fairly clean, and was feeling dead on my feet when Brian, the space-cadet with the burgers, came over with a crapload of greasy, hot, dripping stainless steel stuff and dumped it in the soapy water in one of the sinks.
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
“Kitchen shit.” He looked over at me with half-glazed eyes. “Dan will bring over the grill guards and baskets in a minute.”
Will appeared next to me. “I told you I’d help. This is the shittiest part of the dishwashing thing.” He grabbed a scrub brush and handed me one. “Tony comes and looks everything over himself, so make sure you get all the shit off of it. He’ll keep you all night if he doesn’t like how you cleaned up.”
Exhaustion ripped through me. I’d been hopped on coke for the last few weeks. I wasn’t used to relying on my own energy sources, and I was dropping. My days were typically a lot less workful, and I liked it just fine that way. For one second I considered throwing my scrub brush down and telling them all to fuck off. Two things stopped me.
The first and most important was that I had enough money waiting at the end of this shitty summer work deal to get my ass anywhere I needed it to be. The second was that once I walked out of those double doors, I didn’t have one person to call and pick me up. Lylee’s house was more than two hours away. Short of taking my chances hitchhiking, I didn’t have a way to get back home. And this wasn’t exactly an area where a good-looking guy could feel comfortable sticking his thumb out on a dark road. So I picked up the scrub brush and went to work with Will until Tony himself came in.
He was as big as a damn grizzly bear. He had Cadence’s green eyes, but, other than that, he was all bushy red-blonde hair, like a gigantic Viking. He stood with his arms crossed and watched us work for a while. Then he said, “Good job, guys. Will, when this batch is done, you’re free to go. Brian, come and help Will finish. Saxon, you come with me.”
He didn’t look back to see if I followed him, but I did. ‘Cause he scared the shit out of me, though I didn’t like admitting it.
I followed him all the way to a little back room, and I was hoping he didn’t plan on beating my ass in, because there was no escaping. At all.
He sat behind a neat desk in a big leather chair and nodded for me to sit across from him. “Did your father explain what you’re going to do here?”
I shrugged. “Work, I guess.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Call me old-fashioned, but I expect younger people to call me ‘sir’ when they address me.” His voice was like the voices of the guys they always use as the scary military ops leaders in movies.
“Work, I guess. Sir,” I ground out, keeping my mind focused on the small fortune that saying ‘sir’ was going to get me.
“Yes.” He steepled his fingers like some kingpin and nodded. “We’re open six days a week, Tuesday to Sunday. You’ll have Mondays off, but those will be spent running Great-Aunt Helene’s errands with her. You’ll have access to her car to drive her. You will take her wherever she needs or wants to go, and that will last all day Monday. Clear?”
“Yes.” He glared at me. “Sir.”
“Here, at Tony’s, you’ll start as a dishwasher. But there’s room for you to move up. There are better jobs here, but every single person starts as a dishwasher, at least for one shift. I think it’s important to know what the most menial laborer is doing. It helps foster respect among the workers. Your shift will be closing, so you won’t have to come in until five, and you’ll stay until around midnight. My daughter, Pamela will drive you home with some other workers every night. Do you have any questions?”
“Do I get paid? Sir.”
“You do.” Tony’s mouth finally curved into a smile. His eyes were all sparkly, like a wolf that just saw a fat deer wander into its path. “But that money goes directly into Aunt Helene’s bank account. Room and board, of course. You’ll get your lump if you last the summer, won’t you?”