Текст книги "Just One Day"

Автор книги: Gayle Forman

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

Twenty-five

APRIL

Miami Beach

Mom and Dad are waiting for me at my gate in the Miami airport, Mom having arranged for their flight to get in a half hour before mine. I’d hoped I might have gotten out of this year’s Passover Seder. I just saw Mom and Dad for spring break a few weeks ago, and coming down for Seder means taking a day off from school. But no such luck. Tradition is tradition, and Passover is the one time of year we go to Grandma’s.

I love Grandma, and even if the Seders are always mind-numbingly dull and you take your life in your own hands eating so much of Grandma’s home cooking, that’s not why I dread them.

Grandma makes Mom crazy, which means that whenever we’re visiting, Mom makes uscrazy. When Grandma visits us at home, it’s dealable. Mom can get away, go vent to Susan, play tennis, organize the calendar, go to the mall to buy me a new wardrobe I don’t need. But when we’re at Grandma’s old-people condo in Miami Beach, it’s like being trapped on a geriatric island.

Mom starts in on me at the baggage claim, sniping at me for not sending thank-you notes out for my birthday presents, which means she must have asked Grandma and Susan if they’d gotten theirs. Because other than Jenn and Kali—who baked me a cake—and Dee—who took me out to his favorite food truck in Boston for dinner—and Mom and Dad, of course, there was no one else to send thank-you cards to this year. Melanie didn’t send anything. She just posted a greeting on my Facebook page.

Once we get into a cab (the second one, Mom having rejected the first one because the AC was too weak—no one is safe from Mom when she’s on a Grandma trajectory)—she starts in on me about my summer plans.

Back in February, when she first brought this up, asking what I was going to do over the summer, I told her I had no idea. Then, a few weeks later, at the end of spring break, she announced that she had made some inquiries on my behalf and used some connections and now had two promising offers. One is working in a lab at one of the pharmaceutical companies near Philadelphia. The other is working in one of Dad’s doctor friend’s offices, a proctologist named Dr. Baumgartner (Melanie used to call him Dr. Bum-Gardner). Neither job would be paid, she explained, but she and Dad had discussed it and decided they’d counter the loss with a generous allowance. She looked so pleased with herself. Both jobs would look excellent on my résumé, would go a long way toward offsetting what she referred to as the “debacle” of my first term.

I’d been so irritated, I’d almost told her that I couldn’t take those internships because I wasn’t qualified; I wasn’t pre-med. Just to spite her. Just to see the look on her face. But then I’d gotten scared. I was getting an A in Shakespeare Out Loud. An A minus in Mandarin, which was a first for me. A solid B in my biology class and labs, and an A in ceramics. I realized I was actually proud of how well I was doing in my classes and I didn’t want Mom’s inevitable and perennial disappointment to poison that. But that was going to happen no matter what, though I was sticking to my plan A—to show her my final grades when I made the announcement.

But finals are still three weeks away, and Mom is breathing down my neck right now about these jobs. So as we pull into Grandma’s high-rise, I tell her that I’m still mulling it over and then I skip out of the cab to help Dad with the bags.

It’s so strange. Mom is the most formidable person I know, but when Grandma opens the door, Mom seems to shrink, as if Grandma is some ogre instead of a five-foot bottle blonde in a yellow tracksuit and a KISS THE MESHUGGENEH COOK apron. Grandma grabs me in a fierce hug that smells of Shalimar and chicken fat. “ Ally!Let me look at you! You’re doing something different with your hair! I saw the pictures on Facebook.”

“You’re on Facebook?” Mom asks.

“Ally and I are friends, aren’t we?” She winks at me.

I see Mom wince. I’m not sure if it’s because Grandma and I are FB friends or because Grandma insists on shortening my name.

We step inside. Grandma’s boyfriend, Phil, is asleep on the big floral couch. A basketball game blares from the giant television.

Grandma touches my hair. It’s to my shoulders now. I haven’t cut it since last summer. “It was shorter before,” I say. “It’s sort of in between.”

“It’s better than it was. That bob was awful!” Mom says.

“It was a bob, Mom. Not a Mohawk.”

“I know what it was. But it made you look like a boy.”

I turn to Grandma. “Was she traumatized by a bad haircut in her youth? Because she seems unwilling to let this go.”

Grandma claps her hands. “Oh, Ally, you might be right. When she was ten, she saw Rosemary’s Babyand begged me to take her to the children’s beauty parlor. She kept making the lady go shorter until it was all off, and as we were leaving the salon, another mother pointed Ellie out to her son and said, ‘Why don’t you get a haircut like that nice little boy?’” She looks at Mom, smiling. “I didn’t realize that still upset you, Ellie.”

“It doesn’t upset me, because it never happened, Mother. I never saw Rosemary’s Baby. And if I had, at ten, that would’ve been entirely inappropriate, by the way.”

“I can show you the pictures!”

“That won’t be necessary.”

Grandma eyes Mom’s hair. “You might think of trying that pixie again now. I think you’ve been wearing the same style since Bill Clinton was president.” Grandma gives another wicked grin.

Mom seems to shrink another inch as she touches her hair—straight, brown, in a low ponytail. Grandma leaves her like that, pulling me into the kitchen. “You want some cookies? I have some macaroons.”

“Macaroons are not cookies, Grandma. They’re coconut cookie substitutes. And they’re disgusting.” Grandma doesn’t keep anything in the house with flour during Passover.

“Let’s see what else I have.” I follow Grandma into the kitchen. She pours me some of her diet lemonade. “Your mom is having such a hard time,” Grandma says. When Mom’s out of sight, she’s sympathetic, almost defending her, like I was the one who riled her up.

“I don’t see why. She has a charmed life.”

“Funny, that’s what she says about you whenever she thinks you’re being ungrateful.” Grandma opens the oven door to check on something. “She’s having a hard time adjusting, with you being gone. You’re all she’s got.”

I feel a pit in my stomach. Another way I’ve let Mom down.

Grandma puts out a plate of those gross jelly candies I can never resist. “I told her she should have another child, give her something to do with herself.”

I spit out my lemonade. “She’s forty-seven.”

“She could adopt.” Grandma waves her hand. “One of those Chinese orphans. Lucy Rosenbaum got a cute one as a granddaughter.”

“They’re not dogs, Grandma!”

“I know that. Still, she could get an older one. It’s a real mitzvah then.”

“Did you tell Mom that?”

“Of course I did.”

Grandma always brings up things the rest of us don’t. Like she lights a memorial candle on the anniversary of when Mom had her miscarriage all those years ago. This, too, drives Mom crazy.

“She needs to do something if she’s not going back to work.” She glances out toward the living room. I know Mom and Grandma fight about Mom not working. Once, Grandma sent a clipping from a news magazine about how badly the ex-wives of doctors fared financially in the event of divorce. They didn’t speak for months after that.

Mom comes into the kitchen. She glances at the jelly candy. “Mother, can you feed her some real food, please?”

“Oh, cool your jets. She can feed herself. She’s nineteen now.” She winks at me, then turns to Mom. “Why don’t you take some cold cuts out?”

Mom pokes in Grandma’s refrigerator. “Where’s the brisket? It’s almost two now. We should put it in soon.”

“Oh, it’s already cooking,” Grandma says.

“What time did you put in?”

“Don’t you worry. I got a nice recipe from the paper.”

“How long has it been in?” Mom peeks in the oven. “It’s not that big. It shouldn’t take longer than three hours. And you have to cover it in foil. Also you have the heat way up. Brisket’s meant to slow-cook. We’re starting the Seder at five? When did it go in?”

“Never you mind.”

“It’ll be like leather.”

“Do I tell you how to cook in your kitchen?”

“Yes. All the time. But I don’t listen. And we’ve dodged many a case of food poisoning because of it.”

“Enough of your smart mouth.”

“I think I’ll go change,” I announce. But neither one is paying attention to me anymore.

I go into the spare room and find Dad hiding in there, looking wistfully at a golf shirt. “What are the chances I can escape for a round?”

“You’d have to throw down some plagues at the Pharaoh first.” I look out the window to the silver-blue strip of sea.

He puts the golf shirt back in the suitcase. How quickly we all give in to her. This Seder means nothing to him. Dad’s not even Jewish, though he celebrates all the holidays with Mom. Grandma was supposedly furious when Mom got engaged to him, though after Grandpa died, she took up with Phil, who’s not Jewish, either.

“I was just kidding,” I say, even though I wasn’t. “Why don’t you just go?”

Dad shakes his head. “Your mom needs backup.”

I scoff, as if Mom needs anything from anyone.

Dad changes the subject. “We saw Melanie last weekend.”

“Oh, really?”

“Her band had a gig in Philadelphia, so she made a rare appearance.”

She’s in a bandnow? So she can become Mel 4.0—and I’m supposed to stay reliably me? I smile tightly at my dad, pretending like I know this.

“Frank, I can’t find my Seder plate,” Grandma calls. “I had it out for a polish.”

“Just visualize the last place you had it,” Dad says. Then he gives me a little shrug and heads off to help. After the Seder plate is located, he helps Grandma get down serving bowls, and then I hear Mom tell him to keep Phil company, so he sits and watches the basketball with napping Phil. So much for golf. I go out onto the balcony and listen to the competing sounds of Mom and Grandma’s bickering and the game on the TV. My life feels so small it itches, like a too-tight wool sweater.

“I’m going for a walk,” I announce, even though there’s no one on the balcony but me. I put on my shoes and slip out the door and walk down to the beach. I take off my shoes and run up and down the shore. The rhythmic beat of my feet on the wet sand seems to churn something out of me, pushing it through the sweat on my sticky skin. After a while, I stop and sit down and look out over the water. On the other side is Europe. Somewhere over there is him. And somewhere over there, a different version of me.

_ _ _

When I get back, Mom tells me to shower and set the table. At five, we sit down, settling in for a long night of reenacting the Jews’ escape from slavery in ancient Egypt, which is supposed to be an act of liberation, but somehow with Mom and Grandma glowering at each other, it always winds up feeling just like more oppression. At least the adults can get drunk. You have to down, like, four glasses of wine during the night. I, of course, get grape juice, in my own crystal carafe. At least I usually do. This time when I go to drink my first sip of juice after the first blessing, I almost choke. It’s wine. I think it’s a mistake, except Grandma catches my eye and winks.

The Seder carries on as usual. Mom, who, in every other part of her life, is respectful, assumes the mantle of rebellious teenager. When Grandma reads the part about the Jews wandering through the desert for forty years, Mom cracks it’s because Moses was a man who refused to ask directions. When the talk to turns to Israel, Mom harps on about politics, even though she knows this gets Grandma crazy. When we eat matzo-ball soup, they argue about the cholesterol content of matzo balls.

Dad knows enough to keep quiet. And Phil plays with his hearing aids and dozes in and out of consciousness. I refill my “juice” glass many, many times.

After two hours, we get to the brisket, which means we get to stop talking about Exodus for a while, which is a relief, even if the brisket isn’t. It’s so dry it looks like beef jerky and tastes charred. I move it around my plate, while Grandma chitchats about her bridge club and the cruise she and Phil are taking. Then she asks about our annual summer trip to Rehoboth Beach, which she usually comes up for a portion of.

“What else do you have planned for the summer?” she asks me casually.

It’s a throwaway question, really. Along the lines of how are you? Or what’s new?I’m about to say, “Oh, this and that,” when Mom interrupts to say that I’m working in a lab. Then she tells Grandma all about it. A research lab at a pharmaceutical company. Apparently, I accepted the position just today.

It’s not like I didn’t know she would do this. It’s not like she hasn’t done this my entire life. It’s not like I haven’t let her.

The fury that fills me feels hot and cold, liquid and metal, coating my insides like a second skeleton, one stronger than my own. Maybe this is what allows me to say, “I’m not working in a lab this summer.”

“Well, it’s too late,” Mom snaps back. “I already called Dr. Baumgartner to decline his offer. If you’d had a preference, you had three weeks to make it known.”

“I’m not working at Dr. Baumgartner’s, either.”

“Did you line up something else?” Dad asks.

Mom scoffs, as if that’s unthinkable. And maybe it is. I’ve never had a job. Never had to get one. Never had to do anything for myself. I am helpless. I am a void. A disappointment. My helplessness, my dependency, my passivity, I feel it whorling into a little fiery ball, and I harness that ball, somewhere wondering how something made of weakness can feel so strong. But the ball grows hotter, so hot, the only thing I can do with it is hurl it. At her.

“I don’t think your lab would want me anymore, given that I’ve dropped most of my science courses and am going to drop the rest of them come fall,” I say, spite dripping from my voice. “See, I’m not pre-med anymore. So sorry to disappointyou.”

My sarcasm hangs in the humid air—and then, like a vapor, it floats away as I realize that, for the first time in my life, I’m notsorry to disappoint her. Maybe it’s the spite talking, or maybe Grandma’s secret wine, but I’m almost glad of it. I’m so tired of avoiding the unavoidable, because I feel like I’ve been disappointing her for such a long time.

“You’ve dropped pre-med?” Her voice is quiet, that lethal mix of fury and woundedness that could always take me down like a bullet to the heart.

“That was always yourdream, Ellie,” Grandma says, shielding me. She turns to me. “You still haven’t answered my question, Ally. What are youdoing this summer?”

Mom is looking so fragile and so angry, and I feel my will starting to break, feel myself starting to give in. But then I hear a voice—my voice—announcing this:

“I’m going back to Paris.”

It comes out, as if the idea were fully formed, something plotted for months, when in fact, it just slipped out, the same way all those admissions to Willem did. But when it does, I feel a thousand pounds lighter, my anger now fully dissipated, replaced by exhilaration flowing through me like sunlight and air.

Thisis how I felt that day in Paris with Willem. And thisis how I know that it’s the right thing to do.

“Also, I’m learning French,” I add. And for some reason, this announcement makes the table erupt into pandemonium. Mom starts screaming at me about lying to her and throwing my whole future away. Dad is yelling about switching majors and who’s going to pay for my exchange program to Paris. Grandma is yelling at Mom for ruining yet another Seder.

So with all the commotion, it’s a little strange that anyone can hear Phil, who has barely said a word since the soup, when he pipes up, “ Backto Paris, Ally? I thought Helen said your trip to Paris got canceled because they were striking.” He shakes his head. “They always seem to be striking over there.”

The table goes silent. Phil picks up a piece of matzo and starts munching on it. Mom, Dad, and Grandma all stare at me.

I could so easily cover this up. Phil’s hearing aid was turned down. He heard wrong. I could say that I want to go toParis because I never made it there on the last trip. I’ve told so many lies. What’s one more?

But I don’t want to lie. I don’t want to cover up. I don’t want to pretend anymore. Because that day with Willem, I may have pretended to be someone named Lulu, but I had never been more honest in my life.

Maybe that’s the thing with liberation. It comes at a price. Forty years wandering through the desert. Or incurring the wrath of two very pissed-off parents.

I take a breath. I brave up.

“ Backto Paris,” I say.

Twenty-six

MAY

Home

Imake a new list.

Airfare to Paris: $1200

French class at community college: $400

Spending money for two weeks in Europe: $1000.

All together that’s $2,600. That’s how much money I’ll need to save to get to Europe. Mom and Dad are not helping with the trip, obviously, and they’re refusing to let me use any of the money in my savings account, from gifts through the years, because that’s supposed to be for educational purposes, and they’re the trustees on the account, so I can’t argue. Besides, it’s only through Grandma’s intervention, coupled with my threat to go live at Dee’s for the summer that Mom has even agreed to let me live at home. She’s that mad. She’s that mad without even knowing the entire story. I told them I went to Paris. I didn’t tell them why. Or with whom. Or why I need to go back, except that I left something important there—they think it’s the suitcase.

I’m not sure what infuriates her more. Last summer’s deceit or the fact that I won’t tell her everything about it. She refused to speak to me after the Seder and then four weeks went by with barely a word from her. Now that I’m back home for the start of the summer she basically avoids me. Which is both a relief and also kind of scary, because she’s never done anything like this before.

Dee says that twenty-six hundred dollars is a lot for two months, but not impossible. He suggests skipping the French class. But I feel like I need to do that. I’ve always wanted to learn French. And I’m not going back to Paris—not facing down Céline—without it.

So, twenty-six hundred bucks. Doable. If I get a job. But the thing is, I’ve never had a job before. Nothing remotely job-like, beyond babysitting and filing at Dad’s office, which hardly fills the spiffy new résumé that I’ve printed on beautiful card stock. Maybe this explains why, after dropping it off at every business in town with a job opening, I get zero response.

I decide to sell my clock collection. I take them to an antique dealer in Philadelphia. He offers me five hundred bucks for the lot. I’ve easily spent double that on the clocks over the years, but he just looks at me and says that maybe I’ll do better on eBay. But that would take months, and I just want to be rid of them. So I hand over the clocks, except for a Betty Boop one, which I send to Dee.

When Mom finds out what I’ve done, she shakes her head with such profound disgust, like I have just sold my body, not my clocks. The disapproval intensifies. It wafts through the house like a radiation cloud. Nowhere is safe to hide.

I haveto get a job. Not just to earn the money but to get out of this house. Escaping to Melanie’s isn’t an option. Number one, we’re not speaking, and number two, she’s at a music program in Maine for the first half of summer—this according to my dad.

“You just gotta keep trying,�� Dee advises when I call him for job advice from our landline. As part of my punishment, my cell phone has been turned off, and the family Internet password protected, so I have to ask them to log me onto the web or else go to the library. “Drop your résumé at every business in town, not just the ones saying they’re hiring, ’cause usually places that are desperate enough to hire someone like you don’t have time to advertise.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“You want a job? Swallow your pride. And drop off a résumé everywhere.”

“Even the car wash?” I joke.

“Yeah. Even the car wash.” Dee isn’t kidding. “And ask to speak to the manager of the car wash and treat him like the King of All Car Washes.”

I imagine myself scrubbing hubcaps. But then I think of Dee, working in a pillow factory this summer or hosing off dishes in the dining hall. He does what he has to do. So the next day, I print out fifty new résumés and just go door to door, from bookstore to sewing shop to grocery store, CPA firm to the liquor store to, yes, the car wash. I don’t just drop my résumé. I ask to speak to managers. Sometimes the managers come out. They ask me about my experience. They ask me how long I want to be employed for. I listen to my own answers: No real job experience to speak of. Two months. I get why nobody’s hiring me.

I’m almost out of résumés when I pass by Café Finlay. It’s a small restaurant on the edge of town, all done up in 1950s décor, with black-and-white-checked floors and a mishmash of Formica tables. Every other time I’ve gone past, it seemed to be closed.

But today music is blasting from inside so loud the windows are vibrating. I push the door, and it nudges open. I shout “hello.” No one replies. The chairs are all stacked up on the tables. There’s a pile of fresh linens on one of the booths. Yesterday’s specials are scrawled on a chalkboard on the wall. Things like halibut with an orange tequila jalapeño beurre blanc with kiwi fruit. Mom calls the food here “eclectic,” her code for weird, which is why we’ve never eaten here. I don’t know anyone who eats here.

“You here with the bread?”

I spin around. There’s a woman, Amazon tall and just as broad, with wild red hair poking out from under a blue bandanna.

“No,” I say.

“Mother fucker!” She shakes her head. “What do you want?” I hold out a résumé. She waves it away. “Ever work in a kitchen?” I shake my head.

“Sorry. No,” she says.

She looks at the Marilyn Monroe wall clock. “I’m going to kill you, Jonas!” She shakes her fist at the door.

I turn to leave, but then I stop. “What’s the bread order?” I ask. “I’ll run and get it for you.”

She glances at the clock again and sighs dramatically. “Grimaldi’s. I need eighteen French baguettes, six loaves of the Harvest. And a couple of day-old brioche. You got that?”

“I think so.”

“ Think so’s not gonna butter the bread, honey.”

“Eighteen baguettes. Six loaves of Harvest and a couple of day-old brioche.”

“Make sure it’s stalebrioche. Can’t make bread pudding with fresh bread. And ask for Jonas. Tell him it’s for Babs and tell him he can throw in the brioche for free and knock twenty percent off the rest because his damn delivery guy was a no-show again. Also, make sure I don’t get any sourdough. I hate that shit.”

She grabs a wad of cash from the vintage register. I take it from her and sprint to the bakery as fast as I can, get Jonas, bark the order, and run back with it, which is harder than it sounds, carrying thirty loaves of bread.

I pant as Babs looks over the bread order. “You know how to wash dishes?”

I nod. That much I can do.

She shakes her head in resignation. “Go to the back and ask Nathaniel to introduce you to Hobart.”

“Hobart?”

“Yep. You two’ll be getting intimate.”

Hobart turns out to be the name of the industrial dish washer, and once the restaurant opens, I spend hours with it, rinsing dishes with a giant hose, loading them in Hobart, unloading them while they’re still scalding hot and repeating the whole enterprise. By some miracle, I manage to stay on top of the never-ending flow of dishes and not drop anything or burn my fingers too badly. When there’s a lull, Babs orders me to cut bread or whip cream by hand (she insists it tastes better that way) or mop the floor or find the tenderloins from one of the walk-in coolers. I spend the night in an adrenaline panic, thinking I’m about to screw up.

Nathaniel, the prep cook, helps me as much as he can, telling me where things are, helping me scrub sauté pans when I get too slammed. “Just wait till the weekend,” he warns.

“I thought no one ever ate here.” I put my hand over my mouth, instinctually knowing Babs would be mad to hear that.

But Nathaniel just laughs. “Are you kidding? Babs is worshipped by the Philadelphia foodies. They make the trek out here just for her. She’d make way more money if she moved to Philly, but she says her dogs would hate it in the city. And by dogs, I think she means us.”

When the last of the diners leave, the kitchen staff and the waiters seem to all exhale at once. Someone blasts some old Rolling Stones. A bunch of tables are pushed together and everyone sits down. It’s well past midnight, and I have a long walk home. I start to pack up my things, but Nathaniel motions for me to join them. I sit at the table, feeling shy even though I’ve been bumping hips with these people all night.

“You want a beer?” he asks. “We have to pay for them, but only cost.”

“Or you can have some of the reject wine the distributors bring by,” a waitress named Gillian says.

“I’ll take some wine.”

“It looks like someone died on you,” says one of the waiters. I look down. My nice skirt and top—my good job– hunting outfit—are covered in sauces that look vaguely like bodily fluids.

“I feel like I’m the one who died,” I say. I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired. My muscles ache. My hands are red from the near-scalding water. And my feet? Don’t get me started.

Gillian laughs. “Spoken like a true kitchen slave.”

Babs appears with the big bowls of steaming pasta and small chunks of leftover fish and steak. My stomach lets out a gurgle. The platters get passed around. I don’t know if her cooking is “eclectic,” but the food is amazing, the orange tequila jalapeño sauce is only faintly orange, and it’s smoky rather than spicy. I clear my plate, and then sop up any remaining sauce with a hunk of Jonas’s not-sourdough bread.

“So?” Babs asks me when I’ve finished.

All eyes turn to me. “It’s the second best meal I’ve ever had,” I say. Which is the truth.

Everyone else oohs, like I’ve just insulted Babs. But she just smirks. “I’ll bet your first best was with a lover,” she says, and I go as red as her hair.

Babs instructs me to return the next day at five, and the routine starts all over again. I work harder than I ever have, eat an amazing meal, and pour myself into bed. I have no idea if I’m filling in for someone or maybe being auditioned. Babs screams at me constantly, for using soap on her cast-iron sauté pan or not getting the lipstick off the coffee cups before they go into Hobart or making the whipped cream too stiff or not stiff enough or not adding the exact right amount of vanilla extract. But by the fourth night, I’m learning not to take it so personally.

On the fifth night, before the dinner rush, Babs calls me to the back near the walk-in refrigerator. She’s sucking on a bottle of vodka, which is what she does before the rush begins. Her lipstick leaves smudges on the rim. For a second, I think this is it, that she’s going to fire me. But instead she hands me a sheaf of documents.

“Tax forms,” she explains. “I pay minimum wage, but you’ll get tips. Which reminds me. You keep forgetting to collect yours.” She reaches under the counter for an envelope with my name on it.

I open up the envelope. There’s a wad of cash in there. Easily a hundred dollars. “This is mine?”

She nods. “We pool tips. Everyone gets a cut.”

I run my fingers over the money. The bills snag on my ragged hangnails. My hands are beyond thrashed, but I don’t care because they’re thrashed from my job. Which has earned me this money. I feel something well up inside me that has nothing to do with airplane tickets or Paris trips or money at all, really.

“It’ll go up in the fall,” Babs says. “Summer’s our slow season.”

I hesitate. “That’s great. Except I won’t be here in the fall.”

She wrinkles her red brows. “But I just broke you in.”

I feel bad, guilty, but it was right there on my résumé, the first line—Objective: To obtain short-term employment. Of course, Babs never read my résumé.

“I go to college,” I explain.

“We’ll work around your schedule. Gillian’s a student too. And Nathaniel, on and off.”

“In Boston.”

“Oh.” She pauses. “Oh, well. I think Gordon’s coming back after Labor Day.”

“I’m hoping to leave by the end of July. But only if I can save two thousand dollars by then.” And as I say it, I do the math. More than a hundred bucks a week in tips, plus wages—I actually might be able to pull it off.

“Saving for a car?” she asks absentmindedly. She takes another swig of her vodka. “You can buy mine. That beast’ll be the death of me.” Babs drives an ancient Thunderbird.

“No. I’m saving for Paris.”

She puts her bottle down. “Paris?”

I nod.

“What’s in Paris?”

I look at her. I think of him for the first time in a while. In the craziness of the kitchen, he became a little abstract. “Answers.”

She shakes her head with such vehemence her auburn curls come loose from her bandanna. “You can’t go to Paris looking for answers. You have to go looking for questions—or, at the very least, macarons.”

“Macaroons? The coconut things?” I think of the gross cookie replacements we eat on Passover.

“Not macar oons. Macar ons. They’re meringue cookies in pastel colors. They are edible angel’s kisses.” She looks at me. “You need two thousand bucks by when?”

“August.”

She narrows her eyes at me. They’re always a little bit bloodshot, though, oddly, more so at the beginning of a shift than at the end, when they take on a sort of manic gleam. “I’ll make you a deal. If you don’t mind working some doubles for weekend brunch, I’ll make sure you earn your two grand by July twenty-fifth, which is when I close the restaurant for two weeks for mysummer vacation. On one condition.”

“Which is?”

“Every day in Paris, you eat a macaron. They have to be fresh, so no buying a pack and eating one a day.” She stops and closes her eyes. “I ate my first macaron in Paris on my honeymoon. I’m divorced now, but some loves are enduring. Especially if they happen in Paris.”

A tiny chill prickles up my neck. “Do you really believe that?” I ask her.