Running on Empty (5 page)

Seeing the other two orders hanging from metal clips, Ethan scanned the countertop. He saw some of the same clips in a plastic container, pulled one out, fastened the paper to it, and hung it from the string.

Ike sighed profoundly. “Ever heard of ‘First come, first served’?”

Ethan nodded.

The cook lifted Ethan’s order off the string and hung it to the left of the other two, advancing the string toward the right. “Got it?” he demanded.

“Got it,” said Ethan.

Ike’s eyes suddenly narrowed. “What the hell’s that?” he asked, pointing at what Ethan had written.

Ethan shrugged. “The guy’s order.”

“This here an eight?”

“A four.”

“And he wants it raw?”

“Rare.”

“With a
man?
”

“A side of mayo.”

The cook tore the paper from the clip, crumpled it, and tossed it at Ethan, bouncing it off his forehead before Ethan could react. “Can’t cook what I can’t read, numbskull.”

Ethan flushed. “Looked clear enough to me.”

Ike took two broad steps forward, and although he was at least four inches shorter, his physical presence seemed magnified as he glared up into Ethan’s face. “Let’s get one thing straight right now,” he snarled. “I don’t give a rat’s ass how anything looks to you. This is
my
kitchen and I’m king, got that? If I tell you to cross your legs and shit salmon, you’d better goddamn do it.”

Flushing even more deeply, Ethan fought the urge to tell the king where he could shove his crown. “Got it,” he replied.

“You’d
better
,” continued Ike, “if you wanna keep workin’ here. I got zero time for slackers, fancy boy. Now write me the goddamn order so I can read it.”

Fancy boy!
Ethan fumed as he opened his notepad, rewriting the order with exaggerated care. He tore off the page and hung it carefully to the left of the other two on the string. “Happy?” he asked.

Ike looked as if he was going to backhand him, and Ethan nearly flinched. “Oh, we got a long road ahead of us before I even get in the
neighbourhood
of happy,” the cook growled.

Ethan just shrugged and turned to leave.

“You forgettin’ somethin’?” Ike nodded at the crumpled paper on the floor.

Ethan gaped at it. “I’m not the one who—”

“You don’t walk away from a mess,” Ike growled. “Not in
my
kitchen.”

Seething, Ethan stooped to pick up the paper, thinking about the mom-and-tot swims at Harbourside that had been such a
pain in the ass. Not once during all those Saturday mornings had any of the moms—or any of their snot-nosed brats—pissed him off as much as this prick.

Back in the dining area, he could tell from the looks on everyone’s faces that they’d been listening to the exchange in the kitchen. Lil and a couple of the old guys gave him sympathetic smiles, but Clarence uncorked another of his guffaws. “So how hard can it
be?
” he snorted.

You got chutzpah, kid
, Lil had told him. Four hours later, Ethan was pretty sure that whatever chutzpah he might have had was now gone, along with the feeling in most of his toes. In fact, all he was really conscious of below his waist was an ache that began in his arches and spread to his ass. Allie had told him he should dress up a little when he applied for jobs, so along with a sport shirt and a pair of dress pants, he was wearing the patent leather shoes his father had bought him for his cousin’s wedding that summer, and those wingtips had been tight to begin with. They were now at least half a size too small, and man, was he paying for it. He could feel a stickiness in his socks that probably meant his blisters were bleeding.

Not that he’d had a moment to check them. Lil had been right about the gawkers. The destroyer and the cruise liners had brought waves of people down to the harbour, all seeming to need to eat at the same time—and non-stop. Ethan suspected that hungry tourists with big money probably went to the more expensive restaurants along the waterfront. The Chow Down, on the other hand, seemed to attract every oddball, cheapskate, and family with kids under five. Kids who screeched at their parents, upset their food, balled up the pages of the colouring books Lil kept on hand, and threw the crayons Ethan brought them in Styrofoam cups. Reaching down for a stub of Burnt Sienna that looked like it had been gnawed on, he could understand why some species ate their young. In fact, by the middle of the
afternoon, he’d begun to wonder why the human race hadn’t died out long ago. If the odds were heavy in favour of producing kids like the demon spawn he’d been serving, who would want to take the chance? As much as Ethan loved risk—hell, it kept the blood pumping and let you know you were actually alive—he doubted he had the
cojones
for
that
gamble. The last four hours
—no
, he thought, glancing at his watch,
make that four hours and nine minutes
—had been a hell of a lot more effective than any of those ass-numbing lectures on birth control he’d sat through in school, and he had new respect for Raye’s ability to keep those Applegate hellions in line.

Dropping the crayon back into its cup, Ethan began clearing the table. As he stacked the dirty dishes onto his tray, he uncovered the tip the father of that freak show had left him—two lousy bucks. Math had always come easily to Ethan, and a quick mental calculation told him he hadn’t even been tipped five per cent on the before-tax total. And that wasn’t the lowest he’d gotten. Some people had left him a buck, and a few hadn’t tipped him at all.

One reason, he realized, was that he lacked Selena’s considerable assets. Some of the oddballs had even asked about her, clearly annoyed those impressive tits had moved on to Alberta. But it wasn’t only his flat chest that undercut his efforts. He’d mixed up orders, dropped a tray of dirty dishes, smashing everything but the cutlery (he’d mistakenly pushed through the left batwing door instead of the right just as Lil was coming out), and upset a glass of ice water into a woman’s lap. She stormed out shouting that she’d never darken The Chow Down’s doorway again if
he
was serving there. Ethan was surprised that Lil hadn’t fired him on the spot, but she’d just shrugged her shoulders and told him there were orders up in the kitchen. Ike mostly glowered at him before turning his eyes toward the ceiling as if silently counting to ten. The few times he did speak, it was only
to snarl at Ethan about what he was doing wrong, which was pretty much everything. Ethan had bitten back so many replies that his jaws ached nearly as much as his feet.

“Could we get some
service
over here?”

Ethan turned to see a large, burgundy-haired woman glaring at him from the booth by the window that his buddy Clarence had sat in hours earlier. Despite having given Ethan a hard time, Clarence had left him the biggest tip so far—four bucks—along with some information. “You know what
tip
stands for?” Clarence had asked. When Ethan shook his head, he’d told him, “It’s short for ‘to improve performance.’ You got no place to go but up, kid.”

“Be right there,” Ethan said to the burgundy-haired woman as he finished wiping off the table, then carried the tray of dirty dishes toward the kitchen, trying not to wince with each step. They’d gone through a ton of dishes that afternoon, and Ike’s assistant had certainly earned whatever The Chow Down was paying him.

Lil had introduced the assistant simply as Rake. Ethan didn’t know if that was the guy’s real name or just some handle he’d picked up, but Ethan guessed the latter because, in his late fifties or so, Rake was as thin as any garden tool and had about as many hairs on his head as the tines on the business end of one. Besides doing prep work for Ike, one of his jobs was to keep the clean dishes coming, which he did. Something he didn’t do was talk. He’d barely nodded when Lil had introduced him, and Ethan hadn’t heard him say a single word during any of the times he’d been in the kitchen.

“Here’s another one,” Ethan said to Rake as he set the full tray beside the dishwasher. He grabbed an empty one, loaded it with clean cutlery and paper napkins, and hurried back out to the dining area. An hour earlier, they’d gotten so busy that Lil had given him a few more tables to serve, and all of them were
now occupied as he headed toward the burgundy-haired woman. Across from her sat a man half her size, the expression on his face a lot like the one Ethan probably wore each time he had to return to the kitchen.

The woman was drumming her fingers on the tabletop, the rapid clacking of her long fingernails, like miniature gunfire, audible even above the surrounding chatter. “We’ve been sitting here for almost fifteen minutes!” she spat.

Liar
, thought Ethan, who’d seen the couple come in less than five minutes before. “Welcome to The Chow Down,” he said, the greeting now as automatic as breathing. “You had a chance to look at the menu?”

“What do you
think
we’ve been doing all this time?” she asked. He couldn’t place her accent. American Midwest maybe? For all he knew, though, she could have come from Musquodoboit Harbour on the Eastern Shore.

“Sorry,” he said, swallowing the sudden urge to upset her ice water. “It’s been crazy here all afternoon.” He held out his notepad, now noticeably thinner than when Lil had first given it to him. “What can I get you?”

As he wrote down their order—she wanted the Garden Salad while her male companion chose the Mile-High Burger, probably praying for a heart attack to put him out of his misery—Ethan’s mind wandered back over the last four hours. Rude customers like this burgundy nightmare hadn’t been the worst of Ethan’s afternoon. Nor had poor tips, aching feet, or even tongue-lashings from Ike. The lowest point had come when he realized that the largest group he’d waited on—one he’d pulled a couple tables together in order to seat—had stiffed him. Which meant that the cost of three All Day Breakfasts, two Tuna Melts With Fries, a Chicken Alfredo With Garlic Toast, and a Seafood Platter Supreme was coming out of his own pocket. Combined with the cost of the dishes he’d broken,
Ethan might end the day owing more money than he’d earned, measly tips included.

His latest order in hand, he headed to the kitchen and was just clipping the paper to the string when his cellphone vibrated. Easing it out of his pocket, he saw Allie’s name on the display. He knew better than to let Ike see him answer it, of course, but at that moment he needed to hear the voice of someone who actually gave a shit about him.

“Where’ve you been? How’d the interviews go?” she asked him. The phone tucked between his ear and his shoulder as he reached for two plates waiting under the warming lamp, Ethan could barely hear her voice over the clatter of cutlery and the rattle of pans.

“I got a job,” he told her. “A place called The Chow Down.”

“That’s great!” she said. “When do you start?”

But before he could answer, one of the plates in his hands shifted and he watched an All Day Breakfast slide off the chipped porcelain and hurtle floorward. Bracing himself for another roar from Ike, he felt the cell shift along his neck and it, too, fell, landing squarely in the middle of Eggs Over Easy. It didn’t even bounce.

“Thanks for picking me up, man,” said Ethan as he slid into Seth’s ancient yellow VW Beetle. A huge Love Bug decal had once adorned its hood, but the car’s previous owner had altered it with Day-Glo paint so it now read
Love Buggery
, which suited Seth Wheaton just fine. “I couldn’t’ve faced that bus.” The ache Ethan felt earlier in his feet and legs had migrated to his back, and there was a knot between his shoulder blades the size of a fist. No shift at the Harbourside Pool had ever left him feeling like this.

“No problem, buddy,” said Seth as he pulled the car into traffic, the Beetle backfiring twice. “You look like crap.”

“Believe it or not,” Ethan muttered, “I feel worse than I look.”

Seth grinned. “So what was it like?”

“Not as glamorous as you might think,” Ethan replied drily, recounting some of the afternoon’s humiliations.

“How’d you do moneywise?”

“I owe them nineteen dollars and change.”

Seth laughed, then stopped when he saw the look on Ethan’s face. “How—?”

“I tend to drop stuff,” he mumbled, unlacing his wingtips and gingerly sliding one of them off. He was right—the heel of his once-grey sock was now brown with dried blood. He reached down to rub his foot but then thought better of it. He didn’t want to start things flowing again.

Early-evening traffic was heavy as the Beetle coughed to a stop and Seth waited to turn onto Morris Street, scanning for an opening before swinging the car out. The engine hesitated, so Seth floored it, the Beetle belching blue smoke as it laboured forward. “Look on the bright side,” he said. “At least you got a day’s experience. Maybe that’ll help.”

“Help what?” asked Ethan.

“When you apply somewhere else.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“You got fired, right?”

“Actually,” said Ethan, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a piece of paper, “I got a schedule.” He unfolded it to show a calendar page with dates circled in red and times written beside them. “I’m working again tomorrow.”

Seth’s eyes widened. “It’ll take that long to work off what you owe? Just how bad
are
you, man?”

Ethan shook his head. “Lil, she’s the person who interviewed me, she gave me the job. She actually wants me back.”

“Why? Comic relief?”

“Lil says most people start out like I did,” said Ethan, then grinned sheepishly. “Maybe not
exactly
like I did, but not great. Anyway, she says I’ll get better with experience.” He reached behind him, massaging his lower back. “One thing’s for sure. I can’t get any worse.”

“We need to talk,” Jack Palmer said when Ethan limped through the front door. No “Hello” or “Hi,” or even “Hey.” Just
We need to talk
.

Looking into the living room through the wide archway flanked by marble columns, Ethan saw his father sitting in a wingback chair. He’d obviously been waiting for him, and Ethan wondered for how long. Hoped it was hours.

Music played through hidden speakers wirelessly connected to their entertainment system. As usual, his old man was listening to ‘70s rock. Jack and Raye Palmer both loved “oldies,” although Ethan thought “mouldies” was more accurate. Despite the low volume, he recognized Jackson Browne, who was often at the top of his father’s playlist. This time the rocker was singing “You Love the Thunder” and, judging from the look on his father’s face, Ethan figured thunder was in the immediate forecast.

“Where’ve you been?”

Ethan shrugged. “Out.” He hadn’t said more than a handful of words to his dad since the No Deductible hammer had shattered his savings. Not that his father would have noticed. He and two other lawyers at Fisher, McBurney, and Hicks were tied up in a high-profile case involving a politician charged with drunk driving and leaving the scene of an accident. The driver of the car he hit had recorded the whole thing on his cellphone and posted it on YouTube, which made building a defence a legal nightmare, and Jack had been working late every night since he’d caught the case.

“Sit down,” his father said, pointing to the sofa. Its white upholstery reminded Ethan of the drawings of sheep in Lil’s
Mother Goose Activity Book
, which he’d passed out to kids at The Chow Down. He’d given one of them a page to colour from the nursery rhyme section, and the kid had immediately zigzagged purple all over Mary’s little lamb. Ethan mused that a few zigzags of purple—or
any
colour—would be an improvement in that living room. On the advice of his fiancée, Jack had had the decorators paint and upholster everything in a colour called “Brilliant Cream.” The only thing that wasn’t absolutely white was the photograph of his grandmother, its rosewood frame and sepia tones stark against the wall where it hung. When she saw the finished room for the first time, Raye had muttered to Ethan, “Looks like somebody puked January in there.” Neither he nor Raye ever used the room. In fact, Jack himself rarely spent time in there unless he was entertaining guests, so Ethan found it odd to see his father sitting in the living room now, waiting for him.

“Got things to do,” Ethan said. He intended to go upstairs, run a hot bath in the whirlpool tub, and spend the next half-hour letting the jets pound away that knot in his back.

“They can wait,” his father said.

Ethan recognized his
I’m Not Asking You Again
tone and silently promised himself that if he was ever unlucky enough to have kids of his own—even creatures as ungrateful as those little snots he’d served that afternoon—he’d never use that voice on them. Sighing, he trudged into the room and slumped onto the sofa. “What’s so important?”

His father pulled his cellphone out of his pocket, pressed three keys, and set the phone on Speaker.

Ethan recognized the beeps of the phone company’s automated voice mail, then a recorded voice saying, “You have one archived message. To review your message, press 1.”

Ethan’s father pressed 1.

“First archived message,” said the automated voice, “sent at 11:17 today.” Then another voice spoke. “Mr. Palmer? This is Rachel Moore at John C. Miles High School. I’m Ethan’s homeroom and English teacher.”

“Look—” Ethan began, but his father held up his other hand, cutting him off.

“I’m sorry to bother you on a Saturday,” the voice continued, “but I’ve been away at a conference and am just now getting caught up at school. I found a letter from you on my desk explaining Ethan’s absence on Thursday, and I’m wondering if you could give me a call. I have a concern that I’d like to speak with you about.”

Ethan’s father clicked off the phone and set it on the coffee table beside a white vase filled with dried flowers that his decorators had obviously sprayed with Brilliant Cream latex. He stared at Ethan and waited.

Ethan let the silence hang in the air. He looked above the fireplace at the photograph of his grandmother, at the sheets billowing around her in the wind. At the laughing smile directed at the camera. Directed at
him
. He’d be damned if he was going to speak first. Two could play the drawing-out-the-moment game.

Finally, his father spoke. “What do you have to say for yourself, Ethan?”

“What do you
want
me to say?”

“I think an apology is in order.”

“I’m sorry,” said Ethan, his response cool and careless.

Jack sighed. “Do you even know what you’re apologizing for? It clearly doesn’t matter to you, but it’d be nice if you understood
why
you should be sorry.”

The ball in his court now, Ethan was tempted to let his father wait for his answer, but he thought again about the whirlpool tub
and the knot in his back. “Forging the note,” he lobbed back, then added, “Big deal.”

His father raised his eyes and appeared to study the ceiling as if reading words on that flawless white expanse. “Ethan,” he began, “I once defended a man—another lawyer, in fact—accused of embezzling money from his firm.”

“Look, could we maybe save this story for another time? I’ve had a long—”

“When I asked him about it off the record,” his father interrupted, his voice firmer, “he said it all started the day he forged a client’s name on a document to meet a litigation deadline. It was innocent enough. He didn’t benefit from it other than saving himself and a paralegal some time refiling the case.”

Ethan could guess where this was headed. Longing for the whirlpool, he wished his old man would just get on with it.

“But that,” said his father, turning to face Ethan again, “just made it a little easier the next time he decided to forge a signature. And before long—” He paused, shaking his head. “Before long, he wasn’t doing it just to save time.”

“So,” said Ethan, “the big life lesson here is that forging your signature is my first step on the road to white-collar crime.”
Or Brilliant Cream–collar crime
, he thought, looking at those ridiculous walls.

“Don’t trivialize this.”

“But you make it so easy.” Ethan stood up. He’d had enough.

“Sit down.”

“Look, I’m tired. I just want—”

“I said,
sit down!
”

Ethan eyed those spray-painted flowers again, considered hurling them and the vase across that pristine January room. Instead he sat.

“I had a long talk with Ms. Moore,” his father said.

Since you missed the parent-teacher evening last month
, thought Ethan,
I’m not surprised
.

“She says you haven’t been applying yourself.”

“If by ‘applying myself’ she means I haven’t been hanging on every golden word that falls from her lips, yeah, she’d be right about that.”

His father looked at him as though unsure what he was seeing. “What happened to you?”

Ethan didn’t respond.

“It’s like I don’t even know you anymore,” his father continued. “Nothing seems to matter to you.”

Resentment ignited in Ethan’s belly. “Things matter to me,” he said.

“Name one.”

“The money you took. I would’ve been able to buy Kyle’s Cobra if you hadn’t—”

“Listen to yourself,” his father interrupted again, his right index finger stabbing the air for emphasis. “If
I
hadn’t. Who was the person who lost control of the car in the driveway? Who was the person who ran the Volvo into the corner of the garage?”

This was the part Ethan hated most—that witness-stand feeling as his father machine-gunned him with questions. Although he’d never seen his old man operate in the courtroom, he could guess this was exactly the strategy he used with people who testified against someone he was representing. “And
you’ve
never made a mistake in your whole
life
,” he snarled.

“Sure I’ve made mistakes,” said Jack. “But I owned up to them. I
paid
for them. I certainly didn’t try to blame somebody
else
for what I’d done.”

Ethan seethed in silence. As usual, Fisher, McBurney, and Hicks’s star attorney had all the right words, even if what he said was so much bullshit.

His father seemed to take his silence for agreement. “Look,”
he said, “I know we haven’t seen eye to eye on a lot of things lately—”

Ethan snorted.

“—but,” continued Jack, “I only want what’s best for you.”

“Then give me back the money you took.”

Jack sighed and shook his head. “Money isn’t what’s at stake here, Ethan.”

“Then what is?”

“Doing what’s right.”

Ethan looked down at his hands that had curled into fists. He forced his fingers apart, struggled to keep his voice even. “That would be life lesson number
what?
”

“Ethan—”

“No, really. They’re all coming so fast now that it’s hard to keep track. I think I need a program.”

“For Christ’s sake, don’t be such a smartass!”

Ethan blinked, astonished to hear his father swear, but that only fuelled his anger. “Just so I’m clear,” he said, his hands making fists again, “is ‘Don’t Be A Smartass’ a
separate
life lesson or a subsection of the ‘Doing What’s Right’ material we just covered?”

“Young man—” his father began, then stopped, and Ethan could see his jaw still working as if Jack Palmer were the one groping for words for a change.
Yes!
Ethan did a mental fistpump, betting that his old man preferred the predictability of courtroom procedure to the uncertainty of what passed for life on Seminary Lane. Somewhere in that attorney’s head of his there had to be a white room where everything he ever said got written down first, revised, edited for clarity, rehearsed, and then rehearsed some more.

“Ethan,” his father finally continued, “you’ve had everything you could possibly want.”

Ethan thought about that dumb
Freedom from Want
painting
that Moore-or-Less had bought in New York, and his anger rekindled. People like that artist and Jack Palmer didn’t know a goddamn thing. “How would
you
know what I want?” he snapped. “You’re never
around!
”

“That’s not fair,” said his father. “Need I remind you, my job pays for the house you live in, the clothes on your back, the food you—”

“I thought you said money isn’t what’s at stake here.”

His father flushed. “You have no idea how lucky you are, Ethan. When I was your age—”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Sing that song again. The ballad of Ann Almighty and the poor little Palmers.”

His father’s face looked like a sudden scar as he turned toward the picture in the rosewood frame. Drawing a deep breath, he said, “All I ever wanted was to teach you values you could hold on to your whole life.”

“Values, huh?” Ethan was surprised by the venom in his own voice, but it gave him strength as he plunged ahead. “Like that case you’re working on now? Defending a man the whole world
knows
is guilty? The other driver got it all on video.
Recorded
him staggering at the scene of that accident, for Christ’s sake, then recorded him just driving off. And the guy claims he’s
innocent?
I’m wondering what value
that’s
teaching anyone. How about this? When you drink and drive, don’t run into people with cellphones.”

Turning again to Ethan, his father spoke evenly, but heat underlined every word. “Everyone is entitled to due process. Everyone is innocent—”

“Until proven guilty? The video’s already done that!”

“That video should never have been made public before the trial. It compromises—”

“Everyone
knows
who it compromises. The team of lawyers who have to
defend
that jerk-off.”

“It was an accident that could have happened to
anyone!
” Jack shouted, his face crimson.

Now it was Ethan’s mouth that hung open. But only for a moment. “You’re actually standing
up
for the guy?”

His father’s hands gripped the arms of the wingback as though he were holding himself in place. “The man’s a respected government official with years of public service to his credit. He made a mistake.”

Ethan leaped to his feet. “The guy gets drunk and rear-ends another driver then leaves the scene of the accident before making sure nobody is hurt. And that’s a
mistake
. But
I
clip the corner of a garage and receive the full punishment of Palmer law. That’s beautiful.” He turned and headed toward the doorway.

“Ethan! We haven’t finished here yet.”

Ethan ignored him.

“Don’t you
dare
walk away when I’m talking to you! Do you hear me?”

Ethan grabbed the handle of the front door and wrenched it open. Because he knew his father was expecting him to slam it, he left it swinging wide.

“Getting to be a habit?” asked Pete.

Ethan looked at the joint in his hand. “This?” He took another toke, then handed it back to his friend.

Pete sucked on it, held his breath for a long moment, and then released the sweet smoke, watching it curl over their heads. “No. You arguing with your dad and then running off.”

“Seems like it,” Ethan said. Then, “Hey, you didn’t have plans tonight, did you?”

“Nah.”

Ethan frowned. “You turning into a monk or something, buddy? When’s the last time you had a date?”

Pete gave an exaggerated sigh. “
Please
tell me we’re not going there again.”

“Look, I told you that Hailey Pettinger has the hots for you, right?” He’d gotten that from Rico, who played soccer with Hailey’s brother.

“Not my type,” said Pete.

“And what type would that be? Inflatable with a big round mouth?”

“Funny,” Pete replied.

“I mean it, man. You haven’t gone out with anybody since you took Corrine to the prom. And that was, like, four
months
ago.”