Fixing Lia Read online

  “Push the duck over the Wagyu,” Anson told me, as I stepped from the side of the bar and out of hiding, and I nodded. No one was ordering duck tonight and he didn’t want to get stuck with a bunch of unsold birds. I flexed up and down on my toes before I went first to the party of four, because I didn’t want to walk right past them to go to the other group of new customers. That was a mistake.

  “Welcome to Atelier Anson,” I told the diners. “My name is Lia. May I offer you a glass of something to start off? A cocktail, or something sparkling?” I discretely flipped one of the hand-calligraphed cards to the liquor menu on the back, but unfortunately, no one took the opportunity to ask for a drink so I could head off with their orders. That would have given me the chance to quickly move to table eleven to greet them, too, but this four-top already had a ton of questions about the food that apparently needed immediate answers. It took me much, much too long before I was able to escape. My other new table was a party of nine men who I secretly eyed as I had to go through the twelve-course prix fixe menu, step by excruciating step. From what I could see out of the corner of my eye, the other table looked pissed.

  Finally I got away from the four-top. I put on a big smile as I approached the party of nine. “Welcome to Atelier—”

  “For the prices we’re about to pay, the least you could do is bust your ass over here to take our drink order,” the man at the head of the table announced.

  The fake smile disappeared off my face. “I’m sorry, another table—”

  “No, see, you’re already wrong. You can’t say that you had to go to another table, because then you’re saying that they’re more important than us.” He waited. “Well? Are they more important?”

  “No, of course not. I apologize—”

  “No, of course not,” he mimicked me. “Did you think that they’d tip better? I think you can now assume that I’ll tip worse.”

  I stood and swallowed, staring at the collar of his shirt so I wouldn’t have to look him in the face. “I’m very sorry that I was detained. I don’t have an excuse for it,” except that it was the idiot hostess’s fault for giving me two tables at once and now I hated her as much as everyone else who worked at Atelier Anson did. “May I bring your table complimentary glasses of champagne to make up for it?”

  He glanced at the wine list and plunked a stubby finger next to one of the entries. “Yes. We’ll all take this.” It was our most expensive selection, at fifty-three bucks per glass.

  I swallowed thickly. “Of course. Excuse me while I get that for you.”

  “Quickly. With haste,” he specified.

  “Of course,” I said again. Then I had to explain what had happened to Anson and that made another person who was furious at me.

  “You comped nine glasses of Saint-Morand Blanc de Blancs Brut? Do you know how much that will cost me?” he demanded.

  “I just said a complimentary glass of champagne. He was the one who picked the Saint-Morand,” I tried to justify myself, but Anson didn’t give a shit.

  “You’ll make this up to me, Lia,” he told me, and I nodded. God, I was screwed. I hadn’t worked at Atelier Anson long enough for him to trust me much, and he wasn’t someone to forgive and forget. Since I’d started three months before, he’d hired and fired five hosts and hostesses for lesser mistakes than this one.

  I asked Tina to take the four-top so I could bring the champagne to table eleven myself. I walked carefully around with the tray, serving quietly and unobtrusively, only glancing briefly at each guest as I did. “Saint-Morand Blanc de Blancs Brut,” I murmured. “Please enjoy.” I deftly balanced the tray as I picked up the next delicate, wobbly champagne flute. “This is Saint-Morand Blanc,” I started to say, but then I happened to flick my eyes across the table to one of the guests I hadn’t served yet.

  My hand jerked under the tray and the remaining flutes flew off it, crashing onto the table, spilling five glasses of fifty-three dollars-worth of bubbling liquid. Champagne rained down on the man I was serving, the man next to him, the tablecloth, and the floor. “Oh God, I’m sorry, I—”

  “Get the manager. Now.” The man at the end of the table said it very calmly, smiling like he was enjoying himself, and that was how I knew that it was over for me.

  “Nine covers,” Anson said to me over his desk at the end of the night. He held his old calculator in one hand and poked at its dirty keys with the other. “They all ordered the prix fixe menu at two seventy-five, and also the wine pairings, an additional one eighty-five each.” He jabbed at the numbers on the grimy machine. “Nine glasses of Saint-Morand, fifty-three a glass. Only four served,” he noted, and looked at me. “I’m totaling up what you cost me when I had to comp their check.”

  “I didn’t mean to…I’m sorry. I don’t ever drop trays. This was my first one in three months here.” I had worked hard over the years on keeping my hands steady. But the shock—

  “More than forty-six hundred,” Anson said, showing me the smudged little screen. “That’s how much you lost at just one, single table. What do you think that did to me tonight?”

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated. I had to ask. “You really didn’t make them pay for anything?”

  His head snapped up again and he glared at me. “The bald guy at the head of the table? He owns the Straits Casino downtown. Do you know how much business he can put my way? I had to comp them, I didn’t have any choice. I lost almost five K tonight.” The number had grown. Anson shook his head. “You’re fired, Lia. If I could dock your wages for this or make you work it off, believe me, I would. Just get out.”

  Tina was waiting for me outside his office. “He fired you?” she asked, as she took off the discrete apron all the servers wore. I untied mine, too, and tossed it on the counter. I wouldn’t need it again.

  “Of course he did.” I didn’t really blame him, but oh, balls. Atelier Anson had been the most I’d ever made, with the big-ticket wine bottles and the overpriced prix fixe menu…we pooled our tips, but still. “He had to comp their whole dinner.” My hands shook again as I pulled on my coat.

  “Wow,” Tina whistled. She knew how much that had cost Anson, because she had done the rest of the serving for them. I had taken two of her tables so that both she and Anson could focus all their attention on the nine-top with the Straits Casino guy. “What will you do?”

  “There’s always a waitress job somewhere.” Maybe I needed to look for something with better hours so I could be with my brother more, anyway. The long shifts at Anson’s meant I got home very late, and I didn’t entirely trust the neighbor I had watching him at our apartment the nights when I was working. She showed up on time and she hadn’t ever left him alone or anything, but a few things had disappeared from our apartment. A beaded necklace that wasn’t worth much, but I had liked it, and some coupons out of the stack I kept in an envelope on the fridge. A wool scarf.

  A ton of food got eaten, too, a lot more than what I left for Jared for dinner. She told me that he was a growing eleven-year-old and hungry, but he told me that the sitter ate like a pig. I couldn’t afford another mouth to feed, especially if now I wasn’t going to get to eat the dead plates, the food we couldn’t serve for whatever reason, at Atelier Anson.

  Tina and I walked out together to the dark parking lot behind the restaurant. We workers left our cars on a tiny patch of concrete filled with trash and cat piss, but Anson’s customers got complimentary valet. Earlier, I had hidden behind one of the thick velvet curtains at the restaurant’s front door and watched the men at the nine-top leave after their twelve-course dinner. I had watched one guy in particular as the valet drove up an expensive grey car for him, a car that was very different from the dirty old truck he used to have. I guessed the new car fit better with the new look he had sported tonight: the expensive suit, perfectly knotted tie, and polished shoes. You didn’t drive to five thousand-dollar dinners in a truck that rumbled and shook, wearing a Michigan baseball cap and a broken-down pair of jeans like he had f
avored before. I wondered if he still had those things or if seven years had changed him completely, like it had me.

  Tina and I both turned our heads to the sound of an animal skirmish nearby. “Ugh,” she shivered. “I hate parking here.” It actually reminded me a lot of the alley that ran next to the store where I had worked in high school. I shook off that memory. I hadn’t thought of that alley in a while. It was just that seeing him there tonight, sitting across the table from where I had been serving the champagne—

  “I’ll ask around for you,” Tina told me. “I’ll let you know if I hear about any openings. You ok till you find something?”

  “Yeah.” No. “Yeah, we’re fine, but thanks. And thanks for taking the table with those ass-waffles.”

  She shrugged. “They weren’t all that bad. One of them asked me about you.”

  My steps stuttered. “Which one?”

  “The cute one, the young one. Younger than me, older than you,” she said, and smiled a little. “He said, ‘Is that girl going to get in trouble? The other waitress?’ I told him that everything was fine and apologized again.”

  “Was it the guy with the hazel eyes? Kind of dark-caramel colored hair with some chocolate undertones? And the dimple in his right cheek, and the arched eyebrows?”

  She glanced at me and smirked. “Oh, you noticed him, too? I didn’t see the hazel eyes, caramel chocolate hair, and arched eyebrows. But I did catch a glimpse of a cute ass as they all walked out. He barely touched his food, which may be how he maintains it. God damn it, what did I just step in?”

  I hopped over that puddle. His hair was a lot shorter now; before, when I had known him, it had been longer and a little unruly. But I had only seen him at the end of the long days of working construction, and only when it hadn’t been tamed down by that old Michigan hat. His ass, as I had seen it tonight from my hidden spot behind the velvet curtains…yes, that was still the same. And the hazel eyes hadn’t changed in seven years, either.

  Connor. After all this time, Connor Hayes.

  Right after I’d spilled the champagne, I’d been so shocked and confused that I thought I had imagined him, that he wasn’t really there, seated in my section at Atelier Anson. It was too incredible that after seven years he had suddenly appeared again, eating poached lobster and grilled Wagyu like nothing had ever happened. Like he hadn’t been shot in his leg, he hadn’t been bleeding to death under my hand. The last time I had seen him, EMTs had been loading him into an ambulance and had physically prevented me from climbing after him. I had thought he was going to die. I started to shake a little just thinking about it and clenched my fists.

  I had watched him through all those courses tonight, drinking wine, talking with the other men at their table. It really was Connor, there was no doubt, even though a lot had changed since I’d seen him on that gurney. He, obviously, was fine, but what had happened to me after that night was not fine. And now I was fired because of him, because of my reaction to seeing him again. I sighed. “Bye,” I told Tina.

  “Keep in touch, Lia.”

  Sure. This would be the last time I would see Tina or anyone else from Atelier Anson, which didn’t bother me at all. I was usually pleasant with my co-workers, but I was at work to get paid, not to make friends. I wouldn’t miss any of them.

  I tried to think on the way home about what I would do next. Restaurant work had always been my go-to since I’d turned sixteen. I’d gradually moved through the ranks of a bunch of different restaurants, starting with my first job of bussing at a Coney Island. I’d bounced around until I waitressed at a steakhouse where I’d started figuring out what fine food should actually taste like and started (illegally) drinking wine. Finally, I’d moved to serving at Anson’s place in Corktown. I’d felt like I’d made it to waitress graduate school or something when I got the job at Atelier Anson because it was so refined and specialized.

  Really, it would be easier not to work there, I consoled myself. We were always having menu tastings and wine tastings which took up a lot of time, and Anson was a picky, annoying ass-waffle. That was what I told myself so I wouldn’t worry, but actually, I wasn’t as worried as I should have been about losing my job. Instead, I couldn’t stop thinking about Connor, and my mind kept drifting back to seven years before.

  I had tried to go visit him at the hospital after the shooting but I hadn’t ever been allowed into his room and no one there would tell me anything about how he was doing. The various hospital personnel that I had shyly tried to question had generally ignored me. Finally, I had approached the people I knew were in his family, and that hadn’t gone well at all. But Connor had been in the ICU, so even fifteen-year-old me had known that his condition couldn’t have been good. Then, suddenly, he had been gone. I had no idea why he had left the hospital, except that someone in scrubs did manage to disclose that he wasn’t dead, but he was no longer in their care.

  After that, the problems in my own life were too overwhelming for me to worry much about Connor and later, when I was better, I’d tried to forget him like he had forgotten me. Except that really, he was always there, all of it was. It existed in a corner of my mind and in my nightmares. Sometimes when I slept, I relived everything like it was happening all over again.

  “Hi,” I told the sitter when I came into my apartment. My eyes went immediately to the dishes piled in the sink. “How’d it go with Jared?”

  “Fine,” she said, and her own eyes moved to my empty hands. “Didn’t you bring anything from the restaurant?”

  “Not tonight. I got fired, so I’m not going to need you to babysit anymore.” I handed her the cash I owed her. “Bye.” Thanks for eating us out of house and home and thanks for stealing my stuff, I thought to myself. She didn’t say anything back to me but she did look sadly at my refrigerator as she left and I locked all the deadbolts behind her. Our building, and our neighborhood, weren’t the greatest.

  A dim light shone under my brother’s door, so I opened it. “Hey.” I picked up a t-shirt, sweatshirt, and socks off the floor as I made my way to the bed. “Aren’t you supposed to be sleeping?”

  He had his dumb little gaming device on, as always. I rued the day when he had saved enough of his pittance of an allowance to buy it. “I’m almost done with this level,” he told me, without looking up.

  “It’s almost midnight and you have school tomorrow, J. Turn it off.” I held out my palm to him.

  After a moment, he sighed and slapped the console into my hand without looking at me. “Whatever.”

  “Goodnight,” I said, and bent to kiss his forehead, but he jerked away and closed his eyes. Yeah, whatever. I pulled another blanket over him and patted that. “Goodnight, Jared,” I said again. I flicked off the light and went to go sit at the table in the living room/kitchen to start looking at job listings on my phone.

  That was where I was again the next afternoon, but my phone lay next to me on the table. I had already applied to a few jobs and had even gotten a response, and if they wanted me, I would take it. I couldn’t afford to be picky, but once again, I was not as focused as I should have been on my job search. After I had waited with Jared at the bus stop that morning, I had come back to the apartment and gotten down the box from the top of the bedroom closet where I kept the few things that I had managed to salvage from our childhoods. I had found what I’d been looking for at the bottom, under a quilt that some nice volunteer ladies had given me in the hospital.

  I had pulled out the notebook to look at later, after I had nailed down a job, but instead, I was flipping through it now. I was remembering high school and the few friends I’d had, remembering my uncle and his store. Remembering the first night that Connor had walked in to buy a pack of Allumette Gold cigarettes, and how we’d gotten to talking. How funny he’d been and how sweet, and how bit by bit, my crush had grown until I thought about him on the bus, in English class, while giving my brother a bath, all the time. I turned a page of the notebook, from my notes on his schooling/educatio
n over to helpful tips about construction I’d gleaned from our conversations. I had always taken extra time to give him his change so he’d kept talking. “Things to know about framing,” the next sheet read at the top. Maybe that would be helpful to me now.

  My phone startled me with its ring. Atelier Anson? What the hell did they want? “Hello?” I shivered and zipped up my jacket.

  “Lia? Hi, this is Makayla, from the front of the house?” The hostess, she meant.

  “Yeah, hi, Makayla. I’ll come in to pick up my last paycheck.”

  “No, it’s about something else? Like, this guy called here, and he wanted to talk to you?”

  “What guy?” I asked suspiciously.

  “He didn’t give his name, but he said he knew you?”

  I sighed. “Ok, sure. Did you get his number?”

  “So, no? But I gave him yours, I hope that’s ok?”

  “No, that’s not ok! You gave some stranger my number?” I asked angrily.

  “He said he knew you, though, and so I also gave him your—”

  My head turned toward my front door. “Hang on, someone’s here knocking.”

  “Address?” Makayla finished.

  I froze. “Did you just say that you gave a stranger my address, too?”

  “Yes?” she answered.

  “Not everything is a question!” I told her, and hung up. I walked softly to my door, and leaned forward carefully to look through the peephole. Holy balls. My hands started to shake as I slid back the chain, and then undid one, two, three locks before I reached for the knob. I hesitated a moment and then I turned it to open the door. We stood, staring at each other.