Kitchen heat, p.9
Kitchen Heat, page 9
After stretching out on the couch, she closed her eyes, pursed her lips and pushed out her chest. “Kiss me, Clay. Take me. Take me now. I’m yours.”
He held back a laugh at the slurring drama of her words. Instead, Clay pulled a blanket over Roz. She opened her eyes, confused. “What are you doing?”
“Roz, I like you, but not like that. We’re friends. I don’t want this to happen, and certainly not when you’re drunk.”
“It might happen another time though, when I’m not drunk?”
“You’re not going to remember anything about tonight. You need to go to sleep now.”
“It’s Kassi, isn’t it? Table-hogging bitch.”
“Don’t call her that,” Clay snapped. “You know she’s a good person.”
Roz was crying again. “It’s true. She is good. I love her like a sister. I wish she was my sister. I miss my sister so much. Did I tell you my sister is in prison? Oh wait, nobody knows that. Shhhh,” she said, putting her finger to her lips. “I promise to be nicer. I shouldn’t have been so happy about all that bathroom shit. The mom offered to clean it up. I’m a terrible person. A terrible, ugly, drunk person. No wonder you don’t want me.” She let out a ragged sob and covered her face with her hands.
“Lift your head.”
She obliged and he tucked a pillow under her head. She held his hand to her cheek. “You’re so sweet and kind,” she said.
By the time he returned carrying a steaming mug of chamomile with honey, she was passed out and snoring. He tucked the blanket in around her, put the cup beside her on the end table, along with a glass of water and a bottle of aspirin, and went to bed.
He turned on the TV and Hitchcock’s movie The Birds was showing on the public television station, the scene where Tippi Hedren gets pecked nearly to death by the flock. That fits the mood, he thought.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
INT. ROSE AND THORN RESTAURANT – DAY
KASSI brews coffee. MEREDITH is nearby. The restaurant is not busy. NICK is working the cash register and working KASSI too.
Kassi was stacking clean bus tubs when Roz and Clay arrived at the restaurant together. Clay went straight to his locker to grab a chef’s coat.
“Thanks tons for the ride,” Roz said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “You make a mean cup of coffee and your house is so cute, even if it is a mess!” She giggled and nudged him with her hip. “It was a perfect night, thank you, Clay.”
Clay looked embarrassed but didn’t deny it. Kassi hoped her expression didn’t show her surprise. Roz looked at Kassi triumphantly. Kassi abruptly stopped what she was doing, leaving two tubs on the floor, and left without a word, escaping into the dining room.
At the coffee station, she tried to settle herself down and collect her emotions. She shook her head, trying to get the picture of him in bed with Roz out of her mind, telling herself she was overreacting. “It doesn’t matter. Not one bit. They’re adults, free to do whatever they want. What difference does it make?”
“What difference does what make?” Meredith asked, walking up to the coffee station.
“Was I talking to myself? Like, out loud?” Kassi asked.
“Yeah. Kind of charming, actually.”
“More like a deranged bag-lady. Or that woman getting munched by birds in the Hitchcock film.”
“Was she talking to herself in that movie?”
“I think so?” Kassi wasn’t entirely sure, she fell asleep halfway through the movie the night before. When Roz was, apparently, at Clay’s house, with a different kind of pecking going on. “She was screaming, I guess.” Like Roz was probably screaming last night. Kassi tried again to shake the image from her head.
“The psychology behind why some people talk to themselves is fascinating,” Meredith said, turning to make a run through the dining room with the full pot of coffee.
Kassi felt a headache coming on.
The restaurant was clearing out from the lunch rush. She’d be out the door in less than an hour, thank goodness. Kassi didn’t think she could take any more of Roz flirting with Clay. Not that Kassi had any claim on him, she knew this, but somehow, she felt like he was cheating on their flirting. How could he clean out a shit-filled bathroom with her in the afternoon and then sleep with Roz that very same night?
Walter signaled for his check. Enough, she thought, enough of that childish reaction. She would purge them both from her mind and get back to work.
“Having a tough day, Kassi?” Walter asked as she dropped the check on his table.
Walter, the big tipper, was coming in almost every day now. He said it helped lighten his mood after selling dumbbells to gym-rats and overpriced exercise bikes to retirees with bad knees all day. He only seemed to come in when Kassi was working and always ate alone. When it was slow they talked, and she was getting to know him.
He was a boxer back in the day. By his telling, he wasn’t a great boxer and lost a lot of fights, but he was a smart boxer who got some endorsements and got out early, before suffering any lasting damage. He earned enough money to franchise an exercise equipment business and it was doing well.
To Kassi, he seemed bored. He also seemed interested in her.
That kind of interest was an occupational hazard of being a server. They all talked about it, even Kristoph. The wistful looks, the notes and phone numbers left behind on napkins, the out-and-out ass pinches and taps. When something that overt happened, you could get angry, and usually the manager on duty would kick the guy out—it was always a guy—but most of the time a customer’s flirting was less obvious and mostly harmless.
Still, why did so many people think servers and bartenders were fair game? She figured it was because customers knew your pay depended on your private performance for them, even if it was an unconscious response. Whenever someone added flirting into the mix of your performance appraisal, you had to play the game because a little return attention drove the tips higher, and if servers don’t make tips, they don’t eat. Or have money for daycare. So, Kassi flirted back.
The sad thing was that after so many years of waiting tables, flirting with customers was sort of a habit for her now, an automatic-pilot setting. Sometimes, she even initiated the game. Some guy came in, occasionally a girl, and she could see their eyes sparkle when she introduced herself. She could calculate almost to the dollar how much higher her tip would be based on how hard she twirled a strand of hair or laughed at a dumb joke or, mostly, showed an interest in their lives. Sometimes, she did want to hear their stories and felt a certain pride that she could help alleviate loneliness for a minute or two, make people feel good about themselves. She told herself it wasn’t flirting-for-tips so much as it was mini-therapy.
“Kassi?”
“Sorry, what did you say?”
Walter laughed. “I wondered if you were having a tough day?”
“No, just a little distracted.” She smiled. “Please don’t take it personally.”
She watched as he opened his wallet and slipped out a twenty, acting like he was putting the cash under the plate innocuously even though they both knew she saw it.
“Hopefully that makes your day a little better,” he said, standing. “I’ll pay the check at the register on my way out.”
What was she supposed to say? How grateful she was? She was grateful, and Walter was a good and kind person, of course, but such interactions sometimes made her feel like a food delivery prostitute.
Okay, she was probably going overboard here, she thought. Not probably, certainly. Cue flirtation mode. Survival of the fittest and all. She needed to keep those twenties coming.
“Oh, you didn’t have to do that, but it sure is kind. I’ll put it toward that new typewriter I’m saving for.” Kassi flashed what she hoped was a Pretty Woman Julia Roberts-wattage smile.
Walter was her last table. She wiped down the coffee station, restocked the glasses and napkins, and refilled the handful of salt and pepper shakers that needed it. Thankfully, today it was someone else’s job to clean the bathroom. Then she went up to the register to ask Nick the manager if it was okay to clock out and sit in the back dining room to count her tips.
“You bet, but could I see you in the office first for a minute?”
“Of course,” she said, following him.
It was the first time she’d been inside the manager’s office. It was tiny and cramped. Wedged in the back was a small desk covered with papers, old menus and food magazines. Half of the desk was taken up by a computer and printer, similar to the type Kassi had used in her college days. A tattered swivel chair faced the door. She guessed the chair and desk were reserved for Molly.
Along the wall was a narrow table with four inboxes, one each for Nick, Ione, Tess and Clay. A single folding chair faced all four. She saw a scribbled note in Clay’s in-box taped around a zucchini. It was Molly’s handwriting, which they all knew well because of the incessant sticky notes she left for everyone.
Nick pulled out the single folding chair and motioned for her to sit, then he leaned against the edge of the desk.
Why had he called her into the office? Kassi assumed he was about to either lecture her for table-hogging or fire her. A lecture she could handle. Being fired would be problematic. Her mind was racing ahead to what would happen, how she would handle things. She would need to find a way to break her lease and then ask her mom for a loan so she and Samantha could fly home and move back in with her. Would she keep working on the screenplay? How would she say goodbye to Clay but since he was sleeping with Roz maybe that didn’t matter anyway, plus…
Dammit. Nick said something important, and she missed it. He was looking at her expectantly. It didn’t look like the face of someone who had just fired her.
“I mean …” she said, letting her words trail off.
“You strike me as artistic, the cultured type. That’s why I’m asking.”
“I do?”
Nick reached into his pocket and pulled out two tickets. “It’s La Boheme. Doomed love. The Oregonian called it a lovely staging. I hate going alone and it gives us a chance to dress up and have some fun. Do you like to dress up?”
“You’re asking me out?”
“Not on a date. Just to the opera.”
It’s not like I have anything else going on, she thought, and she did love going to the theater. It was the one thing she and Barry did together regularly when they were married. In public, at the theater, she knew he would behave; it was a safe place. Plus, maybe this would inspire her on the screenplay, and take her mind off Roz and Clay together.
“I can’t afford it,” she said.
“I thought I made that part clear. Everything is on me. I’m an annual subscriber, so the tickets are already paid for.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes, and sorry it’s so last minute. I was going with a friend, but she canceled.”
“Sam is with her father tonight,” Kassi said, regretting instantly saying that out loud. Not having a babysitter was always a built-in excuse to say no.
“Perfect. It’s settled then. Pick you up at six?”
Nick wasn’t ugly. Older than her by maybe fifteen years. A little soft around the middle but a nice man. A mature man. The kind of man who would not try to manhandle waitresses who worked for him while at the opera. Granted, he had probably hired her based on her bust size but that wasn’t manhandling. Eye-handling maybe, but everyone did that, right?
“Just friends?”
“Just friends,” Nick said.
He gestured toward the door and she stood.
“Go ahead and clock out now,” he said, as she was leaving, and it wasn’t lost on her that he asked her out while she was still officially on duty.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
INT. ROSE AND THORN RESTAURANT – SAME DAY
KASSI counts her tips. It’s quiet and gloomy in the back dining room, and that suits her mood just fine. Until a certain flirt-cheating HUNK shows up.
Kassi untied her apron and sat down at a table. She pulled the loose bills from the pocket and turned the apron upside down, carefully spilling the coins onto the table. She began sorting the stack of one-dollar bills so that the George Washingtons were facing the same direction. My little soldiers, she thought, counting them out with emphatic precision.
She was so engrossed she didn’t notice Clay walking up.
“Hey, Kassi,” he said. She looked up and nodded. He slipped into the other side of the booth. “How was your shift today?”
“Great.” She was determined to play it cool, to act like she didn’t care at all about him and Roz. “In fact, so good that I can splurge on some Goodwill kitchen stuff for my new place.”
She had cleared almost sixty bucks, thanks to Walter’s twenty. After the tip-out to Miguel, the lunch busser, and the kitchen crew, she would walk with forty-eight dollars and some change, which still needed counting.
“Kitchen stuff?”
“Thanks to you we’re not sleeping on the floor, but I still can’t cook in my new place. Well, to be honest, I can’t cook even with a stocked kitchen, but at least I need to be able to make boxed mac and cheese for Sam, and the occasional broiled chicken breast with frozen peas.”
“I happen to be pretty good in the kitchen department.”
“I’ve noticed.” She started piling the change into dollar-equivalent stacks.
“I’m off today, I just came in to, well, it’s not important why. I can give you a ride to Goodwill.”
“You sure that would be okay with Roz?” Crap, that was not playing it cool.
He looked up at the ceiling and then down at his hands and she had the most horrible thought. It was true. He had slept with her. On some deep level, she realized now she had convinced herself Roz was playing some sort of game because Kassi didn’t want Clay to be like that, didn’t want him to be the kind of man who had sex with a rotating cast of waitresses.
She felt her neck and cheeks flushing. To think she had flirted with him in good faith! They had cleaned up toddler shit together, fell on a mattress together. Not only had he flirt-cheated on her, but he also cheated on their fantasy-potential to have something together, which in this moment almost felt like real cheating.
Shit, this is ridiculous. How can this man be making me think such crazy things? Flirt-cheated? That isn’t even a real thing. She picked up the three stacks of bills, swept the coins into a water pitcher and slid out of the booth.
“It’s none of my business,” she said, embarrassed. “I never should have even said that, I’m sorry.” She turned and walked toward the front counter to change the coins and one-dollar bills into bigger bills.
“It wasn’t like that,” he said to her retreating back. “Kassi, wait.”
She paused.
“Roz was … she had too much to drink. Way too much. She showed up at my place hammered. I couldn’t let her leave like that. It wasn’t safe. She slept it off on my couch.”
Kassi turned around, feeling a sense of relief tinged with shame for misjudging him so deeply. “Isn’t Roz in AA?”
“I don’t know. Is she?” he asked.
“She is, I think, but she’s struggling. Tess has been trying to help.”
“Now I feel shitty for ratting her out.”
His handsome face was contorted into a pained expression. He hadn’t slept with her. He was protecting her from ridicule, at his own expense. She walked back and stood too close to him. She touched his cheek with her palm.
“I assumed the worst and you were just being kind.”
“I didn’t want her to get razzed,” he said, brushing his fingers across her hand as it rested on his cheek. “I’m not into her, not at all, and I need to tell her that tonight.”
“Tonight?” she asked, lowering her hand. Her breath was coming faster. She felt as if gravity was pulling them closer together.
“Roz left her wallet at my place and needs to come by to pick it up.” He was looking deep into her eyes.
“That’s the oldest trick in the book,” Kassi said with a slow smile.
“Trick?”
“If you want to avoid things getting messy, tell her you won’t be home tonight, that you’ll bring her wallet in tomorrow. She’ll magically find it in her purse.” She pushed a strand of hair away from her face. “Now, how about that ride to Goodwill?”
Less than a half-hour later Kassi was rummaging her way through a bargain-basement box in the kitchen section of the largest Goodwill in Portland.
“Look!” She held up a cast iron frying pan. “Only two bucks! And what are you doing over there just watching? I thought you were here to help.” She didn’t wait for an answer, just dove back in and within a few minutes had a stock pot, a colander, two saucepans and a crepe pan piled up in her cart.
“You know how to make crepes?” Clay asked.
“Spinach crepes with cheese sauce. Oddly, it’s the only thing I know how to make for real. Mom taught me when I was a kid from some article she read in Good Housekeeping when Julia Child was all the rage.”
“Your mom sounds cool,” he said, evaluating the pans in her basket. He pulled out the stock pot and pointed to its pitted base. “Get rid of this one, not worth the price.”
“It shall be done,” she said, setting it back in the bargain box. “Next up, napkins and glasses.”
“Get them from the restaurant. We go through them like water through a sieve. Won’t be missed.”
“If you had suggested that before I had a kid I would have agreed, but now I need to be a good example, even when she’s not around. That means no stealing.” She grinned. “Being upstanding all the time is exhausting.”
“Understood. Speaking of Sam, okay if I buy her a toy?”
“Maybe a book? That is if there are any good ones here, it’s always a crapshoot,” she said, but then her gaze slipped away. He followed her eyes. She was looking at an old typewriter.
She pulled her notebook from her pack and ripped off a blank page as she covered the few yards between her and the typewriter and then rolled in the sheet, pecking at the keys. “Wow, it’s in great shape, and has extra ribbons.” She typed Fasten your seatbelts.
