Shrimp Read online

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  your own life going and stop worrying about mine? Why are you in the car, anyway?" I reached into my Sailor Moon backpack for my audio player. The Dead Kennedys couldn't drown out Alexei quickly enough.

  Pray for me to make it through a whole semester working with Alexei. My first day on work-study I couldn't even tell him it is actually possible that a punk-Goth chick can be personable and even, dare I say, beloved, to customers, or that I can help with fixing the espresso machine when it's clogged, before he snapped at me, "I am not going to spend my semester off baby-sitting the Little Hellion. I don't know what Sid was thinking, placing you in this environment. I can't imagine you have any useful skills." And I just tore into him. Did he know I was Employee of the Month two consecutive months when I had worked at Java the Hut? Did Alexei know how many customers asked for me personally at Java the Hut and The Village Idiots? Was it not a fact that I repeatedly worked double shifts, unasked, at both establishments when flaky employees didn't show up because they thought they were too good for minimum wage? Ask me how full the tip jar was when I was on duty--just ask me, Alexei. Then Sid-dad had popped his bald head into the restaurant, along with a group of fellow investors, right as I was about to explain to Alexei the difference between understanding what makes a job and what makes a career-. something called a work ethic. "Everything going okay in here?" Sid-dad asked. He looked so happy to see us, especially against the expressionless army of white men flanking him. "Great!" Alexei and I both said.

  Alexei turned around to face me from the front seat of the car. His face was flushed deep red but in that healthy

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  way, the color of his cheeks made sharper by the red bandana on his head, tied at the top of his forehead like some Estonian version of Tupac. I felt an involuntary jerk reaction pass through my body, like this brief sizzle. Eek, Alexei is not entirely bad-looking, if you go for that type of chiseled face and wrestler bod and overachiever mentality. Which I don't.

  "No need for you to go all Chernobyl on me, Princess. Fernando and I were lifting at the gym when you called to be picked up early. Hey, Fernando, did you know Daddy's beloved Little Hellion has busboys at the restaurant dropping trays of food on customers? She's only been on the job two days and already she's helped the restaurant lose its first celebrity customer. Well done, Princess."

  "Hey, Fernando," I pitched in, as I placed the headphones over my ears. "Did you know that it was only one busboy and that I can't be held responsible if said busboy is paying more attention to me picking up a menu from the floor than to the fact that he is clearing the table of the Forty-niners' new first-round draft pick?"

  "No, that's not how it... ," Alexei started, but I jumped right back in, headphones off. Now I was mad, nearing Chernobyl-meltdown mad.

  "Hey, Fernando, did you know further that College Boy has you and Dad believing he's taken the semester off from college to get this great experience assistant managing a hot start-up restaurant allegedly cuz it will look good on his MBA applications one day, but really he's at the restaurant BECAUSE OF A GIRL? Go on, Alexei, tell Fernando all about Kari."

  KAR-ee, not Carrie, 'scuse me, is the general manager at the swank new restaurant where Sid-dad sucker-punched

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  me into working as a hostess two afternoons a week for work-study. The one and only thing Alexei and I have in common is that we both think and act at the direction of the wrong part of our anatomy, and I know he has it bad for Kari, and I know gettin' wit' her is the reason for the semester off. Sad, really. See, our young Alexei met Kari at a bar in The Marina over the summer. They got to talking. She was interviewing for the Big Job at this new restaurant. Alexei has some weird older chick fetish and he was trying to get into her skirt. Turns out they both also knew a guy a.k.a. Sid-dad, who would (a) definitely give ear time to Alexei's offhand recommendation that Kari get the general manager job, and (b) would love to bend the rules a little and have Alexei work there for only a semester, to get the experience that will one day help get him into Harvard Business School.

  How did I retrieve this 411? Well, let's just say there are advantages to having a posse of busboys panting over you, especially ones who like to gossip about their hated boss, Lord Empress Kari.

  "That's not true!" Alexei protested from the front seat. His massive shoulders hunched a little. "Kari has opened and managed three top-rated restaurants in the Bay Area and Napa. She's even been profiled in the Wall Street Journal. Working with someone of her skill and experience is an unbelievable opportunity, worth taking a semester off. Great for the resume, and great for the bank account. Not all of us have trust funds to put us through college, Princess."

  KAR-ee, who is about my mother's age, is Super Career Gal--she wears horrid lack-of-length power suits with fuck-me

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  heel shoes, and she has raven hair shaped into one of those blunt bob cuts with razor-sharp bangs and the rest falling just below her ears, with big baby blue eyes and cute (for an old person) pursed lips. The interesting thing about Kari's otherwise boring face is that she has a lazy eye on her left side and I have to practice staring at her button nose when she talks instead of looking her in the eyes so I don't get busted staring at that nonmoving baby blue.

  And, Kari is anything but lazy. She races around the restaurant with a mouthpiece headphone jutting from her ears down to her lips, barking out orders to the kitchen and reception area with this four star general's tone, as if getting tables 12 and 14 put together and set up for a party of thirteen, STAT, is the battle plan that will ensure Allied victory. In my short time working at the restaurant, I've had to master the art of not staring at her lazy eye and also not falling on the floor in hysterics every time she yells into that headphone mouthpiece (that quite frankly is somewhat phallic and obscene against her Kewpie doll mouth-- hence why I'm sure Alexei is enlisted as her lovestruck minion).

  Proving I was right about Alexei's intentions with Lord Empress Kari, Alexei had turned back around to face the front of the car so I couldn't see his eyes. Even though Alexei is a Horrible, he also has the most honest face ever; you can always tell if he's lying. When I was in elementary school and Alexei would be in the car when Fernando picked me up, I would ask Alexei if he had an extra Capri Sun punch to share with me and he would snap "NO," but then his face would turn red and his eyes would go all simpering puppylike from his lie, then miraculously he would find an

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  extra juice from his backpack and throw it at me. I almost feel sorry for Alexei now because Kari treats him more like a secretary than an assistant manager. From behind my stacks of menus I've already witnessed her sending him to pick up her ugly power suits from the dry cleaner and bristling at him to confirm her hair appointment already.

  "Dios mio, ENOUGH!" Fernando exclaimed. Fernando slammed the car brakes hard on Great Highway. We'd reached a red light, true, but the hard slam was definitely intended to jolt us in our seats. Fernando did that Jesus-Hail Mary thing he always does, you know, that the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost crossing-your-hands-over-your-chest business. "Remind me never to have the both of you in the car at the same time again." Alexei and I shut up at Fernando's brake slam and allowed Fernando to listen to the salsa radio station in peace for the rest of the drive down to Daly City.

  I want to ask Sid-dad could I just bail on this job and go back to work at Java the Hut, because even working with Mr. "Just Friends" Shrimp and the Autumn wench would be better than a swankster-hip restaurant for Financial District phoneys, but I feel like I have let Sid-dad down a lot in the past, and this time I am going to see this one through. Also there is the remote possibility that despite the new calm in our home, asking to go back to work at Java the Hut, where all the crazy business leading to Alcatraz started, would be like asking to unleash the gates to Hell.

  Fernando's cell phone rang just as we pulled into the parking lot at the Krispy Kreme store in Daly City, the 'burb just below San Fran with
all the little houses on the hill that look like Monopoly houses. Fernando said, "I need to take

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  this call. Why don't you two get in line? You know what I want, right?"

  I hopped out of the car and said to Fernando through the driver's window, "You want a dozen dulce de leche donuts for you to supposedly share with your grandchildren, but really I know you'll eat half on your own, good man, and if they're out of dulce de leche you want straight-up original glazed."

  "You got it," Fernando said with a laugh. He started speaking into his cell phone in Spanish.

  While we waited in line Alexei said, "There's a Jamba Juice where I can get a Powerboost near here, right?"

  "I bet it's closed," I said. 'Anyways, live a little, why don't you?"

  "I guess one custard doughnut won't kill me. But really, I prefer Dunkin' Donuts back East."

  I've had a recent spiritual conversion from Dunkin' Donuts to Krispy Kreme since Luis in Nueva York told me that Dunkin' Donuts are frozen and then microwaved, while Krispy Kremes are baked fresh every day. I'm not sure if that's just urban legend, but I don't think Luis would lie about something important like that, and I am not willing to take the risk.

  "Custard!" I said to Alexei. "Those doughnuts suck. They are the ultimate fake out on the doughnut goodness scale. You're at Krispy KREME. If you're gonna splurge on calories, at least get a cream-filled chocolate glaze."

  The best doughnut I ever had was at a family-run diner at a truck stop on 1-5 one summer when I was little, before Josh and Ash were born, when Sid-dad tried to take Nancy and me camping at Yosemite and we did not last one hour

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  in those sleeping bags before begging Sid-dad to take us to a motel. That truck-stop doughnut, a simple glazed cinnamon twist, was perfection: homemade, hot, moist, melt-in-your-mouth good, a true wonder I don't expect ever to experience again in my lifetime, so I don't know why I was defending any Krispy Kreme flavor so hard to Alexei. But there were loads of people waiting in line ahead of us at the Krispy Kreme store on this Saturday night, which had to be some testimony in support of the institution.

  Alexei sighed. "Do you always have to bust a guy's chops? Can't you just relax a little? I think you owe me a small debt of gratitude for a certain pub incident not too long ago, so I'd like to cash in. Please, just shut up."

  I protested, "But I cannot pay that debt back by letting you consume bad doughnuts. That would just make me a schmuck."

  Fernando joined us in the line. He said, "How about a truce between the two of you be the settlement of whatever this score is already."

  Alexei and I both protested. "But..."

  Fernando put up the Talk to the Hand gesture. He said, "Cheer up. We're going to stop by the nursing home on the way home. Sugar Pie can't wait until after church tomorrow morning for her doughnut."

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  *** Chapter 10

  The truth is, I've been kinda doggin' Sugar Pie since I got back from NYC. I've been going to the nursing home my usual ten hours a week for community service, and while I always pop my head in to say hi, I haven't been hanging out with her like I used to do. I haven't been logging extra hours in her room playing gin rummy or begging her to read my tarot cards or listening to her explain about Vicki's many different personalities (and quite complicated love life) on One Life to Live. Not that hanging with Sugar Pie isn't more fun and interesting than changing linens and reading Harry-Potter books aloud to the old folks more HP-obsessed than my little brother, but there's just something about this time of year that makes me remember the secret Sugar Pie and I share: an abortion in our pasts. Also Sugar Pie's got true love now. She doesn't need me ruining her good time.

  Much as I am loving this San Francisco fall, I can't help but remember that this time last year I was pregnant and panicked back at boarding school in New England. I was six weeks along before I finally got up the guts to call Frank real-dad and ask him to wire me the money I needed, since Justin was no help and it's not like I had any friends at that school. I can't help but remember that this time last year I was throwing up between class periods and sweating bullets in my bed at night, wondering what to do, feeling completely alone and desperate. I guess part of me can look

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  back now and say, Huh, a year has gone by, and look how much better my life is now, look how I've changed and look how many great people I have in my life now. Another part of me, more buried but that seems to come out most when I see Sugar Pie, who was the first friend I made after coming home to San Francisco, that part of me thinks, Huh, if things had gone differently, I might be living in some halfway house for teenage mothers now, cradling a small baby and wondering was that baby really smiling at me, the mommy, or was it just gas in its tummy.

  Maybe this hurt will go away when fall passes, when the anniversary of the A-date is gone by. I wonder if this is a pain I will feel every year, if every year I will imagine a photo album of what might have been that baby's life: This is how my baby would have looked trying to blow out the candle on its first birthday cake, or this is the baby waving from the school bus on the first day of elementary school. Maybe the year will come when I don't remember at all, and I don't know if that will be a good or a bad thing.

  It doesn't help that Sugar Pie has fallen completely in love with Fernando's criminally adorable one-year-old granddaughter, she of the big black eyes on cinnamon skin and cascade of black ringlets. You can't go into Sugar Pie's room anymore and not find his granddaughter toddling around the space, pulling out dresser drawers or handing you Pat the Bunny to read to her again. If not for that clinic visit I could now be a mother to a baby who would be just a few months younger than Fernando's granddaughter.

  I really do love babies. I love the way their heads of soft hair smell, I love the way they grab on to your fingers, I love when they laugh when you play peekaboo with them.

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  I especially love when they start screaming and you can return them to their mommies and then go out for a cappuccino--and if the mommies are like Nancy, they then hand off the crying baby to a nanny, to be returned only when baby is being cute again. But tonight I couldn't--or wouldn't--focus on the baby playing in Sugar Pie's room, playing cute for Sugar Pie, Alexei, Fernando, and her mommy, Fernando's daughter. Instead I chose to sit at the corner of the room, licking the cream from the sides of my Krispy Kreme doughnut and staring out the window into the night sky. I was reminded of last year, alone at night in that boarding school bed, fighting back insane food cravings and mood swings and annoying tears. I didn't realize actual tears were visible on my face until Sugar Pie asked, "Baby, are you alright?" Nothing gets by that woman. 'Allergies," I told her.

  The beautiful café au lait skin on her face frowned slightly. "Mmm-hmm," she said.

  "I don't know why you live here," I told her, kinda curt but wanting to change the subject. Sugar Pie has already corrected me that she lives in an assisted-living facility, not a nursing home, thank you very much, but whatever it is, it's still an institution that smells like a hospital infirmary situated in an ancient moldy Victorian haunted house, like the smell of Clorox and pee and mantelpieces that haven't been dusted in ages.

  When I am an old person I hope that if I live in a home like Sugar Pie's that I will also have a premium satellite TV system. Or maybe Shrimp and I will be back together by then and when we look at each other, all gray hair and hunched bodies and wrinkled skin, we'll think, Wow, you

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  look as awesome as the day I first knew I loved you, and not, Whoa, what the hell happened to you?

  "Maybe I won't be here much longer," Sugar Pie said. For an old person, she looks damn good: Her face has some wrinkles that I like to think of as treasure maps to her past, but her skin has a rich, deep color, glowing now from the true love she waited a lifetime to come to her.

  Now I was more depressed. Was Sugar Pie saying maybe she would die soon? No, that wasn't possible. She's in reasonably decent health except f
or the dialysis treatments she has three days a week because of her bad kidneys, and the only reason she moved into "assisted living" was because she doesn't have her own family to take care of her on the days she has dialysis. But on her nondialysis days she's pretty chipper--at least chipper enough to be carrying on a love connection with Fernando (hookup courtesy of moi; I know how to match two true loves), who is at least ten years (cough) her junior. Their May-December romance has lasted through the summer and into fall, and it's officially out of the closet, too--grandchildren jumping on the bed and an official dinner at a fancy restaurant with Sid and Nancy and everythang.

  "Something you want to talk about?" Sugar Pie asked me.

  "I can't talk to you with all these people around," I whined.

  "Isn't somebody just a little self-absorbed?" Sugar Pie said. "If you haven't noticed, everyone else in this room is focused on the baby and the doughnuts and Fantasy Island on TV Land. You've got something to say, say it. Your moody-girl self is ruining my good time and all these nice people visiting."

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  I paused. "The first anniversary of...um...you know is coming up."

  "And?" Sugar Pie said.

  'And?" I repeated. 'And I don't know. Just bumming me out is all."

  Sugar Pie pointed to the TV bolted to the corner wall in her room, where the little guy called Tattoo was announcing, "Da plane, Boss, da plane!" Sugar Pie said, "Maybe what's bumming you out is there's a certain other little guy, one you've got to tell what happened. Because if you're wanting that boy you claim is your true love back in your life, you know that's what you've got to do."