16. Daisy
16
DAISY
I t’s weird how many people look at a menu full of options and then request something else. Wharf Seafood has mahi-mahi, shrimp, trout, and salmon, but there have already been two assholes who perused the entire menu and asked for different fish, as if this is some Michelin-starred restaurant saving the more exotic products for those customers savvy enough to ask.
“You don’t have lobster?” asks the woman in front of us, fretting as she feeds her infant bits of a buttered roll while her glum husband stares at the menu. “Johnny loves lobster.”
“I’m so sorry, we don’t,” says Mia, the waitress I’m shadowing. She actually sounds sincere. I’m not sure I’d manage it myself.
“Okay, can you at least put truffles on his smiley fries?”
That is when I realize Johnny is the baby . She wanted us to procure a special, off-the-menu item for her one-year-old. And put truffles on his fries.
Mia apologizes once more. “Sorry. We don’t have shaved truffles either.”
Of course we don’t. We have gross fried fish and a drink called The Purple Nurple, which is the equivalent of ten shots of liquor served in an oversized baby bottle—this is not where you go for fucking truffles.
The woman asks her still-glum husband if he’s sure he wants to eat here before we walk away.
“The rich are not like you and I,” says Mia once we’re out of hearing distance.
I laugh, though I think if they were actually rich they’d realize a restaurant decorated with fisherman’s netting wasn’t likely to offer much beyond coronary artery disease and a hangover.
I’m sent home following the lunch shift. I earned nothing at all since I’m only shadowing, and it costs fifteen dollars to get my car out of the lot—so far, gainful employment is less rewarding than I’d hoped.
I go straight to Harrison’s outdoor shower to wash the smell of fried food from my hair. I’m emerging with one towel around my head and one around my chest when Harrison’s Range Rover pulls into the garage.
His sunglasses are still on, but I don’t miss the way his gaze travels over me as he climbs out of the car.
I adjust the towel atop my head. “You’re home when it’s still light out? Has someone died?”
His mouth quirks up on one side. “I was falsely hoping it might be the one time of day you’d wear sufficient clothing.”
I laugh as I open the door to walk inside. “You should know better than to ever hope I’d wear sufficient clothing.” I glance over my shoulder at him as I climb the stairs and catch him checking out my ass.
He blinks away guiltily. “I assumed you’d have gotten fired and would be in need of moral support.”
I turn as I reach the main floor, holding my towel in place with one hand. “You seriously assumed I’d be fired on my first day? ”
“How many customers did you mouth off to, Daisy?” he asks, eyes twinkling.
“Not a single one, for your information. To be completely transparent, however, I wasn’t allowed to speak to any of the customers, so my opportunities were limited.”
He laughs. “I guess that explains it.”
I glance toward the ocean. “Tide’s coming in.”
“I guess you wouldn’t want to surf, since you just showered.”
I run my tongue across my lip. “Of course I want to surf. Unlike Audrey, I don’t mind the feeling of sand one bit.”
His gaze meets mine. He’s thinking of my comment from last week and so am I.
I don’t mind the feeling of a lot of things, Harrison .
“Only you could make the word sand sound filthy,” he grumbles, heading to his room.
Ten minutes later, we’re in wetsuits, crossing the street quickly, eager to make the most of the remaining sun.
I follow him to the lineup, closer to the heart of the break, though still a fair distance from the other guys already out here. “Apparently, I’ve graduated.”
“Don’t make me regret it.”
“I’ll probably make you regret it.”
He laughs. “I know.”
I take the first decent wave, and he takes the second. My gut tightens, watching him. He’s so fucking big, so sure of himself, so focused.
Is he like that in bed too? Would he look at me as if nothing else mattered, as if the world could be ending and he’d never even notice?
Perhaps. But that doesn’t mean there wouldn’t come a day when he stopped doing it. When his eyes would remain shut because he was pretending I was someone else—someone smarter, someone special in all the ways he’d finally seen I wasn’t.
We each take another handful of waves and return to the lineup at the same time. The sun is now an orange ball on the horizon, painting streaks of gold in his dark hair, lighting up his face.
“This is more like the rich guy adulthood I always imagined you’d have,” I tell him.
He shoots me a lazy smile. “How exactly does a rich guy spend his day? In case I’ve forgotten.”
“Well, you start by counting your money, obviously.”
“Obviously. Gold coins in a vault. I did that first. Then what?”
“Then you demand something unreasonable for breakfast, and lash out when you get that thing because you now want something else.”
He nods. “Well, it is frustrating to discover you’ve chosen poorly.”
“Then you fire an employee—perhaps someone on parole or in witness protection so he or she will be too scared to sue for wrongful termination.”
“That is easiest, yes. And then?”
I hitch a shoulder. “Really, the sky’s the limit. Talk to other rich people about how rich you are. Go hunt poor people for sport. Impregnate supermodels—the ones your dad hasn’t impregnated first, that is.”
A laugh rumbles in his chest. “What a fascinating place your mind is. I’d like to peel it back to see all the rest.”
“I’m sure you’d love to peel back my mind, but you’re not getting rid of me that easily.”
“I don’t want to get rid of you,” he replies, and something flutters in my chest again. Not lust, this time. It’s sweeter.
If I were already head over heels in love with him, I’m guessing it would feel a lot like this.
I spend my next shift in the dreary restaurant, thinking about my grandmother, oddly enough—how she used to tell me I was just like my dad, and how much I hated it.
He could never stand to be indoors either , she’d say when I’d visit them, always with this combination of pride and wistfulness, as if it were a good thing.
The official story, according to my grandparents, is that my father got held under too long at Mavericks and had a reaction to the meds he was put on afterward for depression.
My mother says they don’t want to acknowledge he was ill all along—that all those qualities in him that seemed quirky and wild and offbeat, like risking your life to surf Mavericks when it’s clear you’re not ready for it, were simply the early signs. I think she’s probably right, which is what made my grandmother’s words so hard to hear. I don’t want to be anything like him, and I suspect I am.
The last time I saw my father, when I was twelve, he was living in a residential center for the mentally ill. Even medicated, most of what he said didn’t make sense, but what scared me was that a little of it did. He insisted they were poisoning him with all the fluorescent light at the exact moment I was thinking the lights were making me tired. He told me he’d rather be dead than be kept indoors all day, and it was a thought I’d had a thousand times. I’d said it to Liam whenever he was blowing off work to catch the winter swell while sending me to school.
People told my mom she put too much pressure on me to become something extraordinary, but I put that same pressure on myself. It felt as if the only other option might be…him.
I look toward the water longingly—there’s a voice in my head as I go to fulfill Mia’s drink orders, saying just walk out, Daisy. Get some sun. Go surfing. Maybe my dad heard that voice too. Maybe at heart, I’m someone who can’t be inside, can’t suck it up and function at a normal job, skilled or unskilled.
I bus Mia’s tables. A guy stops me to ask if our fish is ethically sourced, and it’s all I can do not to point at our drink menu, which features a cocktail called “Bitch Had it Coming,” and ask if he’s serious.
Another of her customers is drawing a picture, glancing my way every three seconds as he sketches. I can tell that it’s me, though he’s got me in some weird dominatrix outfit and the boobs are impossibly big. He hands it to me when he’s done, and I thank him because I’m not sure what to say. As I walk away, I think about that day in creative writing when I was invited to join the writing group that was mostly for grad students…and no one else was. Oh, the look on my ex’s face when I was invited and he was not. The speed with which he raced after me when class ended to beg me to take him back, claiming it was “pretty much over” with the model, which is what men say when they are very much in a relationship but want to fuck you anyway.
I made the wrong decision that day and then proceeded to make worse ones, all because I wanted to be more, because I wanted to be special, because I needed to believe that the reason I hadn’t found my place in the world was because I was extraordinary rather than defective.
And now I’m sucking at waiting tables and thanking people for pornographic drawings, and I’m probably not getting back into school, and I can’t stand the way my life is narrowing, is turning me into my father no matter how hard I’ve tried not to become him.
I don’t take a single deep breath until my shift ends and I’m back outside.