15. Amy
CHAPTER 15
AMY
A my pulled into the parking lot of the event center where she would be catering that night and sighed as she turned off the ignition. She just needed a moment before she got out of the van because as soon as her feet hit the floor, she was going to be in work mode and it would be a long night ahead. She’d never catered for an event this big before and definitely never one this fancy. Even the outside of the event center looked intimidating as it loomed over her, and she had to resist the urge to turn the van on again and drive away.
It stung her pride bad, really bad, but she had accepted all of the jobs that had come through thanks to Kai’s unsolicited meddling. Amy was many things, but she wasn’t an idiot. For one thing she needed the money, and with this sort of money, she could upgrade a bunch of things in her kitchen and, after another few jobs, maybe even upgrade her van. Not to mention if she started actively refusing jobs, especially high-profile catering jobs like these ones, for no apparent reason other than “Sorry, there was this whole thing where I didn’t want Kai Nichols to recommend me because of a very complicated history between us,” word would get around. People would think she was insane and that would be a lethal blow to her business. She would be digging her own grave, so she swallowed her pride, even if it hurt, and took the jobs. But still… she was allowed to be nervous.
There was a knock on the window and Amy nearly jumped out of her skin, her hand instinctively going to her throat like an old woman clutching her pearls.
A young man, a teenager really, in a black and burgundy waiter’s uniform, was looking through the window with a lopsided smile and a wave. Amy caught her breath and opened the door, forcing herself not to admonish the guy for giving her the fright of her life.
“Hey,” he said, shifting shyly from foot to gangly foot. “You’re Amy, right?”
“Yep, that’s me,” she said, heading straight for the back to start unloading the food that she’d prepped, ready to be finished off in the event center’s kitchen.
“I’m Andy. I’m one of the waiters, like, obviously,” he said, gesturing to his uniform. “Uh, my boss told me to come help you, that if you needed anything, that would be my job. So, here to help!”
He gave her an enthusiastic thumbs up and Amy immediately forgave him for scaring the daylights out of her. It was like watching a puppy stumble around. How could you be mad at that?
“Thank you, Andy,” she said with a more genuine smile this time. “Could you help me carry these trays inside?”
“Oh, sure! I’ll show you where the kitchens are and everything. Just follow me.”
Over several trips the two of them got Amy’s trays into the kitchen, most of them laid out on the counter, the shrimp in the fridge and the tiny tacos in the oven to crisp up. Andy gave her a rundown of the evening, reading from carefully taken notes in his phone, showed her where the bathrooms and fire exits were with stern gravity, and then asked if she needed anything else.
“I’m good, Andy, thank you. You’ve done a great job.”
He beamed at the praise. “This is my first real job,” he said, straightening his uniform. “You know, apart from being a cashier after school. I’m saving up for a car too. Not a nice one, but at least some sort of car.”
“That sounds great,” Amy said. “As long as it has a running engine, right?”
“Ain’t that the truth!” he declared before getting called away by the boss of the wait staff that had been hired. The boss gave them all an extra rundown for the evening before the guests arrived, and he explained how they would take the food from the kitchens and in what order. It seemed like a logistical nightmare, and Amy was more than happy to keep to herself in the kitchens instead of serving up the food by herself like she usually would.
For the first time since arriving at the venue, Amy was on her own, everything prepped as much as was possible for the moment, with nothing to distract her from her own thoughts. She instantly hated it.
The first thing that hit her in the now silent kitchen was the nerves. They’d been bad all day, but now they swamped her. This was the biggest job she’d ever signed up for, both in terms of the guest list — over two hundred people were expected to show up — and the prestige of the event. This wasn’t some high school reunion for a random school on the outskirts of San Diego. This was a proper charity gala , where a table cost at least ten grand and men would be wearing tuxedos and women would be arriving in floor-length gowns and stilettos. It was the stratosphere that Jason and Jess belonged to, that Kai belonged to. It was the type of life Amy had had a taste of for a brief week on the yacht. This was what she’d been afraid of with being left alone… Already her thoughts had spiraled back to Kai.
She was still mad at him, but it was getting harder to rationalize being mad at him. Because maybe, maybe , she’d been wrong, which wasn’t something that had even crossed her mind until the last few days when she’d started doing the prep for the gala. It was a different level of catering, a different level of creative control, not to mention an entirely different level of paycheck that had been sent through. So, yeah, she could see why Kai had been so insistent on trying to help her because he could see how wildly different these types of gigs were going to be.
She should reach out to him and apologize. But how did you have that conversation? Hey, I get it, I do. I understand now why you just wanted to help me, and I realize how my own pride and my own demons were getting in the way of my success. It’s okay to have help. I realize this now. But also, I’m still really, really mad, and you deserve it because you went behind my back and ignored my wishes . How did you even begin to talk about that? Amy just wanted her friend back… that was all.
But here was the other problem; she and Kai had swiftly and irreversibly stepped over the line from friendship into something else. Could they even go back to being just friends? Could things ever be the same between them? This is what she’d always been afraid of, that the line would be crossed and everything would fall apart immediately. Well, point proven. Yay.
She pressed her forehead against the cool, stainless-steel surface of the industrial fridge and sighed. What a mess.
Maybe food would help; food usually helped. Either way, if she didn’t eat something right now , she wasn’t going to have the time for the rest of the night as she finished off courses and sent them out. She opened the fridge and took stock of the massive amounts of garlic shrimp skewers she’d made. Amy had ordered way too much, and instead of just letting it go to waste, she had prepped the whole bunch. If she was going to snack on anything, it would have to be the shrimp. A full meal of it wouldn’t even make a dent.
What a weird day. There she was, depressed at the whole situation with Kai, starting to feel the thrill of having this job be a success, but also terrified if this job wasn’t a success, and all the while eating garlic shrimp and waiting for the chaos to begin.
So far the evening had gone well, and even though this wasn’t a sentence Amy had ever thought she’d say, thank God for the awkward teenager that had been assigned to be her helper. Whenever the next course was ready to go out, Andy enthusiastically jumped in to help her take trays out of the oven or out of the fridge, to set the final garnishes on each canapé, and listen intently to what each dish was so that he could help to pass on the information to the rest of the waitstaff should the guests have any questions. The kid was a gem, and it made it painfully clear to Amy that if she was going to keep doing this scale of event, then she was seriously going to need to hire some help of her own. The thought made her feel queasy, and once that feeling reared its head, it never really left.
But then that entire train of thought, as always, led back to Kai and to another stab of guilt at how she’d constantly rejected his attempts to help. It turned out that having assistance made life a whole lot easier. Who knew? Well, Kai had known, and she’d crucified him for trying to make her see it.
So even though the technical side of things had been going well, the waitstaff coming in batches to take out the next course, with Andy jumping in as Amy’s sous chef when needed, Amy was just feeling worse and worse as time ticked by. Mentally and physically. The queasy feeling that had been building in her stomach the whole evening started to flood through her in dizzying waves.
As the waitstaff filed in to take out the trays of shrimp skewers, it all came to a crescendo, the dread and the guilt and then the seasick feeling that had been getting worse and worse, blowing up into straight-up nausea. Amy left the kitchen, having to run to the bathroom to be sick. She made it just in time, thank God, but waves of that terrible seasick feeling kept washing over her. It was a few minutes before she was able to splash her face with cold water and head back to the kitchen with something new to worry about weighing her down.
She never threw up. Ever. No cold, flu or bout of car sickness had ever had her throwing up like that. The only time she could ever remember feeling that sick and having it pass so suddenly was when she’d gotten food poisoning when she was eighteen.
That was just great. Just fantastic. This was exactly what she needed, in the middle of a massive gala event, to get food poisoning. To make it ten times worse, she’d obviously gotten it from her own food because it was the only thing she’d eaten all day. And now it was being served out on the floor to a hundred people.
Think, Amy.
It was the shrimp; it had to be. That’s what she’d stuck to snacking on because there was so much of it. But as she made it back to the kitchens, the trays of the most likely contaminated canapés were already gone, taken by the waiters and presumably being handed out on the main floor.
Amy took a second, just one second, to take a deep breath with her eyes closed, gather herself, and lock down any rising panic. Then her second was done, and she pulled off her stained apron and made her way as calmly and quickly as she could into the gala to find Andy. Thank God he was close by, hovering around like a meerkat on alert.
“Hey, Andy,” she hissed, and the gangly teen loped over obediently to where she was standing by the edge of the room in her jeans and blouse while all the guests glided around in ball gowns and suits.
“You okay? You looked really sick for a minute there,” he asked, so genuinely that Amy felt bad for ever doubting him. If anyone asked for a review, she was going to say he was the best waiter to ever serve canapés and cocktails.
“Yeah, but here’s the thing, I think it was food poisoning…” she said quietly, keeping it on the down low.
“Food poisoning?!” He exclaimed and Amy put a finger over her mouth shushing him, he looked around guiltily before lowering his voice. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine now, I think. But I’ve been eating the shrimp all afternoon.”
Andy looked over his shoulder where there were platters of the shrimp now doing the rounds. Luckily it was the tail end of the night and people weren’t really hungry anymore, no longer leaping for every waiter that passed by.
“I’ll take the left side of the room and you take the right side?” he suggested with a determined expression. “And I won’t mention anything about food poisoning , don’t worry.”
“Good man, Andy. I owe you.”
With a serious nod he was off into the crowd, taking a tray from one of his coworker’s hands with no explanation, leaving them looking around like they’d been pranked.
Amy started in on the right side of the room with pretty much the same strategy.
“Excuse me, I need that back,” she said to the waiters she encountered with as much authority in her voice as she could muster and they gave her the tray without argument, even if they did look confused as they handed it over, not sure what to do with their empty hands.
Andy, like an awkward gazelle appearing on the plains of the savannah, swept past her with the newfound elegance of an ice skater, taking her stack of trays along with his own and disappearing back into the ether. The kid sure could be sneaky when he wanted to be. And he was going to get a five-star review, that was for sure. Ten stars, even. A million stars and he deserved every one of them. She hoped he got the best car ever and that he never got a flat tire or ran out of gas. Continuing to heap blessings upon him, Amy did another sweep of the room and couldn’t see any more waiters with trays of shrimp. Making her way through the crowd, awkward and underdressed, she spotted a man holding a skewer as he talked with a friend, and Amy, no longer concerned with feeling embarrassed, made a beeline for him.
“I’m so sorry, let me get that for you,” she said as if this were a perfectly sane thing to do and plucked the skewer out of his hand. “That’s better, you’re so welcome. Have a lovely night.”
He stared at her with an open mouth and confused eyes, his bowtie slightly crooked. Amy took the opportunity to disappear before he recovered and thought to ask any questions.
Back in the safety of the kitchen, Amy threw the skewer into a trash can where Andy, bless his heart, had already dumped the other offending seafood.
“That was like, super stressful,” he said, hands on hips. “But also really fun.”
He held up a hand ready for a high five, and Amy wasn’t about to leave him hanging. She smacked her palm against his and sagged against the wall.
“Thank you,” she said. “Seriously.”
“You might have to explain to my boss why I was stealing everyone’s trays,” he said with a slightly worried grimace. “Like, I was totally happy to do it, but she’s gonna want a reason.”
“Don’t worry,” Amy said. “I’ll only say good things about you.”
Amy was managing to keep the seasick waves at bay as she cleaned up the kitchen at the end of the night, but it was taking some effort. The fumes from her disinfectant spray weren’t exactly helping either. If she just kept moving, though, she seemed to be able to stay one step ahead of it. Stupid shrimp.
“Uh, Amy?”
She looked over and Andy was in the kitchen, his uniform now more disheveled than earlier in the evening. There was also a supremely guilty expression on his face.
“Hey? You okay?” she asked, genuinely concerned now. “What’s up?”
“Um, well, I was thinking about it, and I kind of have a confession.”
“A confession?”
“Yeah, I might have… not acted strictly by the book…”
He was shuffling foot to foot, looking like a kid in trouble. But he was seventeen, so he was a kid scared of being in trouble. Amy sighed gently and forced him to make eye contact with her.
“Andy, just tell it to me straight and I won’t be mad. I promise.”
He didn’t look so sure, but he nodded. “I was real hungry, you know, been up since six this morning to help set up the gala, so I maybe uh, sampled a bunch of the shrimp cocktail things before I served them. They were real good! That’s why I couldn’t stop at one, you know?”
Amy blinked and waited for her brain to catch up. “So you ate a bunch of the food that you were supposed to be serving?”
“Only the shrimp because I’m gluten-free, and I couldn’t exactly ask what was in everything else without sounding suspicious.”
“Right. Well. Thank you for telling me this Andy, and I’m not mad, but it’s been a long day and I’m still lost about why you’re telling me this?”
“You said that the shrimp is what had you throwing up. That’s why we went all ninja style, you know, and got them back to the kitchen. But I’m not feeling sick at all. Like they smelled fine, tasted great and, yeah, I’m not queasy even a little bit, so I don’t think it’s food poisoning that had you feeling so bad. I just didn’t want you to beat yourself up thinking you’d served bad shrimp, so I thought I better tell you.”
The first feeling that sprung into being was relief. If Andy was fine hours after eating the same thing as her, then the shrimp really couldn’t have been bad. No one else was at risk of getting sick; she hadn’t messed up. It was all okay. Then there was another feeling creeping up her neck, a suspicion of another reason for feeling nauseous and she clamped down on it hard.
Not right now. You can panic about that later.
“Thank you, Andy,” Amy said, still determined to sing his praises even if he did eat the food he was only supposed to be serving, but that wasn’t going to tarnish the million-star review she’d assigned him in her head. “That really does make me feel better, so thank you. And I’m not mad or anything. I promise.”
He literally sagged with relief, like a lanky cartoon. “Aw great. I am sorry. But even if, you know, you’re not sick because of food poisoning, I hope you feel better. Anyway, my mom is waiting outside, so I gotta go. Thanks, Amy!”
With a wave and a grin, he was gone, and Amy was left alone in the kitchen, partially frozen because it had been a lie that the shrimp being just fine had made her feel better. Because without the shrimp as a reason for her sudden bouts of nausea all afternoon, Amy was hit with another possibility for why she was so sick all of a sudden, unable to keep the suspicion at bay a moment longer.
The final night on the yacht, her night with Kai, it all came back to her in sparkling detail.
In a daze she finished cleaning and packing up and then drove the van to the nearest twenty-four-hour pharmacy she could find and returned home to her apartment with a pregnancy test burning a hole in her bag.
She was exhausted. She was still feeling sick, and she was hungry despite feeling sick. But she pushed it all aside to take the pregnancy test as soon as she walked through the door, and the whole process was a lot more awkward than the movies made it out to be. Amy couldn’t bear to just sit in the bathroom and wait for the minutes to tick by for the test to develop, so she kept herself busy. She hadn’t been hungry all day, not since she’d thrown up her lunch. And after that she’d been so stressed and preoccupied with trying to make sure no one else ended up with food poisoning, she’d ignored the concept of eating altogether. But now her hunger hit her like a freight train, so she set a grilled cheese sandwich in a skillet, munching on an apple until it was ready. Then she ate the sandwich. Then she drank a glass of water and did the dishes, dried them and put them away. Then she threw her work clothes into the washing machine and even contemplated vacuuming the apartment so that she didn’t have to face the pregnancy test that would definitely, definitely be ready by now. Unfortunately, the thing that Amy needed most was a shower. She was sticky and grimy from head to toe, and if she didn’t get into the shower soon, she was going to snap and start crawling out of her skin.
So she told herself to stop being ridiculous, get it together and open the bathroom door.
The pregnancy test was waiting on the sink for her and, of course, there were two pink lines, clear as day. Amy threw it in the trash can and jumped into the shower. She needed to think, and she might as well do it under steaming hot water.
So. So…
A list, that was what she needed. She needed to organize her thoughts. That was the first thing that needed to be done.
One. She was going to be a mom. Time to look that fact squarely in the face and come to terms with it. She’d always wanted kids, but she’d always wanted kids someday . Well, turns out today was that day. Apart from the terrifying aspects of, you know, bringing a whole human into the world and all of the complications that would throw into her life, there was still a kernel of excitement in her chest, small but bright. So this was a good thing. The terror would fade, and the excitement would grow. Okay, so that was thing number one sorted.
Two… two was the father, because there was only one possible option for that, and right now it was far more terrifying than the idea of growing a tiny human inside her for the next nine months.
Amy reached for her shampoo and started scrubbing at her short hair much too enthusiastically.
How was she supposed to tell Kai? She had to tell him, absolutely. But it felt like their whole relationship, whatever label that relationship did or didn’t have, had shattered into a million pieces. She wasn’t sure how to even start putting it back together, but she wanted to try. But now with a baby in the mix… was repairing things with Kai even possible?