58. Summer
Summer
Ishift my weight onto my left foot—a move I know by heart. My sneakers have replaced the heels, but my foot hasn’t forgotten the eight hours at the agency. Like yesterday. Like every day this week. The dress code calls for heels. I don’t have a choice.
My shift ends at ten. Two more hours.
Tonight the tray feels heavier than usual. Two plates, a milkshake, a cup of coffee that threatens to slosh over with every step. I cross the floor, trying not to limp.
I set the tray down at table six. Cheeseburger, fries, and a strawberry milkshake for her, club sandwich and black coffee for him.
“Enjoy.”
He mutters something that might be thanks. She doesn’t bother looking up from her phone. I head off without lingering.
Mavis brushes past me, two plates balanced on her forearm. Forty, a smoker’s voice, the drawl of someone who’s never left the neighborhood. She winks at me as she goes.
The tired fluorescent light buzzes overhead. On the screen above the counter, the Yankees are playing the Red Sox, and nobody’s watching. The coffee machine hisses. Outside, Delancey Street makes its usual noise—a siren in the distance, the subway rumbling under the asphalt.
Mavis calls over from the counter.
“Table four, hon. Some guy in his fifties, ID badge still around his neck. Looks like the type to send his plate back.”
I glance at the guy in question: tie stuffed in his jacket pocket, shirt stuck to his shoulder blades, sleeves shoved up his forearms. I put him in a box before I even reach him—a business-school habit that works almost as well at the diner as it does at the agency.
Rough week, doesn’t want to go home, needs something to gripe about.
I walk over, pull the pad and pen from my apron pocket. He taps the table with two fingers, jaw tight.
“Evening,” I say. “What can I get you?”
“Fried eggs. Bacon. Pancakes. Coffee.”
“How do you want the eggs—sunny side up or over easy?”
“Sunny side up.”
“You got it.”
He buries himself in his phone while I write it down.
At the pass, I slide the ticket into the clip. The cook glances at it, cracks the eggs right away. I grab the coffeepot, make my rounds, top off cups without asking. Not a look, not a thank-you.
At table eleven, a sharp pain shoots through my right foot. I flinch, the mug wobbles, coffee splashes onto my arm. I don’t say anything, wipe it on my apron. The braided bracelet slides down my wrist; I push it back up.
Mornings in Coral Bay, my foot was stiff when I woke up. A few barefoot steps in the sand and the stiffness eased. Two weeks with almost no pain.
I set the pot back on the warmer and get back to work.
When the eggs come up at the pass, I carry them to table four.
“Sunny side up, crispy bacon, pancakes, maple syrup on the side,” I say. “Enjoy.”
I start to walk away. The customer snaps his fingers behind me.
“Hey, miss!”
“Yeah?” I say, turning back.
With one finger, he pushes the plate toward me.
“I said over easy. It’s not that complicated.”
I check my pad—sunny side up. I can still hear him saying it.
“Of course. I’ll fix that.”
I don’t blink. He goes back to his phone without a word. I take the plate back.
Don’t look at Mavis, who’s followed the whole thing from the counter and whose raised eyebrow I can feel. Don’t limp as I move between the tables.
At the pass, I just tell the cook, “Refire. Over easy.” He looks up at me, gets it, says nothing, cracks two eggs into the pan.
I give myself a three-minute break. I step out the service door and lean against the wall. The brick is still warm from the day.
The air reeks of fryer grease and garbage. Across the alley, above the door of a sex shop you’d swear had been closed for ten years, a LIVE NUDES sign blinks red—the letter N stutters, twice a second, never quite deciding to die.
I pull out my phone and find a message from Lena.
Second time I’ve heard from her in twenty-four hours.
Last night, I left here at ten. My foot hurt so bad my vision blurred. I missed Jace so much it was hard to breathe. I’d put my apron in my locker with my eyes burning.
My phone rang at the corner.
I froze in the middle of the sidewalk. A guy plowed into my shoulder and swore at me. On the screen: Lena.
Three years. Three years since she and I had spoken. Three years since she left for Montreal with Mom and I stayed in New York. The thread between us snapped without either of us really knowing who cut it first.
Two or three tears fell anyway. I wiped them with the back of my hand and picked up on the fourth ring.
We started with three too-polite sentences, small talk that didn’t quite fit.
“You doing okay out there?” she asked.
I said yes. She didn’t answer right away, and I understood she knew I was lying.
We talked for fifteen minutes on the sidewalk. I don’t remember half of what we said. She told me about Montreal, her rink, her new program. She asked me about the diner and the internship. At one point we floated Thanksgiving as a possibility, without pinning anything down.
I wonder why that call came last night, after three years of silence. Maybe she sensed, from four hundred miles away, that I was barely standing.
That’s the version I’m sticking with. My eighteen-year-old little sister, stuck in her world of ice and training, somehow felt I wasn’t okay when she walked out of the rink. Probably not true, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the only bright spot since I came back to New York.
I open the message.
A photo of a cappuccino from above. Some unidentifiable shape, drawn in the milk foam.
Lena
Looks like a cockroach. The waiter swore it was a heart. He slipped his number under the saucer.
I laugh—my first real laugh of the day.
Me
I’m guessing you left a bad tip.
I hesitate a second, then my thumb scrolls through the message threads. Jace’s is still there. I haven’t deleted it. I should have; I couldn’t.
I stop on his name, but I don’t open the thread. I lock the screen and put the phone back in my apron pocket.
I look up. The red N is still blinking. Above the alley, the corner of the main neon sign juts out over the diner’s roof—LUCKY STAR, in pink and blue. Pink for LUCKY. Blue for STAR.
Star.
Star Park. The line Jace and I waited in for churros.
The number 17 on our Ferris wheel car. The string lights wrapped around the ride’s posts.
His arm along the rail behind me, not on my shoulders.
The kiss at the top of the wheel. His question: “Be my girlfriend, Summer.” And my hand sliding into his when our car started back down.
I turn my head away. The N keeps blinking. Red. Red. Red.
The dark water. The screaming. Blood on the rocks. The torn-open leg.
I close my eyes and count to three. I open them again. The red is still pulsing on the brick.
I should have been there after the accident.
I should have been there when he woke up. When he saw his thigh for the first time. When he understood what he’d never do again. Through the rehab that followed.
Even if I was only a bet, I loved him, and I wasn’t there.
“Summer?”
I jump. It’s Mavis. She’s cracked the service door open.
“Your eggs are up,” she says.
“Coming.”
She holds the door open for me.
“You okay, hon?” she asks as I pass her.
“Yeah.”
My lie is well practiced.
I grab the plate at the pass. Eggs over easy, pancakes, crispy bacon. Everything table four ordered—or didn’t.
I cross the floor, set the plate down in front of the guy. He ignores me.
I walk away without a word.
I miss Jace. A week of telling myself it’ll pass. It’s getting worse.