Chapter 5
“Go!” I yelled, or something like that. I was just making noise but so were the other people in the stands around me. The Junior Woodsmen were close to the end zone and driving, and it was really exciting.
Winter was finally coming to a close, and the warming weather and the fact that they’d won a lot of games had attracted a big crowd today.
Their increased popularity had given me an idea.
“We should hand out coupons. Like, if they win, we could give away a free fountain drink with a burger purchase,” I had told my mom.
She had looked toward the kitchen, where my dad was crashing things around and hadn’t heard us.
She’d nodded and mouthed the words “do it.”
I had come to the game and found a few people tailgating who had been happy to get my coupon. So had other fans when they’d arrived and many of them had expressed that they hadn’t even known about our restaurant, so this was great publicity.
Then I’d stayed. I would have to leave soon, but my sister was at Walter’s today and was supposed to have been working, too. We would see how much she accomplished but I grudgingly gave her credit for getting up, getting dressed, and getting into the car without anyone resorting to physical force.
I had been so surprised by her actions that I’d stared at her after she’d sat in the passenger seat next to me. “What are you doing?” I had asked.
“Aren’t we going to the restaurant?” she’d replied.
Yes, I had been, but now I was here to enjoy a little bit of the game before heading back.
Shane was here, too, sitting in the top row where the company was sparse and he could get a good visual.
I didn’t think that he’d seen me come in and I looked up again as I reluctantly left, but he had returned to staring through his binoculars at one of the players out on the field. I didn’t bother to wave.
But we had been in contact since I’d helped him move out of his gross house.
He had sent the pictures of Columbus, Ohio that he’d promised.
And when he’d returned to Michigan, he had dropped by the restaurant, too, just to say hello.
He still hadn’t made a decision about where to live but it wasn’t exactly cheap to stay at the long-term motel.
He knew that, so I didn’t have to say it.
He wasn’t dumb about money and responsibility and that was something I liked about him.
There were a few more things, too. I liked how hard he worked.
I liked the fact that he sent me pictures, I liked how he talked about his family.
I liked how he asked questions and seemed interested in my responses.
I liked how he didn’t splice together a video of those responses and then use it to publicly humiliate me, as others had done.
Shane seemed to like me, too. He was the one sending those pictures, after all, but it was clear that there was a limit to his feelings. If he was interested in anything more than a casual acquaintanceship, then he could have made a move. He hadn’t.
I hadn’t either. Why would I have set myself up for more humiliation with a guy, when I was so fresh off the recent one with Corbin and his frat buddies?
I saw them sometimes at school—Corbin and I still had the same class together.
He was careful not to look at me but once, when we had mistakenly made eye contact, he had blushed.
It was like that girl had said to me, after I’d overheard her and her friend whispering about the party and my behavior there: if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.
He had been a total asshole and now he was embarrassed?
I found myself wondering why I had ever thought he was good-looking because he now seemed like a child, weak and ignorant. But he did dress well.
Anyway, I should have been focused on my goal of catching a Woodsmen player but that was going nowhere.
According to social media reports from other fans, the guys that remained in the area during the off-season were mostly married or otherwise taken, and they were staying for things like their kids’ school or their wives’ jobs.
So they were a non-starter and I’d have to wait until summer, when more of the single ones would show up.
My other plan, snagging a great Junior Woodsmen player on his way up, also hadn’t been going well. I had directly asked Shane which ones were going to make it to the big time, but he had been unwilling or unable to give me an answer.
“Not sure,” he’d said vaguely. “Are you placing bets or something?” I hadn’t wanted to explain myself. I had become less enamored of all those plans, anyway—I had been hoping for a rescue, but I was pretty convinced that none was coming.
To my surprise, things were going ok back at the restaurant when I arrived.
I had been prepared to roll up my white polyester sleeves and work like a dog, but when I looked around the dining room, I saw that the setup was nearly complete.
The bathrooms were stocked and ready. I nudged my mom out of the way to confirm that the cash drawer in the register was good to go, and I also checked to ensure that our internet was working so we could take electronic payments. That sometimes fell apart.
Morgan watched me doing the quality control. “Beruhige dich,” she said.
“What?”
“It’s ok,” she assured me. “Everything is fine.”
It did seem that way. I changed into the stunning uniform and then found several social media accounts posting about the Junior Woodsmen game, so we were able to anticipate when we might start to see a crowd.
And we did! Many of them had my coupons in hand, and since soft drinks were such a low-cost item for us, it was easy and relatively harmless to give them away.
We had always done complementary refills and people seemed to really love those coupons. Who didn’t enjoy freebies?
After the crowd of fans had generally moved on, several of the Junior Woodsmen players showed up.
They acted happy about their win and were a lot more upbeat than when they’d come to eat in previous seasons.
I tried to watch them so I could catch the one who was making the ketchup bombs, but I was also busy working.
And he got us again! After they cleared out and I walked through the mostly empty tables, I saw a suspicious drink cup upside down and I knew better than to pick it up. “Damn him,” I muttered. I had been busy, but I had also paid attention to who was sitting where.
That was why I was able to report (tattle) on him when I went out to the parking lot, where Shane was waiting in his truck and blowing on his hands to keep them warm. “It’s the running back!” I announced triumphantly. “He’s the one messing with the ketchup.”
“You got him. What are you going to do about it?”
“I’ll wait until they come back in so I can take pictures, and then I’ll confront him. I’ll tell him that he’s not welcome unless he can somehow stop himself from playing his fun little game of messy condiments. Speaking of games, they played great. Which one were you watching on the field?”
He still wouldn’t specify. “Several different guys,” he answered.
“You could have come into Walter’s and talked to them.”
“I could have, but I figured that you didn’t need me taking up a table and annoying you with my picky order. Also, I’m not ready to approach them. Not yet.”
“So they have to wait in suspense?” So did I, since he wasn’t naming names.
“They’re not in suspense if they don’t know that I’m interested,” he reasoned. “I’ve been writing up reports while I waited just now.”
“You can come in and finish those while I finish, too. It shouldn’t take me very long.”
He did that, since it was significantly warmer than in his truck and I also let him onto our employee-only (aka family) Wi-Fi. It would have been nice, except that it did stop working again.
“I’ll restart the router,” I heard my sister say as I walked out of the men’s room, peeling off my gloves. It had been rancid in there. “Molly, has our network been going down a lot?”
“Constantly,” I answered. With our distance from the nearest tower and with the cinderblock walls, it meant we were often cut off.
As I went to change out of my dumb sailor suit, though, I saw that my sister must have managed to reboot it because several emails suddenly appeared in my inbox, as well as a ton of texts.
What…what? I read them all as I got back into normal clothes and then walked slowly toward the counter, lost in thought.
“What’s the matter now, Molly?” my mom sighed when she saw me.
“Nothing. It’s nothing,” I told her. I was already trying to figure out how to fix it—there had to be something I could do. My phone vibrated with another text, this one accusing me of ruining her future prospects for medical school.
“This isn’t my fault!” I wrote in the group chat, and that was when we heard my dad in the kitchen. He had been doing his cleaning routine, some of it with my help, but now there was a new explosion of noise: yelling and swearing.
“Oh, no,” I also heard my mother murmur. She looked worried and Morgan was clearly scared.
Dad burst out from the back a moment later. “Why the fuck are you all standing around here?” he shouted. “Can’t you get anything done? I’m the only one working, as always! Molly, get your worthless ass in gear.”
“Dom, don’t talk like that,” my mom tried to argue, and he turned on her to yell more specifically about her failings.
I looked at Shane to see his reaction to our family drama.
He had never met my dad or probably even seen him, since he never went into the kitchen.
My father and I were about the same height, but he was a lot heavier.
He had always reminded me of an elephant seal, especially when he got angry because his barrel chest expanded even more—he seemed to puff up all over as he yelled and swore at us.