Dark Water - Laura McNeal [42]
It was fry-grease hot in the hallway, and the kitchen workers, all Hispanic, sweated as they carried and chopped. The eye I’d covered was the blue one, and I tried to see, with my brown eye, something other than moving bodies in white aprons, stained tin pots, brown rubber doily mats, and giant tubs of grease. The passageway felt darker and longer, tilted crazily on its side, and then I couldn’t see the kitchen anymore. My mind filled with the sound of rushing water and the next thing I felt was the wall. I had steered myself smack into it, I guess. Fortunately, no one saw me. I just stood up and felt my way to the door that said LASSES. It took me a while to feel normal again—I splashed my face at the dingy sink, ate a Luden’s I found in my pocket, tried looking one-eyed into the mirror for someone other than myself—but I finally had nowhere to go but back to Greenie and Hickey and the big television set.
Greenie jumped out of her chair when I came back. “There you are!” she said semi-hysterically. “We were just about to move to another table. On the non-television side!”
Hickey was standing but not enthused. Greenie put her hands on my shoulders to steer me, as if I might resist, but I stepped on something I thought was a foot and turned to apologize. That’s when I saw what Greenie was trying to protect me from seeing.
My father was standing at the bar. He’d just finished saying something to the bartender, who nodded, and then my father turned and saw me standing like the last pin on a bowling lane.
It’s funny how his smile seemed completely sincere. “There you are!” he said, just like Greenie had. For a second, his face was the old face. Maureen the waitress was gone and the booths were gone, but it was the old him and the old me, the one that loved him more than all the world.
“Your mom called Greenie’s,” he said, working his way over to us, “and they said you were here.”
I didn’t answer. He kissed my cheek. I kissed his cheek, too.
Already Greenie and Hickey were fading away from us, melting back from a parent they didn’t have to listen to.
“My car’s out back,” my father said. “You guys need a ride somewhere?”
“No, we’re good,” Hickey said.
I hadn’t ordered anything, but I didn’t like how my dad just assumed I was leaving with him now.
“What about the food?” I asked Greenie.
“The waitress hasn’t taken our order yet,” she said. “It’s taking a zillion years.”
“You’re hungry?” my dad asked, which I have to say was a silly question. Why else does a person go to a restaurant? “We can eat here, if you want. Remember the Packinghouse? I can’t believe how much nicer it is in here now. What a change.”
“Never mind,” I said. “I’m not that hungry.”
We walked out into the parking lot together, and I eyed Robby’s Honda under the murky pepper tree—still there, still dark—but I didn’t point it out. My father led me well beyond the cars clustered near the back door of Paddy O’Hara’s and the neighboring Café Chartreuse to a solitary Mercedes parked diagonally across two spaces about ten leagues from everyone else. I’d never seen the car before.
“A rental?” I asked.
“Lease to own,” he said.
I absorbed this information as he pushed a button on his key and the car lit itself up inside.
“Like it?” he said.
I didn’t speak.
He opened the door for me and I got in. The car already smelled like the black licorice I knew would be in the glove compartment if I opened it. He started showing off the features—GPS, surround sound—but I said, “I get it. It’s a nice car. A lot nicer than our health insurance.”
“Ah,” he said, easing himself back in the driver’s seat. “That’s what you’re mad about?”
I didn’t say anything because it was hard to talk to my father as if he were an idiot. He couldn’t be both my father and an idiot. I wouldn’t allow it.
“The resentment you seem to feel is not fair,” my father said in his controlled angry voice, the voice that when I was very little made me curl up behind the clothes in my closet instead of in my bed, where I felt I didn’t deserve to sleep. “This car is a tool. A tool that