Smart Mouth Waitress (37 page)

He hadn't come by to see me at all. It was Monday, and he'd come in to have his same old breakfast—brown toast, crispy bacon, and poached eggs—and he wanted to quietly work on his crossword puzzle.

He didn't want me any more than my mother wanted her family.

I stood, pulled the notepad out of my mini-apron, and wrote the following:

MARC IS A TOTAL DICK!

I smiled sweetly. “Shall I put in your regular with the kitchen, or do you want to hear the daily special?”

“I'm not really a
daily special
kinda guy,” he said.

“No, you sure aren't.”

As I walked away, he was already pondering his crossword puzzle.

Somehow, I got through the first half of my shift. When I took a meal break, sitting at the back window to eat my bagel and scrambled eggs, Toph started talking to Donny about some girl he'd met at a concert.

“She was so fake,” Toph said. “She must have used spray tan. There's no way you'd get that tanned in Colorado.”

“You have to watch out,” Donny said as he adjusted the sweatband he'd worn that day. Summer was coming and the kitchen had been getting hot, even on drizzly-weather days. Donny waved his spatula and said, “You have to get a good look at them under the bright light.”

“What do you mean
them
?” I demanded from my seat on the bench. “Women are not some enemy camp, trying to trick you with our womanly wiles. We're people. We have feelings.”

“Too many feelings,” Toph said.

Donny, who was not quite old enough to be Toph's parent, patted him on the shoulder in a fatherly way. “Easy now. Just because you only have two prevailing emotions doesn't mean other humans aren't more complex.”

Toph, apparently missing the insult, laughed at Donny's comment.

“Perry, what do you think?” Donny asked. “Do you have any girlfriends who might take our friend's virginity for him? You know, teach him the ways of the mysterious female.”

“You guys. I can't even lose
my
virginity.”

Donny clapped his hands together with glee. “Problem solved! Two birds, one stone. Uh, two eggs, over easy. Two sausages, ready to serve. Or, one sausage and one … taco?”

I put down the second half of my bagel, my appetite gone. “Enough, Donny. I'm picking up on what you're throwing down. No more metaphors.”

Toph, looking as hopeful as a little boy who's just seen the giant teddy bears at a carnival, grinned at me.

“Not gonna happen,” I said. When Toph caved in on himself with disappointment, I added, “Only because it would be weird with us working together. You know. I've seen you work with your hands and I'm sure you'll be a very skilled lover for someone … some day.”

I scraped off my plate and put my dishes on the dishwasher rack, feeling Toph's undressing gaze on me. I stuck out my chest, enjoying the sensation of being wanted, even if it was just Toph.

When I got back out front to relieve Ginger for her break, I was still thinking about Donny's suggestion. You might even say I was considering it. Toph always smelled clean, like soap, and since he'd shaved off that scraggly goatee, he wasn't so bad to look at.

Thinking about bedding my co-worker certainly took my mind off my family problems. He wanted to have the experience as much as I did, so it would solve two problems at once.

One thing held me back from saying anything to Toph, though. Well, two, if you include his ridiculous name.

I couldn't shake the mental image of my other co-worker, Ginger, having one night in a hotel room with another guy, just to see what it was like, and then falling in love with him.

I'd heard of girls getting attached to guys because of all the different hormones that fluctuate after intimacy, and I didn't want to accidentally fall in love with Toph.

When I got home from my shift, the house felt ancient and lifeless.

Everything was exactly where I'd left it, including my note on the table. On the way home, I'd stopped to pick up a few items I'd forgotten to buy on Friday, and it was already half-past four. My brother should have been home from school and my father from work.

Instead, I had a feeling they hadn't even been home the night before. The kitchen was perfectly clean, as I'd left it, with no cereal bowls anywhere, not even in the empty dishwasher.

I ran around looking for my phone, to call them. I couldn't find it anywhere, and worse, couldn't remember where I'd used it last. I picked up the land line and dialed my number, listening for a ring—I'd set it up so the land line always made a ringtone, extra-loud, specifically for these situations—but I heard nothing. The battery must have died.

Next, I would have called my father's cell, but I couldn't remember the phone number. Nor could I remember my brother's. Or my mom's. Or the number of
anyone
who would be remotely useful.

My mother had probably mentioned a hundred times that we needed to print out all the numbers and tape them up somewhere in case of emergency, but we'd never gotten around to it.

With no numbers, no cell phone, and no sign of my family, I teetered on the brink of panic. And by
teetered on the brink
, I mean I sat on the floor and hugged my knees while talking to myself. If other people had been there, and we were in an old-timey movie, some dude would have had to slap me across the face to calm me down.

With no one else to do it for me, I patted my hands on my cheeks until I felt better. This triggered a memory, of a beautiful Indian woman who'd done a workshop with me and Mom, for some wackadoodle self-help therapy. She'd given us some exercises, and they came back to me in pieces.

I began tapping my arm with one hand, lightly tapping from the wrist to the elbow and back down again. “This is my skin,” I said out loud.

I moved on to the other arm, tapping up and down and repeating the mantra that I was
in my skin, in my body
. My mind calmed enough for me to remember the name of what I was doing: EFT, or Emotional Freedom Technique. My arms were feeling tender from all the smacking, and I had to stop doing the tapping so I could remember what I was all worked up about.

My father and brother were missing.

A friend. I needed a friend to help me figure out where my father and brother were.

I grabbed my jacket from its hook by the doorway and pulled everything out of the pockets, looking for a phone number.

I still had the business card Marc had given me before he came over for dinner. I also had a card Sunshine had given me, with her home phone number, which was also Cooper's number.

Marc was smart, on his way to becoming an engineer. He would be able to think like my father, and thus help me find my father. I grabbed the cordless phone from the hallway and pressed the first few digits of his phone number.

In my mind, I saw him glance at his crossword puzzle, uninterested in my problems. I canceled the call.

I didn't need an engineer so much as I needed a friend. Haylee and Andrew would have been great, and while I didn't have their number, I could go to their apartment.

There was another option, though.

Holding the second business card in one damp hand, I phoned the Cooper residence. Sunshine answered. My mind cut to black and I couldn't remember Cooper's first name for a few seconds, so I asked if her brother was there.

She said, “Perry?”

“Hey Sunshine,” I said. “My little brother's missing and I need some help.” I started to say something else, about my Uncle Jeff's instability and everything being my fault, but it came out as blubbering.

“Hang on,” she said.

I held the phone to my ear with my shoulder and tapped my fingers on my arm until she came back on the line, saying she and her brother were both going to come over and help.

Chapter 23

While I waited for Sunshine and Cooper to show up, I checked my dad's and my brother's computers, but found no hints about where they might be.

I grabbed my laptop and posted emergency messages on my Facebook wall and my brother's, asking if friends had seen either my dad or my brother, to call the home phone number. We never gave our number out, because of my mother, but I posted the phone number, along with a note that I didn't have my cell phone on me.

You're being silly
, I told myself.
They're just at Uncle Jeff's.

Uncle Jeff's seemed like a logical place to look.

But first, I needed to call Mom and let her know.

I opened the emails from my mother and found a dozen different phone numbers for various hotels and studios she would be at some days, some times. I couldn't figure out which place she'd be at on that particular day, but did it matter? She was in LA, what was she going to do from there?

I sent her an email that would get her attention.

Subject:
Emergency, 911, I can't find Dad or Garnet

Email:
Mom, I've lost my phone and Dad and Garnet didn't come home last night. I don't know where they are and I'm worried sick and have no phone numbers. You were right about printing out a phone list
for emergencies. I'm sorry I didn't do that. I'm sorry about everything. Can you try phoning them and tell them to call the house ASAP?

I then typed something snarky about her finding time in her busy schedule between making out with random dudes, but I deleted that part and sent the email without the hate.

The doorbell rang, and I raced down the stairs. When I opened the door and saw Sunshine and Cooper standing there, it felt almost as good as if it had been my dad and brother. I threw myself into Cooper's arms. He rubbed my back and told me everything was going to be okay.

Sunshine had a notepad and pen in one hand, and an iPad in the other. She flashed me a web page that looked like an official government site. “We're supposed to call the police immediately if the missing person is a child, or if they're suicidal.”

“I don't think they're either,” I said. “Garnet's fifteen, so, I don't know.”

Softly, Cooper said, “What about your dad? He saw those photos of your mom, right? Marc told me about that.”

“My dad's weird, but he's not suicidal. He takes pills for anxiety, but not depression. I think.”

Cooper and Sunshine exchanged a worried look.

“Can we just drive to my uncle's place?” I asked. “If they're not there, we'll call the police.”

We walked over to Cooper's car, where Sunshine squeezed into the back seat and let me take the front.

I didn't know my uncle's exact address, but I named the cross streets, in New Westminster, which was east of Vancouver.

Cooper did a low whistle. “It's rush hour, that's going to be at least an hour.”

“It'll be fine,” Sunshine said. She rubbed me on the shoulder. “We'll be fine. Just an hour. Don't worry, we'll find them.”

Sunshine read more from the website, out loud. Much of it was rather obvious instructions, but in light of how panicked I'd been, I could understand why the RCMP had a bullet-point list telling people to first try calling the missing person on their cell phone, and to contact their friends.

The school.
I should have called the school to see if Garnet had been there that day.