The Big Kahuna (Fox and O'Hare #6)(64)

A year later, when you finally travel to Casablanca with your family, you do not recognize your grandmother, nor does she recognize you. How is it possible to miss someone you don’t remember? And yet you do. For the duration of your visit, you sit side by side with her, in companionable silence. When you do venture out, tourist guides ask you in English if you’d like a tour of the medina and, if you ignore them, they try again, this time in German. Bazaar clerks call you Miss, offer you mint tea, and charge you four times the price for every trinket. Boys standing at street corners whistle when you pass, then openly touch their groins.

After college, you go to dentistry school at Loma Linda. There, you meet a clear-eyed man who is never late, never sick, never rude. When he speaks Arabic, it is as if music is streaming from his mouth. Words like zaytun and sukkar and habibet el-omr sound like they’re accompanied by a thirteen-string lute. You marry him, open a practice together, make your parents proud. “Why can’t you be more like Salma?” your mother tells your sister, and each time she says this, you feel a special thrill.

Day after day, you stare at open mouths, smell rancid breath, scrape rot from cavities. Increasingly you have to spend your afternoons arguing with insurance companies about billing and payments. The whole thing gives you a headache. You take a Vicodin. You are no longer a trained seal. Now you are a bird. You float away, free. When your husband complains that the painkiller samples are disappearing fast, you say it’s not your fault you had three root canals in one week. You haven’t begun to order extra boxes of diazepam and he isn’t suspicious yet.

But someday he will be, and you will have to meet his eyes across the dinner table, answer his questions, and agree to let him take over your surgeries. He will ask that you see a substance abuse specialist, but you will say you’re fine. At least talk to someone, he will beg. Talk to your mother. The thought of your mother finding out about your habit is excruciating. Her approval is a prison you do not wish to escape. I’ll see a specialist, you say, and never make the appointment. After he goes to bed, you sit on a lounge chair on the deck, and watch the view that the realtor said was unparalleled anywhere in the valley. You take another pill.

This is where the plane took you.





Nora




I can see now that there was an element of stubbornness in what I did next. But at the time, I felt I had no choice but to help manage the restaurant, because my mother abruptly stopped showing up to work. This might have been her way of forcing my hand on the sale, though it had the reverse effect: I stepped in for her. And it surprised me, too, how quickly all the little habits I had learned years ago came back. I wore closed-toe shoes, even in the heat, a comfortable pair of washable pants, and a polo shirt with the diner’s name embroidered across the breast pocket. I folded silverware into napkins, refilled salt-and-pepper shakers, took over Veronica’s tables whenever she went on her cigarette break, made sure the wait station had plates and cups and bowls, talked to customers, and tried to be cheerful about it. How are you this fine morning? Would you like some ketchup or mustard? Careful, that plate is very hot. What a beautiful baby.

After a few days working at the restaurant, I found that I could take care of all my duties and still have time to run to the store for supplies or to the bank for quarters and nickels. Still, I had forgotten how physically taxing food service was, how much my feet could swell or my arms ache from a single day’s labor. How did Veronica do it? Or Rafi? By the end of my shift, when my only thought was of how long it would take me to get to the cabin and collapse on one of the porch chairs with a beer, they still looked as fresh as they had when they started their day.

But the best at this line of work was Marty. I could never keep up with him. He had his own set of habits, too, like carrying extra straws in his apron pocket so he wouldn’t have to walk back to the wait station every time a customer asked for one. Without needing to be told, he changed the channel on the stereo when the music got too loud for an elderly couple, or lowered the shade when the afternoon sun streaming through the windows made a toddler squint. He knew several of our customers by name and talked to them like old friends. He would close the restaurant every night, and when I opened it in the morning, I would find that he had given me a head start by restocking the jam caddies or refilling the sugar dispensers.

Late one morning, while I was at the wait station with the paper napkins I had just bought on my run to Costco, Marty left the cash register and came to talk to me. “Miss Guerraoui,” he said, taking off his glasses and letting them dangle from their retainer, “are you taking over from your mother?”

“I’m just trying to help out.”

“I see.”

“If I missed something, let me know.”

“As a matter of fact, there is something.”

“What is it?”

“Your father promised me a raise last year, but we had to replace the freezer and he told me it had to wait. Then a couple of months ago, he ordered that fancy new sign you see outside, so I brought up the raise again and he said he’d do it. But then he passed away and now, who knows what’s happening?” He swept his hand in a gesture that took in the entire restaurant. “I’m not even sure who’s in charge around here.”

I swallowed. “I’m in charge.”

“So you’re gonna give me that raise your father promised? Twenty-one dollars an hour, that’s what we agreed on. Twenty-one.”