The Music of What Happens(11)

A Dodge Durango pulls up and Max hops out of the driver’s side. He runs his hands through his wavy black hair, and as he walks over to where I’m sitting, he gives that toothy Guy Smiley smile, raising his killer dimples. Some people are just blessed with good everything, and Max is definitely one of them. He’s wearing a simple blank T-shirt and hideous tan cargo shorts that I would never in a million years be caught dead in, and yet somehow it just works on him.

“What up?” he says.

I stay seated. “What up,” I say back.

He stuffs his hands into his shorts pockets. “So how does this work?”

I laugh. It just … works. There’s a big fridge in the garage with supplies. We’ll load the truck with them. We’ll drive the truck to Ahwatukee, to the Sunday morning farmers’ market. We’ll ask someone where to park. We’ll put up the whiteboard menu, we’ll turn on the truck’s power, and we’ll take money and sell food.

“Okay, good talk,” Max says. This is about my least favorite dude bro saying. Someday I’m going to mace a dude bro when he says that to me. For effect.

“Are you going to tell me anything?” he asks.

I have no idea what to tell, to be honest. Yesterday was our first day ever. I got nothing.

“Blind leading the blind,” I say, and because I haven’t stood up, he sits down next to me in the dirt.

“That’s rough, dude.”

I shrug. “Yup.” I want to send him away. He seems reasonably harmless for a dude bro, but I want to send him back to whatever dude bro farm he was raised on.

“So …” he says, waiting for me to do something, I guess. I truly don’t know what to do.

I trace a circle in the dirt with a tiny piece of stick. “You should probably go and find something better to do,” I say. “Which would be almost anything. I mean. My mom pretty much cornered you, and it’s not like two guys with no experience are going to exactly kill it. Have you ever even been on a food truck?”

He shakes his head.

“It’s really hot, first of all. The AC doesn’t work so we just have the ceiling vent, and the grill is on. It’s nasty hot.”

“I like heat.”

I give him a dubious look, because we both know I don’t just mean hot. I mean Phoenix summer hot. Yesterday it only got up to 104, and by the time I got home I’d lost five pounds of water weight. What’s 115 going to feel like?

“No, really,” he says. “I thrive on it.”

“I’ve never cooked anything that’s on the menu.”

“I cook,” he says. “And I like challenges.”

I laugh and shake my head. “There’s challenges and then there’s … this. Have you ever cleaned out a fryer? Because I did yesterday for the first time, and it sucks ass. I still smell like grease.”

“Do you want this to work?” Max asks.

“What? Yeah.”

“Then stop trying to talk me out of it. I want this job. I want to make this happen. I like challenges. Okay?”

“You’re crazy.”

He scratches his neck. “Good pep talk, boss.”

I roll my eyes and stand up, and he stands up too. “Jesus. Am I the boss?”

“You have the most experience.”

I say, “By a day,” and then I walk over to the truck, which is sitting in the driveway in front of our garage. “You know how to drive a truck? Because I don’t. I don’t even have a driver’s license, and I am not getting behind the wheel of this thing. Nonnegotiable.”

“Dude,” Max says, shaking his head. “Dude.”



Once we get everything loaded and secured — the counters have little lips so that the plastic trays holding raw chicken breasts don’t fly across the rickety truck every time it takes a left turn — Max slams the passenger-side door closed, plops down in the driver’s seat for the first time, and turns on the ignition. The truck buzzes to noisy life and it feels stuffy almost right away; no airflow, no AC. I remember it from yesterday, when Mom cursed the whole way to Gilbert. I sit near the front on a cooler that we’ve filled with bottled waters and canned sodas that we didn’t sell yesterday.

“Dude. There’s no speedometer,” Max says. It’s a truck my dad bought used about the time I was born, when he switched over from construction work to Coq Au Vinny, and at the time it was old. Now it’s a relic from another era entirely, with dark wood paneling throughout. You could have a groovy ’70s party in this thing for sure.

Max puts the thing in reverse and we slowly creep back out of the driveway. I can’t see behind us, and Max is stretching his neck to the side like he’s not seeing much behind him either. He stops the truck.

“Dude. The side window is all clouded up and I can’t see the side-view mirror.”

“How about the one on your side?”

He laughs. “What one on my side?”

I crane my neck. “Oh,” I say. There is a mirror holder thingy, but no mirror in it. “Sorry.”

“This thing is a death trap,” he says, and he steps over to the passenger door and slides it open. The warm breeze comes in and actually it feels better than it did a second ago. “Now I can see,” he says, and I think, Sure, okay. We’ll drive with the door open. What could possibly go wrong?