AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She likes him. She used to sit with him while he ate his fries and waited for me to get off shift. They talked about movies and music.
“Go out back. Take out the trash or something. Pull yourself together. Take a break. I’ve got this.” She pushes me gently.
I walk quickly past Deb and Lonnie all the way to the back door and out into the parking lot behind the restaurant.
It isn’t until I hear a soft voice say “Sit down, girl, take a load off” that I realize José is perched on an overturned pickle bucket, smoking a cigarette, listening to me hiccup as I try not to sob. It doesn’t work. My eyes fill and my chest heaves. He stands, gesturing to the bucket.
I sit down. I hold myself as tightly as possible, as though I can stuff my sobs inside, but it doesn’t work.
Dylan was theone thingthat made me feel better after Laurel died. He was theone thingthat came along and made me feel wanted and important, like she had. I told him things I’d never told anyone else. And he listened, like the things I said were important. Until they weren’t.
“You want a cigarette?” José asks.
I shake my head.
“You want a drink?”
I sniffle, looking up at him.
My brain says:Challenge him first, to be careful.
My heart says:Just take it.
“What? I’m akid.”
“Kids drink. Don’t if you don’t want to.” He shrugs. “Under the pickle bucket. Maybe a little to calm you down. You might be a kid, but it seems like you’re having a grown-up kind of feeling right now.”
I stand up, lift the bucket. A pint of Smirnoff is sitting there.
“Sometimes you just need something to get to the next thing, you know what I mean? You just need to keep going and hope thenextnext is better,” José says.
I hesitate at first, because, well, I have to go back in and work, and what if Patty notices? And also, what if José turns out to be one of those closet creeps and tries to touch me or something?
José chuckles, like he knows what I’m thinking. “Suit yourself,” he murmurs.
I can have this. I know I can maintain if I have this. Just a littlethis.
I lift the bottle, unscrew the cap, and take two swallows before José shakes his head. “Not too much.”
I take one last giant gulp, replace the cap, put the bottle back under the pickle bucket. The vodka burned my throat but replaced what was hurting inside me with a numbing warmth.
And kind of took my headache away. Hair of the dog, just like my dad says.
José holds out his palm. “Mint,” he says.
I pop it in my mouth.
“ ‘As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off,’ ” José says, looking at the sky.
“What?”I’m patting my face with my apron, hoping my eyeliner didn’t smear too much.
“It’s from a poem we’re reading in my class at Pima,” José says. “She’s talking to her boyfriend, who leaves her and goes back to his wife. Those are the last lines. I think about them all the time.”
He takes a drag from his cigarette.
“I’m not sure what the words mean, exactly,” he says, staring at the stars just beginning to pop in the sky. “But I find them kind of comforting, you know? Sad things can be really comforting in a weird way.”
I nod, because I’m not sure what to say.
