Chapter 1
She hated burgers.
Hated the smell of them, the sight of them, the over-puffed buns and leaky meaty grease that dripped out of them, hated the sticky condiment bottles that shuffled from table to table to accompany them, and the ever-present customer complaints of overcooked/undercooked. As if there was some universal color wheel of patty pinks and browns that she should have memorized to the nth degree.
It’s possible she liked burgers as a child, she mused waiting for order-up by the kitchen, but she really couldn’t remember. She didn’t often think of before or beyond this job, except for today. Even rarer for her to think back on her childhood.
Last day, last day, last day. Order up table six, check ready table nine. She pushed past the swinging doors into the dining room, a heavily laden tray in one hand, four burgers and a child-sized spaghetti bowl, and a sticky leather check folder in the other. She wove among the tables, a rictus smile of polite calm on her face, while her feet moved madly below. I’m that Jetsons character with the wheels for feet. Whee!
“Burger well-done for you, burger medium-rare for you, burger just shy of well-done for you, and spaghetti.” She plopped the last dish down in front of the booster seat.
“You sure this is medium-rare? I don’t think medium-rare is this pink.”
“I assure you the cook understood your request for medium-rare, but if you’re dissatisfied with it I can take it back to the kitchen and bring you another. It’ll take about fifteen minutes.” She put on her best blank expression. A fifteen-minute wait deterred some customers, but only if they hadn’t figured out that the delay was designed to frustrate their request.
“Well . . . I guess it’s all right.”
Blow me over with your enthusiasm. “I hope you enjoy your meal.” Choke on it. “I’ll be back shortly with a drink refill.”
Left turn, right turn, and a check for the creep at table nine. Last day, last day.
“Here you are, sir. Cash or credit?” She rested a hand on the credit card machine in her apron pocket, but table nine’s eyes strayed higher to fix on her chest. The uniform supply cupboard was always short of size smalls, and the baggy size large helped hide the constant sweat that came with the exertion of the job; between that and her barely developed figure, she wondered what exactly table nine thought he was ogling.
“Sir? Cash or credit?”
“Cash. I always pay for a meal in cash. If I put it on my card I’ve passed it before I’ve paid for it.” He laughed.
Charming. “I’ll be right back with your change.” She reached for the money, but table nine took that opportunity to wrap his fingers around her wrist and tug her hand closer.
“I’ll leave you a big tip.”
Jane smiled queasily, hearing the buzzing white noise of muted panic inside her head, as she did whenever a situation like this occurred. No matter how many times it occurred. She kept her expression carefully blank.
He released her wrist with a final leer, the grease of his fingertips leaving a burger-scented trail behind on her inner wrist like a swipe of sick perfume. She turned back to the kitchen, forcing her pace to stay the same as usual, surreptitiously rubbing her wrist against her apron’s rough polyester.
It’s my last day.
For six years Jane had religiously refused to contemplate a “last day.” A “last day” would imply a next step, a plan, some other job, and she had none.
The restaurant was neither fancy dining nor greasy spoon but part of a respectable mid-tier chain that peppered the suburbs outside Toronto’s city reach, suitable for family meals, date night, and rowdier things like sports games in the bar. Pay was low but tips were good, and the baggy polo shirt and apron were supplied free of charge. Dental was included, and the constant turnover of mostly teenage waiters meant there was always a ready supply of shifts. It was fine. Really. She could do a lot worse.
I could do a lot better.
But that was a thought to be pushed down. I have nothing but a high school education. I have no real skills. I have no help. This is a good job for someone like me. There’s dental.
Her twenty-first birthday came and went, and her twenty-second, her twenty-third, her twenty-fourth: the mantra of acceptance scraped increasingly thin. The burger smell grew stronger; her feet felt more tired at the end of every shift. I’m young; this is hardly backbreaking labor; suck it up. But young wasn’t permanent. She pictured herself at forty still staring down at those same tabletops, moving the same condiments from place to place, keeping her mind on her hands and her hands on the orders and ignoring the bleakness. That same inner voice that once hardened her to her fate now instead began to berate her, to harden her to the idea that this was not sustainable, and that no rescue would come, no improvement in sight, unless she did it herself.
The answer came from the most unlikely source during closing one night.
Fellow waitress Mandi had just returned home from university after dropping out for the second time. She’d moaned about pressure from professors, pressure from her studies, and now pressure from her parents and their insistence she work unless she returns to school. Any school.
Mandi’s friend “Whatever,” as Jane had mentally named her after hearing her use the word so repeatedly it was like a tic, was proposing a solution to Mandi’s problem.
“Training college. Legal assistant. Legal secretary. Whatever.”
“The hell do I wanna be a receptionist for?” Mandi pouted at her phone, minutely adjusting the tilt of her head for the fluorescent lights to capture the shine of her dexterously applied Sephora highlighter, and snapped a selfie. She examined the result critically while Whatever continued to stack chairs. She had stacked two tables to Jane’s six.
“Legal assistant, it’s like a lawyer’s office person. It’s like a brilliant plan. They’ll back off ’cause you’re in school, and ’sides, they won’t care if you graduate—they’ll, like, think maybe it’ll make you want to be a lawyer or something, whatever,” Whatever said.
Jane paused in her chair-stacking clatter, listening.
“But would I have to, like, study?”
“Tina’s reject brother did it when he got back from rehab or whatever; that’s how I know. Whatever, it’s barely a year and mostly online, which means”—she paused as Mandi looked up, clearly waiting to lay out the ace card on her brilliant plan—“there’s hardly any classes, and whatever, your parents can’t complain when you’re on your laptop! More time to work on your Insta, so when they think you’re working on your career, you totally are, but, like, your actual career as an influencer.”
Huh.
That night Jane googled the community college she’d heard them name and pored over their website. Whatever was onto something. A part-time program, mostly online, requiring nothing more than a GED and an application to get started. The tuition . . . would be a stretch, but it was doable. Completely doable.
Her one experience with a lawyer’s office had been just after her father died. Jenson, Jenson and something. Three men in a family law office in a big building beside a plaza. There had been a middle-aged woman behind the desk who had smiled sadly at her and cooed like she was three instead of thirteen. Was that their legal assistant?
An hour down a Google wormhole and two episodes of the drama Suits later, and things felt a little clearer—except for the part where their NYC office was so obviously filmed in Toronto—but the rest of it sounded promising.
Legal assistant. A clean, quiet office. A specific skill set. Better pay. Burger-free.
Yes, this was a future. This was achievable.
The thought followed her around for six months. The condiments changed blindly under her hands, orders in, orders up, crappy tips and good tips, and a new kid’s menu special fetchingly called Zucchini Spirelli that parents approved of and kids invariably left in a fat wet spiralized clump under the table.
Jane didn’t blame them.
Six months to build up the bravery, alternatively chiding herself for being unsure and ridiculing her fear around what was really such a small step—wasn’t it? It wasn’t. It was an awful, sickening wrench to hand over the money, the largest purchase Jane had ever made, and another nausea-inducing case of nerves for the first day on campus for registration and orientation in a packed classroom.
It felt a bit like a joke. A cliché. A former foster kid and waitress looking for a better life.
If someone’s reject brother can do it, so can I. Whatever.
And so she did.
That conversation between Mandi and Whatever had been nearly two years ago now. A year of school had since passed, neither slowly nor quickly, but with a steady stream of class assignments and burgers marking the days. And there’d been a steady drip of short-lived forgettable waitstaff at the restaurant. Mandi and Whatever were replaced by a cutesy blonde named Kirstie before being replaced by a surly Stanley, who stole everyone else’s tips and was fired, and then eventually an acne-seared teenager named Rob who dropped everything he touched.
Jane didn’t know it was possible to shatter industrial-sized plastic ketchup containers quite like that.
Graduation day for Jane had been two months ago. She skipped it in favor of working a double shift, but her diploma had come in the mail just the same. It was sitting on her kitchen table at home, a morning touchstone, a surety that soon she wouldn’t need to deal with any more Mandis and table nines.
And now today was her last day.
“I need change for table nine. Rob! Can you take this back to the customer at table nine?” Jane swapped the two twenties for a five and loose change and flagged down the fumble-fingered teenager.
“Whuh? Why?”
“Creepy customer. Can you just drop this off for me?” She held the change-filled check folder out to him and tried to look matter-of-fact about it, certainly not like someone seeking a hero. She was not pleading with a seventeen-year-old to save her. Nope.
“Oh, uh, sure, I guess.” He took the proffered folder and turned back to the seating area. His apron caught on the corner of the counter as he pivoted, the fabric tensing at the same time the folder slid through his fingers to the floor, coins pinging and rolling everywhere. With an almighty riiiip, his apron pocket split down the side, dropping its contents—three pens, a loose stick of gum, and five still-wrapped Band-Aids—onto the floor with the change.
“Shit.”
He bent down, grossly misjudged the relative distance and spatial permanence of the objects around him, smacked his head on the marble countertop, and crumpled at Jane’s feet.
Jane sighed.
“Marianne! We need a paramedic for Rob . . . again.”
Last day.
Chapter 2
Marianne, Jane’s manager, was grossly disappointed with the caliber of paramedic sent, as per usual.
“I mean, he looks like someone’s dad, for eff’s sake. Why do we never get the young, hot ones? I’ve seen them at the hospital. I know they’re there! Oh, gross, that’s blood . . .”
“Marianne, it’s not like they’re deliberately hiding hot paramedics from you . . .”
“Aren’t they? Just because that one time when I maybe faked choking . . .”
“Oh, you’re the choking girl.” The friendly middle-aged man looked up from where he had affixed the last of the butterfly bandages to a dazed Rob. “Yeah, you’re on a list, sweetheart.”
“Hey, I don’t judge your life. Next time they send help, I want visible back muscles, understood?”
“All right, son, you know the drill. Follow my finger . . .”
Rob’s head wound dealt with, table nine handled, her polo shirt and apron hung up for good and locker cleaned out, Jane walked out the door for the last time with a trepidatious sense of freedom that felt as tantalizingly dangerous as it was fresh and new.
It was already dusk as she left the plaza. Daylight hours were shortening—Canadian winter soon on its way. But tonight, tonight the air was warm and still, a stubborn September holding on to its dregs, and with an uncharacteristic feeling of leisure, Jane passed her usual bus stop in favor of walking home.
Home was a one-bedroom apartment at the top of a three-story walk-up that Jane had moved into at eighteen with the help of the social worker who closed her file. The building was old and peeling, but the landlord was a Polish woman with a stare that made hardened criminals confess, and she vetted potential tenants like she was deciding whom to admit to an Ivy League, so Jane’s neighbors were all quiet, keep-to-themselves types, which suited her fine. They always emptied the lint trap after using the coin-operated washing and drying machines in the basement and never had loud parties.
The neighborhood was called Port Credit, the borders loosely defined. It was part of a series of neighborhoods, once small villages in their own right, that dotted the perimeter of Lake Ontario. They had been swallowed up by the sprawling suburbia bleeding outward from Toronto decades earlier, and now were just names on a commuter train line heading west from the city. Twenty minutes down the road would take you to the more affluent neighborhood of Oakville, the teenagers of which referred to Jane’s neighborhood as “Pot for Credit.”
But “Pot for Credit” would soon be no more. A development boom was transforming the slightly shabby streets into a series of impressively faced town houses, yoga studios, even a nightclub where a boozer-infested bar once stood. Rents were starting to skyrocket, and Jane was grateful that Mrs. Zielinski had yet to sell up or raise her prices. Jane liked Port Credit; it had an easy-access transit terminal, a walkable grocery store, and though the newly refurbished harbor and pier only looked out on the lake and not an ocean—a lake that smelled like hot swamp in the summer and was too polluted to swim in—she liked it just the same. It was easy to pretend it was an ocean with the two-story red-and-white lighthouse standing nearby, though it only served to light the way to the Starbucks next door. Besides, it was her first permanent home since age thirteen. She was attached to it.
Pushing through her door with a happy sigh, Jane toed off her sneakers and dropped both bag and jacket on the floor in the hallway before heading toward the kitchen. Then immediately doubled back to pick them up and put them away. This wasn’t summer vacation. No need to get delirious just because she’d permanently seen the back of Marianne, Rob, and the assorted burger gang. Hopefully.
She drifted back into the kitchen, cramped but meticulously tidy just like the rest of her place, and touched her fingertips lightly to the diploma that sat on the table in pride of place. Still real. Next went her phone beside it, placed exactly so like cutlery on a place setting. She queued up her voice mail and flipped it to speakerphone.
“Hello, Ms. Raine, this is April Kindree from the MD Associates legal staffing agency. It was a pleasure to meet you last week.”
Copyright © 2023 by Melodie Edwards. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
