Random (Going the Distance)

RANDOM

Lark O'Neal

G
OING THE
D
ISTANCE:
B
OOK
O
NE

Copyright © 2013 Barbara Samuel

Book Production Sharon Schlicht

Image: Golden Glory ©
Hidesy

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

I could never do any of this without Sharon Jensen Schlicht, who is my wing man, my friend, and gorgeous to boot.
Thanks, Cuz.

Chapter ONE

L
ife is random. I know that better than most people, but on the first day of summer I find out again. The hard way.

It’s exactly the kind of morning you want summer to be. Blue skies, fluttering leaves, promise of a great, hot afternoon, which I plan to spend beside the local pool, sleeping in the sun.

This morning I’m waiting tables at Billy’s Restaurant, which is busy because we sit on the main drag out of a major industrial area where they do shift work. I’ve landed the regular Thursday morning table of UPS guys. There’s seven of them and I swing the coffee pot around, topping off cups. “Hey, Jess,” one asks me, “when are you going to marry me?”

“When you have a million dollars, baby,” I say, tossing my hip-length braid over my shoulder. I point at the metal pitcher of cream on the table. “Need more?”

“We’re fine, sweetheart.”

The bell rings over the door and a single guy comes in, tall and lean and young. His hair is so glossy it looks lacquered. Little feet of awareness run down my spine. I head toward the front to seat him, but Virginia beats me to it, winking over her shoulder at me as she settles him in her section. I grin. All’s fair when seating hot guys.

Another group comes in, ringing the bell, and this one is mine. As I head for them, music is playing on the speakers overhead, something tinny and country because that’s all the owners will play. The swell of customer voices is cheerful. It’s only Virginia and me on this morning, since Kary Ann called in sick—at five o’clock in the morning!—but we’re both good at what we do, and it’s going fine. We’re both happy, honestly. I can handle half the restaurant and so can she, and the extra tips will be sweet. My tiny savings were wiped out by a car repair last week, and I’m not going to be comfortable until I get a little more back in there. Not the easiest thing in the world when you’re working for tips, but, as we always say, it’s a lot better than minimum wage.

I grab some laminated menus from the stack on the counter. “Hey, folks, four this morning?”

“Got anything by the window?”

They’re going to regret this choice, but none of us know that right then. “Sure.” I lead them to a booth, wait until they settle—the woman takes a long time to slide in, but I see that she doesn’t move that well and try not to be impatient. I’m sure I have an order ready in back and some more tickets to drop off at tables, and there’s someone waiting at the front to pay.

But I know how to be patient. It’s one of the tricks of getting great tips versus good ones, a combination of patience and urgency. I can move fast, carry a lot of plates, and still stand here, smiling, while an old woman maneuvers her way into a too-tight turquoise booth. I catch Virginia’s eye as she heads up to the cash register to ring up a pair of customers waiting to pay. That’s done.

When the party is settled, I pass out the menus. “Coffee?”

“Please,” says the man.

I whirl through the doors to the back, grab four mugs in one hand and the pot in another, pour the coffee, peek in the cream pitcher and head back to the kitchen. Virginia is already starting a new pot of coffee. I put the empty down and she winks. “Good money morning,” she says.

“Very.”

“We’re a good team.”

Virginia is a single mom with two little girls. She is only twenty-four, but she was married at my age—nineteen—and divorced just a year ago. She keeps telling me to be careful about guys, but I just laugh. I have no intention of getting caught by anybody. Maybe ever.

What I will do instead is still up in the air, but for now this job fits the bill just fine.

“Jess! Order up, for God’s sake.”

That’s the Wicked Witch of the West, a woman so mean and ragged she looks like a dog who’s been left outside in the rain for a year. She’s the main cook, the boss’s wife, and she has a craggy, horrible smoker’s voice that screeches when she yells. Like now.

“Got it, Tina, thanks.” I grab biscuits out of the warmer, call out that we’re down to ten, drop the biscuits in a basket and line up the plates on my arm. Three plates on the left arm, biscuits settled in the crook of the elbow in a balance it took me a long time to figure out, and the final plate in my right hand. “Coming through!” I cry as I push through the right side of the swinging doors with my shoulder.

It’s hard work, this job, the hardest I’ve ever done, but I only work thirty hours a week, all first thing in the morning, and I’m totally a morning person, so I’m done by two o’clock and have the rest of the day to myself.

The one downside is the Wicked Witch, who hates me. And her fat sloppy husband, who sits in the back of the restaurant with his wet lips and stares at our asses. He’s mostly harmless, though he has been known to grab. Right now he’s in the kitchen making cinnamon rolls, and when I go into the back I have to squeeze by him, smelling sweat and something sour, to get to the walk-in.

“Jess!” bawls the bitch. “Come get this fucking order before the eggs turn to ice, for God’s sake.”

I squeeze back by Fatty, trying not to notice the way he pushes back, pressing me into the wall with his butt. Gross.

All part of the game. I moved out of my step-dad’s house when I was seventeen, and this job means I can stay in my tiny house. It’s only a mother-in-law house in a crappy neighborhood, but it’s all mine.

The rush is finally dying down a tiny bit when it happens. I’m busing the table from the UPS guys, cheerfully grabbing five dollar bills from several spots, ones from others and stacking them all together, when I hear a huge, crashing noise from behind me. It doesn’t quite compute—breaking glass and a roar—and I turn around to see a car barreling right through the front door.

You’d think you’d instinctively run when you saw something like that, but I’m frozen, money in my hand, trying to figure out what I’m seeing.

A car in the restaurant?

In slow motion, I see the glass and metal around the front door crack and crumple and shatter. The car keeps going, crushing the cash register counter and sending wood splaying out into the world, then keeps coming, smashing into two empty booths, into tables and chairs. I can see the horrified face of a very old person behind the wheel, and that’s when I realize the freaking car is coming right at me. I unfreeze and dive toward the kitchen yelling, “Car!”

Chapter TWO

I
duck behind the freezer and cover my ears, waiting for the whole building to come down. There’s a lot of crashing, but not as much as you’d think, and nobody is screaming.

Finally there’s a sudden, thick silence. The car must have stopped. I look over the pass-out bar at the cooks, and they’re staring toward the front, mouths open. We all stand there for who knows how long—two seconds? five?—and then there’s a really loud, long crash and somebody screams.

We all rush to the front. I shove open the swinging doors and we peer out.

“Holy shit,” somebody says behind me.

The place is so demolished it’s hard to even tell what’s what. The car has pushed through the front door, taken out the counter by the cash register, a couple of booths along the window and several tables, and come to rest at the far wall with debris all over it.

But the worst thing is that the car took out a support beam or something, because half the roof has fallen down in front, leaving a great big hole. We can see blue sky through it.

I reach in my pocket with shaking hands, grab my phone and dial 911. “A car came through the building at Billy’s Restaurant on Platte and Circle,” I say, and my voice is wavery. “Hurry. I think people might be dead.”

And that’s when it hits me. I run into what used to be the restaurant and see people crawling out from under tables. “Virginia!” I cry, trying to think where I saw her last. Was she by the cash register? “Virginia!”

I hear a muffled cry near where the front door used to be and leap over some debris to get there. Shattered glass of all sizes litters the floor, glittering and shining. A sugar dispenser is on its side, and scattered yellow packets of Splenda are confetti on every surface. A pile of wood and metal hides the spot where the booth and cash register counter were.

Or maybe that
is
the counter. My heart squeezes so hard I’m afraid it will burst.

I kneel down urgently. “Virginia? Are you there?”

“Help!”

“Oh, my God.” I start pulling shattered pieces of wood away, looking to see where she is. Behind me there are other cries, and I think about the people who sat by the window. Are they alive?

But I have to get Virginia out before I do anything else. Frantically, I fling away everything I can, and then there’s a guy standing next to me, putting a hand on my arm. The hot one Virginia intercepted at the door.

“Whoa. Slow down,” he says, and there’s confidence in his tone. His hand falls on my shoulder. “You don’t want to crush her.”

My hands are shaking, along with my entire insides, which have turned to jelly. “Right, right. How do we get her out? Help me!”

He’s a tall guy. Rugged but lean, with glossy brownish-blondish hair that’s too long. He takes a second to look me in eye, straight and clear. The color of his irises is startling enough that I notice even under these crazy circumstances, blue with green mixed in, very bright.

And kind. “Don’t worry,” he says in a deep, warm voice. “We’ll get her out.”

I nod.

He squats, looking at the mess as if he knows what he’s doing. I call out, “Virginia, are you okay?”

“My arm is stuck! I’m freaking out.”

“Hang on,” I tell her. “We’re going to get you out.”

The guy points at a big piece of wall. “Let’s get everything off that, and then we can probably see if anything else is on her.”

Sirens ring out, and a crowd is gathering. I hear somebody crying in another part of the room. Together the guy and I drag off broken pictures and pieces of wood and glass from the piece of wall, and I haul the shattered cash register out of the way. It gives me enough leeway to squat down to peer into the space below.

Right away, I see it’s bad. Virginia’s leg is twisted sideways, and her arm is stuck between the booth and the wall. There’s so much blood on her face that it looks like something from a horror movie. She looks white and scared. “Get me out of here!”

“I’m not sure we can move that by ourselves, V.” I nod toward the booth, then look up at the guy, trying to telegraph with my eyes that it’s bad. He gives me a sober nod. “The experts will be here in a second and they can help us, okay?”

“Don’t leave me!” she cries. “I’m so scared.”

“No,” I reach in to see if I can hold her hand. “I’m right here.”

The guy touches my back. “I might need you for one more thing,” he says. I look up, and he points at the table by the window, the one with the old woman. I can see a skirt. That’s it.

The guy kneels down next to me. “Hey, Virginia, you’re brave, I can see that, but there are a couple others stuck and we need to see what we can do to get them out, too. All right? Your friend will be right back.”

“Okay,” she says. She’s sobbing a little, and her grip is about to break my fingers. I don’t want to leave her, but then somebody screams under the other table. I grab the apron from around my waist and pass it to Virginia. “Put this on your face. I’ll be back in a sec, okay?”

“That old lady was right by the window.”

“I’m going to check her right now.” I stand up, trying to get my bearings. It’s hard. I think of pictures I’ve seen of tornadoes on TV, everything all shredded and out of place.

“Over here,” the guy says, touching my arm. “I think.”

“Right.”

We start the process again, moving small debris to see under the mess left by the wall. Everybody there is okay, though, just banged up a little, with cuts and bruises. It takes three of us to get the old woman out, but aside from some minor cuts and bruises she’s fine, too. They were all protected by a beam and, unlike Virginia, they didn’t take a direct hit from the car.

Around us, customers are standing around dazed. My boss has a massive bloody cut on his bald head, but he’s helping the driver out of the car. He’s old, bent over and thin, and he keeps repeating, “I thought it was the brake. I thought it was the brake.”