Page 38 of Her Favorite Fumble
“Lucy, right? Iris Macauley’s daughter?” When Lucy reluctantly nodded, the woman snorted. “You really break up that actress and football player?”
“No. The football player did that. I just had coffee with a guy I met in a coffee shop.” She was really tired of saying that.
“Cool.” The woman got up and set the tray of silverware on the end of the bar. “I’m Mattie. And since you’ll have to write it on slips now and again, it’s spelled with a doublet, not a doubled, because it’s not short for Madeline.”
“People must get that wrong a lot. Whatisit short for?”
Mattie sighed so hard, her shoulders actually rolled. “We’ll do this once and then I don’t want to hear about it again.”
“Okay.” That sounded ominous.
“My mother named me Clematis, after the vine because it’s her favorite. As soon as I started school, the kids started shortening it to Clem and that didn’t work for me, so I had to come up with something on my own really quick. I’ve been Mattie ever since, but if a woman comes in and asks for Clematis, it’s either my mother or my aunt, so keep a straight face and point her in my direction.”
“Got it.”
“Good. I take care of the tables and you take care of the bar. When I give the slip to the kitchen, I’ll tell you what booze I need. If you can’t remember the drinks, write them down because I won’t. Tips are pooled and split at the end of shift because sometimes I’ll get more families and you’ll get more drinkers, and that’s how we make it fair. And then it doesn’t matter if we have to cover for each other for a few minutes or if you have to run food from the pass for me. Clean aprons are under the bar, and dirty ones go in the laundry bag hanging in the break room.”
“Sounds good.”
Mattie started walking, but then she stopped and turned back so quickly, Lucy almost ran into her. “Oh, one more thing. Sasha, the cook, is my wife. She’s also Billy’s daughter.”
“Oh. That’s good to know.”
“Yeah. One big happy family, but we’re loud and all three of us can be short-tempered. Sometimes there’s yelling—usually when we’re putting up with flatlanders overrunning the place—but don’t take it personally and feel free to yell back. Don’t take any crap, even from me.”
It was one of the more interesting job orientations Lucy had been through. And also the shortest, because Mattie just waved her hand toward the bar and then went out back.
With no instructions on how she could help with the opening process, Lucy pulled an apron from the stack behind the bar. It was short and red, with two pockets and a white Uneven Keel logo, so she was glad she’d worn a black shirt with her jeans instead of the red one that was a very different shade. T-shirts weren’t really part of her wardrobe—she preferred tank tops with light cardigans or blouses over them—so she was wearing a long-sleeved black jersey top that was as close as she owned. White sneakers completed the uniform.
After tying the apron around her waist, she plucked an order pad and two pens from the basket next to the aprons. She slipped them into one of the pockets and got to work familiarizing herself with the area behind the bar. Glasses, ice. How the liquor was arranged on the shelves behind her. Memorizing the different beers on tap. Then she skimmed over the menu, paying special attention to the small section of familiar cocktails with nautical pun names.
The Gone Overboard made her smile. It was probably a better name for the cocktail with five different kinds of alcohol than Long Island iced tea, which is what it was usually called.
Satisfied there were no drinks on the specials list she didn’t already know by a more generic name, she looked at the clock. Five more minutes.
She poked her head through the door to the kitchen, where Mattie was helping Sasha prep for the day. “Is there something I should be doing? Can I help?”
“Hi, Lucy,” Sasha said. “I’m Sasha, by the way. Good to meet you.”
“You, too.”
“I don’t think there’s much left to be done,” she continued. “But do me a favor and make sure Dad does paperwork with you before the end of your shift. He’s not great at remembering things like legally required documents.”
“Gotcha.”
Billy Loring emerged from a door at the far end of the kitchen at eleven twenty-nine and, after doing a visual sweep of his restaurant, unlocked the door.
There were no customers waiting to get in.
But as the clock ticked toward noon, customers began trickling in. Several guys sat at the bar, wanting burgers and beer for lunch. A family sat at a corner table, and, much to Lucy’s dismay, the judgmental woman and her friends were back.
Because Mattie handled the tables, Lucy did her best to ignore them, but Billy kept forgetting he was supposed to be letting her take a trial run at the bar, so she didn’t have much to keep her mind off the whispers. And those women weren’t the only ones.
There was a lot of whispering and a lot of sideways glances in Lucy’s direction over the course of the afternoon. She couldn’t tell if they were stemming from the Las Vegas disaster or because she was Iris Macauley’s daughter, but she kept her chin up and did her best to pretend it wasn’t happening.
There was a time midafternoon when there were no customers, and Mattie disappeared out back. Lucy was trying to figure out a way to remind Billy about the paperwork without sounding sure she was coming back. It was supposed to be a trial shift, as far as she knew.
“You coming back tomorrow?” he asked before she could broach the subject.
