“Uh, Ginny?” Shepherd looked down as the waitress came to squat by his feet. “What, uh, what are you doing?”
“Don’t say my name!” she hissed. “Don’t look at me! And don’t look up! Don’t look anywhere! Just … just stand there, and maybe she’ll leave.”
Shepherd, ignoring her orders, looked up because he wasn’t about to stand around with his eyes closed in his own restaurant. An older woman, exceptionally well dressed for the vacation-casual area, strode over to him, an expensive-looking purse cradled in the corner of her arm and a look of disgust at the myriad of shopping bags hindering her path on her too-tight face.
“Hello,” she said, and looked him up and down. Her ice-blue eyes were startlingly familiar. “Would you be the Shepherd of this, hmm, Shepherd’s Pies?”
“Sure am. How ya doing? Whatcha drinking?”
“Oh, no. I was wondering if you make a habit of talking to yourself?”
Shepherd froze, speechless for the second time in as many minutes.
“Or is that my daughter hiding under your feet?”
Ginny popped up, her hands on her earlobe. “Got that earring! Man, that was a close one. Mom! I didn’t know you were coming!” She darted out from behind the bar and embraced her mother warmly. “You should have called!” They let go of each other, smiling in a way that didn’t reach either of their matching eyes. “Seriously, why didn’t you call?”
“Would you have answered?” The mom’s smile didn’t falter.
Neither did Ginny’s. “Eventually. With a text message. A tasteful GIF.”
“We need to talk, Virginia.”
“I’m working, Mom. As you can see, we’re very busy.”
“Yes. I saw that the Walmart of the Seas was parked outside.”
Ginny patted her mom’s shoulders. “I have to get back to work. I’ll talk to you when the rush dies down, OK? Sit down, have a drink. The Key Lime Coolada is delicious.”
She fled to the furthest table waiting on refills, leaving Shepherd alone with her mother. He smiled winningly and nodded at the bar.
The mother sighed and took a seat, her chin up and her mouth twisted. The bracelets on her wrist lightly clicked against the bar as she looked for an appropriate place to set her purse. It went in her lap. “I suppose I’ll try that colada.”
“That’scool-ada,” Shepherd said, both hands going into a double-guns motion, and immediately regretting it. The mother had not been charmed by being corrected. The tips of his ears went white-hot so fast he worried he was about to get struck by lightning. Her ice-cold stare chilled the back of his neck, as he cleared his throat and made their signature drink.
Shepherd slid her the coolada and flashed his patented charming smile.
Ginny’s mother took a sip of her drink without blinking. “You know that a shepherd’s pie is not a pizza, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” said Shepherd, “I know that.”
“Why did you name your restaurant something so ridiculous?”
“Well, ma’am, it’s a pun,” Shepherd said.
“No,” she said, “it is not a pun. A pun is when you take something that sounds like something else and change it. What you’ve done is just give words a new definition. That is not a pun.”
Shepherd’s mouth twitched in a desperate attempt to keep up a smile. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said. “I have to go bus tables.” All of a sudden, the customers that he feared seemed safe.
A couple sitting at one of the outside tables flagged him down through the lightly tinted windows that bore his restaurant’s name. Shepherd went out to them, the bell on the door ringing as he stepped outside into the humid day. It was warm out, maybe high eighties, a welcome relief from the usual almost one hundred degrees they often saw in July. But the heat was secondary to the humidity, which immediately coated his skin and made his clothes stick to his body. The warm air was blowing in from the west and brought with it the sulfuric, rotten-egg scent of sargassum. When it switched to the east, the choking scent of the diesel used to keep cruise ships running, which the town council assured everyone were definitely not polluting their waters—don’t believe your own eyes, believe us instead—wafted in.
Shepherd’s restaurant was located at the heart of the Laguna Key Harbor, on a cobblestone street made only for walking or bike-pulled buggies. At one end of the street was the dock where cruise ships came and went every day of the week. At the other end was the beach. Gulls squawked overhead, swooping down occasionally to steal bits of food from the chickens that never quite left the outdoor tables alone. The pizzeria was located at the halfway point between the ships and the beach. The building was a pale blue color, the name of it written in white script font across the windows. A chalkboard stood sentinel in front of the door, Ginny’s handwriting announcing the day’s specialty pizza and the bargain price of their signature drink.
Shepherd had barely managed to approach the table when Ginny was on him, grabbing at his arm and pulling him aside.
He asked the couple for one moment and turned. “What?”
Ginny’s slender fingers wrapped around his wrist. They were as cold as her mother’s stare. He had a thought to wrap his hand around them to warm them up, but shook it away. The man at the table that he had brushed off made a “harrumph” sound, and Shepherd grimaced an apology.
