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Clara
I hated—and I meanhated—working at my mom’s restaurant.
“Clara!” she shouted from the back prep-room in her thick Sicilian accent. “Timer’s going off!”
“I heard it!” I yelled back while handing the customer their change. In a softer tone, I told them, “Your pizza will be out soon.”
Another customer was coming in the front door, but I turned and pressed the button on the oven timer to halt the incessant beeping. Then I grabbed the huge pizza blade and opened the oven. A blast of heat buffeted my face. By the time I scooped the pizza out and dropped it into a cardboard box, new beads of sweat were already forming on my temple and forehead.
I never really wanted to work here. I did it back in high school because it was easier than finding my own job, and because Dad needed the help. Then I went to college and spent four blissful years nowhere near a pizza oven. The only time I came close to a cash register was whenIwas the customer buying something.
But then I came back home after college, more out of guilt than out of any real desire. It was just supposed to be a few months to help Mom get on her feet after Dad’s funeral.
A year had gone by, and I was still here. And the restaurant was still calledTony’s Pizza, even though dad was just a lingering memory.
“Thank you, enjoy the pizza,” I told the first customer while handing him the box. I turned to the new woman and said, “Welcome to Tony’s Pizza, what can I get for you?”
While I was taking her order, the phone rang twice. Mom answered it from the back, where she was prepping pizzas. After I had taken the woman’s order, my mom poked her head around the corner.
“Delivery,” she said. “Pizza will be ready in five.”
I groaned. The only thing I hated more than working in the kitchen was doing deliveries. There were some real creeps out there, the kind that would make a joke about offering me a bigtip, wink wink. There was a reason most pizza deliverers were dudes.
Most restaurants had a digital order system, but mom still insisted on doing everything by hand. Every order was written on a little slip of paper and clipped to a wire above the prep area. I grabbed the delivery slip and scanned the address. The street was legible, but the number was just a few scratches.
“South Henderson…” My heart skipped a beat. “On the corner?”
There was one place where I loved to make deliveries: the fire station. Those guys were amazing. And not just because they were the kind of heroes who rescued people from burning buildings. The guys who worked at the Riverville, California firehouse wereyummy. Hunks in baggy pants and tight white T-shirts. Charming smiles and bulging muscles.
I’d like two servings of that with extra sauce, please.
But my mom shook her head. “Not on the corner. Six twenty-three.” She wiped her forehead with a sleeve. “A few blocks south.”
Damnit, I thought. We usually got an order from the firehouse on Friday night, but it hadn’t come in yet. Maybe they were switching up their food routine.
“Why can’t Dan take the order?” I asked.
“Dan’s still out on the last delivery,” mom replied impatiently.
“Because he stops to smoke on the way back,” I muttered.
She gave me a look.
“Yeah, yeah. I’m going.”
Mom mumbled under her breath in Italian.
I was still sweating from working in the kitchen, but there wasn’t any time to change. I moved two pizzas into a heat-insulated transportation container and carried them out to my car.
Riverville, California was a quaint little town just outside of Fresno. To the west were sprawling suburbs and endless strip malls, and to the east were farmlands all the way to the mountains. Riverville was in that weird middle-ground. Not quite out in the country, but not really suburban, either.
The delivery was only five minutes away. Everything in Riverville was about five minutes from everything else, depending on the traffic lights. The location for this delivery was a house one block off the main road. There were no cars in the driveway, but the lights were on.
I knocked on the door, and a scrawny kid about twelve years old answered. “Delivery from Tony’s,” I said.
“About time,” the snotty little kid said. Behind him in the hallway I saw a gaggle of other pre-teen boys all snickering to themselves. “Don’t we get it for free if it takes you a while?”
