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I’m giggling, even though I’m also blushing the same color as the ketchup bottles I’m restocking. It’s busy work, but that’s fine by me. There’s been a lull for the past hour, which is fairly normal for this time of late afternoon. Things will pick back up around five-thirty when folks start trickling in for dinner.
Here in Kent, dinner is 5:30 PM on the dot. That took some getting used to. But a lot of things in my new life have also taken some getting used to, so I’ve learned to just roll with it.
“Tell me, when was the last time you got your ‘pie’ eaten?” she asks.
“Mabel!” I cry again. Honestly, I think I use her name more often than I use Adam’s. “Seriously.”
“It’s a serious question.”
“Which I’m not answering.”
“I’m your employer,” she says, putting herself in front of me. “You’re legally obligated to answer.”
“Pretty sure I’m not. And in any case, that question qualifies as sexual harassment.”
“Not if I mean well.”
Laughing, I open up the cash register to check on our turnout for the day. The breakfast shift is always busy; the lunch shift tends to be less so, because people usually grab a meal wherever they work. Dinner is the most hectic, mostly because we’re one of two restaurants in town and the Chinese place is usually reserved for when people are feeling “exotic.”
I love Mabel, but she’s not much help when the evening rush hits. She usually just parks herself behind the counter, spouting unsolicited advice and scaring off some of the more reserved customers by talking about threesomes with truckers and skinny dipping in the local river.
I’d told her as much once, and she’d just giggled and told me that if some people couldn’t take a good “your mama” joke, then she didn’t want them eating in her establishment.
“Anyhow, a little saltiness makes the food taste better,” she added with a wink and an elbow to the ribs.
It’s not the only quote of hers that’s stuck in my head. During my job interview, she told me in lurid sexual detail about the night she met her third husband. She’d convinced him to get married four hours into their first date.
“When you know, you know,” she told me.
Our lives are very different, Mabel and me. But I found myself agreeing with that part.
“I’m still waiting on an answer,” she interrupts, nearly closing the cash register on my fingers. “Pie eating or no pie eating?”
“Hey!” I protest, “Mabel, I need to empty the till.”
“I’m your boss, and I say take a break. There’s no one here anyways.” She rolls her eyes. “You know, you are such a square, Sugar Tits. I thought you’d be more interesting, coming from the big city and all. But you haven’t stolen from me once.”
I laugh. “Sorry to disappoint.”
“Is it the boyfriend?” she asks sympathetically. “He doesn’t like eating you out, does he?”
I sigh. We’ve been down this road before; she’s not going to let up until I give her an answer.
“First of all, he’s not my boyfriend. And second of all, we haven’t…gone that far yet.”
“You really ain’t fucked him yet?!”
I cringe at her choice of words. “I haven’t slept with him, no.”
“Why? I’ve seen the boy. He’s cute.”
“It has nothing to do with him. I’m just…”
“In love with someone else?”
I narrow my eyes at her. “No.”
We’ve been down this road before, too.
