I nod, carefully finishing my bite to take another. The truth is my hands started shaking again, so I had to hide them under the table. It also helps me slow down, calming my impulse to eat everything in front of me as fast as possible. If it was just the four days without food, I might have been fine, but the few hours of stocking the back and doing inventory made me feel weak. Plus, due to my ass of a landlord, I had to run to the next bus stop over this morning to make it here on time. A perfect storm, as always, where the waves assault me from every angle at once, and I can do nothing but ride them out.
Maybe my luck really is just this bad. Or maybe it’s karma from some other life because I sure can’t figure out what I did in this one to justify where I am right now.
Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.
“So, Theo, here’s the thing,” Quinn says.
I swallow hard, ready to be out on my ass looking for another job. I can’t take another hard hit right now, but apparently, it is coming anyway.
“You are my best worker, but during the off season in a few months, the tips are not going to be great. The hours and the hourly rate I pay you won’t change, but the tips can be a big difference. We can talk about a salary, but that didn’t go over well the last time I suggested it to the crew. They wanted to keep tips for bartenders.”
I nod. Quinn pays the highest hourly wage I have ever had in food service, but I still see what he is saying. Tips give me enough to keep Deny off my back with nothing more than bruised ribs. Quinn has suggested a few things to pay everyone more, but cash in hand is hard to beat for the college students. Especially on top of the other benefits Quinn offers.
Quinn continues. “For these college kids, they come and go. They know it’s seasonal, and they don’t really care or think about the next season. I would like for you to stay, but I don’t feel like it’s right to ask you to gut it out for the upswings. Whatever I can do to get you through the slow season until it picks up again.
“Between Mann Properties and The Mann Foundation, there is plenty of work besides food service, if you are interested. Nothing like landscaping or construction, and it might be kind of an odd-job, day-to-day sort of gig, but I can pay you the same hourly rate, if that’s enough. I don’t mean more hours. I mean reasonable hours and more pay.”
“I would like to stay on, if that’s possible. Odd jobs are fine with me. I’ve picked up a few here and there.”
Quinn smiles. “There is a chance the Bear Valley Inn or even Summit House will need something, but I don’t want to guarantee that, and it would be the end of the summer. I’m looking to train up a manager, but I need to figure out what that would look like first before it’s even a possibility. Honestly, you are the first person I have had here who I thought could handle it. If you would be more interested in management than Summit House.”
Summit House. The world-class restaurant being built at the top of the ski mountain. Quinn’s brother Matt’s marquee restaurant. At the thought of working at some place like that again, my chest burns. I’ve seen enough of the design—and had enough of Matt’s food—to know it will be successful. Matt is a Culinary-Institute-trained chef who once worked in a Michelin-star rated restaurant.Multiplestars.
So did I, but no one can know. The Catch-22 of my life. The one place I want to be, my most marketable skill, is off limits.
“I’m good with whatever. I’m not picky,” I tell Quinn instead of the other things in my mind.
“I know it may not be ideal.” He seems to think he’s insulting me or something. “But I can guarantee you certain hours a week. It should smooth out the bumps you might miss in tips, without working yourself to death to make up the difference. Please hear me out. I’m not suggesting you need to work endlessly just to get to the ski season.”
“I understand. Sounds good to me.” However it goes, I’m working myself to death for the foreseeable future. Even making a bar manager salary, I’ll still be nothing more than the cigar-store statue—money passing through my hands but not mine to keep.
“I may be out of town some.” Quinn’s voice holds enough wistfulness to catch my attention. “So I appreciate all you are doing, Theo. I need someone I can count on. I’ll work with Matt and Jack to see what a management position needs to look like.”
I wonder about Sydney, the more obvious choice for the role of a manager, but I don’t say anything.
“Can we meet on Monday then? I’ll show you this project that needs your help, and you can still work the weekend here at Black Diamond. If the snow hits like predicted, it’s going to be packed in here.”
“Okay.” Between the food rushing into my system and the relief I haven’t been let go, the one-word answer is all I can manage.
Maybe things are looking up.
I don’t even let the thought pass through my brain before stamping it down.
If things are, it’s only temporary. I can be happy to eat for the next few days because I am back on the schedule, but I can’t afford—literally or figuratively—to look beyond that.
Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.
“Here it is.” On Monday morning, Quinn opens the double doors in the basement of a condo called Larkspur. It is early and cold out, but the basement air is almost too warm. Quinn designed this building, including the large storage closet down in the basement by the electrical room. Apparently, that’s the destination for our morning sojourn.
“What is this, exactly?”
“This is the Bear Valley File 13.” Quinn flips on the light.
I stare at the boxes upon boxes of items in this cavernous storage room. They stack high and deep on metal shelves creating rows down the open space. The work space at the front is bigger than my last apartment’s living room. The storage space itself gets darker the farther back it goes, so I don’t try to guess how deep it is.
“Okaaaayyy.” I run my hand over some of the unshelved boxes just sitting one on top of another in the open work area.
“If someone loses a glove, or a pair of goggles, or whatever on the slopes, those items generally go to the ski patrol. If it’s not picked up by the end of the season, they box it up and bring it here.” He taps a hard plastic storage container with an inventory list taped to the top, slid into the metal shelving. “But people also leave things at the Inn, or at Black Diamond, or in one of the condos Mann Properties owns and rents out. . .” He gestures to the boxes, markedly less neat than the ones from the Ski Patrol.
