Elijah slowly leaned closer to me and under his breath said, “You’ve never felt the urgency of needing someone immediately?” He didn’t touch me with the question, but heat seemed to radiate from his body to mine and goose bumps formed down my bare arms.
“Never,” I assured him, which was the truth. “No feeling is urgent enough to risk a staph infection. Or getting put on the no-fly list.” I took a bite of my omelet, mainly to avoid his stare.
My mouth immediately heated up, and Michael started laughing. I grabbed my water and downed half of it. “You don’t mess with people’s food,” I said. “Not cool.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
Elijah chuckled beside me, and I knew then that I’d failed today. I’d revealed too much.
CHAPTER 8
I quit.
That was the text I woke up to a couple of days later. It was from my very best server, Presley, and it had me springing out of bed faster than anything had in a while.
Can we talk?I texted her back.
My phone immediately vibrated with a call. Since I’d literally just woken up, my voice was sleep-deep and rough when I answered, “Hello.”
“I can’t anymore,” Presley said. “It’s too unorganized. Not enough servers at night and last-minute changes to the schedule. Raya lets anyone switch whenever they want and then people forget what they switched to because nobody writes it down.”
“If I fix it, will you stay?” I asked.
She sighed. “I don’t know, Sutton, it’s a lot. I’m feeling overwhelmed.”
“Would you like to be in charge of the schedule? For atwo-dollar-an-hour raise?” I shouldn’t have offered the raise without talking to Raya first, but desperate times and all that.
“Truthfully, no. I have school. That’s why I’m up so early today, and I don’t have time for that. But I will stay for two weeks, and if the schedule gets sorted in those two weeks, I’ll stay longer.”
“Okay, I’ll fix it. I’ll make sure everyone knows they can only change through the online app,” I said. “It has to be officially recorded.”
“Thank you,” she responded. “I personally think you need to hire at least one more server, probably two.”
“Done,” I said. Then I spent the day online reading through résumés and putting phone interviews on the calendar. I could whittle it down to a few good candidates and then have Raya conduct some in-person interviews to get a better feel for their personalities. I’d fix this.
“Mom, you have to hold on to my neck or I can’t transfer you.” We’d done this every time I had to move her from wherever she was to the wheelchair. And then from the wheelchair to the toilet or bath or bed. And every time, she didn’t want to hold on to me. I was sure it was her pride. She didn’t truly want my help at all. She wanted to do this all on her own. Like she’d been doing all her life until now, she liked to remind me. But she literally couldn’t walk, and one of her arms was immobilized and she was still battling dizzy spells. She couldn’t do this on her own, but that didn’t stop her from pretending.
“That nurse you hired last week was better at this,” Mom said.
“I’m sure she was.”
“She knew what she was doing.”
I placed her hand around my neck. “Just hold on, okay?”
This time she held on and I was able to shift her to sitting. She cried out in pain.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know it must hurt.”
“You don’t know,” she said. “You’ve never been in this situation.”
“Are you ready?” I asked, because fighting with my mom was pointless most of the time. Without waiting for her answer, I helped her move her good foot into position to support some of her weight as I used all my strength, plus a lot of leverage, to maneuver her into the wheelchair. I was going to be toned after my stint here.
“See, I’m not helpless,” she said.
“You’re not,” I responded. I was trying to be understanding. I would hate it if someone had to take me to the toilet too. “We have a physical therapy appointment tomorrow.” I wheeled her down the narrow hall, trying to avoid bumping into the walls.
“Physical therapy? On what?”
