She Set the Tray Down and Walked to the Sink

Imogen had her hands on the edge of the sink and was looking down at the drain, breathing through her mouth, when Mrs. Aldcott came in.

She was seventeen. She’d come back into the kitchen to put cold water on her face and get herself level again, and instead she’d ended up gripping the counter with mascara running down both cheeks while the party kept on through the doorway behind her, the lights strung along the beams, the chandelier, women in sequined dresses, the low steady noise of people who aren’t worried about anything.

“I can’t do this,” she said. She didn’t mean to say it where anyone could hear. It came out at the sink, to the drain, and then Mrs. Aldcott was standing in the doorway with a champagne glass in her hand, and her husband a step behind her, and all three of them were looking at the girl.

Why She Was There

The house belonged to the Aldcotts, who had money from something to do with buildings and other people’s money, and who put on a charity gala every December that the society pages called the event of the season. Diane Aldcott ran the actual machinery of it, the staff and the flowers and the catering, all the work that goes into making money look like it costs no effort.

The catering company was small and family-run and short two servers that night because of the flu going around, which is how Imogen came to be working a job she was three months too young to legally hold, covering a shift for her mother. Beatriz Reyes had built the company out of one van over fifteen years into something that could staff a party for two hundred, and she’d done it alone with a kid at home, working the nights and the weekends, gone for more of Imogen’s childhood than either of them liked to add up. Two servers down and the season’s biggest contract riding on the night, Beatriz had been near frantic, and Imogen had offered. I’ll carry trays, Mom. How hard can it be.

That was four in the afternoon. By ten she knew how hard, though not for the reason she’d figured.

On Her Break

It wasn’t the work that broke her. Carrying trays was tiring and dull and entirely survivable.

What broke her was a call she took on her break, out in the cold by the vans with her coat pulled over the server’s vest. Her mother had phoned from the commercial kitchen across town, prepping for the next day’s job, and somewhere in it she let go of something she’d been sitting on for weeks. The business was in trouble. The kind where this account, the Aldcott account, was the thing keeping the lights on, and where if it didn’t turn into the renewal they were counting on in January, that was the company. Fifteen years, gone.

Imogen stood there with the phone against her ear and finally understood the way her mother had been looking lately. The tiredness past tiredness. The doing sums on everything, on groceries, on gas in the van. The reason she’d been desperate enough to put her own underage daughter in a vest tonight wasn’t carelessness. She couldn’t afford to lose the client and she couldn’t afford to staff it any other way.

She carried that back inside and tried to keep smiling and tried to keep the trays moving, and somewhere around the thirtieth trip across that room she looked at the sequins and the chandelier and the easy laughing and thought about her mother alone in a kitchen at ten at night, scared, and it was more than she could hold. She set the tray down on a sideboard and walked into the kitchen and put her hands on the sink.

Mrs. Aldcott

Diane Aldcott had come in to check on the dessert timing and found a teenager crying instead.

The first thing across her face was not kindness. Imogen saw it. A flick of irritation — why is the help crying at my party — the look of a woman with a hundred things in motion and no slot in the evening for this one. Her husband came in behind her and put a hand on Imogen’s shoulder, gentler than his wife’s face. “Hey. You hurt? You okay?”

And Imogen, mortified, cornered, three months too young to even be standing there, did the thing you do once you’ve already cracked and there’s nothing left worth guarding. She told them.

“I’m sorry. I’m not even supposed to be here, I’m seventeen, I’m covering for my mom because two people are sick. She runs the catering. And she just told me on the phone she’s going to lose the whole thing if tonight doesn’t go right, because you’re her biggest account, and I’m in here crying instead of working and I’m going to wreck it for her—” The words gave out. “I’m sorry.”

Quiet in the kitchen. Out past the doorway the party went on, two hundred people under the lights with no idea.

Diane Aldcott’s face went still. She set her glass on the marble, and the thing working behind her eyes was not how to help. It was the damage. A seventeen-year-old had just told her, at her own gala, that the company running it was weeks from folding, and that is the kind of thing a host files away and acts on later.

“Okay,” she said, and her voice was flat. “Let’s get you sat down.”

She wasn’t unkind about it. She had one of the senior staff cover Imogen’s section. She walked the girl to a stool in the corner by the dry storage and got her a glass of water and told her to stay put, that nobody needed her on the floor, that it was handled. She was efficient and a little cool, and she did not say one word about Beatriz, or the account, or January, and that silence was its own answer, though Imogen was too wrung out to read it yet. Then Mrs. Aldcott went back out to her party, because she had two hundred guests, and the desserts came out on time, and the chandelier did what chandeliers do.

Drive Back

Somebody from the company came for her around eleven, not her mother but a guy named Marcus who ran the vans, sent because Beatriz couldn’t leave the prep. He didn’t ask anything. He could see she’d been crying and he let it sit and drove with the radio down low.

Her mother was at the commercial kitchen when they got back, sleeves shoved up, hairnet on, sheet trays of something going cold on the rack while she stood over a clipboard. She looked up when Imogen came in and she already knew, the way she knew everything, and the first thing out of her was not relief.

“What did you say to her.”

“Mom—”

“To Diane. In the kitchen. Marcus said you broke down in front of her. What did you say.”

Imogen told her. All of it, the whole confession, the business, January, the part about losing everything. She watched it land. She’d thought, somewhere stupid in the back of her head on the drive, that telling the truth might come out clean, that her mother might be glad it was finally out in the open.

Beatriz set the clipboard down on the steel counter very carefully, the way you put a thing down when what you want is to throw it.

“You told my biggest client I’m going under,” she said, keeping her voice down. “Imogen. You never let a client smell weakness. Never. They don’t feel sorry for you. They get nervous, and a nervous client goes looking for somebody steadier. That’s how it works.” She pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead. “God. January.”

“She seemed—” Imogen started, and stopped, because the truth was Diane Aldcott hadn’t seemed like anything at all. She’d seemed like a woman doing math.

After

There was no phone call that night where it all got fixed. Nobody promised anybody work. The contract sat where it had sat, undecided, January, and now with a teenager’s breakdown stapled to it.

For three weeks they heard nothing. Beatriz worked the way she always worked and didn’t bring it up, and Imogen didn’t either, the two of them moving around the not-talking-about-it like a piece of furniture wedged into a small room. Then the renewal came through in the second week of January, same terms as the year before, no note attached, no mention of the kitchen, just a signed contract and a deposit, the way these things come. Beatriz read the email twice and didn’t say whether she thought it had survived because of that night or in spite of it, and Imogen never found out either, because that’s a thing you don’t get to know.

The company didn’t fold. It didn’t take off, either. It went on being what it was, a small operation living one account to the next, the way most of them do, and her mother kept doing the overnight prep herself because there was no one else to do it.

Imogen didn’t work another shift. Her mother put a stop to that, half-laughing, half-not — you’re done, go be seventeen — and she meant it. One Saturday a few weeks into the spring, Imogen came downstairs and found her mother already gone to a job, a note on the counter under the salt shaker. Back by six, eat something. A twenty folded next to it. She stood there reading it, then opened the fridge and looked at what was in there for a while, and shut it, and went to find her shoes.