Tomb With a View

“Wish I could help you, kid.” Ray took his eye off the grill long enough to shoot me a smile. “I don’t have time to talk. Dang!” Ray stabbed his flipper under the burger at the center of the grill. The patties were paper thin, and that one had already gone from raw to crispy. “I hate when that happens,” he grumbled. He tossed the burger into a nearby trash can and moved another one over to take its place. “If the owners weren’t so cheap and would hire a few extra people around here, I wouldn’t have to worry about burning food and wasting it. As it is, I’m the only grill chef at this time of the day, and Saturdays are always busy.” Expertly, he whisked a couple burgers off the grill, slid them onto buns, stepped to the side where he could better reach the pickles, lettuce, and tomatoes in plastic containers, and grabbed a squirt bottle of ketchup.

“Waiting on that Big Daddy!” the kid up front called out.

Ray grimaced, torn between the burgers that needed to be dressed and finished and the ones still cooking on the grill.

And I knew an opportunity when I saw it. Even when it was one I would rather not have recognized.

There was a purple apron like Ray’s hanging from a hook next to the grill, and I grabbed it, looped it over my head, and took the squirt bottle out of his hand.

I hope it goes without saying that I have never worked in a fast-food restaurant. No matter. The work was just as interesting as I always imagined it would be. After a couple minutes, my brain turned off and my hands moved automatically over the buns.

Ketchup. Squirt.

Mustard. Squirt.

One slice of tomato. One piece of lettuce. Three pickles.

Ketchup. Squirt.

Mustard. Squirt.

“Too much mustard,” Ray critiqued while he stirred the onions. “Not enough ketchup on that one. Here.” He thrust a plastic container of grilled onions at me. “Add those. No! Not to that one.” I stopped with my hand suspended in midair above a square of meat. “That’s the Big Daddy special. No onions. Extra cheese.”

“No onions. Extra cheese.” I was beginning to sound as mindless as all the other Big Daddy workers, and I snapped myself out of it and slid Ray a look, all the while not missing a squirt-squirt-lettuce-tomato-pickle beat.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

He didn’t look especially happy about it. Which he should have considering I was doing condiment duty. “What about?” he asked.

I thought he would have figured that out by now, but since he didn’t, I supplied him with the Reader’s Digest Condensed version. “Marjorie.”

Ray’s spine stiffened. The burger on his flipper slipped off and hit the floor. He stared.

Worried he’d gone catatonic on me or had some kind of age-induced stroke or something, I waved the ketchup bottle in front of his face. “Earth to Ray! I said I needed to talk to you about her, I didn’t say I was raising Marjorie from the dead or anything.”

He shook himself back to reality. “Of course. Yeah. Sure.” Though no one called out another order, he went to the cooler, came back with a stack of burger squares, and carefully arranged them on the grill. “I figured someone from the cemetery would be talking to all of us, taking up a collection for flowers,” he finally said. “If you’re looking for a donation, Pepper, of course I’m willing to contribute. Only it’s kind of hard right now in the middle of the lunch rush.”

I didn’t bother to point out that if I’d been looking for a donation, I could have found a way better place to solicit it. Besides, I didn’t have a chance. A local suburb’s senior citizen bus pulled up outside, and a collective groan went up from the kids behind the counter when a group of bluehaired grannies trooped in.

Oh yeah, we were plenty busy before, but I learned soon enough that busy meant zip in the fast-food business. Not compared with being slammed.

“Thanks for helping me out, kid.” Ray slipped into the purple booth across from where I sat and plunked a medium diet cola in front of me. “After six months at this racket, I’m good at the grill, but not good enough to keep up with a crowd like that on my own. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

Any right-minded person who’d learned the intricacies of squirt-squirt-etc. in so little time would have been rightly proud of herself. I would have been, too, if I wasn’t so bone-tired I could barely sit upright. It was an hour-and-a-half later, the crowds had finally thinned, and Ray had invited me to join him for his break. Since I was never planning to go near a Big Daddy Burger franchise again, it was the perfect opportunity for me to make my escape from the kitchen. Not to mention a chance for me to ask Ray all the things I hadn’t had a moment to talk to him about while he flipped and I squirted.