Crash (Visions (Simon Pulse)) (2 page)

And that was the end of that.

I don’t know what his father said or did to him that day, but by the next day, Sawyer Angotti was no longer my friend. Whoever said seventh grade is the worst year of your life was right. Sawyer turned our friendship off like a faucet, but I can’t help it—my faucet of love has a really bad leak.

•       •       •

Trey parks the truck as close to the Field Museum as our permit allows, figuring since the weather is actually sunny and not too freezing and windy, people might prefer to grab a quick meal from a food truck instead of eating the overpriced generic stuff inside the tourist trap.

Before we open the window for business, we set up. Trey checks the meat sauce while I grate fresh mozzarella into tiny, easily meltable nubs. It’s a simple operation—our
winter truck specialty is an Italian bread bowl with spicy mini meatballs, sauce, and cheese. The truth is it’s delicious, even though I’m sick to death of them.

We also serve our pizza by the slice, and we’re talking deep-dish Chicago-style, not that thin crap that Angotti’s serves. Authentic, authschmentic. The tourists want the hearty, crusty, saucy stuff with slices of sausage the diameter of my bicep and bubbling cheese that stretches the length of your forearm. That’s what we’ve got, and it’s amazing.

Oh, but the Angotti’s sauce . . . I had it once, even though in our house it’s contraband. Their sauce will lay you flat, seriously. It’s that good. We even have the recipe, apparently, but we can’t use it because it’s patented and they sell it by the jar—it’s in all the local stores and some regional ones now too. My dad about had an aneurysm when that happened. Because, according to Dad, in one of his mumble-grumble fits, the Angottis had been after our recipe for generations and somehow managed to steal it from us.

So I guess that’s how the whole rivalry started. From what I understand, and from what I know about Sawyer avoiding me like the plague, his parents feel the same way about us as my parents feel about them.

•       •       •

Trey and I pull off a really decent day of sales for the middle of January. We hightail it back home for the dinner rush so we can help Rowan out.

As we get close, we pass the billboard from the other side. I locate it in my side mirror, and it’s the same as this morning. Explosion. I watch it grow small and disappear, and then close my eyes, wondering what the hell is wrong with me.

•       •       •

We pull into the alley and park the truck, take the stuff inside.

“Get your asses out there!” Rowan hisses as she flies through the kitchen. She gets a little anxious when people have to wait ten seconds. That kid is extremely well put together, but she carries the responsibility of practically the whole country on her shoulders.

Mom is rolling out dough. I give her a kiss on the cheek and shake the bank bag in her face to show her I’m on the way to putting it in the safe like I’m supposed to. “Pretty good day. Had a busload of twenty-four,” I say.

“Fabulous!” Mom says, way too perky. She grabs a tasting utensil, reaches into a nearby pot, and forks a meatball for me. I let her shove it into my mouth when I pass her again.

“I’s goo’!” I say. And really freaking hot. It burns the roof of my mouth before I can shift it between my teeth to let it cool.

Tony, the cook who has been working for our family restaurant for something like forty million years, smiles at
me. “Nice work today, Julia,” he says. Tony is one of the few people I allow to call me by my birth name.

I guess my dad, Antonio, was actually named after Tony. Tony and my grandfather came to America together. I don’t really remember my grandpa much—he killed himself when I was little. Depression. A couple of years ago I accidentally found out it was suicide when I overheard Mom and Aunt Mary talking about it.

When I asked my mom about it later, she didn’t deny it—instead, she said, “But you kids don’t have any sign of depression in you, so don’t worry. You’re all fine.” Which was about the best way to make me think I’m doomed.

It’s a weird thing to find out about your family, you know? It made me feel really different for the rest of the day, and it still does now whenever I think about it. Like we’re all wondering where the depression poison will hit next, and we’re all looking at my dad. I wonder if that’s why my mother is so upbeat all the time. Maybe she thinks she can protect us with her happy shield.

Trey and I hurry to wash up, grab fresh aprons, and check in with Aunt Mary at the hostess stand. She’s seating somebody, so we take a look at the chart and see that the house is pretty full. No wonder Rowan’s freaking out.

Rowan’s fifteen and a freshman. Just as Trey is sixteen months older than me, she’s sixteen months younger. I don’t know if my parents planned it, and I don’t want to
know, but there it is. I pretty much think they had us for the sole purpose of working for the family business. We started washing dishes and busing tables years ago. I’m not sure if it was legal, but it was definitely tradition.

Rowan looks relieved to see us. She’s got the place under control, as usual. “Hey, baby! Go take a break,” I whisper to her in passing.

“Nah, I’m good. I’ll finish out my tables,” she says. I glance at the clock. Technically, Rowan is supposed to quit at seven, because she’s not sixteen yet—she can only work late in the summer—but, well, tradition trumps rules sometimes. Not that my parents are slave drivers or anything. They’re not. This is just their life, and it’s all they know.

•       •       •

It’s a busy night because of the holiday. Busy is good. Busy means we can pay the rent, and whatever else comes up. Something always does.

By ten thirty all the customers have left. Even though Dad hasn’t come down at all this evening to help out, Mom says she and Tony can handle closing up alone, and she sends Trey and me upstairs to the apartment to get some sleep.

I don’t want to go up there.

Neither does Trey.

Trey and I go out the back and into the door to
the stairs leading up to our home above the restaurant. We pick our way up the stairs, through the narrow aisle that isn’t piled with stuff. At the top, we push against the door and squeeze through the space.

Rowan has already done what she could with the kitchen. The sink is empty, the counters are clean. The kitchen is the one sacred spot, the one room where Mom won’t take any garbage from anybody—literally. Because even after cooking all day, she still likes to be able to cook at home too, without having to worry that Dad’s precious stacks of papers are going to combust and set the whole building on fire because they’re too close to the gas stove.

Everywhere else—dining room, living room, and
hallway—is piled high around the edges with Dad’s stuff. Lots of papers—recipes and hundreds of cooking magazines, mostly, and all the Chicago newspapers from the past decade. Shoe boxes, shirt boxes, and every other possible kind of box you can imagine, some filled with papers, some empty. Plastic milk crates filled with cookbooks and science books and gastronomy magazines. Bags full of greeting cards, birthday cards, sympathy cards, some written in, some brand-new, meant for good intentions that never happened. Hundreds of old videos, and a stack as high as my collarbone of old VCRs that don’t work. Stereos, 8-track players, record players, tape recorders, all broken. Records and cassette tapes and CDs and games—oh my dog, the board games. Monopoly, Life, Password, Catch Phrase. Sometimes five or six duplicates, most of them with little yellowing masking-tape stickers on them that say seventy-five cents or a buck twenty-five. Insanity. Especially when somebody puts something heavy on top of a Catch Phrase and that stupid beeper goes off somewhere far below, all muffled.

We weave through it. Thankfully, Dad is nowhere to be found, either asleep or buried alive under all his crap. It’s not like he’s violent or mean or anything. He’s just . . . unpredictable. When he’s feeling good, he’s in the restaurant. He’s visible. He’s easy to keep track of. But on the days he doesn’t come down, we never know what to expect.
We climb those stairs after the end of our shift knowing he could be standing right there in the kitchen, long-faced, unshaven, having surfaced to eat something for the first time since yesterday. And rattling off the same guilt-inspired apologies, day after day after day.
I just couldn’t make it down today. Not feeling up to it. I’m sorry you kids have to work so hard
. What do you say to that after the tenth time, or the hundredth?

Worse, he could be sitting in the dark living room with his hands covering his face, the blue glow from the muted TV spotlighting his depressed existence so we can’t ignore it. It’s probably wrong that Trey and Rowan and I all hope he stays invisible, holed up in his bedroom on days like these, but it’s just easier when he’s out of sight. We can pretend depressed Dad doesn’t exist.

Tonight we breathe a sigh of relief. Trey heads into the cluttered bathroom, its cupboards overflowing with enough soap, shampoo, toothpaste, and toilet paper to get us through Y3K. Thank God our bedrooms are off-limits to Dad. I peek into my tidy little room and see Rowan is sleeping in her bed already, but I’m still wired from a long day. I close the door quietly and grab a glass of milk from the kitchen, then settle down in the one chair in the living room that’s not full of stuff and flip on the TV. I run through the DVR list, choosing a rerun of an old Sherlock Holmes movie that I’ve been watching a little bit at a time
over the past couple of weeks, whenever I get a chance. Somebody else must be watching it too, because it’s not cued up to the last part I watched. I hit the slowest fast-forward so I can find where I left off.

Trey peeks his head in the room. “Night,” he says. He dangles the keys to the meatball truck, and when I hold out my hand, he tosses them to me.

“Thanks,” I say, not meaning it. I shouldn’t have agreed to only ten bucks a week, but I was desperate. It’s not nearly enough to pay for the humiliation of driving the giant balls. “Where’s my ten bucks?”

“Isn’t it only eight if one day is a holiday?” He gives me what he thinks is his adorable face and hands me a five and three ones.

“Sorry. Not in the contract.” I hold my hand out for more.

“Dammit.” He goes back to his room for two more dollars while Sir Henry on the TV is flitting around outside on the moors in fast mode, which looks kind of kooky.

Trey returns. “Here.”

I grab the two bucks from him and shove all ten into my pocket with my tips. “Thanks. Night.”

When he’s gone, I stop the fast-forward, knowing I went too far, and rewind to the commercial as I slip the keys into my other pocket, then press play.

Instead of the movie that I’m expecting, I see
it
again.

It flashes by in a few seconds, and then it’s gone. The truck, the building, the explosion. And then back to our regularly scheduled programming.

“Stop it,” I whisper. My stomach flips and a creepy shiver runs down my neck. It makes my throat tighten. I pause the recording and sit there a minute, trying to calm down. And then I hit rewind.

Ninety-nine percent of me hopes there’s nothing there but a creepy giant hound on the moor.

But there it is.

I watch it again, and I get this gnawing thing in my chest, like I’m supposed to do something about it.

“Why does this keep happening?” I mutter, and rewind it again. I hit play and it all flies by so fast, I can hardly see it. I rewind once more and this time set it to play in slow motion.

The truck is yellow. I notice it’s actually a snowplow, and the snow is falling pretty hard. It’s dark outside, but the streetlamps are lit. The truck is coming fast and it starts angling slightly, crossing to the wrong side and going off the road. It jumps the curb spastically and jounces over some snow piles in a big parking lot, and then I see the building—there’s a large window—for a split second before the truck hits it. The building explodes shortly after contact, glass and brick shrapnel flying everywhere. The scene cuts to the body bags in the snow. I count again to
make sure—definitely nine. The last frame is a close-up of three of the bags, and then it’s over. I hit the pause button.

“What are you doing?”

I jump and whirl around to see Rowan standing in the doorway squinting at me, hair all disheveled. “Jeez!” I whisper, trying to calm my heartbeat. “You scared the crap out of me.” I glance back at the TV with slow-motion dread, like I’ve just been caught looking at . . . I don’t know. Porn, or something else I’m not supposed to look at. But it’s paused at a sour cream commercial. I let out a breath of relief and turn my attention back to Rowan.

She shrugs. “Sorry. I thought I heard Mom come up.”

“Not yet. Not for a while.”

She scratches her head, the sleeve of her boy jammies wagging against her cheek. “You coming to bed soon? Or do you want me to stay up with you?”

Her sweet, sleepy disposition is one of my favorites, maybe because she can be so mellow and generous when she just wakes up. I suck in my bottom lip, thinking, and look at the remote control in my hand. “Nah, I’m coming to bed now. Just gotta brush my teeth.”

She scrunches up her face and yawns. “What time is it?”

I laugh softly. “Around eleven, I guess. Eleven fifteen.”

“Okay,” she says, turning to go back down the hallway to our bedroom. “Night.”

I look at the TV once more and close my weary eyes for a moment. Then I turn it off and stand up, setting the remote on top of the set so it doesn’t get buried, and carefully pick my way to the bathroom, and on to bed. But I don’t think I’ll be sleeping anytime soon.

Five minutes later and Rowan’s breathing
sounds like she’s asleep again. I wish I could just drift off like that. Instead, I lie here watching the wall opposite the window, where faint pulsing light from our restaurant sign beats out a song nobody knows or hears.

The movie theater. The billboard. Now TV commercials. What could be next? Ten minutes crawl by. Fifteen. And I may as well get up and get it over with.