Fed Up - By Jessica Conant-Park & Susan Conant Page 0,33

Then we have to clean the place again after the night crew already did it. It’s disgusting. Plus, Gavin is losing money on all that alcohol he’s drinking, and then he complains about having to reorder more liquor. I just ignore him.”

A waitress brought out my Caesar salad, but it was hard to enjoy it as much as I usually did. In fact, it occurred to me that most of what I was being served tonight was one piece of bad news after another. What happened next confirmed that impression: Gavin popped out of the kitchen, again summoned Wade with a gesture, spoke to him for a few seconds, and then slumped down at the end of the bar and pulled out his cell phone. Wade returned to me with an apologetic look on his face. “I’m sorry, Chloe, but Gavin is making me give you a bill for your dinner. He says he’s tired of his staff bleeding him dry.”

I’d never before paid for dinner at Simmer. Gavin had never expected me to pay. And it wasn’t as though I were in here every day ordering lobster and foie gras. All along, from the time Simmer had first opened, I’d assumed that Gavin knew how hard Josh was working to make Simmer a success and that Gavin saw my occasional meals as a small symbol of thanks. Hah! Apparently not.

I finished my salad, thundered off the stool, slammed my purse on the counter, and pulled out some cash. Gavin showed zero reaction, but Wade absolutely refused the tip I tried to give him.

“I always tip, even when the food is free,” I protested. “Wade, please!”

Although Gavin was still at the far end of the bar, Wade spoke softly. “Not tonight. Consider it my apology for Gavin’s behavior.”

“If Gavin continues acting like this in front of customers, pretty soon he’s not going to have any.” I thanked Wade again, grabbed my purse, and rushed out of Simmer.

Josh always painted a pretty picture of everything about the restaurant, but over the past few months I’d been learning more and more about the downside to life at Simmer. Despite Gavin’s early promise that when Simmer began to do well, Josh would do well, there’d been no improvement in Josh’s brutal schedule or in his pay. On the contrary, although Simmer had now been open for eight months and had, I thought, done very well, it seemed to me that Gavin’s demands on Josh were becoming more extreme and more unfair than ever. I wondered how long Josh would put up with his increasingly impossible boss.

TEN

I spent Wednesday morning at home going over rain barrel orders, of which there were a surprisingly large number. Considering that this summer had been my first attempt at jumping into the world of sales, I was pretty pleased with how many barrels I had sold. Of course, I hadn’t done it alone. Each time my parents landed a new landscaping job, they sent me to meet with the client to suggest the addition of an environmentally responsible rain barrel to the project.

Because my parents ran an eco-friendly company, many of the clients were receptive. These were people who lived in Boston’s wealthy suburbs, where environmentalism was just beginning to influence landscape design and maintenance. Many of them had seen Al Gore’s film and were aware of the environmental impact of traditional landscaping and lawn care. Noise pollution was impossible to miss. There were days when I went to my parents’ house and found that we could barely have a conversation over the roar of the leaf blowers and gigantic lawn mowers that attacked the neighbors’ yards. Those machines guzzled gas. And then there were the ubiquitous sprinkler systems that sprayed water on every available surface, including sidewalks and streets, at preset times, even during torrential rainstorms.

My parents discouraged large, water-hungry lawns. They encouraged clients to plant shrubs and flowers that could survive with minimal watering, to install solar lighting, and even to make compost. As much as possible, Mom and Dad used recycled materials and herbal pesticides and herbicides. Fortunately, Jack and Bethany Carter’s switch to green design had been good for their business. Environmentally friendly gardening did not come cheap, but in their affluent area, homeowners could afford to go green.

And I was enthusiastic about something related to school! I’d spent my first year of social work school frustrated, irritated, and lost. My uncle Alan had stuck a clause in his will that required me to