cheese? It’s not like you have to slaughter a cow to get cheese.
Mr. Tofu Scramble: You know, spelt is better for you than wheat.
Ed, Logic’s Only Son: And what about yeast? You drink beer, right? So is beer vegan? Is it okay to kill yeast?
My second day at Rise Up Singing I trained on the opening shift. I showed up early and Ed, Logic’s Only Son was waiting for me in front of the restaurant. He had on a bomber jacket and a paperback of The Martian Chronicles was tucked under one arm. I could see the comb marks in his gray greased hair. Behind him on the mural wall an enormous black head with an elaborate Pan-African headdress floated in egg yolk.
He tapped a pack of Pall Malls against the butt of his palm and glared at me.
“You’re late,” he said.
“I’m on time. The person training me is late.”
“Who’s training you?”
“Mirror,” I said.
“These fucking names,” he said and shook his head.
Ed pulled the cellophane off the Pall Mall pack, crinkled it into a ball and threw it on the ground where it blossomed into a clear plastic flower.
Mirror was several blocks away biking up the center of the street, her pink ponytails fluttering behind as she pedaled. When she saw us she waved a friendly unhurried wave. I waved back.
“Fucking Christ!” Ed said and turned away.
Mirror coasted down to where we were and got off her bike.
“Sorry I’m late, Ed.”
“This place used to open at seven.”
“So go back in time.”
Mirror unlocked the door and we followed her in. She flipped the lights and started showing me around. The walls inside Rise Up Singing were red, pink and purple. It was like being inside a placenta.
I got the bleach buckets out. Ed stood by the register locked in a staring contest with the unmanned grill. The cook came in, looked at Ed, and walked out back to have a cigarette.
Mirror took out her pigtails and started brushing her hair with an Afro pick. Little pink fuzz balls gathered on the comb teeth and she balled them together and threw them in the trash.
“Della, do you eat meat?”
“Sometimes.”
“Well, don’t eat it here. All the cooks are vegetarian. They either burn it because they get grossed out or leave it totally raw on purpose, it’s disgusting.”
Mirror threw another pink fuzz ball in the trash.
“Franklin said you were a geologist or something. Did you like, study at volcanoes?”
“No, invertebrate paleontology.”
“Cool,” she said, “I saw a special on deep-sea vents once. There were all of these white octopuses living down there that turned out to be totally gay,” she rinsed the Afro pick off in the bar sink, “Probably not a great species survival plan, though.”
Ed tapped his coffee cup with a spoon like he was an inmate but Mirror didn’t look up. She has a pretty laissez-faire attitude toward customers in general. When I went to turn on the OPEN sign she told me not to because, “If you do that, they’ll just come in.” Flawless logic.
At the end of our shift Mirror dumped the tip jar out on the counter.
“I hope Franklin told you we pool tips,” she said and began to separate the change. “He tries to pass it off as communism but it’s really so he doesn’t have to pay the cooks.”
I adjusted the credit slips and Mirror counted the money into piles then went into the till and grabbed three ten-dollar bills. I thought she was going to make change but she just added one ten to each pile, “Slave tax,” she said and paid us out. Jimmy came in through the back door. Her arms were full of lettuce.
“Hey you! I heard they hired you,” she hugged me. “I’m so psyched.”
I hadn’t seen her for several years. Her hair was longer in the front and bleached out to a light orange. The back of her head was still clipped and brown. She dropped the lettuce on a nearby counter and came over. I could tell Credence had given her the update by the way she looked at me.
Jimmy had me help her break down produce boxes and we went out to a fenced area adjacent to the restaurant that smelled of rotten yogurt and urine. I ripped staples out of the boxes and Jimmy folded them flat and threw them in a pile. We talked about school and Annette and the Bellyfish and my parents.
“I always liked Grace,” she said, “I’d love to see them again sometime.”
She asked