For the past eight years, my brothers and I have done everything we can to help our mother keep this place afloat. It’s the last piece of my father any of us have left.
It’s not like business isn’t great, because it absolutely is. Any other restaurant with the customer base we have and the history we have should be just fine… but the debt my father left behind is crippling.
While I’d never tell my mother this, I don’t think we can tread water for much longer without drowning.
“Ma!” I hear my brother, Oliver, calling from the kitchen.
I look across the booth at her, and she sits silently with a smile.
“Ma!” he calls again.
“Aren’t you going to answer him?”
“If he needs something, he’ll come talk to me at a normal volume. No need to shout across the damn restaurant.”
My mother is a fifty-nine-year-old spitfire in its purest form. She’s maybe five foot nothing, with dark black shoulder-length hair that she keeps pulled back in a low ponytail, but she doesn’t take shit from anyone. Especially not my brothers, Oliver and Benjamin.
I shake my head and laugh.
“Dang, Ma. I was calling for you,” Oliver says when he finally decides to come out into the dining room, instead of hollering from the kitchen.
“I heard you, but I’m your mother, not one of those hussies you keep around. You’ll come talk to me respectfully.” She levels him with a stare.
“Yes, ma’am.” He pulls off his apron and tosses it onto the counter behind us.
She turns her head toward me, and mouths, “Still got it.”
I smile and scoot over so Oliver can slide into the booth next to me. “You smell like a grease trap,” I tell him, nudging him over a little.
“That’s what happens when you actually get work done back there. And that’s actually what I was needing to tell you, Ma. We are going to have to call Mario next week to see if he can come clean out the trap. Ben and I have done what we can with it, but it needs the professional touch.”
She sighs a little, probably trying to hide it from us, before she responds, “I’ll call him in the morning.”
“Who are we calling in the morning?” my other brother, Benjamin, asks as he slides into the seat beside my mother.
“Mario, to see if he will come fix the grease trap,” Oliver replies.
“Finally. We tried to do it ourselves, but as much as I hate admitting it, we do have a fatal flaw. We can’t fix everything ourselves.” Benjamin smirks.
My brothers are six years older than me, identical twins, so I’ve always had built-in bodyguards and pains in my ass since I was born.
I wouldn’t trade them for anything though.
“If we are done here, I’ve got to get going. Meredith is meeting me at the apartment,” Benjamin says as he checks his phone. “And I have to make a stop first.”
“It’s nearly eleven at night. What could you possibly need to stop for?” my mother asks.
“Well, Ma, I don’t want to get my booty call pregnant and we used all four remaining con—”
“NOPE! No need to finish that sentence. I don’t need to hear it. Go. Go. Get out of here,” she says with a wave of her hand.
He leans over and plants a kiss to the top of her head. “Later. Ma, I love you. Pipes, be good. Oliver, sorry I’m the hotter twin.”
He doesn’t even give any of us a chance to respond before he whirls out of the building like the Tasmanian Devil.
“Yeah, I need to get out of here too. I don’t have a booty call waiting, I’m just tired as hell,” Oliver says. “Need me to walk you to the bank?”
“No, I’m a big girl. I want a soak in my tub with a glass of whiskey so badly, right now, that any mugger or murderer who gets in my way has another thing coming,” I reply.
“Don’t you dare say things like that, Piper. I don’t even want that juju in the air,” my mother scolds.
“I didn’t mean to negatively affect your juju, Ma,” I reach over and squeeze her hand. “But really, I need to get going. I have some work to get done tonight too before the morning.”
“Asshole still being an asshole?” Oliver asks.
“Always. He’s just so impossible and impersonal. It’s like he just doesn’t care, ya know? I don’t know how to do that or respond to that. I care too much sometimes. So I just don’t understand him. Plus, he’s a fucking asshat who wouldn’t know manners if they knocked him upside the head.”
“Language, Piper Kingston,” Ma scolds.
“Really?” my brother and I say in complete unison.
“I’ve heard you call Nancy Parsons a fucking bitch because she didn’t salt her side of the sidewalk three winters ago,” Oliver says.
“And I heard you refer to a beer delivery man as an ungrateful fuck because… well, honestly, I don’t even remember,” I add.
“Certain situations call for severe language.” She shrugs and slides from the booth to stand, and we do the same.
“Get going, Pipes. I’ll stay back with Ma and get it all closed up then walk her home,” Oliver says to me.
“Thanks.” I pull my crossbody bag over my chest. “I’ll see you all tomorrow afternoon.”
I kiss my mother’s cheek and give my brother a hug before slipping out into the New York night.
I try not to notice the stress written all over my mother’s face, nor the way that exact stress has eaten away at her physically.
She is smaller now from not eating very much, and she has perpetual dark circles under her eyes. She’s missing the fire that was once vibrating off of her.
She has two mortgages out on our building, on top of the mounting loan debt my father left behind. Any other person would have sold the restaurant by now, paid off the loans, and called it a wash, but not my mother.
And honestly, not my brothers and me either.
Kingston’s is what keeps us connected to my father. It’s like we can feel him in the building every time the aroma of marinara sauce fills the air and the hustle and bustle of our regulars swirls around us.
I don’t know what we would do if we lost the building, but I’m not naïve, nor am I a child. I know that unless a miracle happens, that is imminent.
I just hope my mother will survive when that time comes.
Nathanial
One could say I’m a fucking asshole.
In fact, I may have been told that to my face a time or two, usually accompanied by a swift drink to the face or a slap across the cheek, courtesy of whichever female is suddenly realizing I’m not interested in whatever it is they thought we were.
I know that’s exactly what I am. A fucking asshole who is addicted to working and wants things the way he wants them, no questions asked.
Is that so wrong?
My addiction to work has never been more obvious as the clock strikes midnight, and I’m still in my suit, the tie long since forgotten, sitting in front of my computer in the office, even as the cleaning crew does their job around me.
The last thing I ever expected for my life is working here, at fucking Lennox Publishing. I didn’t spend four years in college and another two interning all over New York City for a fucking master’s in architecture to run a fucking publishing house. I’ve loathed this company for as long as I can remember. I’d even venture as far as to say this place is the reason I’m as fucked up as I am.