Also, he seems to get the restaurant and isn’t afraid to tell me what it needs.
“There’s a lot to work with here,” Will declares. “I mean, the potential of the online stuff is unlimited, and free. There are also easy changes we can make here in the storefront.”
“Our website really needs help, though.” Right now ours is only a landing site with our phone number and a photo of our menu that’s at least two years out of date.
“I can upgrade it. Do you want me to make you an online shopping portal?”
I gape at him. “You know how to do that?”
“Uh, yeah.” He looks sheepish, so I assume I’m looking at him like he’s just barfed up a pile of gold, which he kind of did, when you think about how much money he could potentially be saving us. “It’s not like I’m a computer genius or anything like that. But my mother made me go to programming camp a couple of years ago, and that was one of the things they taught us.”
I shake my head, unable to believe my luck. One improvement down, approximately 574 to go. “Now, what do you think we should do about Yelp?”
WILL
At around ten o’clock, we get our first preorder for lunch pickup at noon, and Jocelyn brings me back to do a tour of the kitchen when she relays the order.
When I walk through the kitchen door, I understand for the first time why Mr. Evans was pushing me to go behind the scenes for my stories. Five seconds of standing there taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of the kitchen gives me more fodder than a dozen e-mails, more detail than I’d be able to pick up with hours of online research. I’m struck first by the wall of sound. There’s the baseline hum of the refrigerator units, the on-and-off susurration of the dishwasher, the woodpecker sound of chopping. One of the cooks, a burly, pug-nosed Asian man who Jocelyn introduces as Jin-Jin, is cracking eggs into a giant vat of soup. A younger woman named Miss Zhou is cutting carrots with a daunting efficiency. An older woman, reed thin with heavy-lidded eyes, sits at a corner table making dumplings.
Jocelyn brightens. “Come meet my grandma.” She jogs over to the back and introduces me to the older woman. “Amah, this is Will. He’ll be working with me on all the online stuff that Priya and I were talking about.”
“But I’m happy to help out around the kitchen and up front as well,” I insert. I don’t want it to sound like I’m afraid to get my hands dirty.
Jocelyn’s grandma puts down the wooden dowel she’s using to roll the dough and wipes off her flour-covered hands briskly with a wet rag. “Very nice meeting you,” she says in gently accented English. “You work in restaurant before?”
“No,” I admit.
Her face breaks into a wide, eye-crinkling grin. “That what I think. You too skinny. Do not worry.” She pats me on the arm consolingly. “We fatten you up. You like pot sticker?”
“Sure, they’re great,” I say.
“Be careful,” Jocelyn warns. “You’ll want to marry those dumplings when you’re done.”
When I bite into the finished pot sticker, which is still piping hot, sublimely crispy on the outside and juicy and bursting with flavor on the inside, I can’t say that she’s wrong.
“Holy cow,” I say, so overcome that I talk with my mouth still full. If my mother were here she’d be scandalized by my manners. “Why are people not lining up outside your door to buy these things?”
Jocelyn thinks about it. “I dunno. Most of our orders are take-out, so maybe they’re just not as good when they’ve been sitting in a box for twenty minutes? Or…” Her eyes open in horror. “I know why. Because we don’t actually have pot stickers on the menu. Only boiled dumplings, because that’s faster and easier.”
Then she grins like a maniac. “Good thing there’s an easy fix for that.”
JOCELYN
The back entrance to the A-Plus parking lot is open except for the screen door, so I can tell my dad is in a foul mood before I even see him. “Zenmegaode, ludo dou mai?” he mutters as he unloads the boxes of produce from our van. When I look over at Will he’s got a little crease between his eyes. There’s no way he can know that my dad is complaining about our supplier’s lack of green beans, but I’m pretty sure it took him about a millisecond to peg my dad for a grouch.
The screen door screams as my dad pushes it open using his elbow, and he unloads two boxes with a groan and a “zhong si.” He’s panting with his hands on his hips, his back turned to us, when I decide to rip the Band-Aid off.
I give Will a smile that is probably more than a little apologetic. He’s going to have to meet my father eventually; might as well know what he’s getting into from the start.
“Hey, Dad. This is Will. Our new employee.”
WILL
When Jocelyn introduces me to her father, I freeze immediately, because that’s what I do when I’m introduced to new people out of the blue. Dr. Rifkin says it’s a survival tactic that allows me to observe the stranger, put on a neutral expression, and let the other person speak to me first, so as to set the ground rules of our interaction.
Mr. Wu eyes me up and down. He’s wearing jeans and a Hawaiian shirt that’s now patchy with sweat, and I feel like a tool in my button-down.
After what seems like an eternity, he asks, without any preamble, “What your GPA?”
I blink and answer automatically, because that’s what I do with adults. “4.35.”
Mr. Wu squints at me. “How you get GPA more than 4.0?” he asks suspiciously. “What kind of school you go to?”
“I go to St. Agnes, sir. You can get above a 4.0 if you’re taking AP classes.”
Jocelyn’s dad sniffs and nods as begrudging a nod as I’ve ever seen. His eyes are a dark brown, kind of like his daughter’s, but they lack the openness that hers have. “You ever be arrested?” Mr. Wu continues in his interrogation. “Do drugs? I have friend at police station, I can check.”
The outright aggression of his question (nothing micro about that one) leaves me speechless. Thankfully, Jocelyn has my back. “Dad!” she hisses. “Of course not. I asked about that stuff on the application. He got the Citizenship Award last year for crying out loud.”
Her indignation goes a long way toward giving me the words to answer her father’s question. When the sting of his accusation dissipates, I hear my mother’s voice in my head, reminding me to turn the other cheek, to kill with kindness. It’s not as if these aren’t questions that any employer would want to know, even if they don’t have the nerve to ask them to my face.
“Sir, my record is perfectly clean,” I say, in as steady a voice as I can muster. “I can have one of my references, Father Healdon, call you if you have any questions.” I figure it’d be laying it on too thick to add that I was an altar boy and still sing in the church choir.
Mr. Wu frowns and squints at me again, and my brain starts generating rogue press conference questions like a mofo. What if Mr. Wu thinks that I’m too arrogant? What if he decides to call up Father Healdon, who tells him about the time I left my cell phone on and Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” from Thor: Ragnarok (Manny’s distinctive ringtone) went off in the middle of Communion? What if Mr. Wu looks through my résumé and thinks I’m exaggerating my business experience with my “selling ads for the school newspaper” line item?