Nichole Squire

Summary:

Mina Thompson and her brother Joel aren’t what you’d call thriving members of society. Trapped in a dead end town and struggling to make ends meet, they’ve never figured out what it is that they’re supposed to be doing. When Mina is put on probation from her job, she needs to figure out something to pay the bills or lose the life she’s built so far. Enter: the world’s most questionable business venture – a ghost tour in a town that doesn’t technically have any ghosts.

Sharp, funny, and tinged with small-town strangeness, The No-Ghost Ghost Tour is a love letter to the places we can’t quite leave… and the people we can’t help but laugh with along the way.

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Excerpt:

I

I wasn’t anything close to a child prodigy. Some people were. Some people say that by the time they were thirteen years old, they’d read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy and were working as the senior editor on their school paper. Some people, like Judith Henry who was recently hired as my supervisor at Sloppy Joe’s Stompin’ Grounds, claim that they were born gifted and had completed 75% of their degree in marine biology before being forced to drop out when they were sixteen years old. Some people are liars. I think Judith Henry might be one of these people.

I’m picking at a dry chunk of tomato sauce that’s cemented itself to a tabletop when I realize this. For one thing, Judith can’t shut up about pyramid schemes. Her latest one involves these magic cloths that are supposed to leave no streaks on glass or hard surfaces, because they contain trace amounts of silver in them. Wanting to make a good impression, I bought seven from her last week. The cloths are absolute shit. Judith either doesn’t realize that the cloths don’t work and therefore isn’t the woman of science that she claims to be or she’s lying about the supposed virtues of the cloths, which means she can’t be trusted about anything else she said. I’ve decided that it’s the latter, because I’m the only person at the restaurant who uses them. Judith borrows white rags from the back-of-house staff like everyone else does. Well, everyone else but me.

I sigh and throw one of my damp Magic Silver Cleaning Cloths™ on to the table to help saturate the tomato-cement. The fabric has bits of lettuce stuck to it and a rip near the top from where I forcefully tried to remove shards of dried corn from the last table. I may as well be mopping up messes with dollar bills for all the good the purchase did me. I don’t feel like I’ve succeeded in buying myself into the queen’s good graces and she still looks at me like she suspects there’s something wrong with me.

“May I?”

I’m startled out of my thoughts by a small voice awkwardly hovering behind me. I drop the cleaning cloth into my bucket of water in response.

“Yeah. What do you need, Paula?”

Paula pulls her belt loops up towards her navel to try to hide her entire torso into her black dress pants. She’s nearly succeeding. All she needs is to get her boobs and name-tag in next.

“Table 12 said that they asked for their bill twenty five minutes ago and they said they told you they had somewhere to be,” she says, her freckled face burning cherry hot. “I told them you’re very busy and that -”

“Shit.” I’ve totally forgotten about them. No wonder Judith looks at me like she thinks I’m a few buttons short of a sewing kit. “Tell them I’ll be right there.”

I run to the POS machine and curse myself for not putting in their drink orders. To save time, I’d just made them myself and figured I’d punch them in later. It’s not even like the restaurant is that busy. I just thought I’d have time. She had a Bloody Mary and he had a … Was it a Dark and Stormy? Or did he just get an Americano? Was that the man with the pom pom on his hat who sat there before them? I fight down the rising panic and will myself to focus. I tie and retie my apron as I mentally retrace my steps. It’s no use. My brain’s already done a memory dump.

Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Judith parading my way. There’s only one POS between us and it just so happens that she needs to use it every single time that I’m trying to remember an order, because of course she does.

To hell with it. I’ll tell them that the drinks are on the house because of how long I’d made them wait. With any luck, they won’t ask to speak to my manager. Since Chris isn’t in on Tuesdays, this request would automatically default to Judith. I can’t let her witness me making another mistake. If I have to hear the words “re-training” or “Mina had another oopsie” again, I might actually lose my mind. No matter what Judith thinks, I’m a perfectly competent server, even if I didn’t read The Lord of the Rings before my 13th birthday.

Competent enough to be employed at a place called Sloppy Joe’s Stompin’ Grounds in the glorious town of Stanmore, Washington anyways.

I drop the bill off with what I hope is an appeasing smile. “I’m so sorry. It’s one of those days. I don’t know where I leave my brain sometimes!”

The woman offers a weak laugh, but the man slams down his credit card without even looking at the contents of the bill.

“I … um. I took your drinks off for the trouble,” I stutter while I swipe the card. I gingerly place the receipt on the table for him to sign.

“Oh, you didn’t have to do that!” The woman says while the man scribbles a big ‘O’ where the tip option is. He tosses it into his leftover ketchup.

She’s running after him within seconds.

I can hear, “That’s the last time you convince me to go anywhere in this god forsaken town” as they tear through the door as one angry-and-agreeable unit. Like a yin-yang of customers you love and hate to see in one unfortunate match. Bells chime as the door slams behind them.

I feel sorry for her.

I wipe off and then quickly tuck the bill into my apron. Hopefully no one will see it when I do my cash out at the end of the night.

“Looks like you really pissed them off,” Judith calls from behind the bar. “What happened this time?”

“Nothing, Judith. It’s fine. He’s just in a bad mood. I think his toast was overdone,” It’s okay to lie if you’re lying to a liar.

Judith gazes at me under her stick-on magnetic lashes. She touches one, securing it into place. One time, when she was telling me that I needed to get my act together and take notes on people’s orders, she’d gotten so animated that a set had flown off one of her eyeballs and she had to retrieve it out of the garnishes. She’d made me empty the entire container of maraschino cherries because it was contaminated. I remember the way that she’d spat out the word, “contaminated”. Like the state of the cherries was a reflection on my character instead of a byproduct of her ill-advised Amazon purchase. She’d spent the rest of her shift with one eyeball full of lashes and the other eyeball completely bald. I wasn’t sure why she didn’t just remove them both.

Today, Judith looks exhausted. Like her eyelids are barely holding the heavy lashes up. “I’ll talk to the kitchen about the toast,” she sighs. “Next time there’s a problem, please come and get me. It’s my job. You need to communicate what you need from me, Mina. I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what the problem is.”

“Seriously, it wasn’t that big of a deal,” I say. My voice sounds thin and I can tell it sounds like I’m shrugging off the situation. It’s not that I don’t see the significance of my screw-up. I just don’t want to be having this conversation with Judith and her eyelashes.

“Do you even know who that was, Mina?”

I shake my head. “I’ve never seen them in here before.”

“That was Mike Vanderpool and his wife Sharron. They’ve just moved here and rumor has it they have a lot of money. The Stompin’ Grounds could really use customers like them. Plus, I hear he’s thinking about opening a museum.” She says the word “museum” like it’s sacred and like it’s not doomed to be filled to the roof with boring obituaries. “We should be happy for people like them who want to invest in Stanmore’s future.”

I shrug. “I didn’t know, Judith. I’m sorry. Really.” For all the information she gathers on town residents, she’d be better off as a paparazzi.

She dabs at the corner of one of her eyelashes as she considers my apology. “You really need to think more, Mina. Be more present. We can’t afford to keep people on who aren’t willing to be part of the team.”

I hate it more than anything when she insinuates that I’m an airhead who couldn’t care less about my job. Plus, she’s threatening my employment based on things that just aren’t true. She’s been here for all of five minutes and I’m basically a permanent fixture at this point. I know most of the people in here.

As I take in how many seated tables are within earshot of us, I’m mortified to realize that my bottom lip is beginning to quiver in frustration. I suck it in only to feel my chin crumple. The fact that I’m about to embarrass myself by crying in front of all the customers I still have to serve makes my eyes well with even more tears, which is counter productive to the entire issue at stake. I pull off my glasses to catch the tears with my fingertips before they smear my eyeliner. I can’t serve tables in a state of devastation. I’m not Judith.

I struggle to choke out words to end the conversation. She needs to know that I’m a thinking, capable, worthwhile person. An employee to be valued.

“But I bought your stupid rags,” I sniffle angrily as a big fat teardrop rolls from my eye. When I try to catch it, my fingertips come back with the inky traces of my watered down eyeliner.

Fuck.

By the end of my shift, Judith sleuths together the truth of what occurred with my fateful encounter with the Vanderpools. Or at least some of it. When she sees the absence of drinks on the bill, the total sum of my tip from the table, and the testimony from the kitchen staff regarding the state of the toast, she decides it’s best to put my employment with Sloppy Joe’s on probation.

Two weeks to think about what teamwork looks like. Two weeks to think about how I lied to her and ultimately betrayed the whole Sloppy staff. Two weeks to consider whether my job as a server is something I really want to commit to. To add insult to injury, she also tasks me with personally delivering a Sloppy gift certificate to Mike and Sharron.

I can’t hate my life more at this moment.