Page 1 of His Naughty Waitress
Chapter1
Missy
My fatheralways used to tell me I’d get in trouble for my mouthy attitude. He was a high school shop class teacher, and one time he made me stay after school to write ‘My words will be necessary but nice’ two hundred times on his classroom blackboards as punishment. I did what he asked, but all along I was thinking, what a fucking waste of time. I may have said that once or twice while I stood at the blackboard back then. Dad was not impressed, but at least he knew I wouldn’t bullshit him. Dad was really trying during those years—and then he died. I was nineteen, and I wished I had taken some of those lessons toheart.
He was all we had. I never knew my mother. She died before I could walk, so when Dad passed on, my older sister, Rosa-Beth, and I were on our own, and I gotworse.
Rosa-Beth couldn’t handle his passing. Everyone said she was delicate, so naturally all the responsibilities fell to me. For fourteen months, I managed to keep our household together. Until I fucked up big time. Well actually, I had help. Dad’s old drinking buddy showed up. He had become a bank loan officer, and told Rosa-Beth and I we could consolidate all our debt and Rosa-Beth’s college expenses with the mortgage on the house. He assured us we could use Dad’s death benefits to help pay it off. It sounded like a great idea at the time, but Rosa-Beth never mentioned she had racked up fifty thousand dollars in credit card bills while she was at college. Fifty fucking thousand dollars. I couldn’t even picture what that kind of money looks like. I wish I could say she did something useful with the cash, but she didn’t. All she had to show for it were some new friends that went by the names Prada, Chanel, Fendi, Jimmy Choo andVeraWang.
I gave her an earful when I found out, but it’s no fun hollering at a sobbing woman. Fifty thousand dollars put us over the edge, and all of a sudden, we needed to find the money to pay it off, or we’d lose thehouse.
There was no way in hell I’d let thathappen.
Rosa-Beth was in her last semester at college, and when she graduated, she moved back home. She was just as emotionally broken as she was whenDaddied.
It was up to me. I switched from part-time to full-time at the local Macy’s, and by local, I mean thirty minutes north on the main road to Truckee. College fell off my list of career preparation options. The chip on my shoulder grew to the size of the Sierra NevadaMountains.
Right about that time, I hit a new low and got about an inch away from bitch slapping my Macy’s supervisor. In my defense, she deserved seeing my hand an inch from her face. Actually, she deserved the slap, and I wish that I had followed through and done it, even if that may have meant jail time. Instead, better judgment got me, and my only repercussion was I becamejobless.
This is how I ended up working as a waitress at Ed’s Diner here in town. This is how I met CarterNeville.
