Denial

     “I don’t want to get into it,” I say. My fingers drum an anxious beat on the metal counter I lean against. It’s 8pm and the sun is down behind the desert mountains, and there are no customers in the lobby. I’m grateful for that right now.

     “Of course.” My shift lead shakes her head. It was rude of her to ask what kind of family issues are making me leave my job here at Arby’s, and she knows it. 

     “But I will say,” I relent, then lilt my speech into the sing-song pattern of one uncomfortable with bearing bad news, “they amputated my dad’s toe last week. Next they might take his foot, then his leg, and then he might be de-ead~” 

     My face doesn’t match my tone of voice. I’m devastated. She can tell. 

     Her name is Danielle. She’s a fellow student at the college and is about ten years older than I am. She has brown hair that grows down past her shoulders, but keeps it trussed up in a messy bun with an alligator clip on the back of her head, under her team member cap. She’s the shortest one on staff but has power over all of us, like a single tiny car key that ignites the engine of our workplace.

     “I’m sorry, man.” Danielle shakes her head. “I hope it all works out. Call me if you need any–” she frowns. The headset piece on her ear starts blinking. There’s a car in the drive-thru waiting to give us their order. 

     “Shit, sorry. Be right back.”

     I nod as Danielle pats me on the shoulder and leaves me to my misery, spinning on her heel to the order-taking tablet by the window. 

     “Hi welcome to Arby’s what can I get started for you?”

     She says it in one breath, like we all do. Her tone is imitation cheery, the kind of cadence we all put on when talking with customers regardless of whatever else is going on behind the scenes. I am very familiar with the sing-song cadence of falsehood. I think we all are. 

     I’m tired of losing members of my family. I keep up the face until she rounds the corner, then it breaks. 

     I’m smiling.

     I’m smiling because my plan is working. 

 

 

Anger

     I hate working here at Arby’s with every fiber of my being. I would rather rip my teeth out and replace them with metal screws drilled into my gums than take another order over the shitty, staticky headset. Luckily for me, I don’t have to. I put in my two weeks’ notice two weeks ago, and tonight is my last shift. 

     I don’t know why the management insists on a two weeks’ notice from us. I signed on under an at-will termination contract for both parties. They could fire me without a two weeks’ notice any time they wanted. A notice is a courtesy to the management, I suppose, but the management is shit at schedules and there’s either a dozen of us on a dead day, or three of us against a never-ending wave of drive-through orders. I don’t feel like I owe them any courtesy, especially not one they wouldn’t return. 

     But Christ, I need the money. I’m alone at college hours from the place I grew up, and I barely have enough for my monthly rent down here, let alone gas. Don’t get me started on groceries. 

     I glance at the clock in the corner of the order screen. 8:17. Perfect. That’s only four hours and thirteen minutes left before we close and I can leave forever. That’s about seventeen fifteen-minute stretches. I can do that. I can get through fifteen minutes seventeen times. I stop my foot from restlessly tapping on the orange fast food tile. I can wait a little longer. 

     Every time I clock into work, I brace myself for seven hours of standing over that goddamn fryer. The oil evaporates from the vats and clots my pores and cakes into my eyebrows. It spatters erratically and scalds any exposed skin for no real reason other than it hates me just as much as I hate it. I would love to wear long sleeves at work just to add a little layer of protection, but unfortunately the area around the fryer is ten thousand fucking degrees and my face damn near melts off every day anyway, so if I was wearing long sleeves I’m afraid I would simply pass away. 

     Then of course there are the actual orders. They come in one at a time through a tiny screen I have to crane my neck to see. I am 6’3”. Do you know how high something has to be for me to crane my neck to get a good look at it? Pretty damn high. 

     And the orders never stop. Any time I think I’ll have a break for a few minutes, there’s that damn BEEP BEEP BEEP and another order flashes on the screen. Oh, what’s that? You want ten mozzarella sticks, forty chicken nuggets, six large fries, twelve jalapeño poppers, and eight more large fries of the other type of french fry we carry? And you want them immediately or you are going to scream at me until you are red in the face? Until spittle froths from your mouth like a firehose, washing away any fucks I gave in its torrent? Great, I’ll get that right out for you! Right after I kill you and then kill myself. 

     And then there’s the coworkers. God. The coworkers. Any hell can be weathered in good company. Unfortunately my company is comprised mostly of forty-year-old burnouts and small-town teenage boys who scream “faggot” at the top of their lungs and make jokes about fucking each other. They are unaware that I myself routinely have sex with other men, and if they knew I’m afraid they would dunk me in that fryer face first. Who knows what they’d do if they found out that he/him isn’t the only set of pronouns I use?

     I apologize. Danielle is good. She’s a good person. She’s probably the only reason I’ve stuck around this long. But I can’t stay for her sake. Every time the fryer scorches my arms, every time a customer screams in my face, every time a coworker says something that makes me want to hide in a bulletproof room, the misery has been accumulating. And now it’s heavier than I can bear.

     I have to get out of here. I’m tired of having no power, I’m sick of having no choice. I’m so over being stuck in this drudgery simply because “this is the way things have to be.” I don’t want to waste my life being miserable. 

     I’m sorry Danielle, but I’ll do whatever it takes.

 

 

Bargaining

     One thing about me is I am a compulsive liar. I haven’t been diagnosed as such, but it wouldn’t surprise me with how often I do it. Friends and siblings call me on my bullshit when they see it coming, but I still pull the wool over their eyes all the time. Lying is easy. You just have to twist the truth a little. As long as nobody gets hurt, it’s fine. 

     I lied to Danielle. My dad had skin cancer on his head once upon a time and it scared the hell out of us, but thank god it was very treatable and he’s fine now. He did have his toe amputated, that wasn’t a lie, but that was his choice. It had broken when he was a teenager and healed weirdly and always gave him pain. Now in his mid-forties, he’d had enough of it. No point in prolonging misery after all, so chop chop went the surgeon.

     My dad isn’t dying, but my coworkers don’t have to know that. 

     I’m not sure why I lie. I’m not sure why I’m lying now about a sick family member to ease my slide out of Arby’s. I don’t have to. I could just walk out and never come back again, but there’s something in me that hates letting people down. 

     I’m going, whether they like it or not, but I’d prefer it if they thought I was going for a good reason. I don’t want Danielle to think my leaving is somehow her fault.

     And I am going for a good reason. Just not a socially acceptable one. As soon as I signed on here I was expected to stay through hell or high water in order to keep the job, and a single day at the fryer has me going through both several times over. I can’t stay here any longer.

     “Is everything okay?” Danielle asked back when I first told her I was thinking of quitting. 

     “There’s some family stuff going on at home,” I say. It comes slick and natural from my mouth, as if I’d practiced it a hundred times before. I put on a pitiful face and don’t make eye contact. “I might have to drive between here and Salt Lake City a lot. I wouldn’t really have much time for work.”

     “Mmm,” she nods. “I hope everything works out.”

     “Me too.” I say, knowing full well that it won’t, not as long as I’m in control of the narrative.

     One good way to lie is by making it a personal issue that you’re uncomfortable talking about. Nobody will pry for the details you don’t actually have if they’re worried you might start crying, and a sick family member is always a convincing alibi.

     Another good way to lie is by incorporating as much of the truth as you can. I knew the details of my father’s amputation well. They unraveled from my mouth like yarn from a ball, knitting a convincing story on my needles of false witness.

     Things might be different if Arby’s paid well. It doesn’t. I make fourteen dollars and fifty cents an hour here. That’s double minimum wage, which would have been fantastic once upon a time, but that time is far behind us and my rent and groceries eat through paychecks like I’m tossing them directly into the bubbling oil. 

     “Hey, how much do you make here?” I asked her late one night, back when I was still a few weeks new to the job. We’re bagging an order together, and she’s been chatting away about the cafe she wants to open one day for the past half hour.

     “Well, we’re not really supposed to talk about that,” Danielle looks around before giving a conspiratorial grin, “but I make fifteen dollars an hour.”

     My hand squeezes the sandwich I grab a little too hard. She doesn’t notice. 

     “Fifteen?” I repeat after a moment. “But you’re a shift lead. You’ve been here for seven years.” 

     “Yeah,” She laughs wearily. “But it’s better than fourteen-fifty.”

     I don’t reply. I am beginning to understand a lot about this place. It doesn’t matter if I’m as skilled with my grease-coated tongs as a surgeon is with a knife, that I always wear my rubber gloves to protect from germs, that I scrub the dishes with water that boils my hands every night to make sure they’re clean; nothing will ever be good enough. 

     I want to say I don’t care, but that’s wrong. I do care. That’s why I’ve concocted this whole stupid lie about a dying father instead of just quitting up front. I don’t want to look Danielle in the eye and tell her I hate it here. She’s a good shift lead and cares about the people under her, and she’d think it was her fault somehow if the machine crumbled under her watch. If I’m miserable, god only knows how she’s feeling after seven years of this drudgery. 

     The part of me that cared about doing a good job at Arby’s died that night, and now I’ll happily leave the place behind. I have enough money saved up for two month’s rent, plenty of time to find a new job. I’ll pass Danielle on campus occasionally and exchange grim-faced pleasantries to keep up the lie about my dying father. 

     And it will work. I know what I’m doing. I’ve done this a hundred times before.

     Remember what I said about incorporating as much of the truth as possible?

Depression

     Early 2020 my parents named me the caretaker of my dying aunt Carmen. It was stage four colon cancer. Terminal. It had been stage four when she was diagnosed five years ago, and stayed stage four throughout. She’d gone through dozens of operations and hundreds of rounds of chemotherapy, enough to kill someone several times over. But Carmen always hung on. 

     Until her husband Carl called to tell us that her liver failed. She went septic. The entire extended family flew and drove in migrations across the country to Bonsall, California, to be with her, her husband, and their two daughters while she died. Miraculously she summoned up some last shreds of that signature Carmen strength and hung on, though she was still bed-bound and needed assistance. 

     “We want you to stay behind and help take care of Carmen,” my dad told me, pulling me into another room with my mom while our large Mormon family prayed and sang hymns around my aunt’s bedside. “Carl has work all day, and the girls are too young. Someone needs to be with her. They need help.”

     I wanted to refuse. I’ve never liked being around medical equipment and am squeamish around even the smallest amount of blood. Back in high school I helped plan a blood drive with the student government. The representative from the organization came to us to talk about the process. I passed out, then woke up and threw up in a trash can. I hadn’t even seen a needle.

     I had no idea what “taking care of” Carmen would mean. I didn’t know what I’d do when things got bad for her again, didn’t know what I’d see while by her side day and night. But I’d heard of the operations. Of her midsection cut open and her clotted liver removed, transplanted with a healthy one that would give out in another year or so. Just the thought of it made me feel faint. 

     I had the absolute worst constitution for the job. But I was eighteen, the oldest grandchild on both sides of the family. I had been through a year of college. I was responsible. Carmen had been dying for five years, but she was running out of time. They needed help.

     Before her diagnosis, Carmen’s family lived close to us in Utah. We saw them all the time. Carmen always came to family performances to watch me and my sisters sing and dance on stage, and cheered louder than anybody. She hosted pizza parties for us and her daughters where we would watch movies and make holiday cards with her large rubber stamp collection. She’d play games and sing songs with us to cheer us up when we were sad. She had bouncy, curly blond hair and big blue eyes full of life, and a smile that lit up any room. She loved her family more than anything.

     For an instant as they described what they wanted me to do, I imagined myself being the one to find Carmen’s body after she had passed in her sleep. My stomach twisted as my blood chilled, and I almost threw up again.

     “What do you think?” my mom asked. She was Carmen’s only sister. Her best friend. She had that hollow, pleading look in her eyes—the same one she’d had every time another call came from family members with bad news. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to, but it would really help the family. She needs someone around to make things easier for her.”

     How could I refuse?

     I stayed by Carmen’s side all day and night for nearly two months in southern California as the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the country, while Black Lives Matter protests raged in the streets and distant older relatives huddled in fear of “ANTIFA agents,” not knowing what those words meant. The whole world was suffering. It changed in more ways than I could understand at the time, and I wasn’t sure what it would be like when my time with Carmen was over. I wasn’t completely sure I would live to see that day.

     I slept on the couch next to her hospice bed in the living room for an uncertain and tumultuous six weeks, never more than a dozen feet away, bringing her food and drinks and lifting her out of bed to go to the bathroom or running for the barf bowl when attacks came in the middle of the night. 

     I changed the soaked gauze wrapped around her middle almost three times a day. I made sure she took her pills. I massaged her legs, bloated with so much milky pus below the skin that any pressure left an indent in the puffy flesh for hours. It was the only way she could feel anything in them. After a good massage, the imprints of my fingers made her legs look like a storm-tossed ocean.

     I attached vacuum suctioned plastic containers to the little white rubber pipe leaking blood and ammonia straight out of Carmen’s distended stomach, trained at the hand of visiting hospice doctors in the right order to unpack and attach everything so it remained completely sanitary. We leeched gallons of evil fluid from her body with them as often as we could, anything to ease her pain, even if I had to secretly throw up in the bathroom later.

     I brought her the cannabis oil hidden in the cupboard under the bathroom sink at three in the morning. 

     “It was a gift from a friend,” Carmen told me, applying it to her neck and forehead. “It helps. But it’s better if nobody knows about it.”

     It was nothing, just a little marijuana extract. But it had been hidden well and deep within the cabinet for a reason. It was against Mormon values. It was too close to a recreational drug to have any pharmaceutical worth in the eyes of The Lord. Her husband wouldn’t like it. Her children wouldn’t like it. Her parents, my grandparents, living in a town only twenty minutes away, wouldn’t like it. Even though she was actively dying. Just wanting a break from the pain. 

     But Carmen’s suffering was a mark of her virtue, like Jesus on the cross. To ease her suffering with The Devil’s Lettuce would strip her of that honor.

     She didn’t lose her hair during chemotherapy, somehow. It was still blonde and curly, though the color was dull and the curls thin and limp. Her blue eyes clouded with the yellow onset of jaundice around the edges. She didn’t smile very much these days.

     It was dark in the house, one of those many quiet early moments spent with the dying woman. I looked up, half expecting to see her daughters and husband looking over the edge of the balcony at the top of the stairs, watching this elicit conversation take place. But of course, it was empty. Just us and the marijuana.

     “Okay.” I said. I would keep the secret.

     I didn’t notice much change in her after the oil was applied, but who was I to tell her what worked for her pain or not? That mind-numbing agony for five years straight, turning something as simple as a sentence into a breathless battle. It wasn’t fair. If the oil dulled her senses and brought her out of her condemned flesh for even just a minute, who could dare deny her that?

     I went to church with her, my uncle, and my cousins on Sundays. We’d sing the hymns of relief and salvation, and my tongue would curl every time the eyes of the congregation turned on my aunt in pity. People would come up to Carmen and tell her she was a saint, that her pain on earth meant an eternity of heavenly grace above. They practically worshipped her with prayer and platitudes.

     I wanted to throttle them.

     Carmen died a few months after I left. She was the strongest person I’ve ever known, but nobody can take that kind of torture forever.

     I’ve seen someone go through hell before. I’ve had real family emergencies where we drop everything and drive the twelve hours to California. I’ve said those excuses and mumbled apologies for my absence hundreds of times. That’s why I’m good at them. That’s why I know they work.

     That’s why I swore I’d never let myself get anywhere even close to that kind of misery, not if I could help it. And I know it’s nothing compared to what Carmen went through, it’s a shitty fast-food job versus an unbearably painful terminal illness. I know that better than anybody. 

     Carmen didn’t have many chances to change her circumstances, so now if I have the chance to make things better, I’m gonna take it. If I have any power, I’m gonna use it. For myself and for others. I don’t care if God wouldn’t approve of my methods for relief. 

     I don’t care if I have to lie. 

Acceptance

     It’s past midnight now in the Arby’s kitchen, my last day on the job is almost over. I’ve mopped the lobby and the back and the bathrooms, cleaned out the fryer, washed every dish in the sink by hand and taken out the garbage. My coworkers have cleaned the back line and counted the till, respectively. I tap my pin into the tablet and clock out. The receipt printer buzzes as it dispenses an account of my hours for the day, seven and a half. Thirty minutes was deducted for my meal break.

     That translates to one hundred and eight dollars, and seventy-five cents. I’m not sure what it would be after taxes, but I know it’s about two tanks of gas, or a couple grocery runs, or a good chunk of my rent. I’m not sure what I’ll have to put it toward yet. I’m not sure if it was worth the seven and a half hours of my life spent at the fryer.

     For a moment, I wonder just how much money in medical bills and ambulance rides it took to keep Carmen alive for those five years. I remember the thousands upon thousands of dollars my grandparents spent to keep Carmen alive for a year, a week, an hour, even a second longer. I wonder how much money it would have taken to keep her alive until today. I know they would have paid it.

     I wonder just how much money a life is worth. I get the feeling I don’t want to know the answer. I shake my head and stuff the print into my pocket with all the others.

     “Are you sure about this?” Danielle asks from behind me as I walk to the exit. “We can hold your resignation for a while, just in case things get better.”

     “Thank you, but I’m not sure they will.” I shake my head. I look down. I wait a beat, then continue. “It’s looking pretty rough back home.” 

     For a moment, I’m ashamed. I don’t want to let Danielle down. I didn’t want to let Carmen down either. But Danielle gives me that understanding half-smile with a half-cocked nod of her head, and it seems all is well. One day, I hope she gets out of here too. 

     “Well, let me know if you change your mind. Normally we don’t take people back if they didn’t give a two weeks’ notice, but you were always a good worker. We’d make an exception for you because of the circumstances.”

     “Thank you.” I give a weak smile, then open the door. “See you around.”

     I don’t mention that I did put in my two weeks notice, that it sat on the desk in the office in the back for two whole weeks but was never touched, and was slowly buried by more important papers. She’ll find it in a month when the pile is worked through, or maybe not at all. It’s not my business anymore. I’m no longer a piece of an uncaring machine. Thank god it’s not my business anymore.

     There is no virtue in needless suffering. We’re not here to be miserable. I think I get that now, seeing so much of it firsthand. Certainly no one is more virtuous than someone else just because they suffer more, but that’s how it feels, sometimes. Why does our society value pain more than people? 

     That’s what it takes to make money, I suppose. To put your shoulder to that eternal grindstone. No pain, no gain.

     That’s what it takes to be like Jesus, I suppose. He who suffered for all of us up there on the cross. He who took on the entire weight of mortal sin so the rest of us wouldn’t have to.

     There’s nothing wrong with admiration for someone who’s going through a hard time, but pain itself is nothing to respect. It’s nothing to revere, nothing to glorify, especially if it’s avoidable. 

     We’re all suffering all the time and all of it sucks. You can’t always prevent the pain, but you can ease it. You can seek relief. It’s okay to chop off the toe that’s hurting you. I don’t regret the things I’ve done to make it easier for people, myself included.

     The glass door closes as my coworkers echo their farewells. I am alone in the parking lot. The moon was full a few nights ago, but is now a waning gibbous, still casting plenty of light over the dark streets. I take a breath and step off Arby’s property and over to my little black sedan. 

     I never look back. 

 

     I think Carmen would approve.