Wish You Were Here Renee Carlino Read Online
Praise for Swear on This Life
BOOKLIST, TOP 10 WOMEN'S FICTION OF 2016 GOODREADS BEST ROMANCE OF Baronial 2016
"Swear on This Life is Renée Carlino at her finest. Raw, existent and gripping; I read it in one sitting."
—Colleen Hoover, #ane New York Times bestselling author of It Ends with Us
"This bestselling author knows how to deliver a literary punch, and Swear on This Life is her strongest yet."
—Redbook
"Mysterious and compelling, Swear on This Life is the ballsy love story your summer needs."
—Hurry
"Carlino fans will love this i, and so will readers who have non even so made her acquaintance. The tale is engaging and paced to proceed the pages turning long later on the lights should be out."
—Kirkus Reviews
"[Readers] will find themselves simply smitten past both the novel in front end of them and the story within the story. Romance readers and women's fiction fans should snap up this charming love story."
—Booklist
"Romance fans will notice this heartfelt story of resilience and first love hard to put down."
—Library Journal
"Mesmerizing. A story of love and redemption, Renée Carlino's novel is a perfect reason for staying upwardly also late to read."
—Shelf Awareness
"I love the juxtaposition of the story inside a story, and I'm fond to Emi and Jase's sick-blighted beloved."
—Heroes and Heartbreakers
"A beautifully written 2nd-chance romance that stays with you long after you're washed."
—Vilma's Book Weblog, 5 stars
"Carlino's writing will transport you."
—Book Baristas, iv.5 java cups
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For Rich, the best brother in the earth.
I love you, even though y'all're Mom's favorite.
one. Little Flags
Tuesdays were tortilla soup days at Blackbird's Café. They offered unlimited refills for a lousy iv ninety-5. It was awesome if you were a tortilla soup lover. Information technology was some kind of evil if you were a waitress at that place.
The restaurant's play a trick on was that the bowls were broad and shallow, making it announced like a massive corporeality of soupy goodness, when really, each bowlful amounted to simply a few thinly spread ounces. The problem with said plates disguised as bowls is that they were impossible to behave on a tray; the soup just sloshed from side to side, predictably spilling over the lip each time you traipsed from the kitchen to the customer'southward table, no affair how steady your hands were. Jack, the owner, and his fat "little" blood brother, who went by Jon-Jon (ridiculous, I know), insisted that we carry the trays upwardly high, like waitresses on roller-skates at a goddamn carhop. Information technology'due south part of the amuse, they said. The word charm was used loosely to justify the outdated décor, in my opinion.
If you ordered the "bottomless" tortilla soup bowl, you had to shamefully heighten a miniature flag on a tiny flagpole screwed to the end of your table. Information technology was an abominable mechanism, truly, but information technology achieved Jack and Jon-Jon's desired effect: no ane always, not even a three-hundred-pound man with a passion for Tex-Mex, would raise the flag more than twice; information technology was too humiliating.
Unfortunately, this type of ploy to get people into the restaurant without the business losing coin didn't describe a high-tipping clientele, so Tuesdays were a bust for the waitresses at Blackbird's. We fabricated no coin and we always went home with a salubrious amount of tortilla soup splattered on our white tuxedo shirts. (Yes, we wore tuxedo shirts and bow ties in a pie-and-fry diner; more than of that charm I guess.) But this particular Tuesday was the worst.
* * *
"I Feel LIKE I'1000 in hell. Have you seen the guy at table 20-three?" Helen, my best friend, roommate, and fellow waitress, said to me in the side station.
I peeked around the wall and spotted a gray-haired man eating by himself. "Aye, what about him?"
"He asked for an avocado al dente. Who the fuck uses the term 'al dente' to describe an avocado?"
"You know what he means though, right?" I was laughing but Helen was serious.
"Yeah, but this isn't Spago. He'd exist lucky to become a green avocado at this identify."
"Information technology's not that bad," I said as I filled a plastic loving cup with Coke. The fountain dispenser started huffing and puffing trivial bursts of air. "Fucking shit, the CO2 is running out. Can you lot go tell Jon-Jon?"
"Sorry, I have to get xx-one'southward gild." As Helen left the side station, I watched her hips sway from side to side as she breezed into the dining room. Helen knew she had a skilful body and that men gawked at her. She walked slowly and rhythmically, which made me think she liked the attending.
I, on the other hand, walked fast everywhere, with my shoulders slumped and my head down. People would ever say, "You're a pretty girl, Charlotte. Why do yous walk like an former man?" My response was commonly something similar, "I don't know, it'south only the style I walk." Lame, I know, just I didn't put much thought into how I was perceived. Probably because the simply thing I really liked about my entire body was my long, red-brown hair. I had large brown eyes that my brother called "poop colored" and freckles that, thankfully, were fading every bit I got older. Yet, if you asked me to draw a self-portrait, I'd unconsciously add the freckles. It's like that Freudian theory that says you're a perpetual child in your own mind.
"Did I hear my proper name?" Jon-Jon was suddenly standing inappropriately shut to me as I unscrewed the large CO2 cylinder.
"Can you fix this?" I was bent over with my ass in the air.
"Yous seem to be doing a pretty good job."
I popped up straight. "Why are y'all and then pervy? Y'all're gonna become sued one twenty-four hours." Had I not been fired from 2 jobs already that year, I never would take put upward with Jon-Jon'due south crap, only I needed the coin and I was non in a position to lose some other task. I call up it goes without proverb that waitressing wasn't my career of pick, though that wasn't my biggest problem. I had a caste in diet and my real manor license, and I was a certified massage therapist. Run across a pattern? At i betoken I actually idea I wanted to become a horse jockey. I'd never even been on a horse, only repeat viewings of Seabiscuit were enough to persuade me.
"Relax, Charlotte, out of the way." Jon-Jon moved his tubby little body in forepart of me and took over replacing the cylinder.
I looked into the dining room to see raised flags on three of my tables. It was time for some ingenuity. I found a large pitcher nether the dishwasher's station. "Can I employ this?" I held information technology up to one of the busboys.
"Sure, Gutterfoot," he said. Did I mention that anybody at Blackbird's chosen me Gutterfoot? Directly underneath the big metal trays where we stacked dirty dishes was a one-foot-by-1-foot drain where we scraped all the nasty nutrient that was left on the plates. Sometimes it got clogged, and very rarely, a waitress would step in it. Some shitty Tuesday when I was in a hurry, I was that waitress, and the damn thing was practically overflowing with what looked like vomit. It wasn't actual vomit, of course, but if ever you need something to really resemble vomit, a mixture of soup, meatloaf scraps, pie, soda, and beer is pretty much as close as you can get. The sludge went halfway up my right calf, only I merely pulled my foot out and smiled, briefly
thanking some higher-up somewhere. On any other twenty-four hour period of the week, this incident would accept enraged me, but information technology was a Tuesday. I thought for sure I'd become sent home and be relieved of my duties as soup peddler. I was wrong. Jack said nosotros were too slammed, then I had to stay and distribute bottomless bowls of tortilla soup with a sopping-wet pant leg and shoes filled with rotting nutrient sludge. Naturally, I got nicknamed Gutterfoot.
I took the pitcher and began ladling tortilla soup into it when Jon-Jon establish me. "Charlotte, what are you doing at present?" he asked.
"I accept a bunch of refills. This'll brand information technology faster and easier."
"You know you've been on thin water ice since the closet caper, correct? We don't serve soup via pitcher," Jon-Jon said.
"I'm being efficient! And, anyway, the closet stunt was Helen's doing." Nosotros ever got blamed for each other's mistakes because we were inseparable. A couple of weeks before, when our shift had gotten irksome, she'd told me to find Jon-Jon and ask him if he'd fixed the door to the linen closet. I'd known she was upwards to something.
When Jon-Jon had opened the closet, Helen jumped out and yelled, "Wah!" He'd fallen back on the floor and clutched his center immediately; a homo with his kind of dumpy picayune body was totally a candidate for sudden cardiac arrest. Luckily we hadn't been responsible for his untimely death . . . yet.
"Yous were part of it," he said.
"No, I really wasn't."
Helen came bouncing through the kitchen. "Dude, you take flags up on, like, every i of your tables. People have no dignity."
"I'm going, I'g going."
Jon-Jon was right. Tortilla soup should not exist served via bullpen, but if anyone asked, I would say it was office of the charm at Blackbird'southward.
After our shift slowed down, I pulled a little closet caper of my ain. I knew when Helen went on break that she'd sometimes make out with Luc in the linen closet. They'd been sucking each other'due south faces off for about six months. He was a French dude who had flunked out of some hoity-toity pastry school in French republic and now was stuck at Blackbird's, making pies for the masses. He was actually surprisingly proud of his job, despite the fact that he made minimum wage. His pie technique was incredible, and he had the liberty to make every kind of pie he wanted. Somehow, this aroused Helen. I tried non to judge, just I could barely watch Helen'south confront whenever Luc said anything. He pronounced her name Huh-leen, and every time he said it, she practically had an orgasm.
The beginning time they met, he'd kissed her paw and whispered in her ear, "Yous and I would make beautiful babies." Helen had turned into a pile of goo, and she was Luc's ever since. He'd helped both of u.s. get hired at Blackbird'south—I was between careers, and Helen hadn't landed a substantial interim gig in eight years—and then I merely rolled my optics and kept my rima oris shut whenever I saw Helen throwing him seductive looks.
Just when I swung the linen closet open up, it was just Helen sitting on a stool, puffy-eyed and holding a bottle of vodka she'd clearly swiped from Jon-Jon's famous Bloody Mary bar.
"What are yous doing?"
"Luc broke up with me." She sniffled.
"What? Just at present? Why?"
"He was rambling something in one-half French, half En-glish, so I didn't catch it all. Something about a ship running its course, and overripe peaches. He was smiling the whole time, that bastard." She took a swig and hiccupped.
"How do y'all know he was breaking upward with you?"
"Considering he said, 'Huh-leen, information technology was a beautiful think, you and me, but eet is over.' "
She unintentionally made Luc'southward accent sound Mexican, and it fabricated me express joy. "I'1000 sorry, but honestly, y'all're ameliorate off. I mean, those bright-pink tennis shoes and that permanent five-o'clock shadow . . . come on. I bet he wears Speedos."
"He does!" She burst into tears.
I aptitude and hugged her effectually her shoulders. "Don't worry, infant; there volition be other, less stinky fish in the sea."
She straightened up. "He smells, doesn't he?"
"Like torso odor mixed with pie dough. It's offensive."
"I need a rebound." Her eyes shot open and she raised her index finger to the cupboard ceiling. "That's it, we're going out this night."
I shook my head. "I'k as well tired, and you shouldn't be going out this evening, either. It won't make you experience any meliorate. The first dark of a breakdown should be near Chinese food, water ice cream, and bad TV."
"I'll let you dye my hair tomorrow," she offered.
"Wait. Really?"
Helen nodded like an excited puppy.
"Ugh. Deal." I had been contemplating going to cosmetology schoolhouse, only I didn't have enough people to practice on. Helen changed her hair color subsequently every breakup—it was currently a pale shade of purple—simply she'd never let me near her hair earlier.
"I'm thinking chartreuse," she said, rising from her stool.
"Chartreuse will wait great on you!" I gave her a bone-burdensome hug of gratitude. "Nosotros'll get some Manic Panic tomorrow. So, where do you want to go tonight?"
"Ladies!" Jon-Jon barked. "Out of the closet. Do I have to remind yous that this is a place of concern?"
We peeked our heads around the door. "We weren't doing annihilation, Jon-Jon. We just wanted a interruption in peace," I said.
"Well, take your break outside. You two are getting phased for the night." He made a circular move with his hand in front of his face, which was the symbol for, Wrap upwards your tables because you're going home.
"Thank you, Jesus!" Helen shouted. Once the rush was over, every waiter wanted to get phased. You didn't really make any money later the dinner blitz, and the waiters who had to stay late concluded upwards doing boring side piece of work, like filling upward saltshakers and ketchup bottles. It sucked.
"Did nosotros decide where we're going tonight?" I asked Helen while we wiped down our empty tables.
"How virtually Villains?"
I gave her a wide smile. "Perfect."
2. Muse
Villains was an unpretentious tavern with alive music about five blocks from our apartment in the Arts District of Downtown LA, where Helen and I had been living together for the concluding eight years. I'd heard of other people'south friendships imploding after they became roommates with their BFFs, but Helen and I were ever joined at the hip. Nosotros'd known each other since we were little kids growing upwardly in the aforementioned suburban cul-de-sac, and we'd been together through twelve years of grade school and 4 years of college at UCLA. If we had whatsoever trouble, it was that nosotros were possibly too comfortable with the idea of becoming spinsters together.
Helen loved Villains because, deep downwards, I was pretty sure her Plan B was to become some rock god's muse. Whenever we'd go to a concert, she'd stand in front of the crowd about the stage and sway back and forth in an effort to go the attention of the lead singer. It wasn't subtle. I'd usually sit at the bar and watch the spectacle from afar.
When it came to dating, I always waited to be approached. I'd had boyfriends, but nothing had lasted longer than a yr. I had a way of turning every date into a yearlong relationship instead of getting out early, when I knew it wouldn't last. I simply couldn't get into the one-night-stand scene. But Helen had no rules about anything. I envied her for that.
After our shift ended, we went dorsum to our flat and peeled off a layer of tortilla soup, got set, then headed to Villains around 10. I was wearing my party uniform—black blouse and jeans—and Helen was in a red, high-waisted, A-line brim and sleeveless white blouse with platform heels. She e'er looked way hipper than me.
In one case inside the bar, she shouted, "Damn information technology!" I followed her gaze to the stage where an all-girl band was setting upwards.
"Bummer," I said.
"Let's leave, Charlie. This is lame."
"No, I like it here. Information technology's then shut to our flat. Don't make me become back out there."
The lead singer approached the mic and tapped on information technology.
"Check, bank check." When she tore off a crazy guitar riff, Helen's face up lit up. "Okay, fine. We tin can stay for a while, but nosotros're getting shots!"
Remember how I said Helen had no rules? She liked attention, and it didn't matter who it came from. We sat at the bar and took shot after shot, forgetting all almost tortilla soup, Luc, and the messiness of our lives. An hour into the set, Helen left me to approach the phase. She stood near the front and tried desperately to get the pb vocalizer'south attention, merely the woman wasn't having it. Maybe she was straight? After more than shots and watching Helen's pathetic attempts to catch the singer's centre, I found myself sitting in a berth, comforting a rejected—and very drunk—Helen.
"Why doesn't anyone want me?" she slurred. "Not fifty-fifty that gay chick with the guitar."
"Well, no one hit on me either."
"No ane ever hits on you, Charlie! You're standoffish!"
"What? No I'm not," I whined.
"Your eyes scream, 'Stay abroad, I hate one-night stands.' "
"Anybody hates one-night stands. They're awkward as hell."
"You're but a prude."
"Ugh. Permit'south go home, I'm over this night, and I don't want y'all throwing upwards in this bar." Betwixt Helen, my brother, my mom, and Helen's mom, I got enough crap virtually the state of my honey life.
"No, I wanna trip the light fantastic." Helen slid out of the booth and fell directly on her ass with a thump. I pulled her up by the armpits, wrapped my arm around her waist, and started dragging her toward the door. Nosotros were making a scene, but Helen was finally getting her wish: the atomic number 82 singer was staring at her, along with everyone else in the bar.
"I got it, I got it," she said.
"I don't retrieve and so, infant. You lot can't even walk." I propped open up the door to the bar with my foot and led her out onto the street.
"I think I got roofied," she slurred every bit her head lolled confronting my shoulder.
"I think information technology'due south the ten shots you lot took, not to mention the vodka from earlier."
Wish You Were Here Renee Carlino Read Online
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