Minutes felt like hours as Lola worked her dreaded Sunday double-shift, her mind only able to focus on Miles Hollingsworth. What was he doing? What romantic, amazing date was he planning now? Was he thinking of her the way she was thinking of him? She stumbled through taking orders, often having to ask customers to repeat themselves, which was not good for business. She knew this. After another flunked customer service interaction, bringing a customer a regular coke instead of a diet coke, Lola knew she had to do something to get her mind straight. Not even Lola's family owning the Cantina could save or excuse Lola losing money.
She approached her father, who was at the front of the restaurant greeting, something he always liked to do when the restaurant was busy, which it always was during the Sunday brunch shift. "Do you mind if I take a break?" Lola asked, placing her hand on her father's shoulder to grab his attention.
"Sorry, we're way too busy. We need everyone on board." He responded, not taking his eyes off the crowd of customers he was greeting and attempting to keep happy while they waited for tables to open up. "Sorry. I know you were hoping to get off early today, but I don't think it's in the cards. Apparently the other Argentinian restaurant a few blocks away stopped doing brunch, so we're getting a whole new crop of customers. Sundays are probably going to be our most profitable and busy day for the next few months."
Lola sighed, but placed a light kiss on her father's cheek anyway. "No worries. I'll just brave through." She said, knowing now that she really needed to get her head screwed on if she was going to work the next several hours without a break. She departed from her father and headed back toward one of her tables, grabbing an empty water glass and taking it away to refill. Her brain was still so occupied, but her body managed to work on auto-pilot for a while. She wasn't at her most charismatic or attentive, but she was doing her job just fine.
Never had Lola been so completely stuck on someone. She didn't realize that this was the way you were supposed to feel about someone. With Tiny, her mind was usually stuck on how she was going to keep him interested, because deep down, there was something inside of Lola that recognized that Tiny never stopped liking Shay, and that she was the second choice. But with Miles, she knew that she was his finally his first choice. His only choice. And it felt really, really good.
"Going on a hot date with the white boy after this?" Lola's coworker, an older woman named Belinda, said as she filled up a drink next to Lola at the soda fountain. "Roberto said he heard that he was tu novio." She teased, shoving her elbow into Lola's ribs lightly, causing a very distracted Lola to spill the drink that she was filling up.
"Crap," Lola whispered under her breath as she looked down at her hands which were now coated in sticky soda and shivering from the impact of the ice. "Why'd you do that?" Lola questioned instinctively, quickly realizing as soon as she said it that Belinda hadn't purposefully done this. It was her own fault for not being on alert. For being distracted by the thoughts of the very boy Belinda was questioning her about. "Sorry." She quickly corrected. "I'm like, completely on a cloud. I can't even think straight." She started as she took a wet rag that Belinda had extended to her and began wiping the sugary residue off her hands and arms.
To tell the truth, Belinda wasn't a coworker Lola had spent much time with. There were a lot of people who worked for the Cantina who felt like family to her, and Belinda truthfully... wasn't at the top of the list. She was relatively new to the Cantina, and for some reason always seemed sort of nervous whenever she talked to Lola. Lola didn't consider herself a particularly intimidating person, but she wasn't about to ask Belinda why she always seemed sort of on edge around Lola, especially when Belinda was being pretty pleasant at the moment, even reaching out to Lola trying to gab a bit. So, she decided to just go with it.
"Could you grab me a new cup?" Lola asked as she finished cleaning up the spill and attempted to go back to the task at hand: refilling a customer's drink. She was sure that in the time it had taken her to flub this task, seven more tasks have piled up at the tables she was now unintentionally neglecting. Belinda handed Lola a fresh cup and Lola began filling it up again, this time keeping her thoughts as straight as she possibly could. "Yeah," she said. "I have a date with Miles tonight. And he is my boyfriend." She confirmed, for the first time out loud. "I'm kind of really distracted thinking about him, if you couldn't tell." She referenced to a soda stain she now had on her apron. Annoying, but she didn't have time to obsess over it. She gave Belinda a look that said 'be right back' and served the drink she had filled up and began checking in on her other tables, seeing what tasks she needed to complete now.
"You seem really happy." Belinda said the next time the two crossed paths to clean up a table that had been left a disaster by a group of parents who had way too many kids and the types of attention spans that let the floor under the table to be almost completely coated with maple syrup and orange juice. "Your father told me about how you two did that play together and you lost that baby and I've just been really keeping you in my thoughts ever since. Hoping that you two would be able to make things work.
Lola was struck suddenly when she heard what Belinda had said. She was first confused by the intimacy in which Belinda referred to Lola's father, when Lola didn't know that the two talked at all, let alone by the second thing that had struck Lola so violently. The intimacy of the details... and the detail Belinda seemed to get wrong. Had Lola's father been talking to people about Lola's brief pregnancy, and had he been telling people that she had a miscarriage rather than an abortion? Disclosing the details of her abortion with her father was not something Lola wanted to do, but due to the public nature of the video she posted about it, her hand was kind of forced. That video got thousands of views. There was no way that it wouldn't be brought up to Lola's father, especially considering he ran a restaurant named after Lola that had a giant mural with Lola's face on the side of the building.
He wasn't happy about it, of course, but he accepted that it was Lola's choice at the end of the day. Or had he? The way Belinda spoke about it really sounded like the 'loss' wasn't a conscious choice. "I'm sorry?" Lola finally said, stopping completely in her tracks. "What are you talking about?"
Belinda's face suddenly went pale. "I... thought he talked to you." She said, her voice much weaker than before, and her mannerisms suddenly reverting back to the nervous ones Lola knew her for. "I feel like I'm kind of stuck here." Belinda stated, mostly avoiding eye contact with Lola. "Your father was supposed to talk to you months ago, but he kept putting it off. He told me that he was going to tell you yesterday... But it's clear he didn't, so I guess this falls on me now. Your father and I are together. Engaged." She dropped the bomb, and without thinking, Lola pulled her apron off of her petite body and dropped it on the restaurant floor. She walked toward the entrance where her father was still greeting a slightly lighter flow of customers, and she spoke to him in a tone she'd seldom used with him. An angry tone.
"You're engaged." She said. She didn't ask. She may have not known Belinda, but it was clear from the way the woman stumbled through her statements that she wasn't making up a story. "You're engaged, and you didn't even tell me you were seeing someone."
Her father kept his mouth shut, clearly shocked and thrown off by the confrontation. "Why don't you take a paid vacation day?" He said, his demeanor as calm as it could be, though it was clear that his eyes were screaming for Lola to please, please understand that they can't talk about it right now.
"I think that'd be best." Lola said, walking out of the restaurant without looking at her father again. She was completely mixed up about this. Why would her father hide this? He had been in a relationship with this woman behind Lola's back for who knows how long. She thought of her father as someone she could trust and someone she had a good relationship with, but maybe that wasn't true. After her mother left, it took her a long time to not have issues trusting people. She had just recently started feeling like her trust issues weren't controlling her anymore, but now, she was back at square one.