It’s the lunch rush at Pyszne, the restaurant where I work every weekday from seven in the morning to two in the afternoon. Pyszne, which is pronounced push-nah, has the distinction of being the only Polish restaurant in the neighborhood of Bloomfield, Pittsburgh's Little Italy. The word Pyszne, as far as I can guess, means something like "Yummy." Unfortunately, no one, not even the Pittsburghers, can pronounce it properly, and when tourists come to the city, as they often do, they show up in Bloomfield expecting Italian food in all the restaurants, even though Bloomfield hasn’t been Pittsburgh’s Little Italy in at least sixty years, and the city as a whole is way more diverse than it used to be. (My little sister Eliza likes to illustrate this by telling people that we’re Irish—as if that’s some sort of badge of diversity, equity, and inclusion—and I have to quickly point out that there are a great deal of East Asian, South Asian, and Middle Eastern families here as well.)

At any rate, tourists to the city don’t know this, and so they walk into a place called Pyszne (which, to me, sounds very obviously not Italian), and they still try to order pasta with meatballs and red sauce. And then, when someone (say, a timid waitress) tries to tell them that, no, ma'am, we don't serve ricotta-stuffed tortellini here, because this is a Polish restaurant, they often begin ranting about how immigrants are taking over our country, and that all they want is a nice authentic Italian dinner.

Unfortunately for me, I suck at being a waitress, even though I’ve worked at Pyszne since my senior year of high school, about six years ago. Despite myself, I am fundamentally unable to refuse to serve pasta, even though it’s not on the menu.

Today, it’s a sunny Tuesday in September, eighty degrees, without a cloud in the sky. Days like this make me sick. It’s seasonally incorrect, too bright and blinding, and everyone has so much audacity. A party of two middle-aged couples has settled themselves into the corner booth, and when I greet them politely with the spiel we have to rattle off for each new party: “Hello, and welcome to Pyszne, the only Polish restaurant in Pittsburgh’s Little Italy, my name is Helen and I’ll be your server, can I get everyone started with drinks?” they reply with, “We’re having trouble finding the pasta options,” and here we go again. I try to politely guide them to look at our actual menus, and they insist that they want meatballs and red sauce (one of the women specifically wants “big meatballs,” and says so over and over again, which is somewhat concerning to me), and when I try to explain we don’t make meatballs and red sauce, or pasta, because this is a Polish restaurant, and the closest I can do is halusky (noodles fried with onions and cabbage) or pierogies (dumplings filled with potatoes and cheese), they give me tight smiles and ask for the manager.

And here’s the thing: technically, I am the manager. There isn’t really a hierarchy at Pyszne; we all work for Stan, the owner. But I’ve been here longer than anyone except Phil, the cook. I’ve definitely been here longer than any of the other waitresses. I know this place inside and out; I’ve led shifts; I’ve trained a bunch of people; I’ve gotten a few raises. If anyone had the right to be called a manager, it would be me. But when a middle-aged white woman with brilliantly pearly teeth and a forehead so botoxed it doesn’t even wrinkle gives me a tight smile and asks for the manager because I won’t give her the big meatballs she wants, I completely fold. I can’t do it. I smile and nervously laugh and scribble out an order for meatballs, red sauce, spaghetti, and complimentary garlic bread (I’m a sucker!), and I scurry into the kitchen to tell Phil the bad news.

Phil Petrowski is a grizzled, sixty-something yinzer who smokes like a chimney and swears like a sailor and is also the sweetest guy you’ll ever meet. When I give him the order, he sighs and looks at me with mingled sympathy and irritation. “Didn’t you tell ‘em, hun?” he says, though he knows the answer. I did tell them we don’t serve any of these foods, but I’m too much of a wuss to follow through on it.

“You need to be more assertive,” he says to me, a statement he makes every day. “They wanted to speak to the manager,” I say. “And I wasn’t about to let them talk to Stan!” For as annoying as it is to deal with customers on my own, it’s ten times more annoying to have Stan deal with them. Stan is a “the customer is always right” sort of boss, even when the customer is very, very wrong. Stan will do anything a customer asks, even at the expense of his own business and his own employees. If a patron wanted a Cirque-de-Soleil show during the lunch rush, Stan would hand out tights for all of us.

Phil nods, understanding this. “Good call. He’d have promised them corned beef and cabbage, and a French baguette to boot.” Stan, we suspect, is the originator of Pyszne serving off-menu foods. I have a theory that he put together a secret menu that somehow all the customers know about, but he never told us.

Phil’s face looks thoughtful, and a little red in the steam coming off the pots on the stove. He takes a drag on his cigarette, which makes me notice, well, that he has a cigarette.

“Phil!” I cry. “No smoking in the kitchen! It’s a health code violation!” I reach over and yank it from his hand, throwing it on the floor and crushing it under my rubber-soled shoe. This is a statement I make to him every day. I feel strongly about food safety, even if Stan does have an arrangement with the health inspector.

Unfazed, Phil nods. “Assertive, yes,” he says. “Be more like that.” Then he takes the box of Newports from his shirt pocket, pulls out another one, and sticks it in his mouth. “Might as well run and grab sauce and meatballs,” he says after lighting it. “Business is business.”

And there it is: the familiar feeling of loving Phil and hating Phil, of mingled camaraderie and complacency, the confirmation that no one at Pyszne is really in my corner. It’s easier to smile and get the customer what they want, to rush down the street to the corner store for a jar of spaghetti sauce. In the end, the patrons will get their pasta, Stan will get his money, the restaurant will get a four-star Google review ("It would be five, but the waitress wasn't very efficient"), and Phil gets another Newport. What does Helen Murphy get? A two-dollar tip and a scolding for not being assertive enough.

So, I find myself at Anatoli’s, the Italian grocery store on Penn Avenue, trying to remember what brand of spaghetti sauce we usually get. I compare and contrast different packages of frozen meatballs, trying to figure out which ones are big enough. I wonder if Phil can make garlic bread on the fly. And then, I hear a familiar voice in the aisle next to me.

“So, it’s all right to skip lunch then?” I stop and listen. Eliza?

“It's like college classes. You get three skips.” Another voice, a little older. Brattier. “Which looks best on me? Nude or Nude Light?” A third voice. Older, brattier, more nasal.

I creep down the aisle and peer around the corner. There’s Eliza and two girls I’ve never seen before, crouched over the makeup section, all in the blue-and-green St. Bart’s uniforms. I don’t know what surprises me more, that Eliza isn’t in school when she’s supposed to be, that she has friends besides Charlotte and Spencer, or that Anatoli’s has a makeup section.

“You don’t get in trouble, right?” says Eliza. “Because it’s lunch time, so it’s like a free period.”

“Relax,” says the non-nasal girl. “We do this all the time.”

Eliza turns both pink and pale at the same time. “I thought you only get three skips!”

My brain can’t process this. There’s no way Eliza is actually skipping school. She’s only thirteen. How’d she even get out of the building? St. Bart’s is like Fort Knox. I walk down the aisle toward them, but their backs are all to me. I clear my throat. Only Eliza, jumpy, turns around.

“Helen!” she cries.

“Eliza,” I answer. “What’s up?”

“Nothing much.” She attempts a casual pose but goes too far, wrapping her noodle arms around each other until her elbows hyperextend. She exhales and unwraps her arms again, swinging them to her sides.

“Is everything okay?" I ask, hoping that maybe I’m misunderstanding the situation, that perhaps there’s a logical explanation that isn’t my sister is a juvenile delinquent. My heartbeat quickens.

"Yes, yes fine," Eliza answers. “How are you?”

I think through all the possible scenarios. "Did you forget lunch or something?"

"No, I have it."

"Did you need... tampons?" I whisper the last word, because Eliza’s still incredibly embarrassed when the subject of tampons or periods or cramps comes up.

She blushes. "No! No, no, of course not."

"Then what are you here for?" I ask, hoping against hope it’s some other unforeseen emergency.

Eliza’s cheeks are patchy pink; either she’s nervous, or she’s been eating shrimp. I vaguely, wildly hope it was the latter, that she’s having mild anaphylaxis and is here for allergy medicine. But instead, she gestures to where the two girls are still, incredibly, perusing the lipsticks. "We... ahem, they, they wanted lipstick."

Here it is, another familiar feeling: my sister has done something foolish and potentially dangerous, and somehow it must be my fault. The last time I felt this, it was because she left a hair straightener plugged in when we were at Mass, but now the stakes are higher. How many times has she done this before? How many signs did I miss? What else has she been doing? Is this young, innocent, artistic dreamer of a girl just a façade? Do I even know the real Eliza? Is she involved in petty crime? Am I implicated?

I swallow all these worries. "Oh, so the essentials then," I say. This is a crisis now, I realize with a sinking feeling and a more intense numbness working its way up my limbs. My tone is brisk, sarcastic. This is a joke, treat it like a joke, treat it like you know she’s been doing this all along. “You know, we have lipstick at home.” A big collection, one we’ve built together. One of our favorite silly hobbies, because it’s so cheap.

"I know. I'm really sorry, Helen," Eliza says. "We were just goofing around. It's lunch period, anyway."

I look up toward the ceiling, where the original Anatoli, for whom the store was named, hung an ancient dusty clock that still ticks. "It's twelve-thirty," I say. "Your lunch is almost over.”

Eliza blushes again, pink patches working their way across her nose, about to meet in the middle. I look over to the two strange girls, who are now comparing two indiscernible shades of lip gloss. "Who are they?" They don’t even look up.

"My friends."

"I've never seen them."

"You have." Eliza nods frenetically, like an unhinged puppet. "You definitely have.”

"What about Charlotte? Spencer? Where are they?'

"In class."

I look at her, feeling suddenly very tired, at a total loss for what to do.

“What are you doing here?” Eliza says, and in reply I hold up two jars of spaghetti sauce. “Again?” she asks, and I shrug.

“People are especially stupid today,” I say. And I feel like one of them.

She hangs her head. “Just say it.”

“Say what?”

“That I’m in trouble. I’m grounded. Whatever.”

Whatever. I don’t know whatever I should do. This is the question I’ve been dreading, the real reason my chest has felt tighter and tighter with each passing minute. Eliza’s done something foolish and potentially dangerous. She’s put a wrench in the usual schedule, the way things ought to be. And what should I do about it? What’s my response? I don’t know if Eliza is in trouble, if she’s grounded. I don’t know if she should be. I hate that I have to decide whether my sister is in trouble or not. In fact, I hate this whole day. It started with blue skies and racist pasta-loving tourists and has gone downhill ever since.

"We'll talk about it later," I say finally. This is, after all, what parents say on TV. It’s as good a reply as any. It’ll get me through a commercial break, at least. "But get back to class, now."

"Lunch,” she says. Is she seriously correcting me? Now? I fix her with what I hope is a stern look. The look does its job, and Eliza turns away, scurrying out of the store and down the street towards St. Bart’s. I watch her through the window as she flies down the sidewalk in her plaid skirt.

Megan and Sierra, whom I apparently know, who are apparently Eliza’s friends, don’t even notice she has gone.

***

For the rest of the day, I turn over the events at Anatoli’s in my mind. I jump from conclusion to conclusion, from it’s not a big deal that Eliza was out of school for a few minutes, to it’s an enormous deal and means the ruin of civilization as we know it. I’m aware that I am typically prone to this kind of binary thinking, and I work really hard at introducing more nuance into my life. It’s a good attempt, but it pretty much just means I mull things over, searching for that nuance, more than is necessary, or healthy, or helpful.

For the rest of my shift at Pyszne, I’m in a fog of speculation. Has this really been the first time Eliza skipped class, or is this a pattern? Who are these Megan and Jade people? They seemed older; were they influencing or bullying Eliza somehow? Is this an isolated incident of teenage free-spiritedness, or a foretaste of utter rebellion? Was Eliza really shopping for lipsticks, or was she buying drugs? These, of course, are the only possibilities.

Ever since Eliza turned thirteen last April, I’ve been worried about this. Growing up, the two of us were always close. Well, as close as two siblings a decade apart in age can be. Without a mother in the picture, though, we always had a special bond. I was picking her up from preschool and kindergarten as a teen, having movie nights and doing homework together while Dad worked late. And then, when it became just the two of us, things changed, of course. For one thing, I became a lot more exhausted all the time, a new high school graduate with no real plans for college, and no means to make college happen even if I did have plans, nothing but a job at Pyszne and odd jobs cleaning houses in Shadyside.

This is my worry: that I was so tired, and so busy, and so overwhelmed, that Eliza spent her formative preteen years without a solid parental figure in the house. (I am many things, but solid is not one of them.) And yet, even as I blame myself, I remember how it’s always been natural, easygoing, even fun between us. Despite Eliza being naturally more contrary than I will ever be, despite her endless fantastical ideas and chafing against rules and her magical dreams for the future, we’ve always gotten along, in the weird melding of mother/daughter/sister/sister that we are.

But now she’s thirteen. Now, I’m no longer raising just a kid, but a teenager. Next year she’ll be in high school. All the parenting books I’ve pored over for the past five years come back in lightning-like flashes behind my eyes. Teenagers are rebellious, and impossible, and terrifying, and make you hate yourself more than you already do. They are reckless and foolish and stupid, and if you don’t take care to guide them carefully, they’ll end up completely traumatized for the rest of their lives. If TV and the internet are any indication, the young people of today are really going through it. I was her age only ten years ago, but it was a completely different world. Now, not only do I have to keep Eliza safe from your typical fare of drinking, smoking, teen pregnancy, and gang activity but also from catfishing, and cyberbullying, and buying drugs on Instagram.

I’ve done my best to mitigate this so far. I finally caved and got her an iPhone for her birthday (something I definitely didn’t have at thirteen), which has the added perk of easy tracking and parental controls. She protests sometimes, but overall, it’s a win-win. I’ve done my best to be a proactive parent, checking her room every once in a while for any concerning signs, thoughtfully laying ground rules about social events and hangouts with friends, asking her how school went and pressing her to talk to me if she’s upset. A lot of good those measures did me. So now what am I going to do? The real question. What are you supposed to do? What do the books say to do? Should I punish her? Talk to her? Both?

Sometimes I wish I could just be her big sister.

“Doll!” Phil’s voice, like dried hickory, cuts into my thoughts, and I’m brought back to the bustling kitchen of Pyszne, where the lunch rush is just now wearing off, and my shift ends in thirty minutes, and I’ve been absentmindedly filling drinks at the soda machine.

“What?” I answer, looking up in a daze. I know that, as a feminist, I should tell Phil off for calling me things like “doll” and “honey” and “sweetheart.” But he doesn’t mean it in a creepy way. Despite his rough edges, Phil is a bit of a doll himself.

“We’re running low on marinara again,” he says.

“You’re kidding.”

He shrugs. I finish filling the plastic cups with soda and lemonade and balance the tray of drinks against my hip, ice clinking. “Why don’t we have Stan put it on our supply order tonight? We’ll save money if we buy it in bulk.”

Phil waves his hand, dismissive, defeated. “Stan won’t order it, you know. He’ll swear up and down this is a Polish restaurant.”

“Tell him the customer is always right,” I scoff.

“You’re gonna have to start learning how to make marinara sauce!”

I don’t answer him, let his words hit the swinging door as I leave the kitchen for the dining room, and hand out the drinks to my last table of the day. When I come back, Phil is still there, lighting up a cigarette.

“Why don’t you learn to make the sauce, Phil?” I say. “You’re the cook.”

“I don’t make no I’talian food,” he protests. “My mum would be rolling in her grave.” Phil may be a doll, but he’s also an ass. No Pittsburgher, Polish or not, shies away from Italian food. Where would we be without pepperoni rolls and spicy sausage sandwiches? He’s passing this off to me, because he doesn’t want to do it. Because I’m too nice. I’m not assertive enough.

I cross the kitchen in two big steps and swipe the cigarette from him, midpuff. “Health code violation,” I say.