by Jack Gantos
“Do you have the car keys?” Mom asked. “I need to go shopping for a few things.”
“At a time like this?” Dad yelped, sounding both annoyed and panicky.
“Yes,” she said calmly, “there are a lot of good car sales starting today and I think I should take advantage of the holiday deals. We’re going to need a minivan for little Heinzie and all the baby stuff.”
“But I need you to help,” he pleaded. “This is a ton of work!”
“I won’t be much help throwing up,” she replied, rubbing her tummy and wrinkling up her entire face. “That secret icky sauce has done me in and who knows what it’s doing to the baby.”
“Okay.” He sighed, reached into his pocket, and tossed her the keys. “But take it easy on the sticker price.”
“Don’t worry,” she said airily from over her shoulder as she marched off. “I’ve got a trade-in and a good-karma credit card.”
Outside the front door a line of about a dozen men and women and some kids had gathered.
“Freddy,” Dad commanded, “you start with the burgers but watch it because turkey meat cooks quickly, and I’ll set up the buffet.” He ran to the door to greet the arrivals and I got the grill going and began to deal out turkey burger patties like a pack of cards. From then on, I became a turkey-burger-making machine. Dad had everyone wait at the door for five minutes while he hustled back and forth between the kitchen and the coffee counter, where he set a tub of silverware and napkins, paper plates, and dishes of corn, sweet potatoes, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. He tossed me a plastic bag of sliced buns, and when the first burger was finished I flipped it into the air and caught it on the bottom of the bun. “Do you want fries with that?” I shouted loudly to no one in particular.
“Thanks for reminding me,” Dad said as he dashed by. “I better turn on the Frialator ’cause some folks will want fries. And keep count of how many burgers you cook. That will be our lucky karma number.”
We were lucky that the diner sat only twenty-eight people at a time because we could hardly keep up with them. Dad kept running into the kitchen to get more food while people pitched in to help serve pie and coffee, clear tables, and wash extra silverware. Somehow it all worked out so that as one happy group finished up another hungry group took their place. Maybe Thanksgiving was the real secret sauce of life because no one complained about anything. If there was any such thing as good karma, then Dad was sure to get some. But even if there was no such thing as karma, it didn’t matter because doing something to help other people was far better than receiving good luck—it was giving good luck to people who needed it.
And then something happened that confused me because it was good luck for someone, but bad luck for me. I was grilling burgers and I flipped one onto a bun and turned to serve it to the next person in line when in front of me a bouncy kid, who I thought I had seen before, was wearing a baseball jersey I had definitely seen before.
“Nice shirt,” I said, and, just to make sure, I added, “Let me see the back.”
He twisted his shoulders around.
PIGZA, it read. “Nice name,” I remarked, and felt kinda dead inside.
“Not my name,” he replied. “My dad gave it to me.”
I wanted to say, “My dad took it away from me,” but I didn’t and instead I got all worked up and shouted, “Do you want fries with that?”
“Sure,” he said. “I love fries.”
“Me too,” I replied, “but it’ll take a few minutes.”
“Okay,” he said, “and bring some more ketchup to the table. I love ketchup. Lots and lots of ketchup. Like a really big bottle of ketchup.”
“Yeah,” I said. I quickly went into the back freezer and pulled out a bag of precut fries and tossed an order into the Frialator. When I returned to the grill Dad was serving burgers to the retired war vets waiting in line.
“Where’d you run off to?” he snapped.
“Bathroom,” I replied innocently. “And I washed my hands.”
“Well don’t abandon your post again!” he ordered as he tossed me the spatula and dashed off to clear dirty dishes from a table as a new family waited to take a seat.
I made a few more burgers and got them started, then ran back to check on the fries. They were golden brown so I dumped them onto a plate and grabbed a fresh bottle of ketchup from behind the counter.
“Here you go,” I said to the kid, and set the plate on the table. He was sitting with his mom and two younger twin boys. They must have been brothers because all three were equally skinny and fidgety and had the same baldy haircuts.
“Thanks,” he said, and right away began slapping the bottom of the ketchup bottle with his open palm. When that didn’t loosen it up he began pounding the bottle on the table top, which is what I always do, and suddenly I realized he was the kid I had seen at the school who had to sit in the big time-out chair just as I had to do when I was in special ed. It was like looking at my old troubled past again, where I was constantly punished, and it made me like the kid right away even though he was now pounding the bottle on the table so hard that the silverware jangled and water sloshed out of glasses and people turned in their seats to glare at him as he grunted like a pig each time he slammed the bottle down.
“Hey!” his mom hollered, as she wrestled with the two other boys, who were sword fighting with their finished ears of corn. “Cut it out!”
He stopped pounding the bottle on the table and returned to smacking it with his open hand.
I knew I had to get back to the grill or Dad would growl at me but I just couldn’t take my eyes off that kid. In some odd way I felt like I had become Freddy and I was watching a movie of Joey in action and before I could snap out of it the kid smacked the bottle just right and the ketchup blasted out the opening and hit his plate with a loud splat and sprayed onto everyone at the table.
“Awesome!” yelled one of the twins, pointing at my face. “You look dead!”
A dollop of ketchup had hit me in the forehead and was running down my nose.
“My turn,” the other one said, and they wrestled for the bottle.
The mom lurched forward and reached for the ketchup but was blasted again before she finally snatched the dripping bottle from the kid.
That killed the conversation and I ran off to get them some towels. When I returned she was in the bathroom.
“Sorry,” the kid said, licking the ketchup from his arm as if he were a cat.
“Don’t worry,” I replied. “You want a clean shirt?”
“No way,” he said, “this one tastes good.” He shoved a spot into his mouth and sucked on it.
“Freddy!” Dad hollered. “Get over here.”
I could smell turkey burning. “See you around,” I said to the kid and hustled back to the grill.
“I thought I told you not to get lost,” Dad snarled.
“Sorry,” I replied, and began to flip the burnt burgers into the trash.
“Faster!” he ordered. “Bee-sting fast!”
“Stop it with the bee stuff,” I said. “I’m buzzing around as fast as I can.”
“I think that med patch is slowing you down,” he growled, and his arm jerked toward my shoulder.
“Don’t mess with me,” I shot back, and raised the spatula.
From across the room one of the twins yelled out, “Duck!” as the ketchup bottle came twirling end over end through the air and hit Dad so hard on the back of his head with a loud thunk that I thought he was going to die. His knees buckled, but he didn’t go down. His eyes looked like two shooting stars as he braced himself against the counter. After a moment of standing very still he gathered his strength up and looked mighty angry when he turned, pointed to the kids, and savagely shouted, “You three rascals! Outside! Now!”
“He did it,” the twins said, pointing at their older brother as they scampered for the door.
“I’m innocent!” the kid with the jersey said, and made a dash for the spinning bottle. But he cou
ldn’t quite reach it because at that moment his mom stepped out of the bathroom and as he bent over she hooked a finger through his back belt loop and dragged him toward the exit while she called out an apology to Dad.
“I’m innocent!” the kid protested as he swung back and forth, and then once he was beyond the door I could still hear him crying out, “I’m innocent! I’m innocent!” until he was closed up in a van with the others.
Right after that the mood in the diner changed and everyone seemed to finish their meals at once. Dad just sat on a stool with his shoulders sagging down and his head in his hands. I stood by the front door and as everyone filed past I said, “Happy Thanksgiving from the Beehive,” and I gave them a ten-percent-off coupon for our Grand Opening, whenever that was. When the last person was gone I quickly flicked off the lights and hung the CLOSED sign in the front window.
“My head is killing me,” Dad moaned.
“Now you know how I felt,” I said.
I got some ice from the freezer and wrapped it in a dish towel and brought it to him.
He held it against the back of his head. “I hope that flying bottle didn’t undo all the good karma we earned,” he sighed, sounding worried.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “It was an accident.”
“Maybe,” he speculated. “But everything happens for a reason.”
“You’ll know for sure if it was good or bad when you play the lottery,” I said, and rested the side of my face on the table. I was exhausted.
“How many burgers did you serve?” he asked.
“I counted a hundred and thirty-seven,” I replied, guessing a bit.
“Make that one hundred and thirty-eight,” he added as he turned on a hanging lamp and plucked a pen from his pocket.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Dick came to the back door and I gave him a burger while you were chatting with those wild kids,” he explained.
“Why didn’t he come in?” I asked.
“’Cause he stole from me,” he said harshly. “After the rewedding I loaned him some money and he never paid me back, so he’s not exactly welcome.”
“But if you forgive him that would be good karma,” I pointed out.
“Today’s karma was about food,” he said bluntly. “If he wants forgiveness I told him to come back with the cash.”
Even though I was tired I knew that wasn’t true. Dad could pay me all he wanted but he couldn’t buy forgiveness. That came from the heart.
“You should be nicer to him,” I whispered. “He made a mistake. We all do.”
Dad reached over and put his hand on my head. “You’re right,” he said, stroking my hair. “I’m just mad at him. But I’ll get over it and we’ll work it out.”
“That’ll bring you mega karma,” I whispered with my voice trailing off. I closed my eyes, and the last thing I remember was Dad’s frantic scratching on a piece of paper as he mumbled numbers to himself. “Two hundred ears of corn … a hundred and fifty sweet potatoes … ten gallons of cranberry sauce …”
I don’t know how much time had passed, but I was asleep when Mom drove up in her new minivan and honked the horn. I opened my eyes and Dad was still working on his numbers.
“Can we clean up tomorrow?” I asked, yawning.
“Better than that,” he replied, and tapped on his list of numbers. “Once I play these winners I think I’ll just have this diner towed away. It will be a lot easier to junk it than clean it. Besides,” he said, looking around, “I don’t know how much more of this cleaning and cooking I can take.”
We went out to inspect Mom’s new minivan, which was bright yellow with a black interior. “Anyone want to buzz off for dinner?” Mom asked. “I’ll treat.”
We piled in and drove to the Chinese Dragon Buffet, but instead of eating inside the restaurant we got the food to go and sat in the minivan and smelled the new car smell while we watched a movie on the minivan’s DVD player. That was the best Thanksgiving dinner I’d ever had.
9
GRANNY’S COMET
I had been collecting cigarette butts for some time because I was looking forward to visiting my grandmother’s grave. She died a year ago after fifty years of smoking what she figured was fifty thousand packs of cigarettes, enough that if you stacked the cigarettes end to end you would have a cigarette tower over sixty-eight miles high so that if you climbed up and sat on top of it you would actually be in outer space breathing from a tank of oxygen—and that’s how she ended her life, breathing out of a tank of oxygen, but instead of being in outer space looking down at me she is underground looking up at me. Still, I’d rather have her here on earth than have to search the universe through a telescope as if she were a comet exhaling a little trail of cigarette smoke across the starry sky. Once, I was watching TV and they showed an aerial view of a forest fire raging out of control on either side of a highway and I yelled toward the kitchen where she was cooking, “Come here quick and see what your lungs look like!”
She glanced at the flames on the TV then glared down at me. “That’s what your bottom is going to feel like when I smack you with this frying pan.”
She never took criticism well, but I loved her and wanted to do something special, so that’s why I collected the cigarette butts and bottle caps and bits of foil plus I had found a spray can of silver paint in the diner tool closet. I figured it might work like spray-on tinsel so I added it to my bag of supplies, which also included a big tube of Super Glue.
It was sad that Granny was dead but I was happy with my tombstone plan as I walked the few miles from the diner down highway 30 toward St. Mary’s Cemetery, which was right behind our old house where I had hit my head.
Tall Amish buggies clip-clopped by me like wooden outhouses on wagon wheels. I waved to the people sitting bundled up inside and they waved and smiled back, which was nice because I had a huge wool knit Christmas cap stretched down over my ears so my head was the shape of an enormous acorn. They could have pointed and laughed at me but they didn’t because they were Amish, which meant they were always polite. Although the other day Dad pointed at some Amish kids downtown who were staring at a really fancy car. “The young ones can’t always live up to being Amish,” he said. “There is a bunch of them that have secret apartments and cars and go out drinking and looking for non-Amish girlfriends. You can be trapped inside your own skin and sometimes you just want to rip it off and be someone different.”
Even though he was talking about them, I knew he was really talking about himself. He always seemed to be two people at once and I wasn’t sure why. But maybe it was like Mom had said, with forgiveness you can breathe easy inside your own skin. Without it, you are always trying to be someone else.
A line of cars had gotten stuck behind the slow-moving Amish buggies that clogged up the road. The car drivers kept gassing their vehicles forward then falling back, then lurching forward again, then back. I waved to them, too, but they didn’t look very happy. They wanted to speed up and leave me far behind and that reminded me of Charles, who wanted me to leave Joey behind at the speed of light. But becoming Freddy wasn’t so easy, and it was just going to take one step at a time like the steady clip-clop trotting of the horses. That is one reason I was looking forward to sitting by Granny’s grave and having a private chat with her. It had been a long time since I heard her voice in my mind, and with all the pressure on me to “forgive and forget” I thought she would come up with some good advice.
Dad had given me some time off even though it had been a week after Thanksgiving and I had cleaned every square inch of the diner. The dogs were still prowling through the outside trash bins for scraps and El Gordo even got his paw stuck in the ketchup bottle that smacked Dad’s head. I had to pour cooking oil around the opening to wiggle his leg out. The only place it was messy was around Dad’s desk. The floor was littered with ripped-up mega-lottery tickets and loser scratch cards. Each time the kitchen door swung open the paper fluttered up like spooked
butterflies then settled down again.
“Are we ever going to have our grand opening?” I asked him one morning after a couple days of doing nothing but watching the Home Shopping Network with Mom and waiting for the mail to deliver her purchases.
“That plan is on hold,” he said in a distracted voice as he punched numbers into his calculator. “I could work in this diner forever and not make a pot of beans, or I could put my energy into the lottery and make a pot of gold. And believe me, I’d rather go for the gold!”
“So, how is the gold stacking up?” I asked, thinking that the more he had the more we had.
“Well, after I earned all that good karma,” he said proudly, “I played a combination of the number of people we served with the date that Mom says the doctor gave us for Heinzie’s birth. But they were all losers.”
For a moment the expression on his face was so sad I had to look away.
“But it was my fault,” he said, perking up. “I had been thinking too small and only hoping for a regular payoff. Now I figure once I start aiming for the mega jackpot and get a winner, then we can retire in style for the rest of our lives.”
“Can we retire to Disney World?” I asked. “I’d really love to live in Snow White’s castle and be the eighth dwarf. You could call me Zippy, the dwarf who gets things done.”
“I’m thinking more about a castle in Miami Beach,” he said firmly, “where you would be Freddy the houseboy and call me Sir Charles and do everything I tell you to do.”
“What’s a houseboy?” I asked.
“A boy who won’t leave the house and go play with his imaginary friends,” he said, sounding unhappy with me.
“Am I bugging you?” I asked because his patience seemed a bit thin. “If I am on your nerves maybe I can just disappear?”
“Help yourself,” he said without a fuss. “There is nothing to do around here unless you want to snake out the toilet. The place is beginning to smell.”
“I already cleaned it yesterday,” I said.
“Well, this morning I was flushing down a bag of lottery scratch tickets and it got stopped up,” he said, and shrugged.
