“I have no idea what you’re talking about, and give me that thing.” She snatched her purse, pulled her cigarettes out, put two of them in her mouth and lit them both. Then she handed me one. “And sit down, for Chrissake, you’re making me nervous.”
I sat defeated. I took in a lungful of smoke and coughed it out.
“Life sucks and then you die.” She inhaled and blew her smoke up. “That’s all you need to know. And you know what else? I changed my mind about my funeral. I don’t care anymore; just burn me and throw my ashes in a landfill.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but she cut me off. “I mean it,” she said. “I don’t care.”
My mother’s hand shook as she raised her cigarette to her mouth.
“What about your heels?” I asked.
“Pfft,” she sneered. “You can burn them, too.”
My mother had always believed that somehow, somewhere, there was a life out there that was better than the one we had—all she had to do was find it. But I had never seen her this low.
The streetlight above flickered, and, with a buzz, went out. The scenery around us went black. The only sign of life was the glow from the tips of our cigarettes as we smoked.
CHAPTER SIX
Humility
My mother grew up in foster care. She had a half brother but had no idea where he was or even if he was dead. She didn’t know her father, and her mother died when she was six. If I ever asked her how, she wouldn’t answer. Her eyes would glaze over, her cheeks would flush. After a while she’d pull me into her and say, “We got each other now, that’s all that matters.”
We had no other family—we moved too much to make friends. Besides, where we’d lived you had to watch your back with “friends.” But no matter how torn and tattered or rough around the edges life could be, she was always there with me.
I swallowed and looked at her sitting on the guardrail, stooped and gazing down. Simple logic would never cheer my mother up. I knew her biggest weakness, though: she was squeamish. So I did the only thing that always worked: I rattled off all the most disgusting ways in which our lives could be worse. “We could have flesh-eating bacteria and uncontrollable diarrhea. We could have flesh-eating bacteria, uncontrollable diarrhea, and tapeworm. We could have flesh-eating bacteria, uncontrollable diarrhea, tapeworm, and elephantiasis.”
“Stop!” she finally said. “Okay, okay, let’s just keep going.”
By the time we made it back to Tiny’s, the restaurant was dark. But the bare bulb hanging just inside the gas station still glowed. Mel was there, sitting behind the register reading his paper. He folded the two halves together, then turned the page.
My mother pulled her brush out and ran it through her hair. She bent over and fluffed it upside down. She tossed her head back and when she shook it, her hair bounced in paisley swirls, then settled gently on her shoulders.
“Do I look okay?” she tilted her face in my direction.
A smudge above her eye went all across her forehead.
I stuck my hand in my pocket. “Here.” I pulled out a napkin and wiped it off.
“Anything else?” She moved closer. “Look carefully.” She turned her head side to side and presented each cheek to me. So I wrapped the napkin around my finger and blended in her rouge. Then I traced her mouth and tidied up her lipstick.
“There,” I said. “You’re perfect.”
She sighed a half smile. “No, really.”
“You look gorgeous, Mom.”
“Oh, please.”
“You do. You look like an actress.” She loved it when I said that.
“You really think so?”
It was true. Like in the movies, she looked beautiful, no matter how bad the lighting was.
“Totally.”
My mother shrugged a shoulder, batted her eyes, and, as if to prove my point, gave a bashful little smile just like Meryl Streep would.
A breeze moved through the trees. A fragment of the moon dimpled the cloud above us. My mother pulled her tube top up and expelled one quick breath. “Okay, then,” she said, “let’s go.” With her head held high she took center stage and strutted across the parking lot.
Mel saw us coming. He pulled his glasses off, put his paper down, and stepped out from behind the register.
With me behind her, my mother marched right in, slapped our last five-dollar bill down on the counter, and started talking. She went on and on, the whole story tumbling out about how she’d distracted him and I had only pretended I needed to go to the bathroom. “But we were hungry,” she said, “and I don’t know if you’ve ever been hungry, but it can be blinding. And now my car won’t start.”
There was a rip at the seam of her tube top held together by safety pins. There was a knot in the back of her hair that she’d missed. But she looked Mel in the eyes and she didn’t sound fake. She sounded like herself—strong and human and not ashamed of anything. This was who she really was, but she almost never showed it. “Keep your guard up,” she always told me. “Life, at any moment, will knock you down and kick you in the teeth.”
“Please,” my mother said. “I don’t have much, but I’m a real hard worker, and so is she.” My mother grabbed me and pulled me forward.
Superheroes, I realized, don’t fly or look like Jesus. They drive used Fords like my mother’s and they take their kids with them no matter where they go.
I took my hands out of my jean pockets, pushed my glasses up my nose, stood up straight, and smiled. Mel’s eyes shifted and when he saw me grinning, a piece of him softened.
“You got any waitressing experience?” he asked.
Part Two
CHAPTER SEVEN
Work
It turned out that Peter Pam was Mel’s nephew and she lived in the apartment above the restaurant with Dave. It took us a while to figure out that Dave was not a man but a cat who wore a pink bow at an angle on his head. And Peter Pam spoke Yiddish because her stage character was Jewish, but Peter, the man, was not.
And Mel was not a father after all. “He couldn’t have kids,” Peter Pam whispered, sipping coffee.
We’d spent the night in the car and returned that morning. To help get us back on our feet, Mel was letting my mother work the breakfast shift and he was paying me to wash the dishes. He was giving us a kitchen tour, standing right in front of us, boasting about his grill, but that didn’t keep Peter Pam from talking about him.
She leaned in, holding her coffee mug, pinkie extended. “They couldn’t conceive because of Svetlana’s accident.” She stood up, raised her eyebrows, and nodded.
“Who?” I asked.
Horrified, she drew her hand to her chest and gasped, “Oh my God, nobody’s told you about Svetlana yet?” as if we’d been working there for months.
“This here’s an old dinosaur,” Mel said about his grill, “but it still fires up every day.” He patted the beast, grease-stained and charred, then showed us how to light it. “It’s a beauty of a flame, isn’t it?”
Mel was short and barrel-chested. His fingers were thick and his hands looked as if they could open any jar of pickles or peaches you brought him. His glasses had square plastic frames, the kind that were once in fashion, then went out of fashion, and even though they were back in fashion, on Mel they just looked outdated. He had a sad look in his eyes that never went away, even when he smiled. The roll of fat at the back of his head was deep enough to fit a nickel, and, except for a ring of salt-and-pepper hair, he was bald.
He stepped over to the fire extinguisher hanging on the wall and strained to reach it. “There we go,” he said, finally getting it down. Then he pulled a handkerchief out from his back pocket and, without unfolding it, dabbed at his brow. “This here is how it works: you pull the pin out, and you pull this hose out and aim at the fire . . .”
“He’s always overexplaining things
,” Peter Pam said. “Hey, Unc!” She put her mug down. “You’re losing your audience here,” and she presented us to him with her palms up the way Vanna White does with letters.
“Oh, yeah, well, you get the idea,” he said, and moved on to the walk-in refrigerator.
Svetlana, we finally found out, was Mel’s wife. “Let me tell you something, honeys,” Peter Pam warned. “She was always a bit of a drama queen, but since the quote-unquote accident”—she paused to make air quotes—“left her in a wheelchair, she’s a total bitch. The last thing you ever want to do is try to speak to her.”
Suddenly, Mel stepped out of the refrigerator. “Well, that’s the fridge,” he said. “And that’s everything you need to know about the kitchen.” He wiped his hands together, all finished, and with his glasses still fogged up he pushed open the screen door and walked out.
A few minutes later at seven thirty sharp, the door opened again. A rectangle of light rolled out onto the floor and a woman stepped in.
“Don’t listen to a word this knucklehead tells you,” she said to my mother and me, pointing at Peter Pam. She put her travel mug of coffee down on the counter and walked directly to Peter Pam. “Come here, you big lug.” She pulled Peter Pam down into the crook of her elbow and gave her a noogie. As if she’d been trained exactly what to do, Peter Pam closed her eyes and lowered her head. The back-and-forth slide of her wig was audible.
The woman then pushed Peter Pam to the side and took a bold step in our direction.
“Arlene here.” She introduced herself with one big shake of the hand for each of us. “Mel told me to expect you.”
A long hard life was embedded in the fine netting of wrinkles that traversed Arlene’s face. A scribble of wiry orange hair buzzed about her head. Her eyebrows were penciled in to match. Her forehead sloped directly into the wedge of her nose. Her cheekbones, high and chiseled, were streaked with burnt-orange rouge and her fingernails were bright red. Tall, thin, and all angles, she was like a piece of furniture refinished and stained to look more expensive than it was.
“I’m the head waitress around here. If you got something to ask, I’m the one with the answers.” She pointed and shook her thumb at herself. “And just so you know, I run a tight ship, so you girls better be prepared to work hard.” She stood there and glared, baring her teeth just enough to scare us. But then her face softened. “Ah-ha, ha, ha . . . I got ya!” She tossed her head, exposing her missing back molars. “The last thing we do around here is work hard!” she howled. “You should have seen the look on your faces!” Her laughter abruptly became wheezing and the wheezing turned into a phlegmy cough and before long she was doubled over.
Then, suddenly, she stood erect. Her smile was gone and her face was bright red. Her forehead glistened with sweat and her hair looked as if it was on fire.
“She’s having a hot flash!” Peter Pam declared. “Stand back!” As if she was saving us from a car accident, she threw her arm up and rammed us up against the counter. Arlene narrowly missed us as she stormed by and flung herself into the walk-in refrigerator.
“Thank God I’m not there yet,” Peter Pam sighed.
That first day was a Sunday. The breakfast rush after church was about to begin. I stood at the sink in the ready position like I was waiting for a tennis ball to be served.
Washing dishes was my specialty. I’d worked this job before—at taco joints and Chinese restaurants back in California. I looked older than my age and I’d hustled for work every chance I got. A good dishwasher, I knew, was always hard to find. My policy was that no dish would sit in my sink for more than a second before it got washed, dried, and put away. And all my pots and pans were always spotless.
Mel was greasing up the grill. He wore his baseball cap backwards. tiny’s was stitched in an arc over the bill. When he left the kitchen to pump gas, he’d take his apron off and rotate the cap forward. I’d seem him do that twice already.
“Hey,” he said behind me, “I almost forgot . . .” He pulled out an identical cap from his back pocket, punched it open, and curled up the bill. “Here,” he tossed it to me. “It’s an extra. I found it in my office.”
“Thanks.” I started to put it on.
“It goes backwards,” he instructed, “and loosen up your shoulders.” He rotated his own to show me. I twisted my cap, took a deep breath, and let my shoulders drop.
“That’s it,” he said.
A hand reached through the service window and slapped down the first order. Mel sprang into action. He shoved his glasses on, picked up the order, read it, took his glasses off, and swung them behind him on their string. He clipped the order to the bar above the counter and never referred to it again. He cooked up some home fries, grilled a pound of bacon, cracked a bunch of eggs, and made three complicated omelets faster than any cook I’d ever seen. Once in a while he tossed his spatula up in the air. Catching it by the handle, he’d sling it on the grill like he was playing a set of drums.
He finished the order and tossed the last plate down on the counter. “Order up!” he yelled with operatic bravado. Nobody heard him, so he whistled. A blunt, sharp note shot out through the space between his two front teeth and sliced the air in two.
“It’s in his blood,” Peter Pam remarked when she caught me staring at Mel as he scraped down the grill with long, graceful strokes. “His father was a cook and his granddad cooked for the army, the Pancho Villa War down in Texas. Lugged all his gear around on a mule.”
“Order up!” Mel yelled again. Peter Pam picked up her order and disappeared through the door.
The back wall of the kitchen was lined floor to ceiling with shelves stocked with jars and bottles of ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, and can after can of food—tomato sauce, black beans, pickles, and corn. Under the service window there was a butcher-block counter scarred with shallow knife-width impressions. Pots and pans hung down all over the ceiling and the space was so small, two people couldn’t pass without one stepping aside. But Mel and I moved around each other like players on a court. When I cut behind him at the counter, he just knew to lean forward and let me by. It was amazing how well we worked together.
At the end of the shift, he wadded up his apron. “I tell you one thing,” he said, “you got some serious talent. I never met a dishwasher as good as you.” Then he pitched his apron into the laundry basket like a pro. And I beamed back at him.
Mel let us work again the next night and at the end of it, Arlene walked into the kitchen with a bottle of wine. She set it down on the counter and fished her corkscrew out of her apron pocket. After twisting it in like a pro, she stuck the bottle of wine between her knees. With a loud pop, her upper body spasmed and her arm flew back with the cork on the end of the screw.
“You’re not a bad waitress,” she said, raising her chin toward my mother.
We’d lied about my mother’s waitressing experience. Besides her job at Donut Star, she didn’t have any. But that didn’t matter. My mother was smart, her instincts as honed as a fox’s. She’d watched Arlene’s every move and copied them exactly.
Arlene unscrewed the cork, snapped the corkscrew closed, and shoved it back into her apron. She reached underneath the counter, pulled out two wineglasses, filled them to the top, and held one out for my mother. My mother hesitated. She trusted no one. And you shouldn’t either.
“What’s the matter?” Arlene lifted the glass closer. “You look like a Cheshire cat just caught your tail,” she said, completely botching the metaphor.
Arlene waited there grinning until my mother took the glass.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Trust
It was late by the time my mother and I made it back to the car. Before she settled in her seat, she stretched her leg, reached into her front pocket, and pulled out her tips. A cigarette dangled from her bottom lip. She squinted through a line of smoke as she counted the bills.
&n
bsp; “Where’s yours?” she said, glancing up briefly at me. “Fork it over.” She gestured with her fingers.
I pulled out what Mel had paid me. She took my ball of wrinkled bills and flattened them out on her thigh. “I figured we need about six hundred bucks before we can fix the car and get out of here. We’ll make it the rest of the way to Boston if it’s the last thing I do. One thing I know for sure: you are going to college. With your brains they’ll be lining up to give you a scholarship. Besides, I don’t trust those people back there, especially that Arlene.”
“She seemed nice,” I said.
“Pfft,” she went. “Those are the ones who turn out to be the biggest assholes.” She flicked her cigarette out the window.
“You don’t know that.” In her whole life, she’d never given anyone a chance.
“What do you mean, I don’t know that? Everyone knows that. It’s a universal truth, like ‘Shit happens’ and ‘Life is just one damn thing after another.’ Those are not just stupid sayings, you know. Real geniuses came up with them.”
“Geniuses usually end up killing themselves, which is like walking out of a movie before it’s over, and everyone knows the ending can make a whole story fall into place.”
My mother looked confused, but then her face brightened. “You see,” she said, raising her eyebrows, “right there.” She pointed at me smugly. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. I couldn’t even follow that, that’s how brilliant it was.”
A shadow moved across the dark sky as my mother finished counting our money. In the distance, a possum paused beneath the streetlight. Its tiny little eyes glowed when it looked in our direction. Then it vanished into the woods.
“Wait a minute, that can’t be right,” my mother said. “Turn the light on.” She nodded toward the dome light on the ceiling.
All We Had Page 5
