She re-counted the bills out loud. “A hundred and fifty. That’s pretty good.”
“Add that to the hundred we made yesterday and we’ve made two fifty already,” I said.
She turned to me. “Oh my God. You’re right.” My mother never thought beyond the present day, so my math astonished her.
She counted the money a third time and was still musing to herself when my eyes began to close. She took a breath and finally noticed I was nodding off. She reached over, reclined my seat, then ran her hand across my bangs and kissed me gently on the forehead.
The next morning, I woke up with a start. The car was moving. We were going backwards at an angle. I gripped the dashboard and glanced over at my mother. She looked carsick. Her face was white. She sat upright in her seat.
We were being towed.
“What if they don’t know we’re in here?” I asked.
The thought sent my mother into panic. She leaned on the horn. I reached over and helped her.
In the movie of my life, she and I live fast and hard and when we die, we die together. Like Thelma and Louise sailing off a cliff. Or Bonnie and Clyde, gunned down as we run across a parking lot. But I never imagined we’d go like this. Not in a fiery car crash or a shoot-out, but in one anticlimactic act in a dingy scrap yard where we’d be crushed to death in our Ford.
Abruptly the truck pulled off the road and stopped. We backed off the horn. A shower of dirt pinged across the hood and a cloud of dust drifted through the windows. Then the car began to lower. It bounced when the tires finally hit the ground.
Footsteps headed in my direction. My door creaked open. Sunlight filled the car and gave the dust a blinding glare.
The air slowly cleared, and when I saw Mel standing there, the bill of his cap grazed with dirt, I knew our luck had changed. I could feel it in my bones.
“Life is shit.” “We’re all fucked.” “People are assholes.” These were a few more of my mother’s favorite sayings. But Mel was kind to us. He didn’t look at my mother the way men usually did. Instead he offered her a job. And me—he said he’d hire me any day of the week. I was so good at washing dishes, he gave me a dollar raise on the spot.
My mother didn’t trust him at first. But then he replaced our battery and hardly charged us. And for fifty bucks a week, he rented us a room. It was a small space in the back of the gas station but it had everything we needed: a bed, a bathroom, and a microwave.
A whole week passed. He went on respecting her and being nice to me. And except for the occasional shove she might give you on her way to the refrigerator with a hot flash, Arlene was good to work for.
The river that ran through Fat River wasn’t really fat anymore. It was more of a thinnish stream. Along its bank, in an old mill building, a company had once manufactured metal fasteners: screws, bolts, nuts and rivets. It employed the whole town. Crumbs and curlicues of extruded metal could still be found lodged in the crevices of sidewalks and between bricks. But the building that used to house the factory now sat deserted. It groaned when it was cold and sighed when it was hot, and sometimes it heaved and tossed a piece of itself into the dwindling creek. Peter Pam told us that people used to gather on the bank to see what had been lost of it, but now the building just slowly fell apart on its own.
In the nineties, Fat River tried and failed to reinvent itself as a tourist town. Tiny’s, which was located less than two miles from the center on Route 6, was named after Tiny Irene. She had been one of the Munchkins standing in the crowd when Dorothy landed in Oz. But unless you watched the original, you wouldn’t see her because she’d been cropped out when they resized the movie for TV. She was born in Fat River and even though she’d only lived there until she was five, no other place had claimed her, so the town of Fat River took her as its own. They erected a plaque in front of the house where she used to live and the merchants started selling T-shirts and coffee mugs with Tiny Irene’s picture on them. According to Peter Pam, the design of these products was flawed. Nobody thought to pose her standing next to something for scale. “She just looked like a regular person. Nothing about her said, ‘Munchkin,’ ” Peter Pam explained. So the souvenirs never sold. There were still some traces of Tiny Irene trinkets, but you had to look closely for them. They were pushed back on shelves, dusty and faded.
Seven years ago, a plastic tubing company set up shop fifty miles north of town, and last year, one town over, Walmart moved in.
Tiny’s was made up of regular customers—people who lived in Fat River and worked at one of those companies. They came and left like clockwork. One guy, Bobby, worked for the town of Fat River. According to Arlene, this meant he did nothing. He did seem to be at Tiny’s a lot.
Once, after the breakfast rush, I was stacking coffee mugs on the shelves below the counter. Arlene was leaning up against the wall behind me, filing her nails. Bobby was sitting in my mother’s booth, still waiting for his food. He raised his empty coffee mug and signaled my mother for more. She grabbed the pot behind her, stepped around the counter, reached over his table, and poured him a cup. When she walked away, he tapped her on the ass and the sh, sh, sh of Arlene’s emery board suddenly stopped. I turned around. She twisted her mouth and narrowed her eyes. She took her forefinger and thumb and pulled the sweat off her upper lip.
“Order up,” Mel shouted. Arlene jammed her emery board into her apron pocket and pushed herself off the wall. It was my mother’s order, Bobby’s scrambled eggs and hash browns, but Arlene picked it up. She strolled out from behind the counter and in one perfectly orchestrated move, nudged my mother out of the way and tossed Bobby’s plate down in front of him.
“Watch yourself, big boy,” Arlene snarled. She was the first person I ever knew who could take down a grown man with a single short sentence. Bobby looked mortified, like he’d just peed his pants.
“Remember, I know your wife.” Arlene had an on-again, off-again cheat for a husband. According to Peter Pam, Arlene had taken him back and kicked him out a thousand times over.
“And don’t be so cheap with your tip, either.” Arlene stuck her head in the air and pranced off.
“You don’t need to take shit from anyone,” Arlene had said to my mother. She lorded over the restaurant and protected her staff and I could tell it made my mother feel good. She sashayed away from Bobby’s table, looked over her shoulder, and grinned at him all smug.
My mother couldn’t help but like Arlene. They both smoked Camels and loved Wheel of Fortune. Mel had disappeared one day into the basement of Tiny’s with Phil’s old TV and emerged with it working better than ever. It now sat on the stainless-steel counter by the grill and every afternoon, Arlene and my mother would catch bits of the show while their customers waited.
And like my mother, Arlene wasn’t afraid to tell anyone to fuck off if she had to. And she used that word almost more than my mother did. Arlene hawked the k out with a fierce staccato, infusing the word with sharpness. My mother pronounced fuck as if it were Yiddish—with a breathy, phlegmy, exasperated tone. Fhhhhuuuuuuk. The word itself seemed to bind them together. In no time, the two of them were standing, each with a knee bent against the wall, hissing a form of the word back and forth, using it to describe everything: the customers, the work, the weather.
“You can have the whole fucking lot,” Arlene said to my mother about men. It was the last Friday in June. The restaurant was empty. My mother and Arlene were standing up against the wall. “I’m through with them!” When Arlene was off again with her husband like she currently was, complaining about men was her favorite thing to do.
Mel suddenly appeared from the kitchen without his baseball cap, smelling of cologne, and Arlene stopped talking. She watched him leave through the front door and back out of his parking space. When his tailgate disappeared around the bend, Peter Pam burst headlong through the kitchen doors.
“I can’t believe we almost forgo
t!” Arlene said.
And the two of them sprang into action.
Arlene pulled out a white tablecloth from under the counter and handed it to me. “Here. Go put that on the table by the window over there. And you,” she said to my mother, “get some fresh bread and butter.” Peter Pam walked around and spritzed the air with pine-scented air freshener. Arlene turned down the lights and set the music to smooth jazz. Everything was done in such a flurry, it took them a while to tell us what all the commotion was about: Svetlana was coming. Once a month, Mel picked her up and brought her back for an early dinner. And apparently she liked things just so.
It took twenty-three minutes for Mel to return with her. Arlene and Peter Pam knew this exactly because the minute before they arrived, we were instructed to put on clean aprons and stand behind the counter. Two seconds later, Mel pulled up to the restaurant.
Peter Pam and Arlene talked about Svetlana nonstop. Some of their most heated conversations were about her accident.
When Svetlana was young, she was an aspiring Olympic gymnast. But just before the trials she took a tumble down a flight of stairs and twisted her knee. According to Peter Pam, the injured knee sent her into a depression so deep that she threw herself in front of the truck on purpose. Her “accident” was no “accident” at all.
According to Arlene, she’d landed on her feet at the bottom of the stairs and a squirrel had caused the truck to swerve and hit her. As evidence, she’d cite the dead one they found plastered to the grill of the truck when they pulled it from the water where it had skidded off the bridge. But Peter Pam would point out there were no skid marks. They’d debate the time of day, the weather conditions, and the angle of the truck where it landed in the river, each building evidence to support their arguments. The only thing Peter Pam and Arlene agreed about on the topic of Svetlana was that she was mean to Mel.
“He treats her like a queen and she barely looks at him,” Arlene said.
“Mm-hm, that’s right,” Peter Pam nodded, as if this were church gospel.
“Why he hasn’t wheeled her off and left her somewhere, I’ll never know,” Arlene continued.
But just watching him, I could tell that no one had a sense of duty quite like Mel.
He got out of his truck, walked around, and opened the passenger door. When he ducked into the car, I held my breath and watched as he lifted this mythical creature out.
Svetlana was much younger than Mel. She was small and delicate and looked weightless draped in his arms. With an air of grace and drama, her fuchsia scarf grazed the ground. Mel carried her across the parking lot as if he were her knight and she his Russian ballerina.
“Whatever you do, don’t make eye contact with her, she hates that,” Arlene whispered to us as Mel came through the door.
Mel gently placed Svetlana in the chair facing the window. He settled her at the table, unfolded her napkin, and spread it on her lap. Then he made his way to the kitchen, put his apron on, rotated his cap backwards, and cooked for her. When he was done, he sat with her and watched her eat. She didn’t look at him and he didn’t speak to her.
At the end of her meal, he carried her out, then lowered and placed her in the seat of his truck. And before he shut her door, he straightened her scarf and kissed her on the forehead. It was spellbinding to watch them together.
“I had no idea men like him existed, did you?” my mother whispered.
“No,” I breathed.
“He’s a good one,” Peter Pam agreed, overhearing us.
“Why do all the bitchy girls get the nice guys?” Arlene asked, throwing her towel down and walking off. “For once in my life, I’d like to know.”
CHAPTER NINE
Home
Fat River wasn’t much of a town. It had a hardware store, a gas station, a liquor store, and a bakery that was never open. It was not the sort of place my mother and I would ever live, but six weeks went by and my mother’s tips remained good. Her jaw muscles relaxed and her shoulders dropped. For the first time in a long time she and I were saving money. In early August, when we discovered we had enough to rent our own place, my mother finally agreed to stay.
The only realtor in town, Frank O’Malley, worked and lived in a small space above the liquor store on Main Street. It was a Saturday when we drove to his office. We went to the back and up a flight of stairs like he told us to. My mother knocked on the door, but his TV was blaring and he couldn’t hear us. She opened the door, stuck her head in, and yelled hello, but nothing happened, so we finally just went in.
The office was dark. A layer of dirt diffused the light from the skylight. A brownish hue languished in the air. His desk was large and oak. Two tattered old leather chairs sat at slight angles facing it.
My mother yelled hello again and the volume on the TV finally went down. A few minutes later, the wall of heavy curtains behind his desk parted and Frank O’Malley appeared.
“I didn’t hear ya,” he barked with an Irish accent.
He was a sturdy, graying redheaded man. Wires of hair sprouted off him in all directions, from his eyebrows, his ears, his temples. A fine tangle of red capillaries colonized the tip of his bulbous nose.
“I’ve just the place for ya,” he said when we explained what we were looking for. “It’d suit ya right down to the ground. And I’d be obliged if ya took it off my hands.”
He started going on about the owners and looking for the keys. The house, he explained, ducking behind his desk, checking all the drawers, was owned by the children of the family who originally owned it. Never a good thing, he stood up red-faced and told us. One of the siblings, he said, opening and closing drawers again, would call him and say they were going to sell it, then another would call and tell him, no they weren’t. And it went on like that until he’d spoken to nearly all eight of them. As a result the house had been vacant for years. But our timing, he told us, was perfect. The family had taken a final vote, and for once a majority decided to keep it. Just last week, they’d put it up for rent.
Normally a long-winded story like this would bore me, but I could never resist the lilt of an Irish accent. And his was like music to my ears.
We had waited a lifetime for this. And here it was: me and my mother together making enough money to rent a decent place and pay our bills.
“Ah!” Frank O’Malley stood up with the keys in his hand. “I knew I had these bloody things in here somewhere.”
The house was at the end of a dead-end in a cluster of prefabs and double-wides scattered like dice. Ours was the smallest on the street. A tiny one-bedroom built on a patch of earth that wasn’t level, the house leaned a little to the left. The road wasn’t paved either. It was gravel, and in some places, just dirt. There were overgrown shrubs under the windows and a pant leg of ivy grew up the trunk of an old oak out front. The house had light-blue aluminum siding so faded that parts of it looked white. But we fell in love with it right away. It was fully furnished. There was a couch to the left as you walked in, and to the right, in the front window, a table and two chairs. And there was a color TV at the foot of the bed, which was awesome because TV in bed was our favorite.
The sun was high and bright the day we moved in. The sky was clear and its color seemed deeper and richer than ever, like a million different blues mixed into one.
“After you, madame,” my mother said at the front gate. She bowed and pantomimed me forward. We could not believe our luck. We’d arrived at a place called home, and we had gotten there together.
The gate was freestanding and wobbly. You had to pick it up on its hinges to open and close it. There was no fence attached; it would have been easy to walk around it. But on the day we moved in, we made a big deal about walking through it.
“Oh, no, please, after you,” I insisted, mimicking her.
We went back and forth like that for a few minutes. I can’t remember who finally e
ntered first, but I do remember this:
The gate creaked and clicked when it closed and this seemed to set a whole world in motion. In the tree above, a mourning dove twittered away, leaves scattered, church bells rang in the distance.
“Yoo-hoo!” a voice called behind us.
When we turned, a woman was there, standing inside the gate as if she’d been lowered into place from above.
“Hi!” she chirped. “I’m Patti with an i.”
Patti with an i looked to be around twenty-five. She wore tight jeans and a pair of red flats. Her eyes were heavily outlined with blue liner, and a high ponytail erupted from the top of her head in a celebration of hair, like fireworks. She stood in the middle of the walkway, holding a plateful of brownies on the palm of her hand like a waitress.
“I live over there with my husband and kids.” She rotated with her plate, pointing kitty-corner across the street to a place that had all kinds of Big Wheels and scooters out front.
As she turned to face us again, the door to Patti’s house flew open and a gaggle of kids—maybe three or four of them—spilled out. One of them ran across the street and plowed into her but she didn’t seem to notice. She swayed like a pine tree and when she settled back down, her ponytail recovered to the top of her head. Somehow, she’d kept the platter of brownies perfectly still.
Another door across the street opened. Patti’s next-door neighbor stepped out of her house. Behind her, a little dog jumped back and forth in the window, yapping at regular intervals. “That’s Pancake,” Patti explained. “He’s a six-pound Chihuahua who acts like he weighs eighty. If it wasn’t for the funny look on his face, he might actually be frightening.” Even from across the street, I could see the dog’s pink tongue hanging out the side of his mouth.
“I can’t say that about his owner, Miss Frankfurt. Now, she’s scary.”
I looked over at the woman descending her front steps. Wearing a beige housedress, she was set low to the ground and bottom heavy like a butternut squash.
All We Had Page 6
