by Anne Pfeffer
##
It turned out that, to get our power back, we’d have to pay not only our past due bills, but a whopping penalty fee. “That’s why I never paid it,” Mom said.
I sighed, thinking if she’d been on top of this, we wouldn’t have owed the fee to begin with. “I can’t pay this right now either,” I said. “We’ll get too far behind on the rent.”
She chewed on her lip. “But Travis, no light?”
“No hot water either.” We stared at each other, neither of us able to hide how scared we were.
“Hey, it’s better than losing the apartment, right? We’ll light candles. And take cold showers.” I tried to sound brave as I said it, even though my mind was shouting at her, why don’t you do something? What’s wrong with you?
Three days’ notice. Three days’ notice.
I went to bed that night hearing the words over and over in my head.
Proposition
On break from work the next morning, I sat in the shade under a tree in my normal state of total filth. At least I had a jug of cold water. I poured some over my head, like an animal at a watering hole.
My cell rang. I couldn’t place the number.
“Travis? It’s Zoey again.”
“Oh. Hi.” I found myself straightening up and running a hand though my hair. Kat must have decided to see me. Awesome. Although I would have thought she’d call me herself.
“Kat asked you to call me?”
“Sorry. No.”
“So … you’re the one calling me then?” I asked cautiously. Girls called me all the time, but not usually the really straight-laced ones, like Zoey. My mind rapidly sorted through visions of her beautiful hair, little pink mouth, and what was most likely a slammin’ body under those big t-shirts.
“Good conclusion, Sherlock.” Her voice held a smile. “You told Kat you wanted a job working over the lunch hour. Well, the Community Center just listed one. I thought you might be interested.”
“Really? What is it?” I couldn’t believe my luck. A possible job and, all of a sudden, the chance to see Kat again. Maybe she’d come on a temp assignment.
“We operate a soup kitchen from noon to two. The thing is, it’s a volunteer position. But you get a free lunch out of the deal.”
That was not gonna cut it. Although working for a free lunch was better than what I was doing now. I could see our empty kitchen cabinets, the few packets of Saltines lying there. And now, no power to run the oven or refrigerator. An idea came to me.
“How do I... would I have to interview?”
“No. I can get you a job on kitchen crew.”
“How?”
A beat. “Actually, I’m in charge of it now. I got promoted from the After School program.”
A smile started to creep across my face. “Oh, so you’d be, like, my boss?”
“Yes.” Her voice turned crisp and playful. “You’d have to do everything I said.”
“I dunno know, Zoey,” I drawled. “I’m not very obedient.”
“Oh, well, too bad then. You’ll have to accept one of your many other job offers.”
I hesitated. It totally sucked that I had to ask this question.
“Listen, I could take the job. But I can’t afford to work for free.” I took a deep breath. “I’d be willing to work for food. Two lunches and two dinners a day. For me and my mother. And food on Friday for the weekend.”
She was silent for a long moment. Then she said, her voice lower and softer, “The Community Center gives food away to anyone who needs it. You don’t have to work for it, Travis.”
“Yes, I do! Those are my terms. I’ll work for the food.” I was glad this was over the phone, so she couldn’t see my burning red face. I wanted to throw the phone against one of these big boulders on the hill and watch it splinter apart.
“Done,” she said. “You’ve got a deal.”
“Oh, and another thing.” Why did this have to suck so much? I started to speak, then stopped.
“What?” She said it quietly.
“It’s just that, I have this job clearing brush in the morning. So, to be... well... I’d need to use the shower facility at the Center. You know, before I started work.”
“No problem.” She made it sound like every employee showed up dirty for work, asking to use the showers. “It’s a public facility, you know.”
“Still, thanks.”
“Monday through Friday. Start tomorrow.”
Tree Kicker
Zoey and I stood in the dining room at the community center, with its vinyl floor and green painted walls and disgusting swiss cheese ceilings. It helped that a radio played Spanish music, and that the staff, who seemed to know each other, all laughed and argued in a friendly way.
The thought of Kat floated through my head. I didn’t see her, though, and something told me that asking Zoey about her would not be a smooth move.
The Center dining room was open from nine to two. Zoey supervised both the morning volunteers, who did food prep, and the volunteers on my shift, which was lunch. We showed up at noon, helped with set-up for half an hour, served lunch from twelve thirty to one thirty, then spent a half hour on clean-up.
“It’s a small program these days,” Zoey said, “because the city had to cut back its funding. Budget constraints.”
I knew all about budget constraints. It figured cities had them too.
She handed me a big spoon and pointed me toward a tray of macaroni and cheese. “Whenever a food tray’s close to empty,” she said, “take it into the kitchen for a new one. You need to stay on top of that, because you’ll be doing all the tray running.”
“To what do I owe this honor?”
“I needed a heavy lifter. That’s why I called you.” Zoey smiled sweetly at me and patted my bicep.
“You obviously noticed my strong, muscular frame.” I smirked back at her.
“I noticed you were the only male within a hundred yards of this place, and you needed a job at the lunch hour.”
It was true that I was the only guy she had. All the other volunteers were girls. I could feel myself enter flirting mode. For the first time in a while, I felt like I’d moved up in the world just a notch, rather than down. Instead of spending my four hour lunches on a hot, filthy hillside with Exhibits One and Two from the Dumb and Dumber Museum, I was freshly showered and working in air-conditioned comfort. And surrounded by women. A couple of them whispered to each other and smiled over at me.
I raised a diabolical eyebrow. “So you’re exploiting me?”
“Yep.” She sounded pleased with herself. Her gray eyes warmed with laughter and her little pink mouth curved up in a way that suddenly struck me as highly kissable.
“You’re pretty cute when you abuse your power.”
Zoey’s face was hard to read. “I’m always cute, Travis.” She moved off, her ponytail swinging.
Damn. I had to give her props for getting in the last word. I stood between two girls at a serving table while a line of people walked in front of the table with their trays. I tried to keep my face from wrinkling at the smell of unwashed bodies. Most of the diners were street people with rough, reddened skin, weirdly layered assortments of clothes, and bags of belongings hanging off of every shoulder and elbow.
Guests, Zoey had insisted we call them. We should refer to the weary, hardened people who came to us as our guests. “It’s just nicer that way,” she told the staff.
I spooned out some more mac ‘n cheese.
During the busiest part of lunch, I mainly carried trays back and forth while two of the girls, Charlotte and Terra, served the food. I liked running trays so I didn’t have to talk to the guests.
Frankly, their dirty clothes and blank stares creeped me out. “Many are mentally ill,” Zoey had said. But many of them weren’t, and they had still lost everything. I couldn’t stand to see them there with nowhere to go at night, reduced to grubbing for free food.
Toward the end, I was back on the serving
line. The mac ‘n cheese looked like Day Glo wallpaper paste. With lumps. I plopped a spoonful onto a lady’s plate.
“There you go,” I said, looking up. But my “Have a nice day” faded at the sight of her face, tortured into alligator skin by harsh sunshine and despair. The pale blue eyes, the eyes of a person who could have had a life, had no business being in that dark, leathery face. Her hands were roughened and bleeding in a few places, with horrible, split fingernails.
This would be my mother soon, if I didn’t keep it together for her and me. I kept spooning the food out automatically from the tray to the plates, over and over, except that I’d stopped looking up.
As soon as the lunch service ended, I threw down the spoon and bolted for the exit. Outside the center, in the shade of a tree in the park, I paced back and forth, shaking out my hands a few times, blowing out big lungfuls of air. Pain prickled behind my eyeballs.
I found myself studying the tree. I wanted to punch it, but it seemed like that would hurt, so I kicked it instead. I kicked it again, and then unleashed a hailstorm of hard kicks onto the tree with my heavy boots. It took my punishment without complaint.
“Travis?” Zoey stood a few feet away, her face serious, her forehead crinkled. She had on this little sky blue dress that ended above her knees, and her pale blonde hair flowed back from her face and disappeared behind her shoulders.
I stopped kicking. “Sorry.” Embarrassed again, I bent over, pretending to be winded, leaning my hands on my knees to hide my face from her.
“Not as sorry as that tree.”
I looked up to see her eyes, full of kind humor, crinkle at the corners.
“Yeah, I did kinda kick the shit out of it, didn’t I?” I stood up, feeling disoriented.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” I lied. I didn’t want to talk about it.
In a voice that said, I don’t believe you for a minute, Zoey said, “You wanna take a walk? Get some fresh air?”
“Okay.” I still hadn’t calmed down. All that tree-kicking had gotten me going. Right then, I would have taken on a grove of redwoods.
Zoey blinked a few times, slowly, as if she was thinking hard and trying to understand exactly how I felt. But she didn’t bug me about it or ask questions, which I gave her major points for. She had long eyelashes and perfect curved eyebrows in a dark reddish-gold, a surprise with that platinum hair.
We strolled through the park, scuffing our feet through the few brown leaves that had fallen from the trees, then turned to walk down Main Street. The air was warm from the September heat wave we were still in, and I moved my face up toward the sun. After a minute, I found myself looking around me, catching sight of myself in a store window and thinking I looked just as normal and problem-free as did all the other people passing by. Strange how easy it was to hide your problems. Beside me, Zoey spoke up suddenly.
“The Santa Ana winds are supposed to start up tonight.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“It’s funny,” she said. “I know they cause a lot of fires, but I love them anyway.”
“Me too,” I said.
We stopped for a moment to look in the window of a bookstore.
“They’re so... wild,” Zoey said. “When they really get going at night, and the shutters are banging and the palm trees are almost bent in half, sometimes I go outside and stand in it.”
“I’ve done that too!”
We started walking again, silent now. She took in a deep breath, then said, all in a rush, “Are you all right, Travis?”
Instantly, I withdrew into myself, like a turtle. “Sure. Yeah. What do you mean?”
“You know. The tree.” She shot me a swift look. “You don’t want to talk about it, do you?”
No. Maybe. Probably not. “What do you mean?” Nothing like repeating myself over and over, like an idiot.
“Well, you just seemed upset back there…”
“I wasn’t upset!”
“No, of course not! You seemed …. Pissed off.”
We reached the end of the block and turned a corner. A few trees on this street had actual red leaves, as if we lived in a place with seasons. A little kid, followed by his mom, ran in front of us, forcing us to stop. When Zoey’s eyes met mine, it felt like I was reliving every warm, safe thing that had ever happened to me, every hug from Mom, every cup of hot chocolate.
I hesitated. “Those people in there take some getting used to, don’t they?”
“The guests? Yeah. They’re people who’ve caught every bad break possible, all at the same time. It could happen to a lot of us.”
It was happening to a lot of us. I fought down fear again, thinking of Mom sitting in that apartment with no light or power. Feeling like a world-class loser, I reached for a different subject—any subject other than poor, poor Travis and his shitty little life.
“So you think Kat’ll come by one day?” I blurted.
Zoey’s eyes instantly went flat and emotionless. “She only temps here, and when she does, it’s not usually the meal program. She likes the kids at the After School program better.”
From the little I’d seen of Kat, she didn’t strike me as the sort who would warm up to homeless people. Bad for me, I guessed.
“What about you? How come you transferred to the soup kitchen?”
“It’s great experience for me. I’m going to be a social worker. So I can help people like that.”
“Really? That’s cool. Do you have to go to school for that?” I was grateful to have the subject on safe ground again.
“Yeah. Right now I’m part-time at Perdido Community College. But eventually I’ll go to a four-year school and get my B.A. in social work. And then a master’s.”
“A master’s degree!” Zoey was clearly going places.
As a couple of skateboarders rumbled past so close that my hair blew back, I automatically put a hand on her ribcage and moved her away from them, putting myself in between. They rolled off, two punks maybe fourteen years old, too clueless to have even noticed us.
“Such a gentleman,” she said. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” I’d never been called a gentleman before. “I just figured they’d have a harder time taking me out. I’m bigger than you.”
We grinned at each other. I slowly took my hand off her waist.
“Where are you going to college?” she asked, but before I could answer, her cell rang. She jumped. “Oh, wow, that’s my boyfriend. I’m meeting him now.”
“Okay. I gotta go to work, too.” I walked her back to the Community Center parking lot. “See you tomorrow.”
She had a boyfriend, I thought, as I watched her drive off. I shouldn’t have cared, but it kinda bugged me for some reason. I didn’t know why.
Alligator Lady
That evening Mrs. M prowled the entryway of my building as I walked in. “You are liar!” she hissed at me. “You don’t pay what you promise!”
I stopped. I had finally paid the August rent, but the problem was that all of September was still past due, with October coming up fast. I was falling further and further behind.
Don’t tell me this was it, I thought. The three day notice. Not now, just when I’d finally gotten a second job.
“I have more for you,” I said. Grabbing into my pocket, I fished out the bills I’d saved to buy oil for the car, counted them, my hands shaking with rage, and thrust them at her. “Take this,” I snapped. “It’s everything I have. I’ll be back on Friday with more.”
She’d called me a liar. I could practically feel the steam coming from my nostrils. She knew damn well that I gave her every cent I could spare.
I pushed past her up the stairs to my apartment, thinking I had to get a job on the weekends. I should have done it already, but I was so tired every night, after eight hours of back-breaking labor. I needed time off to recharge.
But I needed a place for us to live more. When I walked into my apartment, Mom greeted me like a kid waiting for Santa Claus. She had
one lit candle on the dining table. She’d spent the whole day at home with no lights, no radio or TV, and dead kitchen appliances. “Did you bring dinner?” She reached for the bag of food from the soup kitchen.
Inside was a meal of macaroni and cheese and cornbread. Starch on starch. Mom looked like she was about to cry with joy. “Travis, this is wonderful! It’s just like magic!”
Actually, no, it wasn’t magic. I’d worked for this food, I thought, feeling a hard line of anger run through me. But more and more, Mom was living in her own world.
“Aren’t you going to eat?” she asked.
“I’m not hungry.” Without another word, I launched myself into the bathroom and took an icy shower in the dark.
##
Zoey patrolled the soup kitchen with a roll of labels and a marker, making name tags for both guests and staff and handing them out. “Let’s all get to know one another,” she said.
T-r-a-v-i-s, she wrote on a name tag. As I walked by her with a tray of steaming turkey pot pie, she stepped in front of me. She had on a t-shirt that clung more than the usual ones she wore and shorts that showed her bare legs up to the top of her thighs.
“Stand still,” she ordered me, a dimple appearing in her cheek. “I’ll put this on you, since your hands aren’t free.” She went up on tiptoes to pat the label on, her fingers moving on my chest for a brief but memorable moment. Zoey’s fingers felt soft, like butterflies, causing an instantaneous below-the-belt response.
What was happening to me? Kat was the one I wanted. Zoey was really cute and interesting, but too grounded for me. And she had a boyfriend.
“Thanks,” I managed to say, slinking over to the serving table and taking my place between Charlotte and Terra. Charlotte was freckle-faced, bubbly, and way too friendly for being barely seventeen years old. I’d overheard her tell Zoey she’d just had her birthday. She liked to come up from behind me and slip her hands over my eyes, a level of creepiness that matched the time out on the hillside when I accidentally put my hand on a big garter snake.
