by Tom Hanks
“Find us some music, honey,” she said, pointing to the tiny radio in the wooden dashboard. “Turn that knob, then that one for a station.”
Like a radio operator on a bomber, Kenny moved the red line of the dial along the numbers. The local radio station had a commercial for Stan Nathan’s Shoes for the Family, a store in town. Static and voices came and went until Kenny located the beam from a station that came in loud and clear. A man was singing about raindrops on his head. Kenny’s mom knew the words and sang along as she dug around in her purse at the same time she steered. She found a little leather case with a clasp on it, which she unsnapped to reveal the tips of cigarettes. They were long cigarettes, longer than those his father smoked. She had one in her lips, the red lipstick already staining the white filter, when she pushed a button on the dash. In a few seconds the button popped and she pulled the whole thing out. There was a glowing red coil on the end of the button, so hot she used it to light her long cigarette. She put the hot button back in its hole, then switched hands on the wheel to open a small, triangular window. As soon as there was a whistling crack, the smoke from her long cigarette was sucked out the window like a magic trick.
“Tell me about school, sweetie,” she said. “You like school?”
Kenny told her that St. Philip Neri wasn’t like St. Joseph, the only other school he had gone to, back in Sacramento. St. Philip Neri was small, not many kids went there, and some of the nuns didn’t dress like nuns. As he savored his bottle of root beer with short, airy sips, he told his mom about the bus rides to school, how the uniforms were red plaid instead of blue plaid and they had some days when they didn’t have to wear them, and that a kid in his class named Munson made models like he did and lived in a house with a pool, but not an inground pool like at the city park, but a circular aboveground pool. From just the one question, Kenny talked all the way from Iron Bend to the Butte City cutoff as his mother smoked. When the one radio station faded, Kenny found another, then another. His mom let him signal to the truck drivers they passed to blow their air horns. He would pump his fist up and down, and, if the drivers saw him, more often than not they would send out a toot. Once, Kenny saw a truck driver looking at them in his sideview mirror and got a blast on the horn without having to pump for it. The driver blew a kiss that was probably meant for his mom, not for Kenny.
They stopped for lunch in Maxwell at a diner called Kathy’s Kountry Kafe, a place for travelers and, in season, duck hunters. The Fiat was the only sports car in the parking lot. The waitress seemed to love chatting with Kenny’s mom—they talked like old friends or sisters. Kenny noticed that the waitress had very red lips, too. When she asked what to bring for the young man, he asked for a hamburger.
“Oh no, honey,” his mother said. “Hamburgers are for anytime. At a restaurant we should order from the menu.”
“Why not, Mom? Dad doesn’t care. And Nancy lets us.” Nancy was Kenny’s stepmother.
“What say we make this a special rule,” his mother said. “Just for you and me.” This seemed like an odd rule to suddenly impose. Kenny had never been told what to order or what he could not have. “I think you’ll like the hot turkey sandwich,” his mother said. “We’ll split it.”
Kenny thought she meant a sandwich that was going to be steaming hot and was not sure he was going to like it. “Can I have a milkshake?”
“Yep.” She smiled. “I’m flexible!”
Truth be told, Kenny liked the open-faced sandwich that was swimming in brown gravy and was not too hot at all. The white bread that sucked up all the gravy was just as good as the turkey meat, and mashed potatoes were his favorite food of all time. His mom had an igloo-shaped scoop of cottage cheese on tomato slices but cut up a few bites of the hot turkey for herself. His vanilla milkshake came in the freezing steel cup it was made in and twice filled up a fancy glass. He poured it himself, tapping the steel against the glass to help it along. This was so much milkshake, Kenny couldn’t finish it.
When his mother went to the restroom, Kenny noticed all the men travelers following her with their eyes, turning their heads to watch her go. One of them got up to pay his check, stopping by the booth where Kenny sat alone.
“Is that your mommy, slugger?” the man asked. He wore a brown suit with a tie partly undone. His eyeglasses had flip-up sunshades that stuck out like small visors.
“Um-hmmm,” Kenny said.
The man smiled. “You know, I got a boy at home just like you. But not a mommy like you got.” The man laughed out loud, then paid at the register.
When his mom came back from the restroom, her lips were freshly painted. She took a sip from what was left of Kenny’s milkshake, leaving red marks on the paper straw.
—
Sacramento was more than an hour down the highway. Kenny had not been to his hometown since his father packed their stuff into the station wagon, the day they moved to Iron Bend. The buildings had a look of comforting familiarity, but when his mom turned the Fiat off the highway it was at a street he had never traveled. When he saw the sign for the Leamington Hotel he felt a smile on his face—his parents had both worked at the Leamington, but now only his mom did. He and his brother and sister had spent time there, tagging along on some weekends when their folks were still married. They played in the big conference room when it was empty and would eat at the counter of the coffee shop when the place was not busy. Dad would pay them a nickel for every tray of potatoes they would wrap in tinfoil for baking en masse. If they asked permission, they could get their own chocolate milk from the dispenser, as long as they used the small glasses. This was long ago; a big chunk of Kenny’s life had passed since then.
His mother parked the Fiat in the back of the hotel and they entered through the kitchen—just as Kenny remembered doing in his dad’s station wagon and his mom’s Corolla. The staff all welcomed his mother and she greeted each person by name in response. A lady and one of the cooks could not believe that Kenny had grown up so much since they had last seen him, but Kenny could not remember who those people were, though he thought he recognized the lady’s cat’s-eye glasses with the thick lenses. The kitchen looked smaller than Kenny remembered it.
When he was little, Kenny’s mother was a waitress in the Leamington Hotel coffee shop and his father one of the cooks. She wore a uniform then, but now dressed in business clothes and had an office off the hotel lobby. Her office had a desk stacked with papers and a wall covered by a bulletin board that had many index cards, all written upon in different colored inks and arranged in neat columns.
“Kenny Bear, I have a few things to do, then I’ll tell you about your birthday surprise, okay?” She was sliding some papers into a leather folder. “Can you sit here for a bit?”
“Can I pretend this is my office and I work here?”
“Sure,” she said, smiling. “Here’re some notebooks, and look, this is an electric pencil sharpener.” She showed him how to push a pencil into the opening of the machine and make the grinding noise that produced a pencil point as sharp as a sewing pin. “Don’t answer the phone if it rings.”
A lady named Miss Abbott came into the office and asked, “So this is your little man?” She was older than his mom and wore glasses on a chain around her neck. Miss Abbott would keep an eye on Kenny and would know where his mother was if he needed her.
“Kenny is going to do some work for us today.”
“Wonderful,” Miss Abbott said. “I’ll give you some stamps and an ink pad to make everything official. Would you like that?”
His mother left, carrying her leather folder. Kenny sat in her chair behind her desk. Miss Abbott brought him some stamps that said the date on them and INVOICE and RECEIVED as well as a metal rectangular box with blue ink on a pad.
“You know,” Miss Abbott said, “I have a nephew just your age.”
—
Kenny used the stamps and ink on a few pages of a notebook, then, bored, looked through the top drawers of the desk. One drawer had d
ividers that separated paper clips, boxes of staples, rubber bands, pencils, and some pens that said LEAMINGTON HOTEL on the sides. Another drawer had envelopes and letter paper that said LEAMINGTON HOTEL with a little drawing of the building at the top of each sheet.
He got up from the desk, went to the door, and saw Miss Abbott at a desk of her own, typing some kind of letter.
“Miss Abbott,” Kenny said. “May I use some paper that says ‘Leamington Hotel’ on it?”
Miss Abbott kept typing. “What’s that?” she asked without looking up.
“May I use some paper that says ‘Leamington Hotel’ on it?”
“Go ahead,” she said as she kept on typing.
Kenny used the stamps and hotel pens on the paper, drawing lines and signing his name next to the stamps. Then he had an idea.
He took the cover off the typewriter that was on its own little desk beside his mother’s. The machine was light blue, had the letters IBM on the front, and was really big, taking up most of its special table. He rolled a sheet of paper into the workings of the typewriter and pressed on the keys, but they were dead. Nothing happened. Kenny was about to ask Miss Abbott why the typewriter didn’t work but then he saw the rocker switch that said ON/OFF and that the OFF part was depressed. He rocked it to ON and the machine hummed and vibrated. The mechanical ball with the letters on it swept back and forth once, then stopped on the left side. The carriage with the paper in it did not move, which made Kenny think the typewriter must be part computer or one of those Teletype machines.
He tried to type his name, but it came out. That’s when he discovered that if he kept the key pressed down, the letter repeated, sounding like a machine gun—. What confused him the most was the lack of a handle he was supposed to slap to make the page go back. There was none. There was a very big button that said RETURN on it. When he pressed that the ball moved back with a chunk and he could type a new line. This was now, officially, the most amazing typewriter Kenny had ever seen or heard of.
Kenny did not know how to type like a grown-up—like Miss Abbott or his mom—so he used just one finger, finding the letters he wanted but sometimes hitting ones he didn’t—. By going very slowly and being very careful he finally typed his name correctly——and rolled that page out of the IBM. He put the date stamp next to his name along with.
“How about a coffee break?” Miss Abbott was standing in the door.
“I don’t drink coffee,” Kenny said.
Miss Abbott nodded. “Well, let’s see what else we can find, shall we?”
He followed her into the lobby, where Kenny saw his mother standing with a group of men. They were all talking business, but Kenny still called out to her.
“Mom!” he hollered, pointing toward the hotel kitchen. “I’m taking a coffee break!”
She turned to him and smiled and gave a little wave, then turned back to the businessmen.
In the kitchen, he asked Miss Abbott if he could get his own chocolate milk like he used to, but the dispenser no longer held chocolate milk. Just regular milk and something called Skim. Instead, Miss Abbott went to a silver refrigerator and pulled out a carton of chocolate milk, grabbed one of the big drinking glasses, and filled it to the top. This was more chocolate milk than Kenny had ever been allowed, which he thought was great. Miss Abbott got herself some coffee out of a round, glass pitcher that sat on a Bunn Coffee Service maker. They could not take their drinks back through the lobby, so they went into the coffee shop, which looked and smelled exactly the same as when Kenny was little. They sat in an empty booth, not at the counter.
“Do you remember me?” she asked him. “I worked here with your daddy. Before your mommy started.” Miss Abbott asked Kenny more questions, mostly if he liked the same things her nephew liked—baseball, karate class, and TV shows. Kenny told her they only got Channel 12 from Chico.
—
Back in his mother’s office he decided to write her a letter on the IBM typewriter. He started with a new sheet of Leamington Hotel paper and went very slowly.
Deear Mom,
How are you I am fine
Your friends sport car is like a racecar. I like how loud the motor goes and working the radio.
I saw you in the hotel just now and wonder what is my big surprise?????? ?
I am going to leave this letter in a place where it will be a SURPEIZE for you. After you find it right me back on this tiperighter that is so cooooool and esy to do.
Love
Kenny Stahl
Kenny folded the letter as best he could and put it into a hotel envelope and licked the seal, careful not to cut his tongue on the sharp edge. He wrote TO MOM on the front with a Leamington Hotel pen, then looked for a place to hide the letter, deciding the best place would be in a desk drawer under a few pages of Leamington Hotel stationery.
Kenny was playing with some rubber bands when his mom came back into her office. She was with a man who had dark brown skin and the straightest, blackest hair. “Kenny, this is Mr. Garcia. He let us borrow his car for the ride down today.”
“Hello,” Kenny said. “That’s your car? The sports car?”
“It is,” Mr. Garcia said. “I’m glad to meet you. But let’s do it proper, shall we? Stand up.”
Kenny did as he was told.
“Now,” Mr. Garcia continued, “we shake hands. Grab firm now.”
Kenny squeezed Mr. Garcia’s hand as hard as he could.
“Don’t hurt me.” Mr. Garcia chuckled. Kenny’s mom beamed at the two men. “Now, look me in the eye, just like I look at you. Good. Now you say, ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you.’ ”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Kenny repeated.
“Now comes the most important part. We ask each other a question, engage each other, man to man, see? I’m going to ask you this—do you know what ‘Fiat’ stands for?”
Kenny shook his head, because he was confused by the question and because he had no idea what was going on. No one had ever explained to him how to shake hands.
“ ‘Fix it again, Tony.’ ” Mr. Garcia laughed. “Now you ask me a question. Go ahead.”
“Um.” Kenny had to think of something to say. He was looking at Mr. Garcia’s head of thick, jet-black hair, held stiffly in place and so shiny. That was when he remembered seeing Mr. Garcia before, when he was little, when he was playing in the hotel with his brother and sister. He remembered that Mr. Garcia did not work in the kitchen with his dad, but would come in from the lobby wearing a suit. “You work here, too, like my mom, don’t you?”
Mr. Garcia and his mom shared a glance and a smile. “I used to, Kenny, but not anymore. Now I’m at the Senator.”
“You’re a senator?” Kenny knew what a senator was from the news on Channel 12.
“Mr. Garcia works at the Senator Hotel, Kenny,” his mother said. “And he has a big surprise for you.”
“You haven’t told him?” Mr. Garcia asked.
“I thought it should be your treat,” she said.
“Okay.” Mr. Garcia looked at Kenny. “I hear you have a birthday coming up, is that right?”
Kenny nodded. “I’m going to be ten.”
“Have you ever flown?”
“You mean, in an airplane?”
“Have you?”
Kenny looked at his mother. Maybe, when he was a baby, she had taken him on an airliner but he had been too little to remember. “Have I, Mom?”
“Jose is a pilot. He has a plane and wants to take you up for a ride. Won’t that be fun?”
Kenny had never met a pilot before who owned his own airplane. Where was Mr. Garcia’s uniform? Was he in the Air Force?
“What are you doing tomorrow?” Mr. Garcia asked. “Want to go up?”
Kenny looked at his mother. “Can I, Mom?”
“Yep,” she said. “I’m flexible.”
—
Kenny and his mother had their dinner at a restaurant called the Rosemount. She knew everybody who worked there. The wait
er took away two place settings because his mom said that she was on “a special date with this young man,” meaning Kenny. The menus were as big as newspapers. He had spaghetti and, for dessert, the waiter brought him a piece of chocolate cake as big as his shoe. He couldn’t finish it all. His mother smoked her long cigarettes and drank an after-dinner coffee. One of the cooks came out, a fellow Kenny remembered from his days at the Leamington. The cook’s name was Bruce. He sat at the table with the two of them and talked with his mom for a while, mostly laughing.
“Good God, Kenny,” Bruce said to him. “You are growing up as fast as alfalfa.” Bruce could do an amazing trick—he could throw a drinking straw into a raw potato and make it stick like an arrow. On the way out through the kitchen—Mom had parked the Fiat in the back—Bruce did the trick for Kenny. Whap! And the straw almost went all the way through the potato. It was amazing!
His mom lived in a two-story building with a stairway in the middle that separated the two apartments on each floor. The living room of her place had something called a Murphy bed that folded up and disappeared into the wall. When his mom pulled the bed down, it was already made. She had a small color TV on a rolling stand that she turned to face the bed, but before he could watch it she made Kenny take a bath.
The bathroom was small and the tub was tiny, so it quickly filled up with water. On one shelf there were bath soaps and other girlie things, all in colorful bottles and tubes with flowers on the labels. On another shelf was a can of Gillette shaving cream and a man’s razor made by Wilkinson Sword. Kenny played in the tub until his fingers wrinkled and the water got cold. Pajamas had been packed in the pink suitcase from home, and, as he put them on, he smelled popcorn. His mom had made some, shaking it to life in a pot on her little kitchen stove.
“Find something to watch on TV, honey,” she called out as she melted butter in a saucepan to pour over the popcorn.
Kenny turned on the TV and it came to life immediately, without having to warm up like the one at home. He was delighted to see all the old channels, the ones he had watched before his mom moved out of the house and his dad got married again. There were shows on Channels 3, 6, 10, and 13. And, on the other channel knob, the one that turned rather than clicked, there was a Channel 40. Every channel was in color, too, except the old movie on Channel 40. He settled on a show called The Name of the Game, which was fine with his mom.
