“I’m afraid we can’t refund you a box.”
“But I bought the box.”
“Be that as it may,” Arthur says, his tone becoming strained, “the box isn’t exactly as important as the item that was inside of it—”
“Oh my God, man, can I just get my money back, please?”
Underneath the stoicism, I notice about fifteen complicated emotions flashing across Arthur’s face. Then he suddenly gets steely. He stands up taller and says, very clearly, “No.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Fine,” Customer says, scowling. “Screw this. You know what, I came here to be good, support local business, whatever, but forget that. Next time I’m just going to Holly’s.”
Arthur watches him walk out with a look of bitter resignation.
“Oh, Arthur,” Kristy says.
“Why the hell did that guy want a Halloween gingerbread house kit?” I ask, trying to lighten the mood.
“This is thankless,” Arthur says to no one in particular. “Thankless.”
Kristy and I exchange looks.
The bells on the door jingle.
“Hey, losers!” Cora says cheerfully, striding in. “I forgot my book in the kitchen, I— who died?”
“We lost another one to the H-word,” I report.
“Oh yeah?” She has the decency, at least, to look concerned. “How’d that go down?”
“Someone wanted to return one of the Halloween gingerbread house kits,” Arthur says. “Now. In December.”
“Can’t blame them,” Cora says. “Those things were shittacular.”
Arthur pinches the bridge of his nose. “Thank you, Cora.”
She looks at all of us, taking in the sorry sight.
“Okay,” she says, very brisk, very argue-and-die. “I’m gonna go grab my book, and then we’re going on a field trip.”
“In case you’d failed to notice, Cora,” Arthur says, “we happen to be open—”
“So close for an hour. What’s gonna happen? We’ll be prevented from driving away yet more customers?” She fake-gasps. “Heavens no!”
Arthur stares at her for a long time. “Fine,” he finally says.
“Good. I’ll be back. You be ready.”
“Field trip!” Kristy whispers to me with a surreptitious bounce.
“Hells yeah,” I whisper back. This may or may not lead to some discreet high-fiving.
“I can’t see,” Arthur says, sounding like the most jaded of men, “how it can get any worse.”
Cora comes back out into the room. She’s striding with an air of supreme badass purpose, and she’s holding … the copy of A Little Princess that’s been sitting on the kitchen table forever.
Unexpected.
“I thought that was Kristy’s,” I say.
“I thought that was Howie’s,” Kristy says.
“Uh, not that gay.”
“Sorry!”
“Enough, children,” Cora interrupts us. “Let’s roll.”
+
And so we all pile into Cora’s death trap of an automobile. We offer to award Arthur the shotgun position, but he says he’s already stressed out enough without having to bear firsthand witness to how Cora drives. So Kristy gets upgraded to front-seat-hood, and Artie and I take the back. As soon as the car gets turned on, the stereo starts blasting what sounds like a ritual sacrifice having hideously violent sex with a cello. Kristy screams.
“What the fuck is that??” I yelp.
“Rasputina, darling.”
“That’s … a pretty name,” offers Kristy.
Arthur looks like he may cave in on himself at any moment.
Cora seems to recognize this; she turns the volume way down and switches it to the radio.
“Taylor Swift!” Kristy screeches.
“Uh,” Cora replies, “may I just say that barf?”
Kristy is too busy singing along to get too bent out of shape.
“Hey,” I say to Arthur, “how you doin’, buddy?”
“Oh, magnificently,” he deadpans. “This may be the best day ever.”
I reach for his hand. He knots his fingers loosely with mine.
“Do we get to ask where we’re going,” Kristy says, “or is it like a guessing game thingie?”
“You all know where you’re going,” Cora replies sagely. “It’s where you’ve been headed all along.”
“You’re going to ax-murder us, aren’t you?” Arthur says. He doesn’t sound too broken up by the idea.
+
She takes us to Holly’s.
It’s not bad.
+
Afterwards, we don’t head straight back to work. Instead, we stop at McDonald’s. Kristy gets a Happy Meal. Cora gets like four pies, which doesn’t exactly seem like a healthy, balanced meal to me, but she’s not exactly a healthy, balanced young lady. I get a couple of Big Macs and some fries. Arthur stares at the menu the way a time-traveling seventeenth century Puritan would watch a Lady Gaga music video. Still, even in the face of culinary depravity, he seems different. Lighter.
Finally, he goes with a bottle of water and those little apple slices.
“There must be so many preservatives in these,” he muses as we all sit down, poking at one of the apples. Then he shifts his attention to my tray. “You got two hamburgers? And French fries?”
Now seems as good a time as any for a bathroom break.
+
When I step out of the stall, it’s to find Arthur standing there.
“Well, hi there. How Whamly of you to drop in.”
He doesn’t seem to care very much about me inventing adjectives. Once again, my genius goes unacknowledged. “Holly’s was very nice.”
“Yeah,” I say, moving over to the sink. “So?”
“So … perhaps it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if—” He goes quiet, like he can’t quite bring himself to speak so bold a notion out loud.
“Perhaps it wouldn’t,” I agree.
He stares at himself in the mirror, then looks over at my reflection.
“You’re not really eating two of that sandwich so big it’s got an extra bun in the middle, are you? That’s absurd. That’s a plea for death.”
“Let’s focus on the good here, Kraft.”
“If the store closes—” He sinks back into thought.
“Yeah?” I prompt, turning the sink off and heading over to the paper towel dispenser.
“—I would be out of a job. My parents would be – displeased, to say the least.”
“It wouldn’t, like, contribute to their financial ruin or anything, would it?”
“No, no, they’re comfortably retired.”
“Then why are you even still doing this?”
“Because—” He stops, and considers his reflection again. It’s like he’s having a staring contest with himself. “That’s a very good question.”
“I’m a very good questioner.”
“You’re a very good lot of things.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Right back atcha. I think,” I add truthfully, “you should do what you want to do.”
He turns away from the mirror to look at me. I realize exactly how much I want him to do this. Really, it all comes down to one simple thing: I really, really want this dude to have a fucking excellent life.
“Maybe I will,” he says. I think he may be marveling.
“That’s the spirit,” I say, clapping him on the shoulder. He catches my hand and squeezes it.
Then all of a sudden his face gets serious, and seriously alarmed. “Cora’s going to think we’re having sex in the bathroom.”
“Shit. She is, isn’t she?”
We speed the hell on out of there. She does anyway.
It’s still a pretty decent lunch.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“May I just point out,” I say, “that that’s your third taco in a row.”
“May I just
point out,” Amber replies through a mouthful of said third taco, “that shut up.”
“Mitch,” I say. “Buddy. Stop giving her tacos.”
Mitch looks a picture as ever this morning in his uniform: a bright yellow t-shirt and a jaunty baseball cap sporting the Señor Taco logo. The Señor Taco logo was clearly devised by somebody with too many thoughts in their brainspace, because it is a sombrero with a taco on it. That in and of itself, while obscure, maybe isn’t unhandleable mentally, but then you throw in the fact that the sombrero with the taco on it is on the hat, and it just gets confusing. Hat on a hat. Even Dr. Seuss wasn’t wily enough to mess with that shit. Hat on a cat, sure. But hat on another hat? There’s a line.
A part of me will always be grateful to Señor Taco, because without it, I never would have gotten to know Mitch in the first place. The rest of me is just glad that I surrendered to the overpowering urge to get the hell out of there three weeks after getting hired. Sure, a baseball cap doesn’t have the same emasculating properties as, say, a quaintly crafted apron, but the whole taco-on-a-sombrero-on-a-baseball-cap conundrum – too much fodder for thought. Not to mention the fact that somehow I just know that eventually, that job would have ruined tacos for me.
Mitch has worked at Señor Taco for three years. Nothing ruins tacos for Mitch Ballard. He’s too mighty a man. And he really likes tacos.
“Mitchell,” Amber says, in her loveliest of girly tones, “can I have another taco please?”
I frown at her as Mitch sets to work.
We are, needless to say, the only people at Señor Taco at ten thirty in the morning. Well, Mitch’s coworker Jerry is here, but he’s sprawled across one of the tables and snoring, so I’m not sure how much he counts.
“Amber,” I say, “it’s ten thirty. You are eating very, very many tacos. More tacos than I could eat at ten thirty in the morning, and I went through a two-month phase where I had potato chips for breakfast. I point this out because I care.”
“He’s putting extra lettuce on them. Would you chill? I’m nervous. Please just allow me, in this instance, to eat my feelings.”
“Kristy’s not going to do anything to you. She’s like God’s gift to everyone.”
“I know that!” Amber snaps. “That’s what’s so nerve-wracking about it. She’s like the best person that’s ever lived and I’m the leviathan superbitch who attacked her with unpleasant life truths and profane language.”
“Excuse me, at what point during that confrontation were we trolling the deep sea?”
“What?” Amber says blankly, and finishes off Taco 3.
“I think ‘cause, ya know,” Mitch contributes, “Leviathan. Sea monster. Rarrrrr.” He thrashes his arms in a way that makes it abundantly clear that they’ve turned into tentacles, and little flecks of lettuce fly around.
Amber groans. “Why are you talking, taco slave.”
“Yeah, man. What’s up with that? What’s – dare I say – kraken?”
“Things are about to get Nessie.” Mitch grins broadly. “You know. Like, messy.”
“Eff, yeah!”
“My best friends are boys,” Amber intones miserably to no one. (Or maybe Jerry.) “Why oh why did I make that horrible life decision.”
“Hey,” I say, pointing at her. “These could be fart jokes. Bad punning knows no gender limitations.”
Mitch has been driven into an impromptu freestyling frenzy. “I spit rimes like a mariner / Kristy’s really scarin’ her / it don’t make no sense / ‘cuz there ain’t no Care Bear carin’-er—”
Amber looks up at him, eyebrows scrunched. “Mitch.”
“Sorry,” he says dutifully. “Tacos.”
“No, not that. I – did you just make a Coleridge reference?”
“Yeah,” Mitch says, smiling way too proudly for the moment to be casual. “He was a Romantic poet.”
“I know he was.” After the longest pause known to man, she says, none-too-tactfully, “…how do you?”
“I read some things,” he says nonchalantly.
For some reason, I feel struck by the sudden concern to help the guy. I’m not sure how, or why, but Amber looks all discerning-eyed and Mitch looks sort of flustered and there’s a taco on the sombrero on his hat and sometimes, sometimes, a man must trust his instinct to do his best-budly duty.
“Care Bear,” I say, like this is the brilliant remark that will revolutionize the conversation. “Care Bear?” See you later, Sammy Cool.
“Dude,” Mitch says, totally heartened. “Care Bears are awesome.”
“Really?” Amber says. “Really? You get all flustered about Coleridge, but you willingly admit that Care Bears are awesome?”
Damn it, Amber.
“Coleridge is awesome,” Mitch says, all my carefully concocted segueing thwarted. “It’s too bad about that whole opium thing.”
Amber stares at me. “Have you been talking to him about Romantic poets?”
“Amber,” I say, “when do I ever talk to anybody about Romantic poets?”
“Oh, please. You make Gay Or Consumptive? Keats jokes all the time.”
“That, lady fair, is my prerogative as a reluctant English major at a shitty community college.”
“Hey,” she scolds. “Your mom works there, remember. It’s not shitty.”
“Yeah, well, for a not-shitty establishment, it sure hires some shitty professors.”
“Like who? Oh my God, are you still mad about that one guy taking five points off your Shakespeare essay?”
“Uh, yeah,” I say. “That.”
“Why are you reading about Coleridge?” Amber asks Mitch.
“I just remember you mentioned him awhile ago,” he says, shrugging. “And I hadn’t really done any reading since the Potter ended, and I thought, ya know, Coleridge, I bet he’s cool. And he is. Like, Christabel, what was that? They were totally girl sexing each other, right? But in this spooky way.”
“You read Christabel,” Amber says, awed.
“Yeah,” Mitch says, like it ain’t no thang. “Tu-whit, tu-whoo! It’s a bummer he didn’t finish it. I was all getting into it, and then it was just, like, the end. That was harsh.”
Amber just stares at him for ten straight seconds, like she’s never looked at him before in her whole life. There’s naught but Amber looking at Mitch, and Mitch looking at Amber, and the sound of Jerry snoring. Finally, I reach for one of Amber’s taco wrappers and start crinkling it up, just for the noise.
“There’s a Victorian horror novel by J. Sheridan LeFanu called Carmilla,” Amber says. She sounds a special kind of weird: it’s, like, 50% reciting-a-textbook and 50% chick-flick-dialogue-with-a-sensitive-indie-song-in the-background. “It draws heavily from the plot of Christabel. Lots of lesbian subtext and vampirism.”
“Excellent,” Mitch says. His expression is turning sappy, and God help me, God help us all, I don’t think it’s because of the lesbian vampires.
I need to fix this. “Like, porn-type excellent?”
“No,” Mitch says. He throws me this minuscule, pathetic excuse for a glance before steering his eyeballs right back to Amber. “Like, awesome excellent. You should make me a book list.”
“A book list?” Amber repeats, disbelieving.
Oh, jeez, why not just ask her to marry you.
“Sure. Reading’s flippin’ sweet. Plus, Rudy and me are almost done with our epic Xena rewatch, so I’m gonna have lots of spare time on my hands.”
“A-all right,” Amber says, along with this cute weird little laugh that doesn’t sound very much like her. “I’ll think up some books for you.”
“Cool,” he says happily.
“Cool,” she echoes, just as cheerful.
They smile at each other.
This … is weird.
“I dig Xena. How come Amber and I didn’t get invited to partake in the epic Xena rewatch?” It’s the only thing I can think of to say. Unfortunately, I say it really friggin’ abnormally loud. Jerry goes ‘Whuuut Xena whu
ttt?’, sits up for two seconds, and then falls asleep again.
“Dude,” Mitch says to me, very seriously, “you have to respect the Xena. It’s only the world’s greatest story of love and redemption. You guys would just be all bantery and stuff.”
“We can be unbantery,” I protest.
“No we can’t,” Amber says. Which is, okay, fair. “Are you really expecting us to believe that Rudy respects the Xena?”
“Rudy pretty much respects any chick who could beat him up,” Mitch explains.
“I suppose my spectacular lack of upper arm strength explains why he starts chuckling like a demented ogre every time he sees me,” Amber says, rolling her eyes. “And because he thought you and I—”
She dwindles off. Is she blushing? Is he blushing? Oh, crap, this will not stand.
“Okay!” I say. “Let’s go visit Kristy!”
“But – tacos—”
“Hold up a sec,” Mitch says gallantly. “I’ll get you one to go.”
“You are beautiful,” Amber sighs.
You know what, I’m starting to develop the very acute suspicion that if I do not separate them right now, they’re going to start licking each other’s faces.
“It’ll go totally okay!” Mitch says. “Kristy sounds really nice. And you’re really nice.”
“And hopefully John’s really nice,” Amber adds. “Since I’m about to volunteer to blind date him.”
“Yeah,” Mitch says, crestfallen. “John. John … too. I bet he’s just … huggable. And … well-groomed. And punctual.”
“What?” Amber says, (understandably) baffled.
“I don’t know,” Mitch says, sort of miserably. “That’s what you ladies look for in a fellow, right?”
“A fellow?” Amber says.
“Well, speaking of punctual, look at that, we are running so late right now,” I say, not bothering to actually look at a clock. Technicalities are for lesser men.
“What? You didn’t say there was a time we had to—”
“There is a time. And the time is now. Later, Mitch.”
Know Not Why: A Novel Page 31