“I go by Mattie,” I say.
“Well, you don’t really resemble your mother,” Fritter tells me.
“Just around the edges.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“You’d have to ask Mr. Penny at the bank. That’s what he told me.”
Fritter shakes her head. “Gordon Penny was a little shit as a child, and he grew up into a big one.”
I nod, but Fritter seems to be waiting for me to say something more. If this is a job interview it’s the strangest one I’ve ever had.
“While we’re on the subject,” I say, for lack of a better idea. “Do you guys have a plumbing problem or something? Because it smells pretty bad downstairs . . .”
“Oh, not again! Come with me.”
I follow her out of the workroom and we start down the stairs. She is surprisingly nimble for an elderly fritter-shaped person.
“This is the fourth time, damn it.”
“Fourth time for what? Wait . . .” I’m struggling not to fall with these stupid high heels on the slick steps.
At the foot of the stairs she stops and waits for me to catch up. “That a visitor has done this.”
“Done what?”
“Believe it or not, they aren’t unheard of in the world of public libraries,” she tells me. “One librarian’s blog refers to them as rogue turds.”
“Librarians blog?”
“Shhh,” she replies.
I follow Fritter as she walks toward the spooky girl at the desk.
“I, however,” she whispers over her shoulder, “have been referring to them as UFOs.”
“Unidentified . . . ?”
“Fecal Objects,” she explains. “Seems classier than turds.”
I can’t argue with that. Just about everything is classier than turds.
“The last one was in the Reference section. On a shelf next to the OED.”
“On a shelf?”
At this point we’ve reached the counter and Fritter raises a finger at me just like my first-grade teacher used to, and it still works. I play the quiet game. Fritter walks up to the desk; it’s almost chest high to the squat woman. She gestures to the teen, who leans forward to hear. “Tawny, can’t you smell that?”
The girl’s name is Tawny? Oh, my. If there was ever a word less descriptive of the vampirically pale teen at the desk, I can’t think of it.
“Smell what?” the girl replies.
“Sweet Jesus on a Triscuit,” Fritter says, walking through the little swinging half-door at the side of the desk. “You need to stop smoking.” The woman puts her hands on Tawny’s shoulders and pushes her out from behind the checkout area. “Go on. You know the drill . . . bag, gloves, cleaner, and paper towels. Chop chop.”
Fritter and I watch as Tawny slouches her way past some bookshelves and around a corner.
“Now,” Fritter turns to me. “What was your question?”
“How could someone take a . . . leave a fecal object on a shelf.”
She shakes her head. “Good question. Of course it was on one of the lower shelves.”
When Tawny reappears with the cleaning products, Fritter announces, “Follow your nose.”
With the old woman leading the way we begin to weave through the library.
“Should we split up?” I say.
“Excellent idea,” Fritter replies. “I’ll take Reference and Audio. Tawny, you and Mattie take Fiction and make a quick run through Periodicals.”
Tawny and I dawdle a bit in our search efforts; the speed of the hunt does depend on whether or not you want to find what you’re hunting. Unsurprisingly Fritter locates the prize.
We hear a quiet “Ah ha!” from a few aisles over and head in that direction with the cleaning supplies.
“It’s not very large,” Fritter says, frowning. Indeed it is an unexceptional poo, on the floor immediately in front of a large window looking out into a coffee shop parking lot.
“The culprit is not modest,” I say.
“Perhaps one of you could speak to the people at that shop and see if anyone saw anything unusual.”
Tawny and I look at each other and in that instant we find a tiny patch of common ground. She may have a bad attitude and five or six more holes in her face than I do, but on one thing we agree—neither one of us is going to go into a coffee shop to ask if anyone happened to look this direction and see a naked ass.
“We’ll take care of it,” I say.
“The last one was quite a bit larger.” Fritter dons the gloves and places the turd in the bag, then sprays the floor liberally with cleaner. “Perhaps we have more than one miscreant.”
“Really? You actually think there is more than one person in this town who would take a crap on the floor of a library?”
Fritter shrugs. “Lots of people urinate outdoors.”
She’s hitting a little close to home now. “Only when a bathroom isn’t available. You do have a bathroom here, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Then this is not an act of necessity,” I say.
“You’re right,” Fritter tells me, her blue eyes now twinkling with either anger or amusement. Or both. “This is an act of war.”
“Cool,” Tawny says. It’s the first time I see her smile.
CHAPTER 17
At eleven forty I make my escape from the library’s fluorescent gloom. Even in my too-high heels, the sunshine puts a spring in my step. It is a beautiful day here in the armpit of America. I turn left at the corner and head downhill toward the Episcopal church. There’s a crowd gathered in the church parking lot for some reason, and I have to weave my way through it, garnering a couple of wolf-whistles from the motley crew.
I push open the main door and slip inside the cool, dark sanctuary. It’s empty, but I hear voices drifting up from somewhere, so I retrace yesterday’s steps through the small side door. Since Father Barnes’s office is empty, I continue to follow the noise until I reach its source: a large kitchen.
My empty stomach rumbles as I survey the scene: steaming pots on an industrial range, stainless-steel counters with tray after tray of rolls, paper cups and plates stacked along one side, and, in the far corner, Father Barnes, holding court with a group of hairnet-wearing women.
One sturdy middle-aged woman working at the stove looks in my direction. Even through the steam on her glasses, she sees me standing at the door. “Sorry, hon. Fifteen more minutes. You’ll have to go on back outside.”
“No, I’m here to—”
“Hon, we can’t have folks in the kitchen.”
The woman looks a little familiar. I take a step closer saying, “But I was invited to—”
She pulls off her fogged-up glasses, saying, “Health regulations, h . . .” and then her voice dies out and she stops smiling. I think she might have been going to add another “hon” but at that moment we recognize each other. It’s the woman who wrestled with me over the bike yesterday. The one I called Pork Chop.
“Listen, I’m sorry,” I say, “but Father Barnes—”
“Is busy at the moment.”
“But—”
“And he’ll remain busy until after we finish serving today’s hunger outreach lunch.”
I’m not liking the direction this is heading. “Wait a minute, I’m not some homeless person.”
“Not all the people we serve are homeless. They’re just down on their luck, perhaps unemployed, and every Tuesday and Thursday—”
“I’m not some unemployed deadbeat.” I don’t add anymore. “Father Barnes invited me to lunch.”
“And lunch you shall have. But you need to go back outside and—”
“Ladies?” Father Barnes has come up behind us. He is beaming. “I see you two are getting acquainted. You remember Tilda Thayer?” He’s asking Pork Chop this. She nods.
“She was one of our favorite congregants,” he says to me with a wink. Then he turns back to the other woman. “This is her granddaughter, Mattie Wallace. Ma
ttie, this is Karleen Meeker, one of our tireless custodial engineers.”
Karleen stares at me for a second, then turns to Father Barnes with a fawning smile. “I was just explaining that we’re not serving yet.”
“And I was just explaining,” I say, “that I don’t need to wait outside, because you and I are having lunch together.”
Father Barnes puts his hand on my shoulder. “When you called yesterday, Mattie, you sounded like you needed a little fellowship and perhaps a hearty meal. We’re providing both here today for a group of folks just like you.”
Learning humility is never fun, and for the last couple days the lessons have been coming hot and heavy. There’s only one way to handle his embarrassingly correct assessment of my situation. I start lying.
“I’m so sorry we had a misunderstanding,” I say with a smile that certainly outsparkles Pork Chop’s. “But I’m doing great. I’m working at the library, and I’m staying at my grandmother’s house. Everything is fine. I was just a little upset yesterday.”
“Oh, well I’m glad to hear that.”
“I just thought it was important for me to find a local church home,” I say, grateful to Fritter for providing the lingo.
“Wonderful!” he says. “This is one of our most active ministries. Volunteering here you’ll meet some of the outstanding women at this church.”
And that’s how I go from an intimate lunch with a dishy man to dishing out lunch to strangers.
I’m stationed next to Pork Chop and, frankly, am surprised at how nice she is to all these people in stained T-shirts and dirty work boots. She exchanges a few friendly words with each, calling a few “hon,” but obviously remembering most of their names. There’s Frankie with a porn-star mustache, and Juanita missing a lens in her glasses and a couple of teeth. There’s even an Elvis, a feral-looking older man with twigs and leaves twisted into his matted hair. He leans in and asks quietly if he can have a little extra for Colonel Parker. I laugh, but Karleen just gives him a wink and serves up another small chunk of meat loaf.
Over and over again, I drop a blob of mashed potatoes on the paper plates passed to me and do my best to smile even though the body odors mixed with food odors turn my stomach.
By twelve forty the crowd has passed through the line. Karleen puts a hand on my arm and says, “Why don’t you make yourself a plate and sit down. I’ll finish up here.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re looking a little peaked. You need to eat something.”
I would argue, but she’s right. She hands me a plate with a slab of meat loaf and I serve myself some potatoes and green beans. There are empty tables, but I need to get away from the oppressive food smell, so I take my plate outside. There’s a picnic table by the door, but it’s occupied by a group of men having a quiet conversation in what sounds like Spanish. So I walk past them out to the parking lot and perch carefully on one of the air-conditioner units.
The meat loaf is as bad as it looks, and the instant potatoes are like rubber, but after a few bites my nausea recedes. The sun feels good on my back and shoulders. The metal is warm under my legs. A hearty weed that has forced its way through a crack in the cement tickles my left calf with each breeze.
I’ve eaten what I can—about half of what was on my plate—when I see Karleen coming around the building toward me. She’s carrying a glass of milk.
“You didn’t bring out a drink,” she says.
I’m not a big milk drinker but I nod my thanks and take it from her. She’s not wearing her plastic gloves anymore, and I notice an angry, red circular mark on the back of her hand.
I look up at her, surprised. I’ve seen that sort of mark before. “Cigarette?”
She pulls a pack from her apron pocket, taps one out, and then holds the pack out for me. I shake my head and look pointedly at the wound on her hand. “No, that burn.”
“It’s nothing,” she says, angling herself away from the wind to light her cigarette.
“I bet it hurts.”
She shrugs and sucks in a lungful of smoke. “God,” she says, exhaling. “I hate how much I love to smoke.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Sure you don’t want one?”
I shake my head.
“So, you quit?”
“I guess,” I reply.
“How?”
“Just lost a taste for it.”
“Lucky . . .” she says taking another long drag, “Even when I was pregnant I loved smoking.”
“Who said anything about me being pregnant?”
“Not me,” she says, looking at me with a smile. “Are you?”
I hold out my hand for her cigarette, and she passes it over. I take an experimental puff and hand it back. Fuck. It’s awful.
“I’m sorry about that whole thing with the bike yesterday,” I say. “I was rude.”
“Me too. I don’t know what I was thinking. My granddaughter won’t be old enough to need a bike that size for years.”
“I shouldn’t have left it parked in the middle of all that shit for sale. And the jewelry box was my grandmother’s. I should have just explained. I apologize for the whole situation.”
“Me too.”
The air conditioner cuts on and we both startle. I hop off the unit, and we step away from the blast of warm air. Karleen leans over and puts her cigarette out on the ground and then slips the butt into her apron pocket. “You were good help today,” she says, pitching her voice loud enough to be heard above the noise. “I’m glad you came.”
“Well, it was nice to discover where Elvis has been hiding all these years.”
She laughs. “You know, he told me once that his name really is Elvis, but I don’t know that I believe him.”
“And Colonel Parker?” I’m remembering the extra serving of meat loaf.
“Well, if your name is Elvis, what else are you going to call your cat?”
We look at each other, grinning. I don’t know what she’s thinking, but I’m thinking about how fluid the border is between crazy and interesting, and how hard it is to decide who belongs where. Hell, most of the time I can’t answer that question about myself.
“You coming to help again Thursday?” she asks.
I’m not sure why, but I say, “Okay.”
She takes the plate, plastic ware, and cup from my hand and smiles. “Have a nice afternoon.”
“Thanks.” I turn and take a few steps and glance back. She’s still standing in the same spot, looking at me.
“I knew your mother,” Karleen says.
“Me too,” I reply, wishing it were true.
CHAPTER 18
When I was eleven years old, my mother dated Dewayne, a baseball cap–wearing NASCAR fan who was a welder and a deacon at a small Pentecostal church that met in a rundown strip mall. The name of the church was the Holy Jesus Apostolic Tabernacle of the Solid Rock of Ages, or something like that, and it was no ordinary listen-to-organ-music-and-pray-it’s-over-soon church. No, this was an old-school, out-of-tune-piano-with-the-minister-playing-a-tambourine, “Amen!”-shouting, tongues-speaking church. The only thing missing was snake handling and there was talk of starting that up.
Every Sunday that spring and early summer, we sat in the third pew from the front, Dewayne next to the aisle, and then my mother next to him and then me stuck next to an overweight man who wore the same dark gray three-piece suit every week. Sure, there was a lot going on, with old Mrs. Bettencourt’s speaking in tongues, the preacher’s fist-pounding sermons, and the bad music. But two hours is a long time to sit in a church with inadequate air-conditioning, and mostly I remember sitting there, dazed, focused on counting the number of sweat droplets that beaded, trembled, and then fell off the nose of the fat man next to me.
Although my mother had a long track record as a serial dater-of-losers, I really think she tried to avoid the dangerous ones. She wasn’t always successful. She shielded me from as much of the actual violence as she could, but it
was harder to hide the results. You win some, you lose some, she’d say as she iced a twisted wrist or blotted blood from a split lip. Love was a game for my mother. Sometimes it was a contact sport.
As June slid into July, things started to get ugly between my mother and Dewayne. Then there was an incident one Saturday night—I never found out exactly what happened—but it marked the end of their relationship. She came home earlier than usual from her night-shift waitressing job, shaken and angry. I remember that she threw her purse on the couch and went straight to the refrigerator for a beer. When I asked her what happened, she told me she’d lost her job and it was Dewayne’s fault. She refused to elaborate but I saw something that looked like a cigarette burn on her forearm. When she noticed me looking at it, she crossed her arms and told me to go to bed.
We never went back to the Jesus Apostolic Holy Solid Tabernacle of the Rock of Ages, or whatever. No more tambourines or sweaty Mrs. Bettencourt’s hubbadahubbada. Our Sunday mornings were rededicated to the ancient, yet satisfying rituals of the eating of pancakes and the doing of laundry, just like they’d been before.
My mother stopped answering the phone. But Dewayne didn’t stop calling.
We were packing our bags for our annual trip to the beach, half watching a Gunsmoke rerun, when there was a loud banging on the front door. It was Dewayne.
He shouted about punishing whores and their bastard children, his voice echoing in the concrete breezeway. We waited a little while, hoping he’d give up and go away, but his voice and the pounding grew in strength. He started using his foot on the door; the latch shook. It was only a matter of time before he either broke it open, or thought of trying the window. My mother made a decision.
She pulled out the baseball bat she kept under the sofa, then turned to me and said, “Go to your room.”
I shook my head. The only thing more frightening than what was about to happen would be listening to it happen from another room.
She must have understood that, because she nodded and said, “Just stay back.”
Luckily for both of us, Dewayne must have finished off his nightly pint of Jim Beam before coming over, because when my mother whipped open the door, he stumbled in, badly off balance.
The Art of Crash Landing Page 11