by Lisa Yee
“What do you mean, what do I think of him? He’s Hollywood.”
“I know.” Ted takes over the couch. “But do you like him?”
“Ted, he’s Hollywood. He’s just Hollywood. It’s not like he’s Nelson B. Nelson or anyone.”
“True,” Ted muses. “He’s nothing like Nelson B. Nelson, who by the way is way too peppy, don’t you think?”
I swat Ted with a pillow. “Don’t you go talking about my Nelson like that!”
“You can have him!” Ted cries. “He’s not my type. By the way, look what I got us . . .”
I can’t help but laugh. “Okay, I’ll make the popcorn. You put The Best of Nelsons Neighborhood into the DVD player.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I get to the taco truck location early. Jess hasn’t arrived yet. I shade my eyes and look out over the ocean. It’s beautiful. I can see why people would pay millions of dollars to live here. If I had millions, this is where I’d want to live.
When Benito’s Tacos #4 finally pulls up, I run to the truck as Jess jumps out and lifts the side to create an awning. I haul out the trash can and plastic chairs. We have to rush. The construction workers have seen the truck and are making their way toward us. It’s only ten a.m., but they start working at six a.m. or sometimes earlier, so they’re ready for lunch whenever Jess shows up.
I step inside and am instantly dumbstruck. The truck is a lot bigger than I would have expected. Shiny stainless steel covers the entire interior. There’s a large grill, and a stove with four burners, and a double sink. Not an inch of space is wasted. There are compartments everywhere, above and below, and each is full. Rock is on the radio.
“Don’t just stand there, Maybe.” Jess hands me a T-shirt. “Quick, put this on.”
“Why?” I stammer. It looks ten sizes too small.
“Maybe,” she says sternly, “if you work at Benito’s you have to wear a Benito’s shirt.”
Reluctantly, I turn my back and take off my Beefy Hanes XL. I don’t like the way the new shirt hugs my body. Before I can protest, Jess is tossing tortilla packages to me. “Start opening these and stacking them over there. When you’re done with that, take out the meat from the fridge.” She turns the heat up on the grill and stirs the onions on the back burner, and we’re in business.
The rest of the day goes past in a blur. Jess does all the cooking and order taking. I make change and generally do whatever she tells me. This includes stocking the sodas, topping the tacos with onions and cilantro, and wrapping up the to-go food. We are constantly bumping into each other. I had no idea it was such hard work.
I am too busy to be bothered by the sexist remarks from a couple of the guys, which include jokes about fish tacos, two girls in a truck, and wanting to know if my hair is bright red everywhere. Most of the guys are nice, though, and find the food much more interesting than either Jess or me.
By the end of the day I am exhausted. I smell like tacos and am all sweaty. My feet hurt. I have burns on my arms from grease splatters, and stains all over my shirt.
I love my job.
Jess and I plop down in plastic chairs. She hands me a plate with different meats on it.
“You ready for school?”
“School?”
“Jessica’s Taco Cuisine 101! This,” she says, pointing, “is carni-tas.” I take a bite and smile. I know carnitas. The marinated roast pork is my favorite. “Tell me, what’s this?” she asks, pointing.
“Chicken?”
“We call it polio.”
“And this?”
“Carne asada, beef.”
“And this?”
I take a bite. It’s a little chewy, but tasty. “Al pastor?”
“Tripas. Tripe.”
“What’s tripe?” I ask, helping myself to more. It sort of reminds me of clams.
“Beef intestines.”
“Beef what?”
“Intestines. Beef intestines.”
I put that taco down. Jess laughs and hands me a big plastic bag. It’s heavy. “Here’s today’s pay, hope you don’t mind cash. Uncle Benny doesn’t know I’ve hired you, nor does the IRS.”
I rise and start stacking the chairs.
“Go home, Maybe,” Jess orders. “Relax and get ready for tomorrow. I’ll clean up.”
I’m too tired to protest. As I walk away Jess calls out, “Hey, Maybelline Mary Katherine Mary Ann Chestnut!” I turn around. “You did great!”
I return her grin.
As I trudge up the hill to Sammy’s house, the bag gets heavier and heavier. I stop on the side of the road and open it. Thank God, Jess included a Jarritos lime soda. The glass bottle has beads of sweat on it. I twist off the cap and drink greedily. Refreshed, I take out two Benito’s shirts and unwrap something in tinfoil.
At first I think it might be tortillas, but it’s not. It’s forty-two dollars in cash. Jess also packed enough food to last a week.
To my disappointment, Twig is home. (That’s my nickname for Willow.) She is either arranging lettuce on a plate or making a meal. I watch with morbid curiosity as she lifts a plastic bottle and sprays her salad.
“Are you trying to kill the bugs?”
“No,” she sniffs. “It’s salad dressing. This way I don’t get too much on it.” She looks me up and down. “You’re not fat,” she says, surprised.
“Who said I was?”
“Well, you’re always wearing those hideously large T-shirts, so I just assumed you were hiding your fat.”
The baggy clothes were my mother’s doing. I was in the seventh grade and we were at the Fashion Square Mall in Orlando. “For heaven’s sake, Maybelline, come out of the dressing room,” Chessy ordered.
“No way!” I shouted back.
“Don’t be silly, come on! I’m not going to quit yelling until you do.”
Slowly I stepped out. Chessy took one look at me in a bathing suit and shrieked, “Maybelline Mary Katherine Mary Ann Chestnut, you have boobies! Maybelline, LOOK! You have boobies! Have you been hiding those darlings from me?”
As I recoiled in horror, I could hear her telling strangers. “Oh, I could just cry. My Maybelline has boobies. She’s always been so flat, but she has boobies now! I’m so happy I think I’ll treat Maybelline and her boobies to Dairy Queen!”
That’s the day I started wearing baggy T-shirts.
“Your makeup is runny,” Chessy is saying. No wait, it’s Twig. “And you look scary.”
When I go to the bathroom I am horrified by what I see. My eyes looked smudged, like a raccoon.
It feels good to take a shower. I slip into fresh clothes, then head back upstairs. Twig’s eyes widen as I take out my haul. The delicious smell of tacos fills the room. I eat slowly to torture Twig as she pokes at her salad.
“There’s plenty here,” I say as I chew slowly. “Would you like some?”
“No, thank you. I’m fine.”
Sammy has a big People magazine shoot in San Francisco. He’s gone for five days, leaving me and Twig alone together. We hardly talk. Instead, she slouches around the house and I try to fade into the background. It’s weird. She’s closer to my age than Sammy’s. I don’t like looking at her because she reminds me of my mother, only without the big hair and big personality. In fact, she seems devoid of personality. I don’t know what Sammy sees in her. Well, except for Chessy.
We’re pretty good at avoiding each other. Still, sometimes accidents happen.
“You’re just living off of him,” Twig is saying as she spears her lettuce.
“You’re the freeloader,” I shoot back.
Twig opens her mouth then shuts it, like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Finally, she answers, “I am not freeloading. I plan to help with the mortgage once I get some acting gigs. Besides, Sammy’s my boyfriend and he likes that I’m living here. He doesn’t like to be alone.”
That’s true. When he was my stepdad, he always wanted company. Even if he was just watching television, he’d always say, “Maybe, come join me.” And I
would, because I liked that he asked, and I wanted to spend time with him and pretend he was my real dad.
Toward the end of Chessy and Sammy’s marriage, the second one, it seemed like Sammy and I were spending more time with each other than with my mother. Chessy was too busy with her pageants and charm school and booze to hang around with us.
“... I have an audition for a baked beans commercial.” Has Twig been talking all this time? “My agent says I am perfect for the part.”
“Goodie,” I say.
As Twig attacks her lettuce, I wonder how long Chessy’s been on a diet. The only time she’s ever off it is on her wedding days when she has a slice of wedding cake. I guess she’ll be able to go off her diet in a month or so when she marries Jake. I can’t believe she’s going through with it.
Suddenly I’m not hungry anymore.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Hollywood’s slaving over his documentary. This film competition is a big deal to him. Still, he calls me every night when he takes a break. From what I can tell, film students are like doctors. They work around the clock without sleep. Hollywood will babble on and on about nothing, but when I ask him about his film he clams up. He’s superstitious. Like when his mom had her second cancer operation, he didn’t want to discuss it. Instead, I sat with him for hours while we listened to Ted spout off about whatever popped into his head.
So, Hollywood’s working. Sammy’s in San Francisco. And Ted’s in Las Vegas with Miss de la Tour—apparently she’s some sort of high roller when it comes to the craps table. But that’s okay. I have Benito’s Taco Truck #4 and Jess.
The first hundred dollars went to pay Parker back. “Be sure to give this to him,” I instructed Hollywood. “And tell him that the extra twenty dollars is for him to buy something for his daughter.” I also owe Ted and Hollywood a ton of money, plus I want to return the money I took from Ian. And I want to get something nice for Sammy since he refuses to take anything for rent or food. I’m saving the rest for a private detective.
Though it’s only been a few days, Jess and I have a routine worked out. She takes the orders, I prep the food, she cooks. I take the money, she serves. We both clean up. We do this a hundred times a day. At least that’s what it feels like. I’m starting to recognize the guys. There’s Toby, who always orders carne asada tacos, no onions. Caesar, who likes his with polio and extra sour cream. Eric likes his five carnitas tacos without cilantro. Everyone drinks Jarritos.
A couple of cops have lunch at the truck every day too. We never charge them.
“There are lots of laws about taco trucks, but if the police like you, they don’t mind looking the other way,” Jess informs me as she bags their tacos and slips in extra salsa and guacamole.
“Like what kind of laws?”
“Like you can’t be at one spot for too long.”
“That’s stupid.”
“That’s the law.”
“Who’d make a law like that?”
“The restaurant owners,” Jess says as she slices limes. She’s so fast she could be on one of those Ginsu knife commercials. “We’re competition, so it pays to feed the cops and get to know them. My mom’s terrified I’m going to get arrested some day, and they’ll take me away from her.”
I laugh. “That’s my mother’s dream come true.”
The onions I’m chopping are making me start to tear up.
“When was the last time you and your mom got along?” Jess asks.
I stop to think. “Well, one Christmas we stayed up late and decorated the tree with chains we made out of construction paper. And we ate gingerbread cookies made by the mom of one of her beauty pageant contestants, and we both fell asleep on the couch. In the morning, there were presents under the tree and Chessy cooked pancakes for breakfast.”
“When was that?”
“I don’t know. When I was really little.”
“What about your dad?”
“Which one? I’ve had several. Actually, I came to Los Angeles to find my biological father. He doesn’t even know I’m alive.”
Jess mops her forehead with a paper towel. “I can’t believe you came all this way to look for him. I’ve never been out of Southern California. You’re really brave, Maybe.”
Me, brave? I thought I was a coward to run away.
“Why would anyone want to leave here?” I say, motioning to the beach.
“To know,” she says wistfully. “Just to see. I always thought it would be cool to go to college back East. But we can’t afford it, plus I don’t want to leave my mom. My mother left Mexico when she was a teenager. We’re trying to get my grandmother to move here, but she doesn’t want to. My mom cries for her all the time and says a prayer for her every day. She sees her once a year when she goes home.”
When I get back to Sammy’s I sit on my bed and look around the room. Sammy’s said that I can redecorate if I want to, but so far nothing’s changed. I wonder what my biological father’s house looks like. I’ve kept looking for him on Sammy’s computer, but I don’t have any more leads today than I had yesterday.
I stare at the photo of my mom and me and Sammy. We all look so happy. What went wrong?
I wonder what my mother is doing right now. Is she thinking about me?
I pick up the phone and take a deep breath before dialing. A familiar voice picks up.
“Hello? Hello?”
“Hi, it’s me, Maybe.”
“Maybe? Where are you, hon?”
In a rush I tell Ridgeway about running away, and living in the dorms, and meeting up with Sammy, and working on the taco truck.
“Whoa, whoa, slow down, girl, or you’ll get me dizzy,” he says, chuckling.
I realize I have been talking about myself nonstop for ten minutes, when the real reason I called was to ask questions.
“Ridgeway . . . ?”
“Yes, darling.”
“How is she? Does she even care that I’m gone?”
Ridgeway is silent for a moment, but it feels like an eternity. I brace myself.
“She’s a basket case, Maybe. With you leaving and her pageant princesses bailing on her, she’s hitting the bottle quite hard.”
“And Jake?”
“Yeah, he’s still around, but they fight all the time.”
Now it’s my turn to be silent.
“Maybe? Are you still there?”
“I’m still here,” I finally say. “Ridgeway, Jake tried to rape me. Chessy doesn’t believe me. That’s why I left.”
“Oh, Maybelline, I am so sorry,” Ridgeway says softly. “I believe you.”
“Do you think she misses me at all?”
“I do, in her own way. But she’s mastered that jaw-locking beauty pageant smile that can cover up anything. Your momma was always very good at that. You want me to tell her you called?”
“No, please don’t do that.” I hesitate, then ask, “Do you remember anything about my biological father? His name? Anything?”
“Sorry, Maybe. I met your mother just after he left her. She’s never mentioned anything about him. I think she’s ashamed.” I feel my face flush. “Oh, darling,” he’s quick to add, “not of you, of him leaving her.”
“Look after Chessy, will you?” I tell him. “I know what it’s like when she drinks.”
“I’m no substitute for you, but I’ll do my best.”
“Thanks, Ridgeway.”
I hang up and stare out the window. My mother drinks to forget. The minute Sammy left for California, Chessy started drinking hard. She never did intend for us to join him.
Is it me she’s trying to forget now?
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
It’s Sunday. I have the day off since Jess and I don’t work week-ends. Sammy’s San Francisco gig went well. He just wanted to chill, but Twig talked him into taking her to Catalina Island for a couple days. Sammy invited me, but I told him I had to work tomorrow. Twig beamed when she heard this.
Ted’s back from Las Vegas and we’re g
oing out to lunch. He’s even talked Hollywood into taking some time off to come with us.
“Mademoiselle . . .” Hollywood bows as he opens the back door of the Rolls. He’s such a nerd. On the seat is a Viva Las Vegas snow globe that’s as big as a cantaloupe.
“That’s yours!” Ted looks pleased with himself. “I was going to get you jewelry, but this seemed more you.”
“You look different.” Hollywood reaches for his Super 8. “What did you do?”
“Beeeep!” Ted shouts. “What is no makeup and no baggy clothes?” He’s always wanted to go on Jeopardy! “Why the makeover?” Hollywood asks from behind the camera. “Not that it isn’t an improvement.”
Ted turns around to check me out. “She looks a thousand times better! Now if only we could do something about the hair.”
“I’ve always liked the hair,” Hollywood says. “It’s spunky. Very Sid and Nancy. Not many people could carry that off. You have to have a certain joie de vivre.”
“What’s joie de vivre?” I ask.
“It’s French for love of life” Hollywood explains as Ted maneuvers down the street.
“Ah, franfais” Ted says with a contented sigh. “I’ve always felt a kinship toward the French. They have excellent pastries. Speaking of tarts, don’t you think Maybe’s hair color is over the top?”
“Anything’s better than my hair,” Hollywood says glumly. “One time I went to one of those barber colleges where they’ll cut your hair for free just for the chance to practice on a real person. Only everyone refused to work on me. Maybe’s hair is a product of her own creativity, even if it does look weird.”
“STOP! Do you idiots realize that I can hear you?” I shout.
As Hollywood and Ted continue critiquing my appearance, I look out the window and watch the coast whiz past. It’s like an endless postcard. Hills and tall palm trees on one side, beaches swarming with bronzed sunbathers and surfers on the other.
Since I started working on the taco truck, I’ve stopped wearing makeup. It just melts off anyway. Out of habit I put on a Benito’s shirt every morning. Jess also lent me some shorts, which I have to admit are more comfortable than jeans when you’re working in what’s essentially a metal box on wheels. The small portable fan does little to cool us off. When customers aren’t looking, Jess and I stick our hands into cups of crushed ice.