by Ann Tatlock
Now, as John looked up at the neon sign above the restaurant’s door, the last thing he wanted to do was laugh. He felt something icy in the pit of his stomach, and he wished he could turn around and get right back into the car and go home. But Andrea had already pulled away from the curb, and Billy was tugging on his arm and urging him toward the door.
“Come on, Dad,” Billy said. “Don’t wait. Come inside.”
Telling himself he wouldn’t be a busboy forever, John followed Billy into the restaurant. He hoped it was only his imagination that every eye in the place landed on him when he stepped inside. Surely there wasn’t something about his presence that warned, Ex-con approaching.
“Once you’ve been in,” Roach had told him, “you’re never out again, even when you’re out. You always got the smell of the big house on you, and people smell it a mile away.”
He had never liked Roach when he was in prison, and he sure didn’t like him now.
A woman approached wearing an apron stuffed with drinking straws, pens, and order pads. Her dark hair was cropped short, and her colorless face was narrow and pinched, and John couldn’t help noticing that in spite of the name of the place, she wasn’t so much as smiling. He tried to smile at her anyway, but his cheeks quivered like horseflesh bothered by a fly. He offered her a taut nod instead.
“Maggie,” Billy called out, “Maggie, here’s my dad. He’s working with us!”
“Yeah.” Maggie looked from Billy to John and back again. “I know. Aren’t we lucky?”
Billy beamed proudly. “Yeah, we’re lucky!”
“Well,” Maggie went on, “I’ll show him around. Billy, you can go ahead and clock in. We have a little bit of paperwork for your dad to take care of, and then he’ll join you out front.”
“You want me to show him how to do the job?”
“Naw, don’t bother. I can tell him what’s expected of the busboys.”
John flinched at that last word. At least in prison he’d been a clerk in the infirmary, typing reports, filing charts, handing out sick passes. It was a clean job and, within the penal system, about as respectable as you could get. Now he’d be gathering dirty dishes, crumpled napkins, and who knew what else.
On the drive in Billy had told him about the occasional surprises he’d come across—the muddy sock, a hearing aid, a full set of dentures, eight artificial fingernails painted hot pink. “It’s like a treasure hunt, Dad!”
John shivered.
“And, Maggie, show Dad the clean dishrags and the rubber gloves, and—”
“Don’t worry, Billy,” John interrupted. “I’m sure Maggie will tell me everything I need to know.”
Billy smiled and went to the kitchen to clock in.
John followed Maggie to an office where his brother-in-law sat behind a desk, bent over a pile of papers. Owen Laughter glanced up without raising his head. “Hello, John.” He waved a pen. “Have a seat.”
John sat. He waited for Owen to stop scribbling, a pause that stretched on for a good thirty seconds. Finally Owen put down the pen and slid the pile of papers across the desk. “We just have a few things for you to sign—tax forms, things like that.”
“All right.”
While he was looking over the forms, he heard Owen say, “You get settled in all right yesterday?”
John nodded. “Sure.” He thought of the one plastic bag he’d carried home on the bus. “Not much unpacking to do.”
But Owen already knew that. He was, after all, the one who’d met John at the bus station in Rochester, met him with the new change of clothes, a candy bar, and a can of Coca-Cola Classic. John had changed into the clothes in the bus station’s men’s room, stuffing the prison issue he’d been wearing in the trash can. He ate the candy bar and drank the soda on the long drive home. He and Owen had forty-five minutes to talk on their way to Conesus, and they’d hardly said a word. Finally, and maybe just to break the silence, Owen pointed to the plastic bag at John’s feet and asked what was in it. John said it held a few personal items, like legal papers, a couple of sweaters, several pairs of socks, and the family’s letters to him from the past five years. He failed to mention the Bible at the bottom of the bag, figuring Owen’s reaction to that would not be favorable.
When John finished signing the papers, he looked up and said, “Thanks for what you’re doing for me, Owen.”
His brother-in-law’s face remained passive. “I’m not doing it for you, John. I’m doing it for Andrea and the kids.”
Owen had liked him once, way back when. They’d been friends long before John and Andrea were married. Owen, John, and Jared were drinking buddies all through those high school summers at the lake. They’d had some wild times together—talk about laughter! The three of them plus John Barleycorn—a sure combination to bust a gut.
But Owen had grown up, gotten responsible, put the adolescent drinking behind him while John and Jared went on indulging. Owen hadn’t been happy with John for getting his kid sister pregnant, but he’d accepted it. It wasn’t the shotgun wedding that did the friendship in. Ironically, the glue that held the friendship together in the first place was what finally broke it up. The liquor took John to prison, and Owen Laughter wasn’t about to forget a thing like that. Even Jared had kept his distance ever since that particular ax fell. Drink had a way of killing off relationships, especially with those people a man used to drink with.
Owen thought his sister deserved better than a drunk and a convict. John couldn’t disagree.
“I understand, Owen,” John said as he pushed the papers back across the desk.
Owen nodded toward the woman leaning against the doorframe. “Maggie can show you what to do.”
John rose. He wondered whether he should extend his hand across the desk but decided against it. Once again he followed Maggie, this time to the kitchen, where she pointed to a layout of the restaurant tacked up on the wall.
“This will be your station right here,” she said, tapping the laminated sheet. “Keep your eyes open. Soon as a party leaves a table, you go clear it. Be sure to spray it down. I’ll show you where the bottles of cleaning solution are in a minute. You’ll carry one around with you, and I’ll show you how to refill it. When the table’s clean, you carry the tub back here to the window. Follow me.”
They walked through the kitchen, where a trio of line cooks worked feverishly. One man chopped vegetables with an oversized knife, another stirred something in a pot on the stove, still another stood with a spatula over a grill that sizzled with a variety of hamburgers and thinly sliced steaks. Maggie didn’t bother to introduce John but walked on through to the window where a young man was rinsing off dirty dishes with an industrial-sized sprayer hose.
“Okay,” Maggie said, “you’ll bring your tub to this window. First thing you’ve got to do is separate out the trash and throw it in the garbage can. You don’t pass anything through this window except dishes and flatware. And make sure you don’t throw away any of the flatware; sometimes it gets lost in the napkins and whatnot. If the trash can is full, it’s your job to tie up the bag and put in a clean one. Now, a lot of people forget and leave things on the table—cell phones, sunglasses, that kind of thing. Those you take to Lost and Found in the office.”
When Maggie paused, John ventured a question. “What about dentures?” he asked. “What do I do with those?”
Maggie didn’t crack a smile. “Dentures?”
“Yeah, Billy said . . .” He thought a moment, then decided to drop it. This lady wasn’t budging an inch.
“Okay, so you can pass the whole tub off to the dishwasher,” Maggie went on, “and pick up another one here.” She pointed to a stack of tubs. “Got any questions?”
John shook his head. “I don’t guess so.”
“Think you can handle it?”
John didn’t bother to reply.
The trick, he thought, would be never to make eye contact. He’d move through the sea of patrons without stopping, zeroing in only on
the empty table, the dirty dishes, the task at hand. If he kept his head down, he could be a nonperson doing a nonjob, not worth noticing. Anyway, since he himself had never lived in Conesus year-round, he didn’t expect to know or be recognized by many people, which he considered a good thing.
Maggie showed him where to find the bibbed aprons, the rubber gloves, the spray bottles and dishrags. Then she thrust a tub in his hands and told him to get to work.
John stepped hesitantly into the dining room. The place was already in the midst of the lunch-hour rush; almost all the tables were full, and the hostess was seating yet another group of patrons at a booth Billy had just cleaned. John moved to his assigned area, a cluster of tables and booths in the far corner of the room. A heavyset man and a bottle-blond woman were at that moment rising from a booth, the man tossing a couple of dollars onto the table for the waitress. He belched loudly as he hiked up his pants, and then he and the woman headed toward the cash register. John looked down at the remains of their meal. He suddenly longed for his desk in the infirmary, even with its view of the prison grounds through a window reinforced with wire mesh.
He picked gingerly at the soiled napkins, tossing them into the tub. He gathered up the plates, the glasses, the flatware, trying to arrange them in such a way that the drinking glasses wouldn’t break. His cheeks and his forehead burned, and a small wave of nausea rippled through his stomach. He remembered the way the w key always stuck on the portable typewriter in the infirmary, how mad that used to make him. He sure wouldn’t be mad about it now. No, he sure wouldn’t.
When the table was cleared, he lifted the spray bottle of cleaner from where it hung by the nozzle on his apron string. He sprayed the table down, rubbed it clean with a dishrag.
There, one table done. He wondered how many tables he would bus before he could quit this place and move on.
The lunch hour passed and the early afternoon crawled by with John and Billy repeatedly passing each other as they moved from the tables to the dish window and back again. Billy was all smiles—for his dad, for his uncle Owen, for Maggie, for the customers. Billy smiled even when there was no one to smile at save his own self. John wondered at the boy’s satisfaction and found it enviable.
When he had a spare moment, he watched his son at work, watched how he tackled each table in the same way. First Billy gathered up the trash, then the flatware, the plates, the bowls, the glasses, the coffee cups. The order never varied. When the table was clear, he sprayed the bleach solution in a left-to-right pattern, starting with the upper left corner of the table and working his way to the lower right. He sprayed five streaks of cleaner over each booth, four over each table, since the tables were slightly smaller. Then, starting again in the upper left corner, he rubbed circles over the table with a dishrag in the same left-to-right pattern until the whole thing was clean.
That was Billy for you, John thought. Orderly and determined, like most kids with Down syndrome. He didn’t like to change his routines, and he didn’t like to give up. The trait could be aggravating for him and for everyone around him, but then again, he eventually got the job done, and that was what mattered.
Around four o’clock John was clearing yet another table when Billy showed up at his elbow.
“I’m working up a big hunger, Dad. You too?”
John realized then that he hadn’t had lunch and his stomach was starting to rebel. Billy was allowed to break for his shift meal at five o’clock, John at five-thirty. One free meal every shift, which was just about the only fringe benefit of the job.
“Yeah, I could eat,” John said.
“Try the Philly cheesesteak, Dad. It’s the best.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. With hot peppers.” Billy patted his stomach.
“Okay, sounds good.”
Just as Billy moved on to his own station, a pretty, darkhaired girl about Rebekah’s age waved at John from a nearby booth. He looked at her, turned, and glanced over his shoulder, then looked back at her.
“Hey,” she hollered, “you Billy and Rebekah’s dad?”
Caught already, on the first day. He didn’t want to admit that he was Rebekah’s dad, more for her sake than his own. But he knew he couldn’t lie and expect to get away with it. He moved over to the table where the girl sat across from a young man with a bowl haircut and a face sporting the first bloom of downy whiskers.
“You know my daughter?” John asked, which, as soon as he said it, he knew was stupid. Of course the girl knew his daughter.
“Yeah.” The girl was all smiles. “We go to school together. So you’re back?”
John nodded hesitantly. “Yes, I’m back.”
“Way cool!” the girl exclaimed. “So what was it like?” John felt himself stiffen, felt his throat constrict. He didn’t want to talk about prison with a child he didn’t know. “Well—”
“I always wanted to go to Peru!” the girl said.
John frowned then. His head moved slowly from side to side. “Peru?”
The girl slapped the table excitedly with the palms of both hands. “Rebekah’s dad has been on an archeological dig in Peru,” she said to the boy.
John’s eyes moved slowly across the cluttered table to the boy. The shaggy teen was already staring up at him with admiration in his brown eyes. “Whoa, dude! Like, whatja find?” he asked.
“Well, I—”
“Didja come across any human bones?”
“Well, I—”
Long after he left the restaurant that day, John considered it a gift of fate that Billy, at that very moment, had dropped a too full bin, scattering dishes, flatware, and shards of glass all over the linoleum floor. John rushed to clean it up while Billy, distraught at his own clumsiness, was whisked away by Maggie to Owen’s office, where he spent twenty minutes calming down. John hated to see his son so upset with himself for what was simply an accident, but at the same time he silently thanked the boy for creating a distraction when he needed one.
John could understand Rebekah not wanting to tell other kids her father was in prison, but—Peru? John wasn’t sure he could so much as point to the place on a map.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Every time she woke up with the throbbing headache, Rebekah tried to convince herself it was worth it. She couldn’t remember even half of what had happened the night before, but she was sure she’d had a good time. Besides, by now she knew how to handle the pain. Pop a couple of ibuprofen, keep your eyes shut, and wait for time to do its trick.
“Beka?”
She reluctantly opened one eye and squinted against a shaft of blinding light. “Yeah?”
“You feeling all right?”
“Yeah.” She shut her eye and hoped her father would go away.
After a moment she realized he was still there. “Are you sure?” he asked. “Of course I’m sure.”
“You’ve been lying here on the glider for the past hour.”
“And your point is?”
“I just wanted to make sure you’re all right.”
“I’m just resting. Is that against the law?”
“Well, no.”
Idiot, she thought. He doesn’t even know a hangover when he sees one. And he, the king of hangovers himself.
She shifted her position and set the glider in motion, an unfortunate mistake that sent waves of nausea lapping across her stomach. She clenched her jaw against the juices creeping up her throat. That was all she needed right now, to toss the remnants of last night’s partying all over her father’s shoes.
A few deep breaths helped settle the queasiness, but still, thousands of tiny tipsy feet beat out a chorus line across her brain. If only she could remember the fun. If only payback wasn’t expected for something she could hardly remember.
“Beka?”
“What?” She stifled a moan. “Can I ask you something?”
“No.”
She sensed his surprise at her answer. Her one word was an attack he hadn’t expected. She liked t
hat.
He sighed. “Well, I’m going to ask anyway.”
Just shut up and go away. She fought the temptation to cover her ears with her hands. She tried to think about being in David’s arms, leaning against him as he in turn leaned against a gravestone in the small cemetery behind the church. That was their favorite place to meet late at night—she and David, Lena and Jim. Sometimes a few others, whoever wanted to sit among the stones and down a few bottles. They laughed at the thought of the A.A. meetings held every Wednesday night in the church basement, and made a point of lining up their empty bottles—vodka, rum, beer, whatever—all along the threshold of the back door. In your face, the bottles said to all those anonymous drunks trying to stay dry.
Lena had introduced Rebekah to alcohol a couple of years ago, when they were both fourteen. Lena was a good friend. Rebekah knew she was indebted to her. It was the alcohol that melted her shyness so that she could simply be with people. The love of it gave her the courage to climb out her window at night and walk along the dark road to meet David and Lena and Jim for their midnight gatherings.
Her father was still standing over her; she could hear him breathing. He had said something and was waiting for an answer. In an attempt to clear her head, she rubbed a temple. “What?” she asked.
“I said, did you tell your friends I’ve been on an archeological dig in Peru?”
She almost laughed—might have, if the thought of moving that much didn’t send her head spinning. “What was I supposed to tell them? That dear old dad was in the slammer?”
She waited for his anger, but it didn’t come.
“I understand why you did it, Beka,” he responded quietly.
She clenched her jaw again. Don’t think it’s going to win you any points being nice to me. I’m not buying it.