by Ann McMan
I sighed and turned the water on. I reached over to pull a couple of paper towels out of the wall dispenser and realized that it was empty . . . as usual. Aunt Jackie stored the extra towels on a shelf behind the only working toilet. I went into the stall to retrieve some more, and snagged the end of my shirt on the changing station. I stood there wondering for the thousandth time why Aunt Jackie even had a changing station in here. I couldn’t remember a single time I ever even saw a baby in this joint. Lucille had to be the bar’s closest thing to a child, and nobody would ever try to lift his fat butt up.
I tried to tug my shirt free, but only succeeded in getting it more stuck. The cartoon Koala bear kept smiling up at me from the trap door of the changing station, seeming to suggest that being stuck there was something I should be enjoying. I was about ready to give up and tear myself loose when I heard the restroom door open and close.
“What are you doing?” a voice behind me asked.
It was El. I knew it without turning around.
“I’m stuck,” I explained. I hoped she’d decide to leave me alone and go back out into the bar. Why had she followed me in here?
I thought of a hundred reasons why she was here, and none of them felt safe. I gave my t-shirt another frustrated tug. Still no dice. It wasn’t budging, and, apparently, neither was El. She stood behind me in the stall. The tiny space filled up with the scent of cucumber and melon. Even though it was a nice change from the omnipresent odors of smoke and stale beer, it was making it impossible for me to think straight. I felt like all the hairs were standing up on the back of my neck.
“Can I help?” El asked. Her voice came from right behind me. I thought I could feel her breath.
“No!” I erupted. “Sorry. I’m a little on edge tonight.”
She laughed. “I noticed.” She leaned against the open door of the stall. “Do I make you uncomfortable, Friday Jill?”
What do you think? I wanted to ask. “Well, right now, I’m kind of at a disadvantage.” I tugged at the hem of my shirt again. “It’s hard to put your best foot forward when you’re being held captive by a Koala Kare changing table.”
“I’ll have to take your word for that one.”
“I’m sorry about this . . . did you need to use the bathroom?”
“Not really,” El drawled. “I followed you.”
Oh, god. This was going from worse to catastrophic. “You did? Why?” Oh, that was good . . . now I sounded as dim-witted as I felt.
El sighed. “Why don’t you let me help you get unhitched from that contraption so we can talk?”
She wanted to talk? “Talk about what?” I tried to shift my body around so I could at least see her face.
“Well, for starters, I suppose we could talk about whether you’re as interested in me as I seem to be in you.”
I slammed my knee into the toilet paper dispenser. “Jumpin’ Jehosophat!” I was seeing stars—and not just from the pain in my kneecap.
El grabbed the backs of my arms to help support me. “Are you okay?”
I was doubled over in pain. “Do I look okay?”
“Hang on a minute.” She maneuvered herself around so she could close the stall door and give us more room. “Oh, this is ridiculous. Why don’t you just take that thing off?”
I was incredulous. “My shirt?”
“No . . . your pants.” I heard her sigh. “Of course your shirt. Then we can get it out of that damn thing.”
“I am not taking my shirt off.” Although I had to admit that the idea of doing so was already shooting excited little text messages out along my . . . extremities.
“Well then stand still and let me try to loosen it.”
“I’ve been trying to loosen it. It’s not budging.”
“Move over so I can reach it.”
I rolled my eyes. “Move over where? On top of the toilet?”
“We need to open the damn thing.”
“I agree—but there isn’t room in here.”
El was pretty much pressed up against me by this point, and there was no way I was going to ask her to leave.
“Desperate times call for desperate measures.” She moved in even closer and reached around me with both arms. “I’ll hold onto this, while you pull the tray down.”
I was seeing stars. “Um. El?” I managed to croak.
“Yes?” Her voice was coming from someplace right beside my ear.
“That’s not my shirt.”
“It isn’t?”
I shook my head.
“Oh,” she said. “My bad.”
I noticed that her hands didn’t move right away. I turned my head to look at her. In the dim light of the stall, her eyes looked . . . scared.
Scared?
“What are we doing?” I asked. I had no idea where my coherence was coming from.
She gave me a shy-looking smile. “Trying to get you unstuck?”
I thought about Misty Ann and Jerry. Getting unstuck was exactly what I needed. But getting involved with a stranger who also happened to be an organizer for the UAW was not the way to do it. What I was on the verge of doing with El was exactly the opposite of getting unstuck. Grammy Mann would say it was like jumping from the pot into the fire.
I opened my mouth to say as much, but El decided that maybe words weren’t really what we needed right then. She was moving in to present a different kind of argument. Just when her lips connected with mine the walls of the stall started shaking. It took me a few seconds to realize that it wasn’t an earthquake—it was someone yanking on the door.
“Will you two hurry the hell up,” a gravelly voice demanded. “I have to tap off.”
Luanne. Of course.
El and I leapt apart like we’d been caught . . . making out in a bathroom stall.
“Oh, damn . . .” she whispered.
“Oh, Judas . . .” I replied.
We pushed and jostled against each other in the tiny space trying to right ourselves, alternately banging into the changing station, the toilet paper holder, the shelf loaded with paper towels, and each other. We were slamming into each other like bumper cars at the county fair.
“Oh, sweet Jesus.” Luanne had had enough. “Just open the damn door and get out here. This ain’t my first rodeo.”
El sighed and finally managed to turn herself around. I looked down and noticed that at some point during our tussle, I had managed to yank my shirt loose from its prison. The bad news was that it was now ripped nearly in half. Great. Like I didn’t have enough problems.
We managed to pry the door open and squeeze ourselves out of the tiny stall.
Luanne stood there like Judge Judy, chewing on one side of her lower lip.
“There were no paper towels,” I started to explain.
Luanne didn’t say anything. I could tell that she was staring at my shirt. I was doing a bad job trying to hold it closed—it was torn open about halfway up to my armpit.
She looked at El. “In a hurry, were you?”
El looked confused. Then she glanced down at my shirt. Her face turned bright red. For some reason, that made me feel a little bit better.
“Not that it would make any never mind to you,” Luanne continued. “But your partner out there has a couple of live ones cornered by the Keno machine.” She jerked a thumb toward the bar. “He asked me to send you back out there.”
El looked at me. “I’ve got a jacket you can use. I’ll go and get it.”
Before I could say anything, she pushed past Luanne and hurried out of the bathroom. I stared at the door for a minute before I had the courage to look back at Luanne.
“Go ahead and get it over with,” I said.
Luanne was already unfastening the front of her pants. “I got nothin’ to say, so I’ll just say this. If you want to be the next Misty Ann Marks, there’s a bar full of candidates out there who would be happy to accommodate you, and none of them are workin’ for the UAW.”
“That’s not fair, Luanne.” She squeezed
her way into the stall, so I was talking to her broad back. “I am not like Misty Ann.”
Luanne didn’t say anything right away. I stood there, stupidly, listening to the sound of her peeing. It went on and on. She must’ve had a lot more Old Style to drink than I realized. Finally, the toilet flushed.
“Like I said. I got nothin’ to say about it. A smart girl like you should have better sense. Here . . .” One of her hands shot out around the half-open door. It was holding a stack of folded paper towels. I took them from her. “Put those up in that dispenser.”
I caught another look at myself in the mirror. My hair was a mess. When the hell did that happen? Luanne was right. I should have better sense.
The door to the restroom opened again, and T-Bomb burst in. “What the heck is going on in here?” She handed me a lightweight, tan linen jacket. “El DeBarge said I should bring this in to you.”
I took it from her. “Where is she?”
“Hell . . . she laid a patch gettin’ outta here. She said you could get the jacket back to her some other time.” T-Bomb grabbed hold of the hem of my t-shirt. “What the hell happened to your shirt?”
I sighed. “It’s a long story.”
Luanne managed to extricate herself from the stall. “Hurry up and pee, T-Bomb. I gotta head back across the river.”
“Well if you’d get your fat ass outta there, I might could,” T-Bomb replied.
“Are you both leaving?” I asked. This evening had sure not ended up the way I thought it would.
Luanne washed her hands. “I called Donnie and told him I’d drop her off on my way home. He said they’d pick up her van tomorrow morning.”
“I told you I was okay to drive,” T-Bomb bellowed. “I don’t need no damn limo service.”
Luanne rolled her eyes and grabbed a paper towel. “Just tap it off and be quick about it.” She looked at my reflection in the mirror. “Same advice goes for you, missy.”
I gave up trying to defend myself and pulled on El’s jacket. It smelled just like her . . . sweet and fresh. Like summertime.
I had a sinking feeling that this one was going to be a tough row to hoe.
“I’ll try,” I said to Luanne.
She snorted.
“What?” I asked.
“That’s what Jay told me twenty years ago when we were sprawled out across the back seat of his daddy’s Buick. Nine months later, we got ourselves Jay Jr.”
“Well, he ended up being a good provider,” T-Bomb pointed out.
Luanne nodded. “And now his baby sister is a true contender for that crown.”
Jailissa. Edwards County’s best hope for this year’s Miss Pork Queen title.
I supposed my odds could always be worse.
Chapter 3
“Why can’t I just tie these loose strands off in little knots? It’ll be a lot faster.”
A couple of months ago, I bought six old oak dining chairs at the antique mall in Haubstadt, and Grammy Mann was teaching me how to re-cane their seats. I was just going to take them to Mrs. Greubel, who used to work at the old Haub House restaurant before it changed hands, but Grammy Mann had a fit about that. She said that Betty Greubel didn’t know the first thing about how to cane a chair, evidenced by the fact that when my father accidentally knocked one over at the restaurant, the underside of it looked like a flicker’s nest. Apparently, the bottom of the chair was supposed to look as neat and tidy as the top. This philosophy of Grammy’s pretty much extended to everything else in her life, too.
“I told you.” Grammy shook her head. “You don’t do it that way. You weave those loose strands into the next hole and clip off the short one.” She was sitting on a low, slat-back chair, holding a dinged-up granite roaster on her lap. She was snapping beans, and this was her shelling chair. Years ago, Grampa had cut the legs off so the back was lower than the front, and the whole thing sat close to the floor.
We were outside on the front porch, since it was so warm inside the house. The box fan Grammy had set up on the dining room table wasn’t doing much but blowing hot air around. She said that was a lot like still having Grampa there.
I was really starting to lose patience with this whole enterprise. By the time I had one of these chair seats fixed to her satisfaction, I’d be too old to sit on them.
My dog, Fritz, was sprawled out on his favorite spot at the top of the porch steps, catching some rays of afternoon sun. We spent most of our Sundays with Grammy, doing chores or just sitting on the porch, drinking iced tea and watching the comings and goings at the house across the road. Doc Baker and his not quite wife, Ermaline, lived there and scandalized the neighborhood with their alternative lifestyle. Grammy steadfastly refused to gossip about Doc and his common-law wife, but I noticed that she was always ready to correct you if you got any details wrong when you shared snippets about them with anybody else.
Most people in town were inclined to forgive Ermaline for moving in with Doc, who drove an El Camino and ran a lawnmower repair service. She had once been married to Kenny Purvis, before he found Jesus and started preaching at The House of Praise. There were rumors that Kenny never really bothered to divorce Ermaline, claiming that god’s law held sway over the laws of mammon. Nobody was ever really sure what that was supposed to mean, but apparently, it gave Kenny permission to take up with a sixteen-year-old girl from Samsville named Desdemona Jones. Kenny had a knack for attracting impressionable young women, and his flock was mostly comprised of starry-eyed waifs who were known as hoppers, because of their tendency to jump and dance around during services at his church. Frankly, I was surprised that any of them had the stamina to hop. At last count, that congregation had about fifteen children under the age of three, and a suspicious number of them looked a lot like Kenny.
I jammed a piece of reed under my thumbnail and jumped about a foot into the air.
“Damn it!”
Grammy looked at me. “What happened?”
I shoved the chair away and sucked on the tip of my thumb. “I can’t do this, Grammy. I can’t do anything right.”
Grammy snapped another bean and dropped it into her pan. “What do you mean? You do lots of things right. This is just something you can’t rush through. It’s not like playing with that fancy phone of yours. You have to take your time and be patient.”
I didn’t reply.
Grammy set her pan down on the porch floor. She smelled a rat. She knew me pretty well. She ought to . . . I’d practically grown up with her. My mother had TB when I was born, so I lived with Grammy for the first few years of my life, and we’d been best friends ever since.
“What’s the matter?” She gave me that look . . . the one that meant I might as well fess up, because she wasn’t going to drop it until I did.
I shrugged.
“Jillian?”
I knew I was in for it. Grammy never called me Jillian unless it was really serious. Nobody did.
I had a hard time looking at her. “I met somebody.” It sounded lame. Even to me.
That perked Grammy up right away. “Who is she?”
Grammy knew I was gay. It always amazed me that this smart, sassy, eighty-year-old woman could be so tolerant—even curious. She never even raised an eyebrow at my twelfth birthday party, when she caught me experimenting with Donna Steptoe out behind the rhubarb patch. She was totally unlike my parents in that way. Ma and Pop, aka Sissy and Wayne, ran a convenience store across the river in Illinois and were a lot more Midwestern in their approach to my sexual orientation. That meant they just didn’t mention it. Ever.
“She’s not from around here,” I explained. “I met her at Hoosier Daddy the other night.”
Grammy looked intrigued by that. “Where are her people from?”
“Some place in New York. I don’t really know for sure.”
“New York?”
I nodded.
“What’s she doing in Princeton?”
I knew it was all going to be downhill from here. “She’s with
the UAW.”
“Oh, honey lamb.” Grammy closed her eyes and shook her head.
“I know, I know,” I said, before she could tell me I was crazy. “But I only met her the one time, and nothing really happened.”
Grammy opened her eyes. “Then what are you all in a swivet about?”
“I’m not in a swivet.”
“No?” She narrowed her eyes. “Honey, are you fighting in the Scarlet Crusade?”
I sighed. “No, Grammy . . . I’m not having my period.”
“Well then, I don’t know what has you all het up. If you only met her once and nothing happened, then what’s the problem?”
I shrugged.
“Jillian?”
She was doing the name thing again. I gave up. “Okay. Maybe something did happen. Something little . . . and it probably didn’t mean anything to her.”
Grammy folded her arms. “What was it?”
“We were in the bathroom together, and we kind of . . . nearly . . . sort of . . . almost . . . kissed. Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
I nodded.
“You’re not sure?”
I shrugged again.
Grammy sighed. “Honey, do you remember when you were five, and you saw the sheep in the south meadow making baby lambs?”
“Oh, god.” I raised a hand to my eyes.
“There wasn’t any ‘maybe’ or ‘almost,’ or ‘nearly’ in that . . . now, was there?”
“Grammy . . .”
“I don’t know much about what did or didn’t happen in that bathroom, but I can tell by your reaction to it that there wasn’t any ‘maybe’ involved.”
In frustration, I picked up a coil of chair cane and lobbed it across the porch. It landed near Fritz and skidded to a stop near the end of his nose. He bolted to his feet and took a desperate look around, as if the long-anticipated alien invasion had finally occurred, and he’d managed to sleep through it.
“Sorry, buddy,” I apologized.
“Now tell me more about this agitator, and what on earth possessed you to consort with her.” Grammy picked up her roasting pan and resumed snapping beans.