by Deb Caletti
“Now, look who is the picture of happiness,” Miz June said.
“Two double rooms, and a couch in one for Harold. In-room coffeepots.” She gave herself applause and did a goofy curtsy. She slid in next to Chip Jr. “Now, for a big, juicy cheeseburger. Bacon.”
“Charles Whitney is certainly looking forward to seeing you” she said to Lillian, who smiled.
“So did you get Mrs. Wong?”
“Oh, right. Jeez, I almost forgot I just talked to her.” Mom thunked her forehead with her fist. It was the same thing she used to do to the television to get the color to work before it gave up entirely and went yellow. “Yeah. Anna Bee was over there having dinner with them.”
“I’m surprised she didn’t accuse Mr. Wong of hitting on Anna Bee,” I said.
“Nah. She’s had enough excitement for a while. She heard from Delores and Nadine,” Mom said to Lillian. “Also from someone at Golden Years. And Delores’ attorney called.”
“He can’t do nothing,” Harold said.
“Scare tactics,” Miz June said. It seemed to be working. Lillian looked scared.
“Don’t worry, Lillian,” I said.
“They’ll no doubt be coming to see Charles,” my mother said.
“We better get there first,” Miz June said. “Get that power of attorney signed.” I suspect she also just wanted another chance to try to break the sound barrier in the Lincoln.
“Well, they’ll be seeing Charles eventually,” my mother said.
“What do you mean eventually?” I said.
“Mrs. Wong told them they’d never find him. That he was in hiding. They tried everything to get her to tell where he was. Reason, pleading, bribery. They finally got it out of her. He was staying at the Coronado Hotel in San Diego. A place Lillian and he had a memorable weekend many years ago.”
Lillian’s shoulders were moving up and down. She snorted a little. Laughter.
“Never been there, huh?” Peach said. Lillian shook her head. I loved it. Victory. That day had been so great. That day was the best thing I ever did.
Cindy came to spread more sunshine and took our orders. Harold and Lillian were both having pancakes.
“If they’re as sweet as you, Cindy, I’ll have the pancakes,” Harold said. His ego had inflated since Mrs. Connors. At this rate, we’d have to get a U-Haul to pull it behind us.
Cindy’s pen stopped scratching. She looked up and withered Harold with a look. So much for his way with the ladies.
“Jesus, Harold. You’re lucky she didn’t jab your eyes out with her pen,” Peach said.
“Or stab you repeatedly with the pin end of her name tag,” Miz June said.
“That was really bad,” I said.
“Couldn’t Mrs. Wong have thought of somewhere a little farther away for Charles to be?” Harold said, ignoring us. “That’s maybe, what, a couple hours down the coastline?” Harold said.
“She did well coming up with that, I thought,” Miz June said.
“So who else did you call?” I asked Mom. “You were out there awhile.”
“She called Joe Davis,” Chip Jr. said. “Can’t you tell by her red cheeks?” He pinched his own to make them rosy. “I like Joe Davis,” Chip Jr. said.
“I had to check on Poe,” she said.
“Well, you certainly have cheered up since the car,” Miz June said.
“You bit Harold’s head off,” I said.
“She was testy all right,” Miz June said.
“I’m sorry, Harold,” my mom said. “I was feeling discouraged that we hadn’t made much progress. We hadn’t even crossed the state line.”
“So that’s what it was about,” I said. “The state line.” I was teasing, or else I thought I was. It was one of those moments where your own voice knows your feelings before you do. It had an edge to it. It was starting to move toward that joking that wasn’t really funny.
“What?” My mom sipped her water. The kid who had been staring in the next booth started to jump up and down on the seat.
“It was about crossing the state line. You wanted to be past where Dad is.” I swayed my hand up and down, in the motion of a roller coaster. I had only meant to indicate we were nearby the amusement park; the more cruel double meaning, that her emotions regarding men were as up and down as the Mine of Terror, only occurred to me as I put my hand down.
Chip Jr. raised his arms roller coaster-style and did a fake scream. He hadn’t yet realized that we’d tripped over into the land of the unsaid. Too late, he noticed that the table had gotten quiet. He put his arms down. He began to scoot the paper off of his straw with the intent focus of someone doing heart surgery. My mother looked down and studied her fingernails.
“It can be difficult for women to get to the point where their feelings are not based on the attention of the men around them,” Miz June said. I presume she meant it kindly, but my mother flushed red.
“Who are you to talk?” my mother said to me. The vinyl of the bench seat was stuck to the back of my legs. I felt the heat rise in my own face. We were suddenly having an argument, and that’s how it was done by Quiet People, anger rising and struggling for release through a red face, words of barely contained viciousness. “After we’ve just done the Travis Becker soap opera.”
“I learned from the expert,” I said. Anger flew from the place where I had tried to contain it for so long. We were book readers, trained to step around raw feelings in the name of politeness and love, and yet I was furious. Furious at her sudden happiness, after years of her periods of mourning and absence that we had tried forever to fix with our goodness and peace and humor. She was happy. Fine. Terrific. Congratulations. My voice was hateful. I didn’t even care that the old people were hearing me. “He loves me, he loves me not.”
“You gave your heart to a thief, Ruby, my God, and it wasn’t like you didn’t know what he was like.” Everyone else was quiet, except for Harold, who took a noisy drink from his water glass and made a show of putting his napkin on his lap. Maybe he had his hearing aid turned off, or maybe he saw his plate of pancakes coming. The charming and bubbly Cindy must have reached the end of her shift, as walking toward us with plates stacked up his arms was RANDY, tall Randy, not much older than me and wearing a mustard-colored shirt buttoned down too low, as if he was trying to show something off. Didn’t restaurants have a law about that sort of thing? After he’d unloaded the plates, I realized his object of pride was probably the one lone chest hair that was waving about frantically as he stood directly under the air-conditioning vent. It looked like a guy on a deserted island trying to signal to the rescue plane.
Harold leaned forward, giving his plate of food a long look with wide, appreciative eyes. My mother was making a snowy mountain from bits of torn-off napkin. The silence was oh so sharp. It cut. “Here you are, gang,” Randy said. “Anything else I can get you?” He was staring at Lillian. You’d have thought he’d never seen an old lady in a wheelchair before.
“What happened to Cindy?” Peach said.
“She’s on a break,” Randy said.
“I hope it’s a long one,” Harold said.
Randy chuckled. “Yeah, glacial.”
Whatever that meant. Randy turned away. I almost waved good-bye to the chest hair. He came back a second later with a catsup bottle, even though there was already one at our table. “There you go, gang. Tomato, tomahto.”
It was quiet at our table, except for the sound of Peach’s knife edge scraping the glass plate as she cut Lillian’s pancakes, and Chip Jr.’s palm hitting the bottom of the catsup bottle. The people with the three kids got up to leave, a smattering of food left on the floor beneath where the baby sat. No one spoke. With Randy gone, tension sat between my mother and me like an extra person. It should have been given a menu and a water glass.
The silence sat in my stomach, making the food look bright and revolting and making guilt creep along the inside of my skin. I tried to eat a French fry.
“I dated a t
hief once,” Peach said. Lillian’s pancake, which she’d been carefully trying to skewer for the past few seconds, dropped off her fork. We all looked up at Peach. Relief eased into the crack of the broken silence. I could have hugged Peach. I tell you, those Casserole Queens were really getting to me. Tension danced out of the room like it realized it was at the wrong party.
“Sure, and you wrote to that convict, too, don’t forget,” Harold said.
“This was when I was sixteen. I can’t remember his name. That’s the funny thing you realize when you get older. People and things you think are so important right then, you can’t even remember later. Billy, maybe. No. Bobby? Starts with a B.”
“Burt?” Miz June suggested.
“No,” Peach said. “Anyway, he stole street signs. Had a whole collection in his backyard. YIELD, STOP, NO PARKING. No idea how he got them off. Once I was going to help him take a signboard on the corner of Front Street and Alder, but then he yanked the whole damn thing out of the ground, post and all. He’d been shaking it loose for weeks. We put it across the backseat of his car, the pole hanging out one window. He wasn’t too bright. Put the bus stop sign he stole in his front yard and got caught when the bus kept stopping there.” I laughed.
“Bart?” Miz June said.
“No. Jeb! That’s it. Jeb.”
“You said it started with a B,” Harold said.
“I knew it was something that sounded like a hillbilly name,” Peach said.
“I was convinced Mr. Varsuccio was in the mafia,” Miz June said.
“And you dated him,” Peach said.
“He was such a snappy dresser,” Miz June said.
“Though Nine Mile Falls isn’t exactly Mafia territory,” my mom said.
“Yeah, but who would look for him there?” Chip Jr. said.
“Perfect hideout,” I said.
“He didn’t dress so snappy,” Harold said.
“Tell us about your thief,” Miz June said.
It was raw, broken-glass territory that required passing in bare feet. But right then, with darkness falling outside and our reflections beginning to show in the window, with the yellow lights of the restaurant warmly displaying the comforts of life—pies behind glass, swivel counter chairs, Miz June’s purse with the pinch clasp sitting on the seat beside me—it seemed safe to venture out there. Everyone looked my way except for Chip Jr., who had lifted the bun of his hamburger and was reordering its insides. Even Lillian looked up with bright, expectant eyes. She cleared her throat, as if helping me to begin.
“He had a motorcycle,” I said.
“Ah!” Peach said.
“I saw it sitting on his front lawn.”
“His parents are rich,” my mother said.
“Ann,” Miz June warned. She put two fingers to her lips and pretended to zip them shut. A surge of joy filled me. Like when the teacher finally sees what that bad kid in your class is doing to you under his desk.
My mother took a big, rebellious bite of her hamburger.
“He liked to do dangerous things,” I said.
“Like what?” Peach asked.
“Stand in the middle of Cummings Road. Drive too fast.” I lowered my voice. “Sneak into people’s houses.”
“You ditched him, I’ll bet,” Peach said.
Guilt snuck around my insides. I wished I could tell them it was true, that Travis was gone from me. The door-slammed-and-locked kind of gone, no remnants of cravings. I needed to tell them the whole story, though, I knew that. Somehow it felt important to say it. Somehow it seemed critical. I wasn’t sure I could do the rest of this. My voice was small, barely mine. “He broke into Johnson’s Nursery. I worked there. Libby Wilson is my mom’s best friend.” God, I was about to cry. My voice shook. I thought I might sob in Denny’s. Maybe a lot of people had sobbed in Denny’s—after all, it was open all night.
“I was there with him.” I heard the glass breaking in my mind. I saw the lit sign DOG KNOWS WHO YOU ARE. “I told him where she kept the key. To the cash register.” The tears rolled down my cheeks. I wiped them with the back of my hand.
“I could kill him,” Harold said.
“What, knock him unconscious with your flour sifter? Listen to him, Mr. Macho. You’re a chef,” Peach said.
“I could take that punk,” Harold said.
“Hit him with your rolling pin,” Mom said through another mouth of burger.
“You could chase him with your scary Halloween cookie cutters,” Peach said.
“Well, it looks to me that you won’t be repeating that mistake,” Miz June said.
“He punished himself, anyway,” my mother said. “Cracked himself up on his motorcycle on Cummings Road.”
Lillian shook her head. “Oh, boy,” Peach said.
“Why is it that women always like the bad boys, anyway?” Harold said. “He was probably good-looking, right?”
I nodded.
“It’s not about looks,” Miz June said.
“It’s not?” Peach said. She’d polished off her corned beef sandwich and was starting in on the pickle skewered with a frilly toothpick. Frilly toothpicks are one of those inventions that make you stop and think that at one point in time, it was someone’s great idea. Imagine some guy in his basement, drinking Orange Crush and picking his teeth and going Aha!
“It’s not just about looks, or even mostly. It’s not that we want something bad, it’s just that we want something big,” Miz June said.
“True,” Peach said.
“So you find it in some punk? That’s like wanting Mexican food but going to a Chinese restaurant to get it,” Harold said.
“True again, but you’re missing the point,” Peach said.
“The pursuit of love gets mixed up with the pursuit of life,” Miz June said.
“So go climb a mountain,” Harold said.
“Oh, Harold,” my mother said.
“It’s that easy, isn’t it?” Miz June said. “I look at my grandchildren and I still see it. The boys are expected to do. Accomplish something. Seek adventure. Sure, they study for careers now, but what are girls still expected to seek? Boys. Boys get mountains, girls get boys.”
“She’s right,” my mother said.
“She is right,” Peach said.
“Girls can climb mountains if they want,” I said. “We know that. I don’t like this idea,” I said.
“Like it or not, it happens all the time.” Miz June delicately cut another piece from her veal cutlet. “A man’s identity is complete through action, a woman’s, when she has a man. Through him. We fall off our high heels into the narrow crevasse of what it means to be female. Let me tell you. You fall in love and you think you’re finding yourself. But too often you’re looking inside him for you, and that’s a fact. There’s only one place you can find yourself.” She patted her chest.
I thought about the painting in Miz June’s living room. Of the man on his knees in front of the woman with her head turned. Miz June, with her pearls and the crinkled skin of a plum left too long in the back of a refrigerator, had years of thoughts stored up on the subject of women and men.
“I thought we were supposed to be over that kind of thing. I thought feminism cured that,” my mother said.
“You can’t possibly believe that,” Miz June said. “Look around. Look at yourself.”
I never would have gotten away with saying that, but Miz June wore pearls. Pearls made everything sound polite. My mother thought about it.
“What about you?” Mom said. “You are always surrounded by men. You are the ultimate lady.”
“Lady has nothing to do with it. I was raised to be a lady. After George died, all these old coots came around wanting someone to wash their socks. A lady I will be, but a man’s accessory, his handbag, no thank you. I will not be someone’s ornament. I will not just be someone’s honey, baby, sweetheart.” She stuck out her chin.
“June, you’re preaching,” Peach said.
“This is a book club. We
are supposed to discuss things.”
“Surrounded by feminists in Denny’s,” Harold said. “Sounds like a newspaper headline.”
My mother wadded up her napkin and threw it at him. Another napkin sailed in the air. It came from the direction of Lillian’s wheelchair. It barely made it to the salt and pepper shakers in the middle of the table, but Lillian looked pleased with herself.
“Chip Jr.,” Harold said. “You, me, outta here.”
“I’m not getting into this,” Chip Jr. said.
“Miz June’s right. We need a chance to have adventure,” my mother said.
“We’ve certainly had one today,” Peach said.
“Love can come when you’re already who you are, when you are filled with you. Not when you look to someone else to fill the empty space.” Miz June said. “Not when it’s your definition.”
“To adventure,” Peach said. She lifted her Denny’s water glass.
“To adventure,” we all said, even Harold. We lifted our glasses. Lillian’s ice cubes shook and rattled in the glass, and a sound came from her throat: to. Miz June’s pearl bracelet slipped up her wrist as she raised her arm. I clinked my glass with everyone’s, my mother’s last. Her eyes said she would always forgive me.
“Here’s what I think, Ruby,” Miz June said after we’d put our glasses down.
“You’ve already told us. I agree with Peach, for once in her miserable life. You’re preaching,” Harold said. “I got to put money in the collection box,” he pretended to take something out of his pocket and toss it into the basket that held Miz June’s bread roll.
“So I’m preaching. Fine. This is important,” she said. “You didn’t love that boy, Ruby. You loved his motorcycle.”
Just then Randy came back. He set our check down flat on the table. “You,” he pointed at Lillian. “I just saw you on TV. I told myself, ‘Randy, the colossum mondo misfired.’ But no, man, I’m sure it was you.”