But Old Man had been dead for five years, Walt for two, and now Souperior’s was wedged between the Kristmas Kottage and Passionetta’s Fudge and Candies, its ruddy old fir floor rippling westward towards the sea. Nadine had edged the great drafty old plate-glass windows in country lace and dark-stained oak, and she hosed and squeegeed away the salt every morning from a catwalk Gordon had built for her the first week they were there. The one thing that made Nadine tolerable, in Petie’s opinion, was the sense of honor with which she looked out over the foamy chop. This woman, whatever else you could say about her—and Petie hadn’t found much else worth saying about her—loved the place with a deep and abiding respect. In Petie’s book that nearly made up for the rest of her, which was all nerves, snip and anxiety. More than once Petie had held her up to Rose as living proof that some people shouldn’t give up smoking.
Nadine met them now at the door, a thin woman with graying flyaway hair and an overbite. “This is not going to happen again,” she said, holding the door as Petie staggered through with one of the pots of soup.
“There’s still fifteen minutes until opening,” Rose said over her shoulder. “And the soup is nice and hot. All you need is a ladle.”
“That’s not the point,” Nadine said.
“What is the point?” Petie said, returning from the kitchen.
“The point is, I need to be able to depend on you, Patricia. The point is, my customers depend on you.”
“The point is, you need to goose the guy who’s sitting on your refrigerator order,” said Petie, slapping Nadine lightly on the back. It always amused her to hear herself called Patricia, a name she hadn’t gone by since the day she was baptized thirty-one years ago. “It’s insane for us to be doing same-day cooking.”
Nadine wilted. “He said there were delays at the factory. It’ll be another week, maybe two.”
“We could probably rent freezer space over at Pacific Seas Packing,” Rose said. “It’s slow right now.”
“I’m not serving frozen food here,” Nadine said. “Not even for one day. You know that.”
Nadine didn’t realize that in order to get more than one day off a week they doubled up sometimes, freezing and storing the extra batches down at the fish plant thanks to a favor owed Jim Christie, Rose’s boyfriend. They thawed the soup out a couple of days ahead, reheated it that morning, and whichever of them delivered it to Souperior’s put on a dirty apron saved from earlier in the week just to make it look like they’d been cooking. Rose wanted to tell Nadine the truth, but Petie thought it was nicer to just leave her in the dark, where she wouldn’t worry herself.
“Look, Nadine, we’re sorry,” Rose said. “We didn’t cut it so close on purpose. When we’re cooking things we haven’t made before, it’s not always easy to guess the timing right. When the refrigerator gets here and we can get a day ahead of ourselves you’ll be off the hook. Okay? We know how important it is. And we like this job. We’re not going to let you down.”
While Rose and Nadine talked, Petie walked over to the coffeepot and helped herself to a good strong cup. Whatever else, Nadine made great coffee, dark and fragrant, nothing like the weak-tea coffee they served down at the Anchor: the early morning boys took their coffee thin and watery, and hell would freeze over before they’d ever let Connie or Rose or any of the other waitresses thicken it up. Petie had worked on them every morning for two years and not one of them had given an inch. That was before Ryan was born, when she still went down every morning at six-thirty with Eddie Coolbaugh. There’d been her and Rose and pretty-faced Pogo Robinson, and Eddie, of course, plus eight or nine others in the back three booths. Petie had sat in the same chair at the same table, morning after morning, keeping a plate of eggs or pancakes going and smoking a cigarette or two, minding a cup of coffee for Rose to sneak from as she waited on them all. Petie was twenty, twenty-one then, cocky and lean, proud as hell of their new beater car and their mouse-scratchy one-bedroom apartment a block back of the highway. She could still remember all their morning go-to-work smells: the jean jackets that had aged on a barstool, the weather-beaten, sweat-permeated ball caps, the safety boots that gave off engine grease and fish, the newsprint from Dooley Burden, who had to do his crosstik. Petie and Rose and Connie had been the only women most days, and of them, Petie was the only paying customer. Petie liked it like that, liked their not talking any special way to her, liked the guff they gave, liked giving it back again. She’d even liked Eddie Coolbaugh, for that matter, with his clean pretty fingernails no matter what job he was working, his tucked-in shirt and big brass belt buckle centered like a hood ornament over his fly, the strut in his walk that almost fooled you into forgetting he was only five-seven. Eddie cared about looking good, and used hairspray on his thin blond hair long before it was fashionable, to keep it in place. In those days he still wasn’t letting anyone cut it but Petie.
All those mornings at the Anchor she had slouched low and easy in the vinyl tuck-and-roll booths, thinking she had a rightful place there, and then she got pregnant with Ryan. Suddenly no one was making eye contact anymore. The boys cleaned up their jokes around her. They stopped slapping at her back pockets with newspapers or jacket sleeves when she got mouthy. Just like that, they got polite and threw her over to the women. And except for Rose, Petie had never liked women—at least women her own age—and had never known how to be around them. So she defied them and kept going down for coffee right up to the day she delivered, but once Ryan came it was over. Ryan had cried all the time and Petie’s milk had backed up and clogged and she was awake twenty hours a day, sometimes more, and then Eddie Coolbaugh had started getting his hair cut by Jeannie Fontineau. No one but Rose came around for weeks, and then some of the women started to; Rose must have told them Petie was in trouble up there alone in her lousy one-bedroom with no washer-dryer. She was so crazy by then she was grateful for the company, and the world had been nothing much but women ever since. She’d gotten better at them—there were always kids to talk about, for one thing—but she never felt the same about mornings after that, or about men, either.
Petie rubbed her eyes and watched the water: medium chop, medium high tide coming in. Paul Kramer’s boat Mariah was picking its way through the channel, loaded with rockfish. She and Rose had started cooking at five-fifteen, with a break to get everyone off to school, and Petie was tired. At least Eddie was working day shift right now at the mill over in Sawyer and would be gone until suppertime. He’d been working security there for just over a year: good job, good benefits. But when he was rotated to swing shift or graveyard it messed up their routine. He was always stirring up Loose or getting on Ryan for something, or else promising to do something with them and then not showing up.
Petie rubbed her eyes again. Something else had happened to them the year Ryan was born: Eddie Coolbaugh had gotten his first dirt bike between his legs. It was just a little gnat of a bike but he’d worked the machine until he wore it out, bumping over back trails and ripping new ones out of the woods. Broken fingers, torn-up knees, stupid stuff, but he loved it. Ever since that first bike he’d been trading and rebuilding and selling and rebuying and generally garfing up their garage and side yard. By then it hadn’t mattered that much to her. Somewhere in the back draft left by Ryan and Jeannie Fontineau, the spark between her and Eddie had been sucked right out. So had the talk. Now there were just little bits of nontalk like, Do you think that clutch is still slipping, and What about fixing some of that venison Luther brought by, and I’m going down to the Wayside to have a couple beers. That was good-days talk. On bad days it was, Try picking up your clothes once in a while, and I thought you said you were coming home for supper, and Why don’t you be nice to Ryan for a change, he’s got your blood in his veins just as much as Loose and all you do is make him feel like shit. They mainly got along, though, as long as Eddie was working and kept his hood ornament to himself. Every once in a while Rose and her daughter Carissa came over to stay with the boys and they went and t
hrew darts down at the Wayside like they used to, but Petie always won and that pissed Eddie off.
ROSE CAME over and sat across from Petie at the table; Nadine had disappeared into the kitchen. “We need to lighten up a little,” she whispered, stirring cream into a cup of coffee. “She’s pretty upset.”
“Talk about needing to lighten up.”
“This is her place, Petie. She can be any way she wants to. And she’s got an awful lot of leftovers back there from yesterday.”
“ ‘Each new day, new soups,’ ” Petie said, quoting Nadine’s motto. “You know, she’s going to go broke.”
“God, I hope not,” Rose said. “I like this job.”
“It does beat getting your butt patted at four-thirty in the morning by some old boy at the Anchor,” Petie said. “Or being up to your elbows in dirty sheets, like me.”
“I kind of miss the boys, to tell you the truth,” Rose said. “Except for the ones like old Dooley Burden, you know how he was always moving his coffee cup way over to the other side of the table and then taking a look down my shirt when I went to give him a refill.” It was widely acknowledged that Rose had very pretty breasts. Just about every male customer at the Anchor had tried to sneak a peek sometime.
“I hope you didn’t put up with that,” Nadine said. She’d come up drying her hands on a dish towel.
“Only when I needed the tips.”
“If you give in like that, you just enable the behavior,” Nadine said sourly. She slid into the booth across from Rose, next to Petie.
“It’s okay,” Rose assured her. “They’d do it anyway.”
“Hell, even I do it,” Petie said. “Rose has great boobs.”
Nadine sighed. “I’m never going to understand you people.”
“Ditto,” Petie said. “How much did that dish towel cost you?”
“Six for twelve dollars. I order them from Williams-Sonoma. It’s a kitchen catalog.”
“It’s expensive,” said Petie.
“Well, there’s nothing better than good-quality cotton,” Nadine said primly, folding the towel in quarters and putting it in her lap, out of sight.
“Huh,” said Petie. She had just been warming up, but Rose had kicked her under the table.
“What I came over to tell you was, the soups are delicious. What gives the lentil its body?”
“You puree a little of the salt pork and add it back in.” Rose said.
Petie sighed. Every day she just wanted to drop off the soup and go, and every day Nadine ended up backing them into small talk. Rose was nicer about it than Petie. The woman’s just lonely, she would say to Petie once they’d left. She doesn’t know anyone yet and business is slow and I don’t think anyone’s been in love with her in a long time, so be nice. It won’t kill you. As usual, Rose was right.
“So tell us about L.A.,” Petie said to Nadine, making an effort. “Give us the inside scoop.”
Nadine shrugged. “There is no inside scoop. People shoot other people for no reason on the freeways. The whole place is on a seismic fault. Where most of the people can afford to live, it’s ugly. Hollywood turns out to be just a state of mind.” They’ve been over all this before.
“But what’s it like?” Petie said. She’d never been to California, but she would like to see Hollywood, Universal Studios, Disneyland. She could do without the beaches. She’d lived around beaches for thirty-one years and they’d never done a thing for her.
“It’s like anywhere else, just more expensive. People go to work too far away, they have jobs they don’t like, they talk about getting out. I worked in a bookstore for seven years and I never even knew the names of the people in the shop next door. I thought a lot about rape and door locks. What do you want to hear, Patricia?”
“She wants to hear about Richard Gere,” said Rose.
“Richard Gere?”
“I like Richard Gere,” Petie said. “He looks like the kind of guy who isn’t worrying all the time about his hair mousse.”
“I never met Richard Gere,” Nadine said.
Suddenly there wasn’t much left to say.
Rose, who was facing the small window onto the street, suddenly leaned forward. “I think I just saw Eddie go by,” she said. “Is he working a half day today?”
“No.”
“Maybe he came home sick,” Rose said.
“Maybe,” Petie said.
“Or maybe I saw wrong.”
“God, I hope so.”
The street door to Souperior’s jangled, and a man and a woman in expensive matching jogging suits looked inside.
“Would you have a menu?” The woman stayed in the doorway but her perfume came on in.
“We serve soup,” Nadine said, getting up from the table. “Today we have corn chowder and lentil. They’re both excellent.”
“Oh,” said the woman, backing away. “Oh, no. We wanted seafood.” She turned around and left.
“All right, we’ll have clam chowder,” Nadine said to Rose, who’d been after her to offer it. “We’ll carry it on the menu as a third soup every day. I’ll pay you both an extra forty dollars a week for it.”
“Forty dollars each?” said Petie.
Nadine just gave her a look.
“Oh, all right,” Petie said to Nadine. She shook her purse, found her car keys and stood up to go. “Want a ride?” she asked Rose.
“I’ll walk. Call me if it was Eddie.”
“I will,” said Petie. “If it was, pray for flu.”
WHEN SHE got home Petie found Eddie Coolbaugh’s old beater Ford pickup halfway up the rutted drive. Eddie was still inside, stalled behind the wheel. Petie pulled around him, parked on the hardpack in the side yard and came back down on foot.
“Fired?”
“Quit.”
“Son of a bitch.” Petie walked around, let herself in the passenger side and shut the door. This was Eddie’s seventh job in six years. Anybody else would have run out of places to go years ago, but everyone liked Eddie. Except for the way he looked he didn’t take himself too seriously, plus he wasn’t the only one around with a history of slipping: off the wagon, into adultery, out of work. He didn’t even slip as often or as far as some.
“Call and tell them you didn’t mean it. Say you were coming down with a migraine.”
“Hell, I did mean it. The guy was getting on me about reports all the time. Report this, report that, write this down, write that down. Today he tells me he wants a shift log entry every hour, that’s the latest thing. I was hired to do security, not be some fucking writer.”
Eddie Coolbaugh had been a terrible student, severely dyslexic, though they hadn’t known it then. By the time they’d finally figured it out, it was too late to fix it. Most people didn’t know. The security job was doomed.
“Plus the little prick keeps calling me Coolpaw, thinks he’s real funny,” Eddie was saying. “Ha ha ha.”
“You could see if they’d take you somewhere else at the mill. You could turn union, maybe.”
“Sure, if they had an opening,” said Eddie. “Which they don’t.”
“Two hundred and twenty dollars,” Petie said. “We’ve got two hundred and twenty dollars in the bank.”
“Come on, Petie, the guy’s a prick.”
“Yeah, well, he’s a prick who was paying you a lot of money. And it was a lot of money we were spending every paycheck.”
“I thought you’d take my side for a change.”
“Honey, when you’re right I’ll take your side so fast your head’ll spin.” Petie got out of the truck and slammed the door. The truck was a piece of trash and should have been driven into a ditch and left there years ago. The door didn’t even slam, it just whined and then stuck. Eddie fired up the engine and chugged along beside her, talking through the half-open door.
“Come on, Petie. I’ll find something else. It’s not that big a thing.”
“Trust me,” Petie said. “This is a big thing. Big. What’s not a big thing is when you
throw away a shit job. This was not a shit job, Eddie.”
“You could just get it over with and hit me.”
“I could,” Petie said agreeably, “but I might break your nose again, and then we’d have to pay a doctor bill we can’t fucking afford.”
“Screw you, Petie, you know? You never understand,” Eddie hollered. He turned the truck around in the ratty side yard and roared off. On the way by, he flipped her the bird. It had all happened before.
Petie let herself in through the kitchen and sat down at the table. The house was thick with the smell of onion and bay and salt pork and lentil. Under that was the fainter, nicer, sweeter-saltier aroma of little boys and sneakers and the morning’s damp towels and laundry; and then there was the fusty odor of the house itself, with its hint of worn carpet and dry rot. And finally, faintest of all, was the scent of Petie herself, the warm soap and skin smell she had been inhaling from the crook of her arm since she was a little girl to calm herself.
While her mother was alive she used to wear some cheap sweet toilet water Petie couldn’t remember the name of, and their house always smelled of that. Later, the camp trailer on Chollum Road had smelled of her father; his cigarettes, his hair oil, his diesely work clothes, all the hot pungent odors about him that were so thick she used to be afraid they’d stick to her when she left for school in the morning. Of all of them, through all the years, only Eddie Coolbaugh had no scent, none whatsoever. He never had. Even soap didn’t stay on him long, even beer. Petie didn’t know why that was.
The phone rang.
“Fired?” It was Rose.
“Quit. The damned guy he works for wanted him to write a lot.”
“Oh, man,” said Rose.
“Listen. When’s Christie coming home?” Jim Christie, Rose’s boyfriend, was still fishing out of Dutch Harbor, Alaska, and had been gone for two months. It was about the right time of year for him to be heading home.
“I don’t know. Soon. I thought I would’ve heard from him by now.”
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