by Amy Sorrells
“I see you’ve met Gabe.” Carla winks at me from behind the counter, where three gentlemen sit sopping up egg yolk with sourdough toast, tufts of white hair sticking out from under the edges of their dark-blue Korean War Veteran hats. Joe, Harry, and Paul. The usual Tuesday morning crew. Behind her, Clyde Herschal, “Hersch,” whose hair is as white and whose back is as bent as the old vets’, is intent on scraping the grill surface clean.
“I didn’t know he was starting today,” I say.
“You didn’t ask.”
I try to ignore the gleam in Carla’s eye. She’s always working to set me up with somebody even though she knows I’m with Bryan. Says I deserve better. More and more I’m thinking she’s right.
“Cute, isn’t he?” Carla tops off Paul’s coffee.
“Stop.” I pull a clean apron off the hook beside the register, hang it over my head, and tie it loose behind my back. I fluff it out in front and try to blame the rise there on the oversize sweaters and sweatshirts I’ve been wearing. Seems to have worked so far.
“He’s an EMT.” She looks at me sidelong, one eyebrow raised, as if I should be so lucky. “I’m glad to see the two of you getting acquainted.”
“We’re not ‘getting acquainted.’ I just ran into him. Literally. What’s he doing in Riverton?” Maybe there was a time that people moved to Riverton—when the land was undeveloped, when the river wasn’t lined by shut-down factories, when folks could make a living in a small town. But nobody comes here on purpose anymore.
Carla doesn’t have time to answer before Gabe, struggling with his apron, emerges from the back.
“Jaycee, help our new employee tie his apron, would you?”
“Of course.” I give Carla the stink eye as soon as I’m behind Gabe.
Gabe steps back and adjusts the apron, then takes the Cubs hat off his head and tousles his thick, wavy brown hair before putting the cap back on backward. He turns to Carla for approval. “Do I look okay?”
“I think so. As long as you wear that hat, you shouldn’t need a hairnet.” She nods toward Hersch, wearing a Reds hat, as he adds more bacon to Joe’s plate. “Hersch here’ll show you the ropes.”
I start arranging mum stems in the green bottles and listen as the two men fall into easy conversation, or what passes for conversation for someone who talks as little as Hersch does, anyway. They start jawing at each other about baseball statistics and spring training, and I’m relieved for an excuse to get out from behind the counter and away from Carla’s ribbing. The bells on the door ring and a family of six arrives and I show them to their table. They’re not from around here, judging from the fact that every single one of them wears a Riverton College sweatshirt or hat or both. Locals aren’t that big on team spirit.
I take their orders and fall into the familiar routine that has kept me upright in the years since Jayden died. Post the order. Fill the waters. Make sure the coffeepot doesn’t run empty. Slice the lemons. Stock the servers. Straighten the chairs. Check the bathrooms. Wipe the counters. Shine the stainless. Fill the salt, pepper, and sugars. Roll the silver. And smile. Always smile. I can keep time to this cadence, lose myself in it, be without thinking, breathe without inhaling.
“Have you talked to your mama?” Carla asks halfway through the day. She knows Mama writes me regularly from the prison, and that I don’t write her back.
I shake my head, conscious of Gabe a few feet away. “No.”
I’m used to Carla making it her business to stick her nose in none of her business, and normally I do not mind her asking about things like Mama since she’s one of the few people I talk to about that. She and Hersch both know my whole story, of course, but Gabe does not, and I’m not sure I want all that to be the first thing the new guy learns about me. He might not be used to the fact that most everybody around Riverton knows or is related to someone who’s done heroin or been to jail or both, as in Mama’s case. She’s been in the state prison for months now, with no sign of getting out anytime soon.
Carla says I should forgive Mama, that maybe she was doing the best she could with what she had, and considering it was the fault of the doctor who’d prescribed her the pain pills that she’d fallen into heroin. I don’t buy that. I’ve had every chance to use heroin myself seeing as how it was in our house all the time. Could have sold it, too, so we’d have more money. But as tempting as that was, I didn’t.
Sudie also says I should forgive Mama, adding that all things—including someone dying—work together for good if you love the Lord. But I say the only thing good that came out of Jayden dying was Mama finally going to prison.
The judge had no mercy for a user who’d let her baby be poisoned, and even less for one who’d been dealing on top of it. Said he sees too many dead babies these days, and I don’t doubt that. Sudie says she’s been digging graves for too many, and she includes the teenagers in with the babies.
Jayden was the third baby from Shady Acres alone who’d lost his life because of the heroin. One, Rosie Lee, wasn’t even a month old before she died. Folks across town weren’t immune to the epidemic, either. Jack Lawson lived in one of the new subdivisions and had real hope of getting out of Riverton on a football scholarship until he was found in his car with a needle still stuck in his arm. I don’t hardly notice the ambulance sirens anymore, people calling to get the naloxone for their overdosing friends and family. Nobody’s gonna notice until more popular kids like Jack Lawson die.
Forgiveness sounds like a good idea, but I bet it doesn’t feel as good as the relief that came over me when the officers put handcuffs on Mama’s wrists and led her out of the courtroom. By that time, after watching Shorty and Sudie lower my brother’s casket into the black-earth hole with ropes because it was too small for the metal lowering machine, after court hearings and witness testimonies about the unimaginable things she’d been doing beyond what I’d even known, and after crying myself to sleep every night without feeling his heartbeat under my hand, I had nothing left to say to her. I don’t have anything to say to her now, either, despite the fact that she sends me letters saying she’s sorry and hasn’t she lost enough without having to lose me too? I guess I just don’t get the point of forgiveness after all that.
The other day I wrote her a letter. Tore it up when I was walking to the mailbox to send it. But I meant every word.
Dear Mama,
I got your letter, the one where you told me you’re sorry again.
People keep telling me I ought to forgive you. That forgiving you is what the Lord would want. And that not forgiving you is only hurting myself.
But I guess I’m sorry too, because I can’t forgive you. At least not right now. Maybe not ever.
Besides that, I’m having a hard time believing you. You had so many chances to get help or do things different, and you never did.
Do you know that every morning I get up and the first thing I think of—still—is what I need to do for Jayden that day? And every morning, I remember again that he’s gone, and why he’s gone. And then I remember that if it weren’t for you and the drugs, he’d still be here.
Sometimes I go visit him out at the cemetery, next to Daddy.
Don’t you realize you could have killed even more people besides Jayden with what you were doing? You probably did and just don’t know it. Every time you sold the stuff, that person could have died taking it, or if they sold it to someone else, someone else could have died taking it. Half the fresh graves out here that died from an overdose could have been linked back to you somehow. Somebody’s son or daughter. Somebody’s husband or wife.
Didn’t you ever think about that, Mama? You weren’t just killing us. You were killing other people, too. People you didn’t even know.
So if I don’t write you back much, that’s why. I don’t know what to say to you anymore.
“Sorry” doesn’t make up for all that.
And I can’t figure out where forgiveness fits into any of it.
Jaycee
&nbs
p; 7
* * *
“So, what do you do for fun, Givens?” Gabe says to me. The place is empty of customers, and it’s the first direct thing he has said to me all morning. The late-winter sun slants in the windows and catches on the clean, upside-down glasses waiting beside the soda fountain to be filled. He polishes the stainless-steel counter, the backsplash of the grill.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” He stops what he’s doing and looks at me with big gray eyes that glisten, then leans against the counter and crosses his arms as if he’s preparing to study me.
I’m annoyed at myself for noticing his broad shoulders, the definition of the muscles in his upper arms, and for blushing at the way he looks at me. “I have fun. I just can’t remember the last time someone asked me that.”
“Maybe you need to have fun more often.” The corner of his mouth turns up.
Stop blushing.
“Like I said, I have plenty of fun.” I turn away so he can’t see the red I feel rising to my face and focus on polishing my own section of stainless-steel counter.
I’m glad Gabe can’t read my mind and see that “fun” for me, since Jayden died, has consisted of dating Bryan, which gets me out of the house and is an improvement from all the time I spent watching Mama and her friends shoot up. I guess I could call working with Sudie fun, seeing the creatures back to health, setting them free back where they came from. Working at the diner isn’t so bad, either.
But I’m sure Gabe means the kind of fun small-town people have in TV shows or commercials—curling up on a porch swing and looking at the stars in the spring, ice cream and Fourth of July parades in the summer, pumpkin carving and apple bobbing and holding hands on hayrides in the fall, and a scene from a Currier & Ives print at Christmas. He doesn’t know yet that while Riverton might look quaint, the architecture and brick streets and picket fences are more like memorials than a representation of what really goes on. Towns like Riverton aren’t what they used to be. They aren’t places to settle down and have fun. They’re places to run from or die.
I go on taking and filling orders and try to get my mind off Gabe, and the rhythm of regulars and folks just passing through Riverton helps. The Gilbert sisters are here in their polyester print dresses, Mary Jane pumps, and matching cardigans. Well past fifty and never married, Sue and Athena Gilbert come every Monday afternoon for sugar cream pie and coffee and to plan the lesson for the Wednesday morning women’s study at church.
I find myself watching Gabe when he doesn’t know I’m looking. He seems like a good worker. Looks for the work. Doesn’t have to be told. By midafternoon, he’s using some of the lingo Hersch and I use . . . a crowd of eggs and a belly warmer, a burger with horns on and run through the garden, a Reuben with legs on it, and dog soup—the way we say water.
Shorty brings a couple of guys from his tool company for pie as an excuse to flirt with me—this is according to Carla, who’s been right about such things before. He comes into the diner all the time, and he’s handsome in an elfish sort of way, soft wrinkles around his eyes and the hair around his temples graying, far from the appearance of someone who digs graves in his spare time. He makes me laugh. But even if I were older I couldn’t date him. I could never date a guy I’d have to lean down to kiss.
Besides that, I already have a man. “Don’t look now,” Carla says, emerging from the storeroom, “but here comes Jaycee’s fun.”
“Be nice,” I say, shooting Carla a warning look as the black, rebuilt Camaro pulls into the handicapped parking space in front of the diner, right next to the bright-blue Jeep, and Bryan gets out. He’s picking me up to take me to the high school wrestling meet. His idea of fun, since he was a wrestler and his dad is the head coach.
Carla pretends to zip her lips shut, raises her eyebrows with amusement at me, then Gabe, then plants herself by the cash register and begins to pretend she’s sorting receipts. I know she’s really sitting there to listen to our every word.
On his way inside, Bryan takes one last draw from his cigarette and tosses it on the sidewalk without bothering to stamp it out. The bells on the door clang louder than usual when he yanks it open.
“Hey, baby.”
I come around the counter to greet him. He pulls me close, a little too forcefully, so that I feel off balance. I startle when he puts his hand on my rear end. “Bryan. Stop.”
“What’s wrong, babe?”
“Not here,” I say through my teeth. He knows I don’t like it when he starts touching me in front of other people. He also knows Carla doesn’t need more about him to dislike.
He steps back and puts his hands in the air in a mocking, exaggerated movement. “Just having a little fun, babe.”
“I still have the floors and bathrooms to do.”
Annoyance flashes across his face, so quick Carla and Gabe don’t notice, but long enough that it’s clear to me I should have paid more attention to the time.
“Take your time. Carla will give me a slice of that sugar cream pie. Won’t you, Carla? And he’ll get me a cup of coffee. Won’t you?” Bryan nods at Gabe and sidles up to the counter.
“If you’re paying, I will,” Carla says, her sweet voice edged with distaste.
I grab the mop bucket and wheel it into the dining area, glad for the chance to gather myself.
In Riverton, you’re only known for one of two things: sports or trouble. Though I had plenty of reasons to be in the second category, I fell in with the rest of the nondescript residents who show up, do our work, and do our best to either leave Riverton or live the rest of our lives here and repeat the dead-end cycles of our families.
Bryan was like Jack Lawson and fell into both categories. He was a star wrestler in my high school class. His dad was the coach back then too. He was supposed to go to college on a full scholarship, but a run-in with the police for sexual assault charges killed that opportunity. The girl who’d made the charges was Mary Ashby, which—as I’d learned later—explained why she was all beat-up and wearing a sling at the hospital the day I brought Jayden in.
I’d been friends with Mary once, back in the third grade. Back before I learned the hard way how much being poor mattered. Mrs. Buchanan was our third-grade teacher, and she assigned me and Mary seats next to each other. We were best friends immediately, trading stuff from our lunches, playing together at recess. Clothes and shoes don’t matter much in third grade, so I hadn’t noticed that Mary wore things from a boutique, and Mary hadn’t noticed that I wore things from the thrift store. We drew pictures of horses and rivers, flowers and rainbows. And one Friday after school when I asked Mary to come over and play the next day, she said yes.
That morning I rubbed a round spot clean on my smoke-filmed window and saw the sun, which meant it wasn’t raining and we could play on the swings that one well-off trailer owner had erected in the Shady Acres common area. I dressed in my best terry-cloth jumpsuit and sat on the concrete blocks under the ash tree, seeds from a nearby cottonwood falling all around like snow. Before long, I saw the white car and heard the slow crunch of its tires on the gravel road that wound through the trailer park.
“Mama!” I’d hollered. “She’s here! Mary’s here!”
Mama came outside, the screen door slamming as it closed behind her. She crossed her arms and took a long draw from her cigarette, then exhaled, “A Mercedes.”
I could see the red leather and trim inside the car. I saw Mary’s face pressed against the back window. I ran to greet her. I still remember the spring sun, warm on my face. The air smelled of trees beginning to bud and the ground beginning to warm and green things beginning to grow. Grasshoppers and chiggers threw themselves at my ankles and shins as if cheering Mary’s arrival too.
But the car did not stop.
“You passed me! I’m right here!” I hollered, jumping up and down as if they’d not seen me. But I knew they had, because Mary was now staring at me through the rear window of the car.
Sur
ely they’d turn around, I remember thinking.
But they didn’t.
An hour later, the phone rang, reverberating against the thin aluminum walls of the trailer.
Mama hadn’t said much, just listened to whoever was on the line. She placed the phone back on the receiver, and without turning around said, “Mary’s sick. She won’t be coming to play today. I’m guessing she won’t be coming to play ever.”
“But why?” I asked.
I’ll never forget the look on Mama’s face when she turned around. She had a funny sort of smile on her face, one I couldn’t understand then, but I do now. “They’re rich and we’re poor. Best you not ask her to come over again.”
After that, I noticed how most of the kids’ mothers brought treats to school on their birthdays, that their shoes weren’t worn through on the bottoms and their toes weren’t pressed up against the ends, and that their pants were long enough to cover their ankles. I listened to classmates talk about having eggs or pancakes for breakfast and figured out most mothers were awake in the mornings to say good-bye. And I never again asked a girl who dressed better than me to come over and play.
But as well-off as Mary and her family were, she didn’t have a chance against the lawyers the Blair family hired, or against the newspaper, which was known to print what it was paid to print. Bryan had wriggled out of jail time with the whole town behind him, but the prosecutor had made sure the university was notified, and they pulled his scholarship. Now he’s stuck in Riverton with the rest of us.
I suppose that’s how I ended up with him. There were few options for him, and even though I should’ve known better, being lonely makes a person do stupid things. When Bryan starting coming into the diner more often in the weeks after Jayden died, I didn’t think anything of it, like the way I was being naive about Shorty. Carla kept telling me to watch out, that Bryan was sweet on me, but I didn’t believe her. People like him didn’t have anything to do with people like me. I got curious, though, and couldn’t help the heat that flushed through me whenever he came around. He was something to look at. And for the first time I felt like something, too, when he looked at me. At least at first.