by Billie Letts
“Well, it’s hard to mess up ham and eggs.”
“So you open this place whenever someone shows up, and you don’t close till nine?”
“Seven days a week.”
“When do you get a chance to get out?”
“Oh, if we had someone dependable in the kitchen, MollyO could run the Honk without me, but…” Caney was quick to turn Vena’s attention back to her food. “You want some jelly?”
“That’ll do it for me.” Vena laid her knife and fork across her plate. “Best breakfast I’ve had in a while.”
“Now you’re just trying to butter up the cook.” Caney poured more coffee, then offered Vena a Camel.
“I’m quitting,” she said, but before Caney pulled the pack away, she held out her hand. “But I’m not quite there yet.”
Caney lit her cigarette, then his own.
“You know,” he said, “MollyO was probably right about this being a slow weekend. We’re not likely to get a crowd in here today and tomorrow won’t be any better.”
“I don’t know.” Vena gestured toward the window. “Looks like you’re getting off to a good start.”
Caney looked up just as Life Halstead opened the door and stepped inside.
“Morning, Caney. Ma’am.” As Life took his stool at the counter, he craned his neck trying to see into the kitchen.
“Guess she’s sleeping in this morning,” Caney said.
“Never knew her to do that.”
“Well, sometimes we all break the pattern, don’t we?”
“Not me.”
“You ready for your breakfast?”
“Yeah, I suppose,” Life said with reluctance. “But MollyO always takes care with my eggs, Caney. Makes sure the whites ain’t runny and the yolks ain’t hard.”
“I’ll do my best, Life.”
Caney rolled into the kitchen, and after Vena crushed out her cigarette, she picked up her plate and followed him.
“Can I help?”
“I guess I can handle this.”
“Then I wonder if I could ask you a favor?”
“Shoot.”
“If you’ve got a shower back there in your room, I’d sure like to use it. See, they haven’t turned the water on at my new place yet.”
“Help yourself. Towels and washrags in the hall closet.”
“Thanks. I won’t be long.”
“Take your time.”
Caney’s bedroom felt familiar to Vena in the way that one motel room seems like a hundred others. The walls were unadorned except for a framed print of a mountain scene, picked, no doubt, by MollyO for the colors that matched the bedspread.
The room was spare and neat. Vena imagined that MollyO did the cleaning, slipping in sometime every morning to smooth the covers back on the bed, empty Caney’s ashtray and straighten the stack of paperback books on the bedside table.
Vena located the linen closet in the hallway leading to the bathroom. When she opened the door and reached in to grab a towel, she saw that the top shelf was crowded with trophies. She didn’t count them, but figured there were twenty-five or thirty, heavy trophies each topped by a brass figure, a rider perched on the back of a bucking horse.
She stood on tiptoes to reach the tallest of these, pulled it down and read the plaque on the base.
CANEY PAXTON
FIRST PLACE BAREBACK EVENT
HIDALGO COUNTY RODEO, 1971
MollyO arrived just in time to listen to Life’s whispered complaints about the mess Caney had made of his eggs. As evidence, Life had saved two small clumps of congealed yolk which he’d hidden beneath his toast. He wanted to make sure MollyO felt the sting of guilt over the damage her tardiness had caused.
But MollyO was a little stingy with her remorse, owing, perhaps, to the strain of facing the first early hours of a gray Christmas Eve. Try as she might, she just couldn’t manage to force regret and joy at the same time.
She did, however, offer to prepare Life a fresh meal, but once he’d gotten a whiff of her White Shoulders and watched her smooth the bib of her apron across her breasts, he hungered for more than the taste of eggs.
After she’d removed the offending plate, MollyO went around the dining room picking up stray icicles which had fallen to the floor. She had intended to rehang them on the sagging line overhead, but finally decided it would be a waste of energy since the decorations would be coming down in just two more days. As she tossed them into the trash near the door to Caney’s bedroom, she froze like a bird dog on point.
“Do you hear water running?”
The question was intended for Caney, who was still in the kitchen, but Life, his bad ear turned to MollyO, thought she was talking to him.
“No more water for me,” he said, “but I’ll take a little more coffee.”
“Caney,” MollyO yelled. “Either you forgot to turn off your bathwater, or you didn’t jiggle the handle on the stool.”
Caney tried his best to avoid answering, but MollyO was not one to be discouraged by silence.
“I said, you forgot to turn off—”
“No, I didn’t forget,” Caney called from the kitchen.
“Well, I’ll go check because I can hear water running somewhere.”
“It’s the shower.” Caney’s admission was barely audible.
“The what?” MollyO feared Life’s deafness was catching. “Did you say the—”
“It’s Vena.” Caney sounded like a child confessing that he’d just shaved the family cat. “Vena’s taking a shower.”
Caney peeked at MollyO to see how she was taking the news, but if he had expected her to blow up, he was in for a surprise. MollyO simply pursed her lips, then nodded her head—gestures of a woman accustomed to disaster.
Minutes later, when Vena came out of Caney’s room, MollyO, filling ketchup bottles at the end of the counter, didn’t look up, not even when the two exchanged mumbled good-mornings.
Vena went straight to the kitchen where Caney was pouring pancake batter onto the grill. “Thanks for the use of your shower,” she said. “I was beginning to smell a lot like the dog.”
“Not that I noticed.”
She was dressed in faded jeans and a blue flannel shirt, creased but clean, with a smell that reminded Caney of lavender. Her hair, shiny and damp, hung down her back in a single braid, but one thin strand, twisted loose from the rest, lay against her cheek and curled across the hollow of her throat. Caney was thinking of how it would feel to brush it away from her face, to let the silkiness of it slide through his fingers, when MollyO poked her head into the pass-through.
“My short stack ready yet?”
“Almost,” Caney said, as he flipped the pancakes, their undersides already too brown.
For the next hour Vena made herself scarce in the dining room by helping Caney out in the kitchen. She chopped onions and sliced tomatoes, then washed dishes at the sink when she found out the dishwasher hadn’t worked since September.
MollyO had little business out front—Soldier and Quinton and Hooks, of course, and half a dozen breakfast orders for workers coming off the late shift at the peanut plant.
She came into the kitchen only once, but stayed just long enough to tell Caney they were running low on napkins.
Bilbo and Peg Porter came in for biscuits and gravy, then stayed to visit a while. They showed up more often now that Peg had given up cooking, but Bilbo didn’t mind. He said Peg had been a lousy cook even before she got sick, so eating out suited him just fine.
A smoker since she was fifteen, Peg had developed emphysema and was now permanently hooked up to oxygen. Bilbo, a three-pack-a-day man, refused to heed the warning printed on the oxygen canister Peg carried around with her, but he was considerate enough to blow his smoke away from his wife’s blue-tinged face when he exhaled.
Then, just before nine, the breakfast run all but over, six cars pulled in, one following the other.
A trucker lingering over coffee at the counter said, “Better roll up
your sleeves and put on your work gloves, girl.”
MollyO, taking a break with the crossword puzzle, tossed her newspaper aside and hurried to the front window.
“You got a damned convoy coming in,” the trucker said.
“We’ve got a what?” Caney yelled from the kitchen.
As the cars parked, they began spilling out sleepy-eyed children, yawning teenagers, tired-looking men and women, some clutching squirming toddlers, one shouldering a crying baby.
“My word!” MollyO said. “Where am I gonna put all them?”
Caney wheeled his chair to the kitchen door, then whistled through his teeth when he saw the crowd gathering outside.
“Might be Gypsies,” the truck driver said. “They travel like that, in convoys.”
“They don’t look much like Gypsies to me.” MollyO spoke with the authority of someone well acquainted with Gypsies even though the only one she had ever seen was a dark, turbaned woman billed as Madam Zola, who told fortunes at the county fair. “Anyway, I hope they’re not. The only word I know in Gypsy is séance.”
As the first of the group shuffled inside, MollyO asked, “Are you all together?”
“Yes,” an older man said, “one big family going home for Christmas.”
Relieved to know her conversation would not be limited to “séance,” MollyO said, “Well, you come right on in and I’ll get you seated.” But before she had the words out of her mouth, Vena was already pulling chairs aside so tables could be rearranged.
“I can do this myself,” MollyO hissed, but Vena, ignoring her, hoisted one side of the table while MollyO grabbed the other, and for a few seconds it looked like the two were squaring off for a tug-of-war. Then, with a barely perceptible shrug of one shoulder, MollyO signaled a temporary concession, and in one motion, they lifted at the same time and moved the table next to the one beside it.
By the time everyone was inside, tables and chairs stretched across the room. And by squeezing in the two high chairs MollyO kept in the utility room, all thirty-four travelers had seats or laps to sit on.
Vena brought water to the tables while MollyO put out silverware and passed menus around. They both poured coffee as long as it lasted, then Vena put on a fresh pot as MollyO started taking orders.
Caney had already started to gear up in the kitchen before MollyO came to the pass-through and handed him her order: nineteen breakfast specials—eight with bacon and eleven with ham; seven early risers—two with short stacks, five with biscuits; four bowls of oatmeal; two waffles; and an omelet with cheese and green peppers.
“Think you can manage back there until I get the drinks?” MollyO asked.
“I could probably use a little help.”
Vena, moving in beside MollyO, said, “I’ll get the drinks.”
“Oh, it won’t take me but a minute. Some milk, a pitcher of orange juice, few cups of hot tea. Then I’ll be free to give Caney a hand.”
“Well, you’d better hump it up,” Caney said, “because we just got busier.”
Vena and MollyO turned to see five elderly women coming through the front door.
“I’ll get them set up,” Vena said.
“No!” MollyO’s voice was edged with anger. “That’s my job.”
“Okay. Then I’ll help out in the kitchen.”
“Thought you said you couldn’t cook.”
“I’m not great, but I can probably save Caney some time.”
“Look. Caney and me have handled more than this all by ourselves. And we’ve been doing it for a long time.”
“Hell,” Caney said, “we haven’t had more than two dozen customers in here at one time since the Kiwanis Club showed up a couple of years ago.”
“And we took care of them just fine, didn’t we?”
“I wouldn’t say that. It took us over an hour to get all the orders out.”
“But we managed, didn’t we?” MollyO flipped a handle on the coffeemaker and began filling cups. “And we can manage now,” she added, cutting her eyes at Vena. “Like I said, I’ll take care of the tables, then I’ll help Caney in the kitchen.”
“Then what the hell am I supposed to do?” Vena asked as she slapped a wet rag down on the counter. “Stand here and watch?”
“Well, since you’re the carhop,” MollyO said, “I guess you’d better go hop a car.”
“Now I’ve had just about enough out of you—”
“Dammit!” Caney grabbed a meat cleaver and hacked through a slab of bacon. “We’ve got forty mouths to feed and I can’t—”
“Please to excusing me.”
The voice came from a small, dark foreign man who had passed silently through the dining room and stood now, just inside the kitchen, bowing his head in respect.
“My name Bui Khanh,” he said. “And I am cooker.”
Chapter Ten
THE RUSH THAT HIT the Honk in the morning didn’t let up until midafternoon, and even then the dining room never completely emptied out. But most of the later traffic came from the locals who stopped by to take a look at Bui Khanh. They could hardly believe that Caney Paxton had, within a two-day period, hired not only a carhop by the name of Takes Horse, but also a foreign cook with a name they couldn’t even pronounce.
MollyO, believing Bui to be an Eskimo, spent most of the morning reciting bits of information about igloos and whale blubber, facts she had gleaned from an issue of National Geographic in her doctor’s office. She shared with anyone who would listen the record low temperature at Point Barrow, Alaska, and the largest known glacier in the Arctic Ocean. By the time Caney set her straight, MollyO had half the people in Sequoyah wondering how an Eskimo could ever survive an Oklahoma summer.
But the revelation that the new cook was Vietnamese sent MollyO into a tailspin. She made a three-dollar mistake on one of her tickets, snapped at Life Halstead when he teased her about a run in her panty hose and dropped a handful of silverware that went clattering clear across the floor.
By then, her energy and spirits flagging, her tirade against Vena had all but played itself out, though her misgivings had not, especially after she saw Vena plugging the pay phone with quarters for a long-distance call.
But MollyO decided to keep her suspicions to herself for the time being, as she figured Caney had about all he could handle for now. She kept her eyes on him as much as she was able, sneaking sideways glances whenever she thought he wouldn’t notice. And though she didn’t pick up on any outward signs of agitation, she felt sure he was just putting up a good front, a trick she couldn’t seem to manage.
When she got zapped by a hot flash that left her feeling light-headed, she slipped back to the bathroom to wash her wrists with cold water and dab at her neck with wet paper towels. By the time she returned, several orders had stacked up on the pass-through which sent her running with plates lined three deep on each arm. But in her hurry, she made the mistake of delivering a bean burger to a woman who ordered a chef salad and serving cheese fries to a man who asked for red-top stew.
As she offered a garbled apology, MollyO scooped up the plates and started for the kitchen, but halfway there, turned around and went back to the same table where she reversed the orders, thinking that would take care of the problem. It didn’t. And when both customers began to complain, MollyO, unnerved by the mixup, picked up the plates again and, with a bean burger in one hand and cheese fries in the other, started to cry.
Vena, who had been keeping MollyO at a distance since morning, stepped in and straightened out the orders which were intended for other customers, then led her, without a peep of protest, to an empty table.
“Miss.” A man at an adjacent table motioned for MollyO. “I need some more coffee.”
“I’ll get it,” Vena said, and without waiting for an objection, she rushed for the coffeepot.
Then, with MollyO watching, Vena refilled not one cup, but three, served two more lunch orders Caney had ready and mopped up a spill of milk.
When she finally rej
oined MollyO, she was ready, half expecting renewed hostility, but she was in for a shock.
“Thanks,” MollyO said, sounding like she meant it. “I appreciate you helping me out.” As another hot flash reddened her face and neck, she grabbed a menu and began to fan with it.
“You want to call it a day?” Vena asked.
“No, I need to stay.”
“I can cover for you in here.”
“I’ll be all right. Guess I’m just tired.” MollyO cast an anxious glance toward the kitchen. “And Caney’ll be exhausted.”
“He seems to be managing okay.”
“Always has.”
“He told me you’ve been with him since he opened this place.”
“But I’ve known him since he was born. Watched him take his first steps. Saw him start to school. Put him on his first horse.” MollyO looked beyond Vena then, staring into the past at a smiling six-year-old perched on the back of a dun-colored mare. “Lord, that boy was crazy about horses. Couldn’t talk about nothing else.”
Still feeling a little uncertain despite signs of a truce, Vena pulled up a chair and slipped into it, her movements tentative and slow, just in case she was misreading MollyO’s mood.
“I don’t think he was happy unless he was on a horse,” MollyO said. “His first rodeo, he was fourteen. Skinny, scared, but hell-bent to win. And he did.”
“I saw some of his trophies.”
“Oh, he was good. Won about every event he entered, I guess. All through school, he was off riding somewhere half the time. His Aunt Effie, the one who raised him, she couldn’t keep him home. Why, he didn’t even walk across the stage at his own graduation ’cause he was on the road to Wyoming.” MollyO drew a ragged breath. “That was his last rodeo.”
“Is that how it happened? Is that how…”
“You mean his legs?”
Vena nodded, waiting.
“Oh, no. Wasn’t rodeo that did that to him. I don’t suppose in all the time he was riding he ever got more’n a few bruises. No, he never got hurt on a horse.”
“Then how did he end up in that wheelchair?”
“Vietnam,” MollyO said, then she put her hand to the hollow of her throat as if to soothe some pain there. “Caney got hurt in Vietnam.”