Sometimes my dad would pick me up on his way home from a job. He’d sit in the car and honk until I came out because he refused to set foot in the diner. Most days, though, I’d stay and help Margo close up. Then she’d drive me home.
If my dad wasn’t back yet, she’d idle in the driveway and shake her head. “Oh, I hate to leave you here,” she’d murmur, clucking her tongue. “No place for a girl to live.”
“It’s our clubhouse,” I’d say, repeating what my dad told me when I complained about the motorhome. “Not many kids get to live in a clubhouse.”
“I’d take you at my place if I could, you know,” she’d say, sighing. “But what can I do?”
I never knew how to answer.
* * *
Closing up with Margo all the time, I learned the ropes of things. I knew where she kept the extra ketchup and the hot sauce, and it was no problem for me to get them for customers if Margo was busy. And if customers needed something else when I brought them their condiments, I’d take the order in my school notebook, tear off the page, and bring it to the kitchen.
“I can’t hire you, kiddo,” Margo said. I was only eleven. “I’d have CPS and the DOL all over my ass for child labor. But if you take orders and people leave you tips, I mean, what am I gonna do about it? You’re not on my payroll, right?” She winked at me and put an apron on the counter. “I’m not giving this to you, but if you take it, I’ll pretend I didn’t see nothing.”
When I was fourteen, she took me to get my work permit and we made it official. She even bought me a new apron—white, with a big daisy on the bib. “I’m proud of you, kiddo,” she said, her eyes shining.
“I didn’t do anything. I just got older.”
“Ain’t that the truth? That’s what we’re all doing, right, girlie?” She put her arm around my shoulder and squeezed me until I was smushed against her boob. “Tst. Just got older!” When she laughed, I could feel her whole body shake against mine.
I didn’t know if I was supposed to hug back or say something or what. Except for Margo, no one ever hugged me.
* * *
Dale comes in, so Margo works the dining room with me, but she lets me keep all the tips. We finish the lunch shift, do refills and wipe downs, count out the drawer, and play Old Maid at the counter until my real shift starts.
“I don’t get why you’re failing math,” Margo says, pulling a card from my hand. “Not once have you made a mistake with the drawer. Not even when you were little.” She puts a pair of kings down.
“It’s not the same math,” I say. “It’s like if train A is running at x speed and train B is running at y, which one will get there first.”
“Is one of them an express?” Margo cringes as I pull a card from her hand.
“Yeah, they don’t tell you that.” I put down threes.
“Then how you supposed to do the problem?”
“That’s what I’m saying!” I angle my hand so she can take another card.
“They should teach you useful stuff, like how to fight with the power company when your bill is wrong. You want to know when a train comes in, you read the schedule.”
I know what she’s saying doesn’t add up to a hundred percent, but I like that she’s siding with me just the same.
Margo gets stuck with the odd queen.
“Old Maid,” I shout, slapping my last pair on the counter.
“Well, you don’t have to go calling me names, Miss April,” she says, scooping up the cards to deal another round.
* * *
Ida comes back at four thirty for dinner. “How was school today, April?” she asks, following our usual script.
“I didn’t— I saw you at lunch.”
Ida blinks at me, panicked.
“It was fine, Ida,” I say. “School was fine.” I go to put her order in before she can say anything else.
* * *
Margo drives me home after we close up. “Alone again?” she asks when she pulls in the driveway. Icy rain smacks the windshield.
“He’s been over with Irene and the boy for a couple months straight now.”
“I don’t know what he’s thinking leaving a young girl by herself all the time.” She sighs. “You know I’d take you at my place if I could.”
I want to ask her why she can’t, but I don’t want to make her feel worse.
She shuts the engine but leaves the radio on. It’s Bon Jovi. “Well, I’ve got good news and bad,” she says, “which you want first?”
“Bad,” I say.
“Bad news is, I crunched numbers and I still can’t figure how to give you extra shifts. You can come an hour early to the ones you already have, and I’ll give you first dibs if anyone calls in sick, but I can’t afford it otherwise, honey.”
She’s looking right in my eyes and I know she can tell I’m disappointed. I make myself smile, and say, “Hit me with the good news,” praying that coming in an hour early wasn’t it.
“The good news is I called Gary, over at Gary’s Tap Room. He wants you to play on Friday nights. I told him you were the best thing since sliced biscuits.” She pats my arm and her bracelets jangle.
“You haven’t even heard me play.”
“I know.” She tips her head back and laughs. I love it when she cracks herself up. “I know! I know! I put on my good sweet voice and told Gary you were our own little Joni.”
“I don’t think I sound anything like Joni Mitchell,” I say, feeling heat rise in my cheeks.
“Oh, Gary’s deaf in one ear anyway, hon. It don’t matter one bit what you sound like.”
Margo’s been seeing Gary. She thinks I don’t know, but Matty and I were three rows behind them at the movies a few weeks back. They made out like teenagers the whole time.
“I only have three songs,” I say.
“Then you better write more!” She kisses me on the cheek, and I get out of the car. She waits for me to unlock the door to the motorhome, like I couldn’t just climb in through the boarded up window at the back if I lost my key.
I shut the door behind me, leaning against it so the lock latches. Turn on the TV for noise and light and grab my dad’s buck knife from under the sink, because I feel safer when I can see it. I sit down with my guitar and try to write for a while, but I come up empty.
When I brush my teeth for bed, I see a big pink lipstick smudge on my cheek in the bathroom mirror. I don’t wash it off.
— Chapter 3 —
I sleep in till eleven a.m. and then work the antenna on the TV until I get a soap in clear enough to watch. There’s static and I can’t always tell who’s who, but the chatter lets me pretend I’m not alone. The mean lady, the one my mom always loved, just had brain surgery and it made her remember she has a twin sister named Sandra. Everyone’s shocked, forming a search party. Her ex-husband just said, “Searching for Sandra is asking for double trouble.” I can’t understand how my mom used to watch this stuff. Like really watch it, not just have it on for noise.
I set out a pencil, my math notebook, a can of diet pop, and grab my guitar. I need to write at least three more songs by Friday. At least.
Strumming through the chords I know, I flip-flop the order until it starts to sound like a song—E, C, D, G, back to E—before I move on to lyrics. I’m trying to come up with rhymes for lies—surmise, prize, tries, french fries—when I hear a twig snap outside. I want to pass it off as TV static, but then I’m sure I hear footsteps.
I grab my dad’s buck knife and inch toward the door, trying to keep the motorhome from shifting. If whoever it is didn’t hear my guitar, maybe they don’t know I’m here, and that has to give me a better chance.
Those footsteps get closer. The blinds are closed and I don’t know if I can peek out without being seen. The door is locked, but the handle moves a little as someone tries to turn it. I hear the scrape of metal on metal, maybe a lock pick. I use the point of the knife to part the blinds and see bright blue eyes shaded by brows like fat fuzzy caterpillars. It
’s my father.
“You’re supposed to be at school,” he says as I open the door.
“You’re supposed to be at work,” I say, stepping aside to let him in.
He eyes the knife. “What the hell you doing with that thing?”
“What the hell you doing leaving your kid to fend for herself in the wild?”
He laughs. “Ape, it’s not even close to wild. And I told you, Irene will let you crash on her couch if you babysit for her kid.” He wriggles out of his jacket, sits at the kitchen booth and pulls my notebook over. “Skies,” he says studying it. “That would be my vote.” He scribbles skies on my list and pushes the notebook back to where it was. “See you’ve got the old guitar out.”
“Yeah, I’ve got my guitar out,” I say, picking it up by the neck with my free hand. “I got a gig.”
“A gig?”
“Yeah. Friday night at Gary’s. You should come.” Then I add, “If you can get away from Irene and the boy,” so he knows Irene isn’t welcome, although I’m guessing he figures anyway at this point.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Yeah, well it’s probably going to be a regular thing and all.”
“I think you can put the knife down, Ape,” he says, and I realize I must look crazy, standing there, guitar in one hand, dirty buck knife in the other. I set the knife back under the kitchen sink but don’t let go of the guitar.
“Coffee?” my dad asks.
“We’re out.” I sit down without offering him anything else.
“I’ll bring some by next time.” He pulls a cigarette from his shirt pocket and slides to the end of the booth to light it on the stove.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
“Why aren’t you at school?” He takes a long drag and looks around for an ashtray. I down the last swig from my pop can and slide it across the table. “Thanks,” he says, dropping ash in the can. A wisp of smoke curls from the hole.
“Why aren’t you on a job?”
“You first.”
“I quit,” I say, staring him down. I’m not apologizing.
“Me too,” he says, staring back. He takes another drag and blows smoke out his nose. When I was a kid, he’d do that and tell me he was a dragon. I thought it was hysterical. “Laid off. Faust doesn’t need as many men in winter. Decided to keep the young guys. Says he don’t want a heart attack on his hands.” He holds his cigarette in his mouth, leans back and cracks his knuckles. He looks thinner than he used to. His cheeks are hollow. I thought a good woman was supposed to fatten a man up, but I’m pretty sure the only thing Irene is good at is convincing my dad she’s a good woman. “Sucks to get old, you know what?”
“Interesting,” I say. “I’ll avoid it at all costs.”
He shoots a finger gun at me and clicks out the side of his mouth. “She’s a quick one, I tell you.” He says it like he’s talking to God, or an imaginary friend.
“So why you here? School tell you I quit?” I lay the guitar in my lap and make chord formations with my fingers, but don’t strum.
“Naw, didn’t tell Irene about work yet. We’re supposed to buy the kid some Nintendo thing for Christmas. She’s gonna be pissed now.” Ash falls on his shirt; he brushes it off before it burns through.
Last Christmas, Irene and my dad gave me a card with five scratch-off tickets tucked in the envelope. I won three bucks on one, but I couldn’t even get the money because I’m not old enough. The card had Merry Christmas to you and yours printed inside. I made my own card for them out of a folded up piece of loose leaf. It said Merry Christmas on the front, and on the inside, Up yours and yours. I drew every letter alternately in green and red crayon. Irene went in the kitchen after I gave it to her at Christmas dinner. She stayed in there a long time and when she came back, her mascara was runny and she smelled like Peachtree, so the card was a success.
“You’ve just been hanging out here when I’m gone?” I ask. I don’t like the idea of him in my space.
“Here or the duck blind. Depends on the weather.” He picks at a callus on the side of his finger until the skin comes off. He just leaves it on the table, this little round piece of skin.
“How long?”
“Week or so.”
“And you didn’t ever wait for me to get home or leave a note?”
“Come on, Ape. I already got Irene on my case.”
“Whatever. You got to go now. I’m writing for my gig.”
“It’s my motorhome.” He gets up and walks into the bedroom at the back and slides the accordion door shut.
I use a piece of notebook paper to pick up his callus and throw it in the garbage.
* * *
My dad won the motorhome from Molly Walker in a poker game. It wasn’t even high stakes.
On the outside, Molly seemed pretty damn close to perfect. She was in church every Sunday and sewed costumes for all the pageants and school plays. On Christmas she’d drive the three hours to Syracuse to volunteer at a soup kitchen. She had sweatshirts for every holiday, even Arbor Day, and put a coordinated flag on her front porch too. And she won first place in the Fourth of July bake-off every year (except for an unfortunate experiment with crepes three years back). Molly tried so hard to be perfect, but she wasn’t, and everyone knew it. All that other stuff—the sewing, the volunteer work—was a cover up, like penance to make up for the fact that she would bet on anything. Margo always said Molly would bet on which way the toilet water would swish down or how long it would take for the stoplight to change. She’d bet on Little League games, how many fish her husband, Hank, would catch on his next fishing trip, or which of the Newton kids would crack their head open skateboarding. She had bets of every size going all over town, and then there were the poker games. If Molly could round up a full table, they’d go through a whole weekend, and by Sunday night everyone would be propped on their fists, looking like hell, hopped up on coffee boiled down to syrup. At the end of those games there was a massive rearranging of who owned what and who wasn’t talking to who. Sometimes property lines changed.
Molly almost always ended up on top, until the losing streak. It started with a bet on the Gary’s Tap Room bowling team, which seemed like a slam dunk, but Gary spent the day before in Buffalo gorging himself on Chinese food. His fingers swelled so bad they got stuck in the bowling ball and his team tanked the tournament. After that, Molly couldn’t seem to get anything right.
The problem was, losing didn’t slow her down any. She’d stop for a few days or a week, but then she’d start up again, and lose just as bad. And since it’s impossible to hide anything in Little River, everyone knew about it.
One time, Margo had a two-for-one coupon and brought us a whole bag of name-brand cheese puffs and they were the best thing I’d ever tasted. My dad and I ate a few handfuls, and then he went out on a job. I put the bag away on top of the fridge, closed up with a twist tie, but I just kept thinking about those cheese puffs. I couldn’t pay attention to the TV. I didn’t even want to leaf through Margo’s hand-me-down catalogs. All I could do was think about those cheese puffs. I went back again and again. At first I closed the bag up after every handful, but then I just gave up and went whole hog. I ate until the bag was empty and the roof of my mouth had strings of skin peeling off. I even turned the bag upside down and poured every last bit of cheese powder in my mouth. I think that’s the way Molly Walker felt about gambling. When she wasn’t doing it, she just couldn’t think about anything else. And when she was all out of every other last thing to gamble, she bet the motorhome.
Most of the men in town wouldn’t play with her anymore, either out of pity for poor Hank Walker or because they didn’t like to gamble with a woman to begin with. My dad didn’t have any problem gambling with a woman and he flat out didn’t like Hank Walker, so he and Molly sat at our kitchen table playing five-card until it was so late it was morning again. Molly bet Hank’s tackle box. Dad bet his wrench set. Molly bet her winter coat and said she’d cut it
down for me too. Dad bet his snow tires. Molly bet tuna casseroles every Friday for six months. Dad bet shoveling her roof all winter. Molly bet something in a low voice that made Dad blush. Dad bet his next paycheck. Molly bet the motorhome and called it a see and raise. Dad said since it didn’t even have a motor it was just a see and since it was so late he wanted to call it, and that’s how we got the motorhome.
Hank left Molly the next day. Took his tackle box before Dad could claim it. Dad got the idea that we could live in this motorless motorhome while he built a real house. “I just need to get us a spread of land,” he kept saying. I pictured someone taking a knife and spreading land out in front of us like peanut butter on a slice of bread.
The spread he finally found was at the dead end of a dirt road at the very edge of town. He bought it from Mrs. Varnick when her husband died. It was cheap for a reason. Seven acres without a good spot to build a house. There were outcroppings of bedrock and no easy place to lay pipes. Pine trees everywhere. It took my dad a year to clear brush and boulders and dig a well, two more to get a foundation in, but then he met Irene and the boy and stopped caring about making sure we got “our piece of the pie.” The foundation filled in like a swimming pool, drawing swarms of mosquitoes and a humongous snapping turtle. Then my dad stopped coming home altogether.
* * *
I try to write for almost an hour, but the only good rhyme for lies is skies, and I don’t want to give my dad the satisfaction. I hear him snoring from the bedroom, this honk-sheeeee noise that sounds like a cartoon. His Carhartt work jacket is wadded up in the booth and I know his truck keys and wallet will be in the inside pocket. I put his jacket on and decide to go stock up on groceries.
The People We Keep Page 3