All We Had (11 page)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Hatred

L
ike a long, cool glass of water after hours of thirst, relief had finally come our way. A year went by. In school, I stopped caring what people thought of me. In my mind I saw myself as a star in a ticker-tape parade, perched on the back of a convertible waving to the masses. Sally Milander would see me on TV. I imagined her on her couch as I knew she would be: overweight, pregnant, and married to an asshole.

Then, sometime in early 2007, things began to shift. The plastic tubing company north of here moved its vacuum-hose production to China. A few months after that, medical tubing went and a gang of teenagers sprouted up on Main Street. They'd ride their skateboards up and down the middle of the road and when they got tired they stood around, kicking the earth and smoking.

One night just before closing, in June of that summer, two of the older ones came into Tiny's and settled into one of Peter Pam's booths.

One of them wore a red cap, the other had a shaved head and a
tattoo—a tangle of snakes weaving up his arm. The one with the tattoo did all the talking; the other one just sat there. His bloodshot eyes roamed around and surveyed the place. My mother and Arlene were already in the back wiping off ketchup bottles.

When Peter Pam brought them their burgers, the one with the tattoos said something to her and the other one snickered. For a split second Peter Pam hesitated, like she wasn't certain how to take it, then her face softened. She said something—mocking and teasing them right back. And before I knew it, they were laughing like friends.

When they finished their burgers and got up, I was stacking coffee mugs behind the counter and Peter Pam was wiping down her tray.

“See ya later, doll,” the one with the tattoo said to her as he walked by. Then just before he left, he turned, widened his eyes, and flicked his tongue in and out. A silver stud, pierced right through it, winked in the overhead light. His teeth were jagged and gray.

“That's gross,” I said.

“Oh, please. That's nothing.” Peter Pam pushed up on the bottom of her wig and lifted a hip like Marilyn Monroe. “They just know a good-looking girl when they see one.”

Mel came out and locked the front door. He unplugged the neon chicken wing and the hot dog flashing in its bun, said good night, then left through the back.

When the four of us finished cleaning up, we slid into a booth—me and Peter Pam with our Diet Cokes, my mother and Arlene with their Chardonnays.

“Oh my God,” Peter Pam said, “I'm exhausted.” Then she unbuttoned her top button and started removing the stuffing
from her bra: a wad of newspaper, toilet paper, and a few crumpled-up restaurant orders spilled out.

Peter Pam refused to fill her bra with anything but recycled material. That's how much she cared about the earth. Her boobs were always uneven and lumpy and anything could be in there. If you accidentally brushed up against one you'd never know what kind of sound would come out. One day, as she clutched her tray to her chest, her left breast squeaked. “Cat toy,” she'd explained when I looked up. “It was nice and round.”

“Reduce, reuse, recycle,” Peter Pam sang, taking a plastic sandwich baggie out of her left cup.

“Oh, please, not this again.” Arlene rolled her eyes and took a swig of wine.

Arlene threw all her trash out on purpose just to aggravate Peter Pam and at the end of the night Peter Pam would dump the whole barrel upside down and fish out every tiny bit of plastic just to aggravate her back. They were like an old married couple in the way they loved each other but disagreed about everything.

In Peter Pam's vision of the world every living creature had its place. If she ever came across a spider or an ant, she'd walk it out, ease it off a magazine, and wistfully watch it go. But Arlene beat insects dead with a broom. And she was wild about it, letting out a string of hoots and howls.

“Oh, look,” Peter Pam said, “a quarter!” as she pulled it out of her bra.

Arlene picked up her pack of cigarettes and smacked the bottom against the palm of her hand so that two of them stood out. She grabbed the taller one with her lips, then reached across the table and offered my mother the other one. There was no smoking at Tiny's but after hours, Arlene did it anyway.

“I'm sick of hearing about the fucking earth,” she declared, picking up her Zippo lighter, extending the flame across the table to my mother. Then she lit her own cigarette the way she always did—like a Marlboro man, with her head cocked and one eye squinted.

“I couldn't give two shits about this planet,” she snickered, a little drunk. My mother laughed. She always took Arlene's side on things.

Even though she and Arlene were friends, my mother never got used to how fond I was of Peter Pam. She was too afraid of losing me. She'd grown up moving in and out with different foster families. In the middle of the night, social services would come and snatch her. So for a long time after I was born she almost never put me down. She told me she even fucked a guy once with me on her hip. “We rode him like a bull!” she'd howled.

With the flick of Arlene's thumb and a tinny
pop,
the flame on her Zippo went out and the lighter closed.

“We'll all be dead soon anyway,” Arlene proclaimed.

It was an argument she used for many things and one my mother heartily agreed with.

When Peter Pam finished unloading her bra, she took the mound of trash and deposited it into a paper bag. She rattled the ice in the bottom of her glass and finished her Coke. “I gotta get out of these mules. My feet are killing me.” It was one in the morning when she slid out of the booth. She walked through the kitchen out the back to the set of stairs that led to her apartment.

A little while later I got up. I took the last bag of trash out back and was about to hurl it up into the Dumpster when a sound stopped me.

A grunt, a groan. I looked up. There was a car parked at the far end of the parking lot. I heard it again, this time it was louder. I moved closer. When I got within a few feet of the car, I stopped and listened.

The smell of that night's burgers and onion rings hung in the air. A cloud had anchored in the sky and locked in all the heat. A faint sliver of moon lingered at an angle behind it. A bat swooped down overhead and the insects shrieked.

The car was shrouded, but even in the dark the hubcaps gleamed. I held my breath and listened. I heard a low throaty grunt and then a
thud!
After that, a snicker, a sneer. Someone was laughing.

I took a step closer and looked underneath the car. On the far side of it, the streetlamp cast an oval of yellow light. Just under the front tire, lying on its side in the gravel, I saw the mule, ­extra-large and red. Beyond it were two sets of black boots.

I stood and backed away, quietly. Then turned and ran as fast as I could. Mel hid a key to the gas station on the ledge above the back door. I found an empty paint can in the pile of Peter Pam's junk. I stood on it, felt around, and found the key. I dropped it twice trying to get it in the keyhole. “Come on!” I said. Finally, the key slipped in. I turned the handle and bolted for Mel's office.

He had a gun. Peter Pam had told me Mel kept it in the top drawer of his desk. I yanked it open, and there it was. I ran back out the door and up the parking lot. By the time I got to the car, I was panting. On the far side of it, Peter Pam was pinned facedown to the ground. Half her clothes were ripped off. The guy with the tattoos stood over her. His pants were down. His ass was white, a vein in his erection swelled. The one with the cap stood by snickering.

I caught my breath, readied the gun with both hands, and stepped into the streetlight.

“Let her go, or I'll shoot you dead!” I was trying to channel Clint Eastwood, but my voice shook like Edith Bunker's.

I steadied the gun in my hands. In the corner of my vision, Peter Pam reached out and grabbed her mule. The one with his pants up ran for the woods. But the one I really wanted stood right in front of me.

“Raise your fucking hands or I swear to God I'll pull the trigger.” This time I sounded more authentic.

His back was to me and when he put his hands up, the snake on his forearm rippled. I jammed the gun at the center of his bald head. He stiffened.

“Ruthie,” Peter Pam said. She was still on the ground a few feet away from me. “Don't shoot.” But I wasn't going to listen to her.

My mother was raped once in an alley. I was eleven when it happened. His buddy held me by the neck up against a wall. I had to hear her moan through the hand that covered her mouth and listen to the
huh, huh, huh
of the guy's throaty breath as he pushed himself inside her. They left her on the ground with her skirt pulled up. I was about to run for the police when she stopped me. She looked up at me in the dim dirty light of that night, sighed, and half smiled, like the idea of calling the cops was the sweetest thing she'd ever heard.

This time I knew better. I wasn't going to call anyone, I was just going to shoot him.

I took my thumb and pulled the hammer back slowly.

“Don't do it,” Peter Pam said.

I'd never shot a gun, but I had a real good feeling I was going to like it. I looked straight down the barrel. I squeezed the trigger but just as the gun was about to go off, a purse knocked my arm down.

“What the hell are you doing?” my mother said to me. Arlene and my mother must have seen me standing in the streetlight. They were bent over huffing and puffing from running through the parking lot. Before they could see her, Peter Pam snatched her clothes and vanished. My mother finally caught her breath. She looked up and when she noticed the guy standing in front of me with his arms up, and his pants half down, rage lit across her face.

“Give me that thing.” She grabbed the gun from me. “I'll fucking shoot him myself!” She turned and aimed. “Nobody touches my daughter!”

“Things like this just happen,” my mother had explained to me, as if being raped was something she was used to. But this was different. The one thing my mother swore she'd do was kill anyone who laid a hand on me. So that night, when the guy made his move and bolted for the woods, my mother pulled the trigger.

The sound of the gun hit the hot still air. A breeze moved through the branch overhead. A leaf teetered down and landed at my feet. Then everything stopped. There was dead silence.

Gun smoke lingered in the streetlight. My mother and I stood there stunned, waiting to hear a body drop. This was how it would end. It flashed before me: my mother in an orange jumpsuit rotting away in jail. But luckily she had bad aim. My shoulders dropped with relief when I heard the
thump, thump,
thump
of his boots pounding hard across the earth.

Arlene had run back to Tiny's and called the cops. They drove up the parking lot at a hundred miles per hour, skidded to a stop, and jumped out. Arlene and my mother worked themselves up talking over each other as they rattled off the details in a frenzy. “He was going to rape my daughter,” my mother screamed. “His pants were down!” Arlene added. “I should have killed him,” my mother hissed. “I could have done it with my bare hands,” Arlene said.

“Ladies, please!” one of the officers yelled before they finally stopped.

A storm was coming. I could smell it in the air. The wind volleyed. The treetops swayed and the silver underside of the leaves turned up. I looked around for Peter Pam but couldn't find her. Then I felt a pair of eyes. Standing in the darkened window of her apartment, she clutched the drape and looked out. Peter Pam was dignified and private. Even from a distance I could feel her sense of shame. When she caught my gaze, she drew the curtain, backed away and disappeared.

They found the guy the next day hiding in the Dumpster behind the high school. We IDed him right away. But I never told what really happened.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Gloom

P
eter Pam shut herself up in her apartment claiming she had the flu and I worried she'd never come out. My mother and Arlene hardly noticed, though. They were too busy phoning TV shows.

Arlene thought the story would be perfect for
Good Morning America
, but when she called they put her on hold too long, so she called
The
Oprah Winfrey Show
and was now on hold with them. She'd been sitting at our kitchen table drinking coffee and smoking Camels for hours.

“The story is not tragic enough for Oprah,” I tried to explain to them. I was on the couch flipping through
People
magazine. “If someone had lost a limb in the incident, it would have been better.” Arlene and my mother looked puzzled so I tried to clarify. “And then, if you lost a leg, you'd have to be happy you still had the other one. Oprah once had on this guy who had no arms and no legs. They wheeled him out onto the stage and he told the audience how grateful he was that he could breathe. Oprah clapped and cried and said, ‘Wow, now that's gratitude.' She's
heavy into gratitude.” Bored, I tossed my magazine down on the coffee table. I was sure I'd made perfect sense. But by the looks on their faces I could tell my mother and Arlene didn't think so.

“Fuck Oprah,” Arlene abruptly quipped, slamming down the phone. “Let's call
60 Minutes
instead.”

Three days passed. Peter Pam still did not come out. She claimed she didn't like people seeing her when she was sick. So we took turns leaving plates of food outside her door.

“Mix in some cream cheese,” Arlene instructed. “It's one of her favorites.”

Arlene and I were in the kitchen. I was scrambling eggs. She was pouring a cup of coffee.

Then suddenly we heard something: footsteps on the floor above us. I looked at Arlene, she looked at me. She set the coffeepot down. I turned the stove off. We stood still and listened.

There was a clatter. Dave, Peter Pam's cat, knew how to flush the toilet. We heard him overhead meowing and pawing at the handle. For a while there was nothing, but then the door to Peter Pam's apartment squawked
the way it always did when it opened.
We heard keys rattle, then footsteps descending her staircase.

The back door opened, and—
poo
f
!
—just
like that, Peter Pam was gone. A man stood in her place wearing sneakers instead of mules. His jeans were loose fitting and worn. His white shirt was button-down, the sleeves halfway rolled up. His hair was brown, and even though he wasn't yet thirty, it was thinning. His mustache was gone but his beard was at least two days old.

“Well, don't just stand there like a couple of ninnies,” he said. “We've got work to do before the morning rush.” With Peter
Pam's usual flare, he walked by us, picked up a dish towel, and shooed us along with it. Then he pushed through the kitchen doors.

Peter, the man, swung his hips wide the same way Peter Pam did, and the occasional Yiddish still slipped out, but life without Peter Pam had no humor. Peter didn't talk or laugh much, and every night after work he went straight home.

One night, I was the last one to leave the restaurant. I shut the lights off and pulled the back door closed and when I turned around Peter was sitting on the bottom step gazing at the sky.

I sat down next to him. For a while we looked up and neither one of us spoke.

The sky was deep and clear. Like microscopic ocean life drifting to the bottom, the stars twinkled then receded into dust.

“Compared to the size of the universe, we are only one billionth the size of an ant,” he finally said.

We sat there awestruck. A satellite blinked across the sky far, far above us.

“What fools we are to think we matter,” he said.

I looked at him. His face was tilted up. The moonlight drew a line down his profile.

“Why were we put here if we don't matter?”

“Apparently God made a mistake,” he said.

A breeze crossed our feet. He and I now wore the same shoes—red Converse high-tops. He hugged his knees into his chest. His feet lifted off the ground.

“Atticus Finch would disagree with you.” I said. No matter where we started, our conversations always ended up on this, our favorite topic,
To Kill a Mockingbird.
We both believed in aliens and agreed 100 percent, without question, that if they
came to Earth and asked for just one book, that's the one we'd give them. It was a triumph how that book showed the human race from so many angles.

Peter Pam would have kept the conversation going, but Peter just sighed. He smiled and tapped me on the knee as if he thought I was being cute.

“It's getting late,” he said. “You better go.”

So we said good night. He stood up and I got on my bike.

“Ruthie?” he called just before I left.

“Yeah?” I turned and faced him.

The light at the top of the stairs by his apartment door caught his face. His eyes filled with sadness, the kind that settles in and never leaves. A long look passed between us.

“Be careful on that bike,” he finally said.