All We Had (6 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

Trust

I
t was late by the time my mother and I made it back to the car. Before she settled in her seat, she stretched her leg, reached into her front pocket, and pulled out her tips. A cigarette dangled from her bottom lip. She squinted through a line of smoke as she counted the bills.

“Where's yours?” she said, glancing up briefly at me. “Fork it over
.”
She gestured with her fingers.

I pulled out what Mel had paid me. She took my ball of wrinkled bills and flattened them out on her thigh. “I figured we need about six hundred bucks before we can fix the car and get out of here. We'll make it the rest of the way to Boston if it's the last thing I do. One thing I know for sure:
you are going to college
. With your brains they'll be lining up to give you a scholarship. Besides, I don't trust those people back there, especially that Arlene.”

“She seemed nice,” I said.

“Pfft,” she went. “Those are the ones who turn out to be the biggest assholes.” She flicked her cigarette out the window.

“You don't know that.” In her whole life, she'd never given anyone a chance.

“What do you mean, I don't know that? Everyone knows that. It's a universal truth, like ‘Shit happens' and ‘Life is just one damn thing after another.' Those are not just stupid sayings, you know. Real geniuses came up with them.”

“Geniuses usually end up killing themselves, which is like walking out of a movie before it's over, and everyone knows the ending can make a whole story fall into place.”

My mother looked confused, but then her face brightened. “You see,” she said, raising her eyebrows, “right there.” She pointed at me smugly. “That's exactly what I'm talking about. I couldn't even follow that, that's how brilliant it was.”

A shadow moved across the dark sky as my mother finished counting our money. In the distance, a possum paused beneath the streetlight. Its tiny little eyes glowed when it looked in our direction. Then it vanished into the woods.

“Wait a minute, that can't be right,” my mother said. “Turn the light on.” She nodded toward the dome light on the ceiling.

She re-counted the bills out loud. “A hundred and fifty. That's pretty good.”

“Add that to the hundred we made yesterday and we've made two fifty already,” I said.

She turned to me. “Oh my God. You're right.” My mother never thought beyond the present day, so my math astonished her.

She counted the money a third time and was still musing to herself when my eyes began to close. She took a breath and finally noticed I was nodding off. She reached over, reclined my
seat, then ran her hand across my bangs and kissed me gently on the forehead.

The next morning, I woke up with a start. The car was moving. We were going backwards at an angle. I gripped the dashboard and glanced over at my mother. She looked carsick. Her face was white. She sat upright in her seat.

We were being towed.

“What if they don't know we're in here?” I asked.

The thought sent my mother into panic. She leaned on the horn. I reached over and helped her.

In the movie of my life, she and I live fast and hard and when we die, we die together. Like Thelma and Louise sailing off a cliff. Or Bonnie and Clyde, gunned down as we run across a parking lot. But I never imagined we'd go like this. Not in a fiery car crash or a shoot-out, but in one anticlimactic act in a dingy scrap yard where we'd be crushed to death in our Ford.

Abruptly the truck pulled off the road and stopped. We backed off the horn. A shower of dirt pinged across the hood and a cloud of dust drifted through the windows. Then the car began to lower. It bounced when the tires finally hit the ground.

Footsteps headed in my direction. My door creaked open. Sunlight filled the car and gave the dust a blinding glare.

The air slowly cleared, and when I saw Mel standing there, the bill of his cap grazed with dirt, I knew our luck had changed. I could feel it in my bones.

“Life is shit.” “We're all fucked.” “People are assholes.” These were a few more of my mother's favorite sayings. But Mel was kind to us. He didn't look at my mother the way men usually did. Instead he offered her a job. And me—he said he'd hire me any day of the week. I was so good at washing dishes, he gave me a dollar raise on the spot.

My mother didn't trust him at first. But then he replaced our battery and hardly charged us. And for fifty bucks a week, he rented us a room. It was a small space in the back of the gas station but it had everything we needed: a bed, a bathroom, and a microwave.

A whole week passed. He went on respecting her and being nice to me. And except for the occasional shove she might give you on her way to the refrigerator with a hot flash, Arlene was good to work for.

The river that ran through Fat River wasn't really fat anymore. It was more of a thinnish stream. Along its bank, in an old mill building, a company had once manufactured metal fasteners: screws, bolts, nuts and rivets. It employed the whole town. Crumbs and curlicues of extruded metal could still be found lodged in the crevices of sidewalks and between bricks. But the building that used to house the factory now sat deserted. It groaned when it was cold and sighed when it was hot, and sometimes it heaved and tossed a piece of itself into the dwindling creek. Peter Pam told us that people used to gather on the bank to see what had been lost of it, but now the building just slowly fell apart on its own.

In the nineties, Fat River tried and failed to reinvent itself as a
tourist town. Tiny's, which was located less than two miles from the center on Route 6, was named after Tiny Irene. She had been one of the Munchkins standing in the crowd when Dorothy landed in Oz. But unless you watched the original, you wouldn't see her because she'd been cropped out when they resized the movie for TV. She was born in Fat River and even though she'd only lived there until she was five, no other place had claimed her, so the town of Fat River took her as its own. They erected a plaque in front of the house where she used to live and the merchants started selling T-shirts and coffee mugs with Tiny Irene's picture on them. According to Peter Pam, the design of these products was flawed. Nobody thought to pose her standing next to something for scale. “She just looked like a regular person. Nothing about her said, ‘Munchkin,' ” Peter Pam explained. So the souvenirs never sold. There were still some traces of Tiny Irene trinkets, but you had to look closely for them. They were pushed back on shelves, dusty and faded.

Seven years ago, a plastic tubing company set up shop fifty miles north of town, and last year, one town over, Walmart moved in.

Tiny's was made up of regular customers—people who lived in Fat River and worked at one of those companies. They came and left like clockwork. One guy, Bobby, worked for the town of Fat River. According to Arlene, this meant he did nothing. He did seem to be at Tiny's a lot.

Once, after the breakfast rush, I was stacking coffee mugs on the shelves below the counter. Arlene was leaning up against the wall behind me, filing her nails. Bobby was sitting in my mother's booth, still waiting for his food. He raised his empty coffee mug and signaled my mother for more. She grabbed the
pot behind her, stepped around the counter, reached over his table, and poured him a cup. When she walked away, he tapped her on the ass and the
sh, sh, sh
of Arlene's emery board suddenly stopped. I turned around. She twisted her mouth and narrowed her eyes. She took her forefinger and thumb and pulled the sweat off her upper lip.

“Order up,” Mel shouted. Arlene jammed her emery board into her apron pocket and pushed herself off the wall. It was my mother's order, Bobby's scrambled eggs and hash browns, but Arlene picked it up. She strolled out from behind the counter and in one perfectly orchestrated move, nudged my mother out of the way and tossed Bobby's plate down in front of him.

“Watch yourself, big boy,” Arlene snarled. She was the first person I ever knew who could take down a grown man with a single short sentence. Bobby looked mortified, like he'd just peed his pants.

“Remember, I know your wife.” Arlene had an on-again, off-again cheat for a husband. According to Peter Pam, Arlene had taken him back and kicked him out a thousand times over.

“And don't be so cheap with your tip, either.” Arlene stuck her head in the air and pranced off.

“You don't need to take shit from anyone,” Arlene had said to my mother. She lorded over the restaurant and protected her staff and I could tell it made my mother feel good. She sashayed away from Bobby's table, looked over her shoulder, and grinned at him all smug.

My mother couldn't help but like Arlene. They both smoked Camels and loved
Wheel of Fortune
. Mel had disappeared one
day into the basement of Tiny's with Phil's old TV and emerged with it working better than ever. It now sat on the stainless-steel counter by the grill and every afternoon, Arlene and my mother would catch bits of the show while their customers waited.

And like my mother, Arlene wasn't afraid to tell anyone to fuck off if she had to. And she used that word almost more than my mother did. Arlene hawked the
k
out with a fierce staccato, infusing the word with sharpness. My mother pronounced
fuck
as if it were Yiddish—with a breathy, phlegmy, exasperated tone.
Fhhhhuuuuuuk.
The word itself seemed to bind them together. In no time, the two of them were standing, each with a knee bent against the wall, hissing a form of the word back and forth, using it to describe everything: the customers, the work, the weather.