Frustrated, Josh groped behind him, felt the carton of milk and closed his fingers on it. As Ethan’s fist drew back to smash his face, Josh hurled the milk at him. From another table a wave of laughter erupted as the white liquid cascaded over Ethan’s face and ran down his shirt.
“Jesus,” Ethan yelled. “What did you do that for?”
“Why can’t you just leave me alone?” Josh snatched his book up from where it lay in a puddle of milk on the floor. He tried to wipe the milk off the already wrinkled pages of the book, but it was too late.
He’d had the book less than a week, and it was already ruined.
“Look!” he yelled. “Look what you’ve done to my book!” He hurled the damp volume at Ethan Roeder, and was about to fling himself on the bigger boy when a booming voice rang out from the door.
“All right, break it up!”
Arnold Hodgkins had been principal of Eden Consolidated School long enough to know how to put a quick end to a disruption in the cafeteria. Now he strode from the door, wading through the crowd gathered around the two boys, one of his thick hands clamping hard on a shoulder of each of the combatants. “That’ll be enough! Got it?”
Josh winced as the principal’s fingers tightened on his shoulder, but he said nothing.
Ethan Roeder, though, glared angrily at Josh. “I didn’t do anything!” he cried out, his voice quivering with fury. “He started it! We were just sitting here, and he threw milk all over me! Look at my shirt! It’s soaking!”
Josh’s mouth dropped open at the magnitude of the lie, but before he could say anything at all, one of the other boys, José Cortez, moved in next to Ethan. José and Ethan were buddies. “It’s true,” José said, his eyes burning into Josh as if daring him to challenge his words. “Ethan didn’t do nothin’. Josh just went nutso. He’s crazy!”
Josh’s eyes darted from one face to another, praying that someone—
anyone—
would tell the truth. But all the kids gathered around Ethan Roeder were his tormentor’s friends, all of them kids from his own class. Kids who already hated him.
His eyes searched further across the cafeteria, and finally fixed on Jerry Peterson, who was standing up on a chair at a table next to the far wall, straining to see the action on the other side of the room and report to his friends what was happening.
Two years ago Josh had been at that table himself, sitting next to Jerry, giggling at whatever joke his best friend might be telling.
Now, Jerry hardly even seemed to see him. Their eyes met for a quick instant, but then Jerry looked away, jumping down off the chair, disappearing behind the crowd of bigger kids who surrounded Josh and the principal.
“Well, what about it?” he heard the principal demanding. “Is that the way it happened?”
Josh shook his head miserably. “I was just sitting by myself, reading. Ethan grabbed my book and wouldn’t give it back.”
“Oh, Jeez,” he heard Ethan groan. “What would I want his stupid book for? I just asked him what he was reading, and he went apeshit, just like he always does!”
“That’ll be enough!” Hodgkins snapped, the look in his eye telling Ethan not to press his hick any further. “Roeder,
you and Cortez clean up this mess. And no backtalk! MacCallum, you come with me.”
Josh nodded, but said nothing. His head down, he followed the principal out of the cafeteria, already preparing himself for the lecture he was going to get about disrupting the cafeteria.
The first day of school this year, he decided, was even worse than the first day last year.
And it wasn’t going to get any better.
“C
hili up, no tears!”
Brenda MacCallum heard the shout from the kitchen, but acknowledged it with no more than a quick nod of her head as she tried to keep up with the changing orders of the four men who were impatiently ordering lunch. Not that she could blame them for their irritability, but was it her fault that Mary-Lou had called in sick that morning, leaving just herself and Annette to deal with the lunch rush? Still, the slow service wasn’t the customers’ problem, and she held her temper carefully in check as one of the men changed his order for the third time. But when Max’s voice—etched with sarcasm this time—came again, his demand to know if she’d suddenly turned deaf combined with the heat of the day to snap the thread of her nerves.
“I hear you,” she yelled back. “But I’ve only got two arms and two feet.”
“More like one of each, given the service around here,” one of the men muttered.
Brenda clenched her jaw, firmly checking the words that hovered on the tip of her tongue, and turned away, heading for the kitchen. Only another forty-five minutes until the noon rush was over. Forty-five minutes until she could find the time to sit down and drink a cup of coffee while the feeling came back into her feet. As she passed the cash register, the phone beside it started ringing. But Brenda
ignored it, moving on to the pass-through to slip the order onto the wheel and pick up the three bowls of chili that were still steaming under the warming lights.
“God damn it, Brenda,” Max growled. “You think the customers want their food stone cold?”
“If they want food, they don’t come here in the first place! And don’t yell at me—I’m not the one who called in sick.”
Max opened his mouth as if ready to fire back at her, but then seemed to decide it wasn’t worth it. And he was right, Brenda reflected as she balanced the three bowls of chili, a basket of stale sourdough bread, and a dish of grated cheddar cheese that was rapidly turning orange, on her left arm, while she picked up the limp salads with her right. This was not the day to push her, not after this morning, when she’d all but had to force Josh into going to school, and tend with the baby’s colicky stomach as well.
As she threaded her way to the table where three women—with whom Brenda had gone to high school only ten years ago—waited for their lunch, she caught sight of herself in the mirror behind the soda fountain, and her heart sank.
Though she was the same age as the three women who were waiting impatiently for their chili, she looked at least ten years older. Her hair, once a luxuriant mane of naturally blond curls, had darkened into a drab, limp mass that looked as if it hadn’t been washed for a week, even though she’d shampooed it this morning right after Josh finally left for school.
Her face had taken on the first lines of middle age, although she was still only twenty-eight. Which, she ruefully realized as she delivered the chili to her three former schoolmates, was nobody’s fault but her own. After all, it had been her decision to marry Buck MacCallum, even in the face of her mother’s objections, as well as those of everyone she knew. But back then, Buck had been as handsome as she was pretty, and she’d been too young to see anything beyond his well-muscled body and his thickly-lashed brown eyes.
Eyes, she’d quickly discovered, that never missed a pretty face—and some not so pretty ones, too.
Within a year of Josh’s birth, Buck had taken off, bored with Eden, bored with pumping gas and fixing carburetors at the Exxon station, bored with her. So she’d come to work for Max, waiting on tables and struggling to make enough to support herself and Josh.
And then, a year and a half ago, she’d run into Charlie Decker for the first time since high school, and thought her problems were over. Charlie had flattered her, told her she didn’t look any different than when she’d been the homecoming queen nine years earlier. He promised to take her and Josh to San Francisco as soon as a deal he was working on came through.
They’d made plans to get married, and when she’d become pregnant, Brenda hadn’t worried at all.
Until she’d called Charlie in San Francisco to tell him the good news, and a woman had answered the phone.
A woman who turned out to be Mrs. Charlie Decker. The woman who had occupied the position for six years.
And who told her that if she wanted Charlie, she was welcome to him, because Brenda was the third goddamn tramp who’d called in the last year, wondering when that no-good son of a bitch was going to come and get her.
Shaking, Brenda had hung up the phone and put Charlie Decker out of her mind. No point in even telling him about her pregnancy. When Melinda was born, she’d given the little girl Buck MacCallum’s last name, figuring if it was good enough for herself and Josh, it couldn’t hurt Melinda, either.
But that was when the ends had finally stopped meeting, and she’d had to go on food stamps to keep their stomachs full.
The sound of Annette’s voice broke through her reverie just as she was putting the last of the order down in front of her old schoolmates. “What’s
wrong
with you, Brenda?” Annette was demanding. “Can’t you hear me? It’s Arnold Hodgkins, and he says he has to talk to you
now!”
The three women at the table glanced inquiringly at her. Brenda’s heart sank.
No
, she told herself as she started
toward the phone.
Not yet. Not the first day. Please?
But her heart sank further as she heard the school principal’s voice on the phone.
“Hello, Mrs. MacCallum.” The three words were freighted with a note of tired resignation that told her the whole story.
“Oh, Lord,” she sighed. “What’s Josh done this time?”
“He started a fight in the cafeteria,” Arnold Hodgkins replied. “He claims it wasn’t his fault, that he was just sitting there reading a book, and that everyone else was picking on him.”
“And the rest of them say he just freaked out,” Brenda finished for him, already knowing what was coming. She’d hoped that after the trouble last year, it would be over with, that by following the school’s recommendation to skip Josh into the next class, he’d be challenged enough to stop relieving his boredom in the classroom with constant troublemaking and displays of temper. Well, so much for that hope.
“I think you’d better come down here,” Hodgkins was saying. “He’s not talking at all, and he’s refusing to go back to class.”
Brenda scanned the packed tables of the café, then noted the time once more. She could see Max glowering at her from the kitchen. Catching her eye, he nodded meaningfully at the orders that were piling up beneath the lights in the pass-through.
She weighed her options, then made up her mind.
“Mr. Hodgkins, I can’t come right now. It’s the middle of the lunch hour rush, and one of the other girls didn’t come in. Max is already glaring at me, and if I take off, he’ll fire me. Can’t you put him in the library or something? Just for an hour?” Her voice had taken on a plaintive note, and she instinctively turned away from the dining area and the eyes of the women who had once been her friends.
Blessedly, the school principal seemed to understand. Almost to her surprise, she heard him agree. “All right. I’ll keep him in my office. But try to make it within an hour, would you? I’ve got a meeting with the head of the school board, and I don’t intend to be late.”
“Thanks, Mr. Hodgkins. I’ll get there within an hour, I promise.”
She hung up the phone and hurried toward the pass-through, where Annette was trying to cope with the backlog of orders. Max was hunched over the grill, his back to her.
“Trouble?” Annette asked.
Brenda nodded, then spoke to Max. “I’m going to have to take off for an hour after we get through lunch. It’s Josh …”
Max glanced sourly up from the griddle where he was tending to a dozen hamburgers. He shoved his spatula at one and flipped it with a violent slash of the wrist. “How come he always has problems on my time?”
Brenda took a deep breath, wanting to snap back that Josh was only ten years old, that all kids have problems, and that this particular problem was cutting into her day just as much as it was his. Unless, she reflected darkly, he was suddenly planning to pay her for the hour she would be gone. Now
that
would be a first. But she said nothing.
Finding this job hadn’t been easy; finding another would be even harder.
Annette, sensing her distress, smiled encouragingly. “Hey, take it easy. You can have a couple of my hours tomorrow night, and it’s not like the tips are heavy after lunch. Do what you have to do, and screw Max, right?”
“Right,” Brenda agreed, her lips twisting wryly as she picked up another batch of orders and started toward a table next to the window. But screwing Max wasn’t the answer, because Max wasn’t the problem.
Josh was, and right now she hadn’t the slightest idea what she was going to do about it.
At one-thirty, with all but two of the tables empty and reset for the after-school crowd of teenagers, Brenda took off her apron and hung it on one of the hooks at the end of the kitchen where the lockers were. Max’s perennially angry eyes fixed on her as she started for the door.
“You plannin’ to wear my uniform on your own time?”
“It’s only an hour, Max. It’s not like I’m taking the afternoon off to go dancing.” She glanced down at the pink
nylon dress with a too-short skirt. “And if I were, I wouldn’t go wearing this crummy thing.”
“That ‘crummy thing’ cost me fifteen bucks,” Max growled. “An’ I don’t have to provide uniforms at all, you know. If that kid pukes on it—”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Max! Can’t you be a human being for even five minutes? Josh isn’t sick, he’s just—” She floundered, searching for the right words, but Max cut in before she found them.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. He’s just too smart for his own good, right? ’Cept it seems to me if he was so damn smart, he’d learn to keep himself out of trouble. You just get back here in an hour, understand?”
“Okay,” Brenda replied, taking his dismissal as tacit permission not to bother changing her clothes. She hurried out the back door, the midday heat instantly making her break into a sweat that caused the nylon dress to cling clammily to her skin, and slid behind the wheel of her nine-year-old Chevy.
The engine ground disconsolately when she turned the key, and Brenda swore silently. “Please, please,” she murmured, twisting the key over and over again, and resisting the urge to press the accelerator to the floor. “Just this once, don’t give up on me.”
Just as the battery was about to give out, the engine caught, coughed grumpily, then began chugging. Keeping her foot on the gas, Brenda reached back and cranked down the rear windows, then leaned over to the one on the front passenger side. It was permanently stuck in the closed position, but she always tried anyway, on the theory that miracles do happen now and then, and one of them just might befall her ruin of a car.