Sandi usually worked the morning shift alone, and we got to know each other. My room in the Republic had a hot plate for warming cans of soup, but sometimes I ate out just for the company. The Burger Derby was safe. No one there was likely to ask you where you were holding your tension.
Sandi turned out to be horse-crazy. When she found out I was from Kentucky she treated me like I had personally won the Derby. “You are so lucky,” she said. “My absolute dream is to have a horse of my own, and braid flowers in its mane and prance around in a ring and win ribbons and stuff.” She had this idea that everyone in Kentucky owned at least one Thoroughbred, and it took me some time to convince her that I had never even been close enough to a horse to get kicked.
“In the part of Kentucky I come from people don’t own Thoroughbreds,” I told her. “They just wish they could live like one.” The Thoroughbreds had their own swimming pools. My whole county didn’t even have a swimming pool. I told her what a hoot we all thought it was when these rich guys paid six million for Secretariat after his running days were over, since he was supposedly the most valuable stud on the face of the earth, and then he turned out to be a reticent breeder, which is a fancy way of saying homosexual. He wouldn’t go near a filly for all the sugar in Hawaii.
Sandi acted kind of shocked to hear this news about Secretariat’s sex life.
“Didn’t you know that? I’m sure that made the national news.”
“No!” she said, scouring the steam table like a fiend. She kept looking around to see if anyone else was in the restaurant, but no one was, I’m sure. I always went there around ten-thirty, which is a weird time of day to eat a hot dog, but I was trying to get Turtle and me onto two meals a day.
“What’s it like to work here?” I asked her. There had been a HELP WANTED sign in the window for going on two weeks.
“Oh, it’s fantastic,” she said.
I’ll bet, I thought. Serving up Triple Crown Chili Dogs and You Bet Your Burgers and chasing off drunks and broke people who went around the tables eating nondairy creamer straight out of the packets would be fantastic. She looked about fourteen.
“You should apply for it, really. They couldn’t turn you down, being from Kentucky.”
“Sure,” I said. What did she think, that I was genetically programmed to fry chicken? “What’s it pay?”
“Three twenty-five an hour. “Plus your meals.”
“What am I even talking about? I’ve got this kid,” I said. “I’d have to pay somebody more than that to take care of her.”
“Oh no! You could just do what I do, take her to Kid Central Station.”
“You’ve got a kid?”
“Yeah, a little boy. Twenty-one months.”
I had thought Pittman was the only place on earth where people started having babies before they learned their multiplication tables. I asked her what Kid Central Station was.
“It’s free. See, it’s this place in the mall where they’ll look after your kids while you shop, but how do they know? See what I mean? The only thing is you have to go and check in every two hours, to prove you’re still shopping, so I just dash over there on my breaks. The number five bus just goes right straight there. Or I’ll get some friend to go. The people that work there don’t know the difference. I mean, they’ve got these jillion kids crawling all over the place, how are they going to know if somebody’s really one of ’em’s mother?”
Sandi was sliding the little white buckets of cauliflower and shredded carrots and garbanzo beans into the holes in the salad bar, getting ready for the lunch crowd. For some odd reason they had artificial grapes strewed out over the ice all around the buckets.
“I’ll go check it out,” I said, although I already had a good notion of what it would be like.
“If you’re going right now, could you check in for my little boy? His name’s Seattle. I’m sure he’s the only one there named Seattle. Just make sure he’s okay, will you?”
“Like Seattle, Washington?”
“No, like Seattle Slew, the racehorse. He’s a little towhead, you can’t miss him, he looks just like me only his hair’s blonder. Oh, they have a requirement that they have to be able to walk. Can your daughter walk?”
“Sure she walks. When there’s someplace she wants to go.”
A celery stick fell out of the bucket onto the floor, and Sandi swiped it up and took a bite. “Well, I couldn’t very well let a customer eat it,” she said.
“Don’t look at me,” I said. “It’s no skin off my teeth if you want to eat the whole bucket of celery, and the artificial grapes besides. For three twenty-five an hour I think you’re entitled.”
She munched kind of thoughtfully for a minute. Her eyelashes were stuck together with blue mascara and sprung out all around her eyes like flower petals. “You know, your little girl doesn’t look a thing like you,” she said. “I mean, no offense, she’s cute as a button.”
“She’s not really mine,” I said. “She’s just somebody I got stuck with.”
Sandi looked at both of us, her elbow cocked on her hip and the salad tongs frozen in midair. “Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.”
FOUR
Lou Ann’s Grandmother Logan and Lou Ann’s new baby were both asleep in the front room with the curtains drawn against the afternoon heat. For the last two weeks Granny Logan had stomped around the house snapping the curtains shut just as fast as Lou Ann could open them, until finally Lou Ann gave up the effort and they all moved around in the gloom of a dimly lit house. “You’d think somebody had died, instead of just being born,” Lou Ann complained, but the old woman declared that the heat was unnatural for January and would cause the baby to grow up measly and unwholesome.
When she woke up, Granny Logan would deny she had been sleeping. She had said she only needed to rest her eyes for the trip back to Kentucky, three days on the Greyhound.
In the kitchen Ivy Logan and Lou Ann were packing a paper bag with baloney sandwiches and yellow apples and a Mason jar of cold tea. Ivy’s heavy arms and apron-covered front moved around like she was the boss, even in her daughter’s unfamiliar kitchen. Under her breath she hummed one line of a hymn, “All our sins and griefs to bear,” over and over until Lou Ann thought she would scream. It was an old habit.
Lou Ann pushed her damp blond hair back from her face and told her mother she wished she would stay a few days more. Whenever Ivy looked at her Lou Ann could feel the tired half-moons under her own eyes.
“You haven’t hardly had time to say boo to Angel. He’ll have Tuesday off and we could take the truck and all go someplace. We could all fit in some way. Or otherwise I could stay here with Dwayne Ray, and you all go. It’s a shame for you to come all this way from home and not see what you can see.”
Surprisingly, Angel had agreed to move back in until after her mother and grandmother’s visit. He might be hard to talk to and unreasonable in every other way but at least, Lou Ann realized, he knew the power of mothers and grandmothers. If Granny Logan had known they were getting a divorce she would have had an apoplectic. At the very least, she and Ivy would insist that Lou Ann come back home.
“Oh, honey, we seen plenty from the bus,” Ivy said. “Them old big cactus and every kind of thing. Lordy, and them big buildings downtown, all glass it looked to me like. I expect we’ll see a good sight more on the way home.”
“I guess, but it seems like we haven’t done a thing since you got here but set around and look at the baby.”
“Well, that’s what we come for, honey. Now we’ve done helped you have him, and get settled with him, and we’re anxious to get on home. The heat puts Mother Logan in a mood.”
“I know it.” Lou Ann breathed in slowly through her nose. She was beginning to believe that the hot, dry air in her chest might be the poison her grandmother claimed it to be. “I wish I could have put you up better than we did,” she said.