plumper, softer, more relaxed version of Gum. “Your grandma has always said she wished you would come visit.”
All three of the waitresses were dressed identically in short black skirts and blue and white checked blouses with sailboats embroidered over the right breast. The two younger ones, Jean and Kelli, smiled at Victor with the gentle condescension of older women over young boys, then went about their business. When they had gone, his grandmother turned on the television that perched on a shelf above the beer cooler and refilled Victor’s Styrofoam cup with coke. They watched the muted television for a while, and then suddenly his grandmother turned to Victor and looked him directly in the eyes for what seemed like the first time.
“You’ve been here before!” she said. “Lord, I just remembered. We came here after your granddaddy’s funeral, me, you, your daddy, and William, and you sat here at the bar and drank a coke just like your doing now, and you were such a little thing you couldn’t even see the TV, so I had to put you in my lap. Do you remember that?”
Victor did not. To imagine himself or for that matter anyone else in his grandmother’s lap was difficult.
“Well,” his grandmother shook her head and smiled in that peculiar way he noticed she had, of smiling a smile that drew in her lips and pulled the corners of her mouth downward like a frown, but which was somehow unmistakably still a smile. “Well,” she said again, and Victor noticed that her accent was such that when she prefaced a statement with the word ‘Well,’ which she often did, it came out sounding like “whale.”
“Whale, we enjoyed having you.”
Victor had never really worked before, and he was astonished by the sheer physical and mental relief with which he took to the tasks of gathering the dishes, washing, and storing them. He had no contact with the other workers in the kitchen aside from brief and soon forgotten introductions and every now and then a curt nod, and once the dinner hours were underway, he moved from task to task at a steady pace that was almost comfortable. At one point, while he was making the rounds of the dining area to pick up the bus pans that were full, he caught a glance of his cousin Shelby perched on her stool behind the cash register/display case peering, with her glasses off, into a paperback book which she held with one hand just a few inches from her face. Not for the first time, Victor wished that he could read the way Shelby was reading, with an obvious lack of effort. To read for any amount of time, unless he was reading something sexy, usually put him to sleep. He moved on to collect the overflowing bus pan behind the bar, and with a surge of pride he could not help but feel, he overheard his grandmother say to one of the aged, overweight patrons of the bar, that he was turning out to be a good, steady worker.
It was only when the pace slowed that Victor felt a craving for a cigarette. Having left his own pack in his sea bag, he rinsed his hands and went up to the cash register to ask one off of Shelby. She looked up as he approached and smiled her broad gap-toothed, lofty grin. “Having fun?” she says.
Victor nodded. “It’s all right. Can I bum a cigarette? I left mine.”
Shelby smirked. “You can always just take a pack from behind the bar,” she paused. “But not while there’s customers. It doesn’t matter. Here you go,” she rummaged around in the big black vinyl tote she used as a purse and held a nearly empty pack out toward him.
“Thank you,” he said, putting it behind his ear. “What are you reading?”
She picked up the book from where she laid it down on the display case beside the cash register and held the cover out for him to see. It was yellow, with the stylized silhouette of the face of a genderless figure with full features. The single word Cane was printed in stark brown letters across the top of the book.
“Oh,” he said, “I’ve never heard of it. What’s it about?”
“It’s not about anything. It’s poetry,” she said.
Victor grimaced.
Shelby laughed. Her laugh was silent, a soft rocking of her body from deep inside. “What’s the matter?” she said. “You don’t like poetry?”
Victor shrugged. Not being a reader, he hadn’t read much poetry outside of bathroom graffiti.
Shelby rocked again. “You’re a boy,” she said. “Boys don’t develop any sensibility until they’re in their twenties. If even then. I’m not even going to bother reading this to you. What kind of music do you like?”
Shelby looked at him, then lowered her brow like a gorilla, thrust out her chin, and pretended to shove her hands into pockets. It was only when she spoke, though, in an unnaturally low and gruff voice, that he realized she was mimicking him.
“Uh, I don’t know…” she said. “I like, gangster rap, I guess, and metal…” she laughed and pushed her glasses back up into her viper’s tangle of curls.
Victor blushed. Her pose, when she was mimicking him, was a pretty accurate reflection of how he was now standing, and yet it was not just him, it was an absolute caricature of the archetypical sullen disaffected teenage boy. She could have been portraying any of the younger white guys in any kitchen, in any restaurant anywhere. With an unpleasant sensation, like that of a cold shower, it occurred to Victor that he was not unique.
Shelby poked him in the chest with the corner of her book. “Move. They’re trying to pay,” Victor turned and sure enough, an ancient couple wearing matching sun visors totteringly approached the register. “Let’s go to the beach tomorrow,” Shelby said to him as she reached for their bill, “then we can talk.”
Victor nodded and went back to work with a feeling of lightness that he could not put his finger on. It was only a little later, while bent over the sink scrubbing a burnt spot off the lip of a frying pan, that it came to him that, for the first time in his memory, he was looking forward to the next day.
The day’s, or rather, evening’s work, ended with the three of them, Victor, Shelby, and their grandmother, seated in a booth across from the bar, in the absolute silence that the grandmother demanded while she counted the day’s proceeds. When this was finished, all the coins rolled and all the bills banded and zipped into a bank bag, the grandmother leaned back and lit up a cigarette.
“It was a good night, for a Monday,” said Shelby.
“Not too bad,” says the grandmother. “We could always do better,” she hung her cigarette in one corner of her mouth and spoke out of the other one to Victor. “What did you think, honey? You seemed to keep up pretty good.”
Victor nodded.
“It’s a lot busier on the weekends,” his grandmother said. “We’ll have Oliver, the little Mexican boy help you with the dishes then, take him off the line. I don’t know, though, you might be able to handle it yourself.”
Victor could feel Shelby stiffen beside him “Gum, Oliver is not a little Mexican boy. He’s Salvadorian, for one thing, and he’s almost twenty-five years old. Why do you have to be so ignorant?”
The grandmother tapped the ash of her cigarette into a tray. “Little Oliver? He can’t be no twenty-five. He’s as twenty five as I
