Chapter 6 Close-out, two nights, and the first bill
She was on the shoulder of the dead highway at twenty to six in the morning with the flannel buttoned to the throat and her arms folded into it, and it was cold enough up here in August to see her own breath go out ahead of her and hang.
Three miles. She had worked it out the night before, lying on top of a made bed in a borrowed T-shirt with the space heater ticking: the truck had taken about six minutes off the sodium lamp at Iron that was the trouble with this town, and she had been in it thirty-six hours and could already see it.
Two miles of ditch and fence line and a dropped muffler lying in the grass going orange, and off to the left the ridge coming up black with the Works standing on top of it, every window out of it, the sky starting to go the color of a nickel behind the stack.
She walked and she did her numbers, because she had always done her numbers and because it was better than doing anything else.
Ten dollars. One flannel, one grey T-shirt, one pair of jeans three inches short, two pairs of socks, a hairbrush with the sticker still on the back of it.
A room somebody else was paying three hundred a month for.
A phone she had not turned on since one forty on Saturday afternoon, on a plan Everett paid, which made it a thing she was holding, not a thing she owned. A wedding dress folded under a bed.
That was the ledger, and there was nothing on the left-hand side of it at all.
Main Street at four minutes past six was two thousand feet of shut doors — half of them papered over from the inside with butcher paper sun-bleached to no color at all, and the pawn shop with the gold leaf still on the glass and its lights on for no one, and one warm yellow oblong three storefronts down where somebody had the coffee going.
THE EMBER. Gold on the glass, and the blind up.
She stood on the sidewalk beside a parking meter with the flag broken off it, and she made herself say the whole sentence in her head first, all the way to the end of it, with the period on it.
Then she went in.
The woman on the register was about fifty-five and built square, with a short-clipped brass-colored perm and a face that had already decided; she had a carbon pad open in front of her and a pen going down a column of figures and she did not look up when the bell went.
“Not till half past.”
“I know,” Maeve said. “I’m not here to eat.”
That got her the look. It came up over the top of the pad and went from the hem of the short jeans to the men’s flannel to the brushed-out hair, and Maeve had the strong impression of being read the way you read a delivery ticket.
“You’re the one came up the pass in the dress.”
“Maeve Purnell.”
“Marla.” She put the pen down. “Saturday night, on the back of Hitch Voyles’s bike, in front of the whole lot. Which I got off three separate people before ten o’clock Sunday, so don’t go thinking this town’s got any better at minding itself.” She folded her arms. “Go on, then.”
And Maeve opened her mouth, and the whole thing tried to come apart in the middle the way it had come apart in sixty feet of stone the day before, and she stood in a diner that smelled of coffee and floor polish and hot fryer oil and got hold of it and said it anyway.
“You’re short on close-out. I want it. Both nights. I want the lunch counter as well if you’ve got it, and I’ll take the bad shifts nobody else will, and I can start this afternoon.”
Marla did not say anything for a moment.
“Who told you I was short?”
“A man with a koi on his arm told the whole of Sunday dinner you were short.” Maeve heard her own voice stay level, which surprised her. “He was going to phone you about it. I’d rather he didn’t.”
“Would you.” Marla came out from behind the register. “Hands.”
“What?”
“Hands. Out.”
Maeve put them out, and had to make herself do it, and hated every part of it.
Marla took them and turned them over and held them there under the ceiling light, and there was nothing kind in it and nothing unkind either.
Three years of nothing. Soft palms, soft pads, and the little pale crescent at every cuticle where the polish had grown out and away from her.
“These have never done a thing,” Marla said.
“No.”
“Close-out here is a hundred and forty a month and you’ll finish at eleven with the fryer to do, and the hot water in that kitchen runs cold for a count of ten and then comes through scalding with no warning in between.
” She let go. “You’ll split them open inside a week and they’ll bleed at the knuckle and you’ll keep coming in, or you won’t. ”
“I’ll keep coming in.”
“Everybody says that.”
“I walked here,” Maeve said. “From out past the salvage yard. I left at twenty to five.”
Marla’s eyebrows went up about an eighth of an inch, which on that face was a parade.
And then the phone on the wall by the pass-through rang.
It rang four times while Marla stood there looking at her, and Maeve knew, with a certainty that put a cold hand flat on the back of her neck, exactly who was on the other end of it and exactly what he was calling to arrange for her, at speed, out loud, before she could get her own mouth open.
Marla walked over and took it off the hook.
“Ember.” A pause. “Uh huh.” A longer pause, and her eyes came back up the room to Maeve and stayed there. “Jesse, sweetheart, you’re about ninety seconds late and you can tell your mother I said so. Yeah. She’s standing right here. She asked me herself.” She hung up.
Maeve found she had to put a hand on the back of a stool.
“Tuesday and Friday close-out,” Marla said, going back to her carbons.
“Eleven to two on the counter Monday through Thursday, and that’s on trial, and I’ll tell you Thursday.
You get paid in cash, because there hasn’t been a bank in this town since ’oh nine and I’m not driving to Ellery for anybody.
Apron’s your own problem. Be back at ten fifty. ”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me, I’m short.” She turned a page. “There’s a lattice on the day-old rack. Take it.”
“How much?”
“Don’t,” said Marla, and did not look up again.
Maeve stood outside on Main with the cherry lattice in a square of waxed paper and the sun coming up the length of the street, and she ate it standing up, and it was the best thing she had ever tasted in her life.
Then she got her phone out of the flannel pocket and turned it on.
She had a reason. That was what she told herself while it woke up: she had a job, and a job needs a number on it, and Marla would want one. It was a good reason. It was also true that she had been able to do this at any point since Saturday and had not.
It came alive in her hand and then it kept coming alive, buzzing and buzzing against her palm, and she watched two days arrive.
Twenty-six messages. Her mother eleven times on Saturday, the first at 2:06, and then nothing at all from her after nine o’clock Sunday morning.
Dara, nine times, the last four of them one word each.
A cousin. Charlene. A number from the hall.
Everett twice — twice, exactly, because he was not a man who called three times — and then, at 8:14 on Sunday evening, a single line of text, no capitals missing and no punctuation out of place: Whenever you’re ready to talk I’m here. Nobody is angry with you.
She read that one four times, standing beside a broken parking meter, and could not have told anybody why her hands were doing what they were doing.
She did not listen to any of the voicemails. She put the phone back in the pocket, and she walked up to the hardware and priced an apron at nine dollars, did not buy one, and she was at the counter at ten fifty.
Dara called at twenty to three that afternoon.
Maeve was out at the pass-through with a bus tub on her hip and both arms in it to the elbow, and Marla jerked her chin at the back door, and Maeve went out and stood in the gravel by the propane cage with the fryer smell coming out of the wall behind her and stopping at about four feet.
“Dara —”
“I’m in the lot.” Her sister’s voice was flat and high and had been crying for a while and had stopped, which was worse. “I’m sitting in the lot at the office in the car. They let me go at twelve.”
The gravel went a long way away.
“They — what did they say?”
“That’s the thing, Maeve.” A small awful laugh.
“That’s the whole thing. Nobody said anything.
Brenda came out and said they were restructuring the front desk and she was sick about it and would I take the rest of the week paid.
She hugged me. She’s known me eleven years and she hugged me and she wouldn’t look at me, and there is no restructuring, and Ron Bidwell plays golf with the man who owns the building, and nobody in that office had to so much as pick up a telephone.
” A breath. “That’s how it works. You know that’s how it works.
You lived in it three years and you never had to look at it because it was all pointed the other way. ”
“Dara, I’ll —”
“You’ll what.” Not a question. “You’ll what, exactly. You’re ninety miles up a mountain with a motorcycle club.”
“I got a job this morning.”
“Oh, you got a job.” And then the crying came back into it all at once, and Maeve stood with her eyes shut in the gravel and took it.
“Eleven years. I’ve got the twins and I’ve got a mortgage that job was paying and you had — Maeve, you had everything, you had the house and the truck and a man who never raised his voice at you, and I told you.
I told you how lucky you were. I said it at your kitchen table in June and you sat there and you let me say it. ”
“I know you did.”
“So what was so bad?” said Dara. “Tell me what was so bad that it was worth this.”
And there it was again, the whole four seconds of it, sitting right there in her mouth on the other side of a gap.
“I couldn’t —” Maeve said.
The line went dead before she got any further than that, and she did not know, then or ever, whether Dara had hung up on her or whether it had only sounded like it.
She called her mother at three, and at ten past, and at half past four, and from the alley with her hands still wet at twenty to six.
It rang out every time. Four rings, then the voice she had heard at that dresser every morning of her childhood saying the number back, slow and careful, the way she had been taught to in 1974.
Her mother had not blocked her. That was not what it was, and Maeve knew exactly what it was, because she had been raised in the same kitchen: her mother was sitting at the table in Verlon with the phone face up on the cloth in front of her, looking at her daughter’s name, letting it ring.
She finished the shift.
That was the whole of it, in the end, and it was not much, and it was hers.
She worked the counter until two and then Marla put her on close-out an evening early because the girl who had it called in, and at half past ten she was on her knees on a rubber mat with her arms in grey water up to the elbow and the fryer basket in her lap and the skin of her knuckles gone shiny and tight and stinging in three places, and there was a paper snowflake taped in the window of the back room from a winter nobody could name, and she scrubbed and thought about nothing whatsoever for an hour and ten minutes, and it was the best hour she had had since Friday.
At six minutes past eleven Marla turned the sign off and put twelve dollars on the counter in ones.
“That’s not wages,” Maeve said.
“That’s tips, and tips aren’t wages, and I’m not arguing about it at this hour.” Marla got her coat off the hook. “Your sister, was it?”
“Yes.”
“Mm.” She did the buttons. “Well. Ten fifty tomorrow.”
The headlights came up behind her a mile and a half out of town.
She knew the sound before the light got to her — that flatbed had a note in it like a man clearing his throat — and it came past her slow and pulled onto the gravel forty feet up with the brake lights washing red over the ditch weeds, and she walked up to it and lifted the door on its hinge and got in.
Hitch had both hands low on the wheel, thumbs hooked under it. He did not ask her what she was doing walking the shoulder of a dead highway at twenty past eleven, and he did not tell her not to, and he did not say a single word about the three miles.
He brought his head round and set his left ear at her.
“Ember,” Maeve said. “Two nights close-out and the counter on trial.”
He put the truck in gear. Somewhere in the dark between the mirror and the windshield something happened at the corner of his mouth and was gone again before it could be called anything.
“Good,” he said.
That was all he said, and it was the second thing anybody had given her that day, and she sat with her ruined hands turned up in her lap the whole three miles and did not tell him about Dara, or about her mother sitting at a kitchen table letting a phone ring, or about what it had cost to get the first one.
Upstairs, she slid the brass bolt and stood in the dark at the gable window, where the Works went up black against a sky with a little light still bleeding off the bottom of it.
Then she took the phone out and set it on the sill, face up, and left it on.
Nothing came.