Chapter 11
BIRDIE
My shift is quiet, which is good, because with my shoulder and leg, even just changing out the refrigerated food display in the middle of the station has tears leaking down my cheeks.
I take some generic ibuprofen from the grimy bottle someone stashed under the counter years ago, shaking out an indiscriminate number and chewing them to try to get them in my system faster.
I think they work—the flaying pain around the gash in my calf seems to dull—and I’m able to lift the crate of new milk off the delivery truck without crying in front of the driver, but it’s a close thing.
The driver, a grizzled guy named Bill, has a good heart and bad lungs. He watches me as he has his customary post-unloading cigarette before he moves on to his next night delivery. “You okay there, Birdie?”
I give him a wan smile. “Had a fight with my ladder earlier today. Got a little beat up.”
He nods and that’s the end of his probing. If I asked him how the arthritis in his hands was doing or about the rattling cough he’s started up with in the last few months, I’d get a similar level of understatement. Always acts up with the humidity. Just a little tickle in my chest.
There’s too much wrong to explain everything all the time to everyone, and generally when it came to anyone who had a reason to be at Buddy’s, it was assumed that you’d share about yourself if you wanted to share.
It could be mistaken for pride, but really, I think it was weariness.
If you already had to live through your problems, did you really have the energy to explain them too?
Bill finishes his cigarette, and I wave him off when he asks if I want him to loop back by after his route.
It’s his gruff and unsentimental way of expressing concern.
He doesn’t like that I’m alone here at night, and more than once, he’s helped me with a tough situation: administering Narcan to a collapsed customer or keeping some asshole distracted outside while I secreted a woman with a black eye in the back room so she could use the phone.
More than once, he’s scared off shaky, desperate-looking men who were either eyeing the register or me or both.
But all in all, the night shift is fine.
A few truckers and a slow leak of people driving to lonely places for lonely reasons.
Early in the morning come the nursing students farmed out from a college in Leavenworth to the rural health clinics and the handful of teachers who commute west to Oskaloosa and McLouth.
I spend the first half of my shift turning over inventory and cleaning and the second half sketching out schematics for my furniture commissions.
Sometimes I sketch ideas for carvings that I don’t have the heart to make anymore.
I’ve drifted away from the popular saints into less common subjects.
A surly Jonah under shriveled vines. Job covered in boils, his face turned defiantly up to the sky—I cry to Thee and Thou dost not answer me.
Saint Peter upside down on a cross. Saint Bartholomew, half flensed.
Saint Agatha with her shoulders hunched protectively around her maimed chest, a hand reaching tentatively up to touch one of the gaping wounds where her breasts used to be.
As sunrise approaches, more people begin trickling in, and I set aside my sketches to ring them up.
When the papers come, I ignore the story below the fold—although I do glance at the accompanying picture, just once, just to see it framed by someone else’s perspective.
A wooden carving, larger than life-size but not by much, left anonymously in Kansas City, Missouri, in front of city hall.
It’s only been a few days since it was deposited on the sidewalk, but it’s already become a viral attraction.
Despite some early noises about moving it, the city has left the statue in front of city hall after the mayor intervened.
Something about Kansas City being a city of art, Paris of the Plains and so forth, and besides, it’s not blocking any traffic or foot access where it is now. He even took a selfie with it.
The Star’s photographer chose to take a picture of it in the morning, right as the sun was pushing up and glowing over the world.
Fitting for the morning star himself. The golden light makes the statue’s brooding features seem like they’re glowing, and same with the intricately and painstakingly etched hair on the statue’s head.
The photographer picked the perfect angle: like this, the sleepy, stretching sunlight throws shadows from the two horns nearly hidden in the statue’s angelic curls.
I allow myself a small smile before I flip the paper over and slide it onto the newspaper display.
I use a post-dawn lull to walk the night’s trash back to the dumpster and find Amber, the day shift cashier, puffing on a vape while she scrolls through her phone.
Buddy doesn’t care if we vape at the counter, but Amber hates getting scolded by the nursing students.
She tells me they’ll all start vaping or smoking the minute they start working as nurses anyway, but she can’t tell them that without sounding bitter, so it’s just easier to top off behind the building.
“Hey,” she says as I walk back from the dumpster. “There was a guy at the bar yesterday looking for your sister.”
That doesn’t surprise me. Busy’s taste in men hasn’t gotten any better, and even though she’s been safe and quiet these past few months, the odds of one of those men still being obsessed or being owed money—or thinking he’s owed money—are high.
“Did he seem dangerous?” I ask. It’s the most important question, and it’s also a question I’ve had to ask so many times over the years that I feel nothing at all when I ask it. Like I’m asking about holiday bank hours or when they’ll finish the new lane along I-70.
And the expression on Amber’s face is like I have actually asked about holiday bank hours. Between working at Buddy’s and picking up bartending shifts whenever she can at the dive downtown, a question like did he seem dangerous has become mundane to Amber too.
A vape cloud wreathes her deep bronze skin as she thinks about her answer; her neck is already shimmering a little with the muggy heat of morning, and the same shimmer glistens along the line of her thick black hair.
In just a few moments, she’ll be covered with goose bumps inside, because the air-conditioning at Buddy’s is cold enough to impede bacterial growth.
“Yes,” she says. “He seemed dangerous but not in the normal way. Some men look at a woman like she’s already naked, but he looked at me like…” She sucks on her vape while she searches for the words. “Like my mind was naked.”
“Did he seem like he knew where Busy was? And did he say anything about money? Or a car?” The next most important questions.
As long as he couldn’t find Busy, it usually resolved itself, and as long as she didn’t owe him money or hadn’t taken his car at some point, then it wouldn’t be a problem for me either.
It had been once or twice. A problem.
“Nah, nothing about any of that. And I don’t think he knows where she’s at either. She’s in Kansas City, right?”
I nod. I like Amber. She’s kind to me, and the tiredness she wears over her shoulders like a coat she hasn’t put her arms in the sleeves of feels familiar to me.
There’s a camaraderie in it. We don’t share much about ourselves—we only see each other for about ten minutes a day—but I know she’s got a daughter and a grandma and no one else around to help.
I know that she flips through the community college catalog every spring and every fall, dog-earing pages of required classes, the information about financial aid.
I know the catalogs always end up in the trash.
I’ve told her a little bit about Busy, mostly because the most recent rescue had me gone for two weeks and she had to get to Buddy’s a little earlier to open in time for the tiny amount of morning foot traffic we get, so I’d wanted her to know there was a good reason for my absence.
“Just outside Kansas City,” I say. “It’s a bit of a drive, but she’s in a good place, I think. A good place to live, I mean. She’s not… It’s still—”
I stop. Amber doesn’t press.
Just like the people at church don’t press when I hunch in the back pew every Sunday, slipping out the moment the first notes of the recessional begin to play. Easier for them to avoid looking at the second of the disgraced Cooper girls that way, something that’s better for all of us.
Just like Paxico doesn’t press—or Bill or Buddy or the cashier at the Bonner Springs Walmart when I paid for foam-lined finger splints at two in the morning, sucking each breath through my teeth like I could exhale three broken fingers away. One of the times a man of Busy’s became a problem for me.
I’m grateful for it because I’m too tired to explain things, and all it would do is stain the air with misery anyway because no one is able to help with this particular thing.
Not Amber or Paxico or Buddy or Bill. They can cover shifts or lend me nail guns, but I’m the only one who can take care of Busy, so it has to be me. Every part of it.
“He was hot, though,” Amber says after a moment passes. The air conditioners are roaring, small streams of water trickling from beneath the cinder blocks they sit on. “It kind of took your breath away.”
I can see that. For how hard life has been on her, Busy is still beautiful, and when her head’s right, she’s electric to be around, so most of her exes have been handsome. Horrible, but handsome.
“What did he look like? In case he comes back?”
She pulls her mouth to the side as she thinks. “He wasn’t there that long, so I don’t remember much. White guy. Big shoulders. Hair like the guy from the boarding school show but blond.”