Chapter Two
Jenny
The dinner rush is generous if you call it a rush at all.
Four orders in two hours, all of them basic burgers with no modifications, all of them eaten quickly and quietly at the tables near the entrance.
By seven, the food court is back to its usual evening hush.
Muzak loops through the speakers above us, and somewhere across the way the woman at the Corn Dog Factory is loudly arguing with someone on the pay phone by the restrooms.
I scrape down the prep area while Tammy refills the ketchup pumps. The pumps always run out fast on weeknights because Dale buys the cheapest possible ketchup in giant industrial jugs and people use twice as much when it tastes like nothing.
"My sister-in-law called this morning," Tammy says, not looking up from the pump. "She wants me to bring Marcus over for Christmas. Like the whole thing. Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, the works."
"That sounds nice."
"It sounds like a hostage situation." She caps the pump and reaches for the next one. "Her house is the size of a postage stamp and she has three kids of her own. Last year she made the boys sleep in the same bed and Marcus came home with a black eye. He said he fell."
"Did he fall?"
"He didn't fall." Tammy sets the second pump down hard. "Her oldest is a menace. I've been telling her this for years. But she's family and Christmas is Christmas and I'm going to spend two days pretending her casserole doesn't taste like wet paper."
I huff out something that's almost a laugh. Tammy glances up and gives me a smile, pleased with herself.
"What about you?" she asks. "What are you doing for Christmas?"
I keep my eyes on the prep counter. "I haven't decided."
"Going to see your folks?"
"Probably not."
She doesn't push it. She caps the last pump and lines all three back up at their stations. The pay phone argument across the way ends with a slam loud enough to echo. The woman at the Corn Dog Factory stomps back to her counter, and the food court returns to its low hum.
A teenager wanders up to the counter around seven-thirty.
Hooded sweatshirt, headphones around his neck, the kind of boy who's at the mall because he has nowhere else to be.
He orders a small fry and a water and pays in quarters and dimes.
Tammy counts the change without comment and slides his cup across the counter.
He retreats to a booth in the corner and starts pulling fries from the bag one at a time.
By eight-thirty I'm cleaning the grill again and Tammy is starting on the registers.
"You getting enough sleep?" she asks.
I look up. "What?"
"You look tired."
"I always look tired."
"You look more tired."
I set down the spatula. "Tammy."
"I'm just saying." She lifts her hands like she's surrendering, which she isn't. "If you're coming down with something, I'd rather know now than have you sneeze into the grease trap on Friday."
"I'm not coming down with anything."
She watches me for a second. I can feel her deciding whether to keep pushing. She decides not to, and goes back to counting the drawer.
We close at nine on weeknights. By nine-fifteen the food court is dark except for the security lights, and Tammy and I are walking out the back together. The wind has picked up. Snow is starting, just a few thin flakes spiraling under the lot lights. Tammy pulls her coat tighter around her ribs.
"Drive careful."
"You too."
She lifts a hand as she walks toward the Oldsmobile and I lift one back. The Granada starts without protest tonight, which I take as a quiet kindness. I sit with my hands wrapped around the steering wheel and wait for the engine to settle before I pull out.
The drive home is quiet. The radio in the Granada works intermittently, and tonight it works, so I listen to a country station out of Omaha until the signal cuts out around the apartment complex.
By the time I pull into my spot, the snow is coming down in earnest. Thin, dry flakes that the wind pushes sideways across the lot.
I let myself into the apartment. The phone is ringing.
I know who it is before I look at the clock. Nine forty-eight on a Wednesday. She always calls at nine forty-five. She's always called at nine forty-five.
Lisa is in the living room with her textbook open on her lap and her highlighter in her teeth again. She glances toward the phone on the kitchen wall and back at me with a question in her face. I nod and set my bag down. She uncaps the highlighter and goes back to her notes.
I pick up the receiver on the fourth ring.
"Hello."
"???." Jenny-ya. My name in her mouth always sounds like a small reaching. "Why does it take you so long to answer?"
I lean my hip against the counter. "I just got in. I worked late."
"You always work late."
"It's a closing shift, Umma. I work the closing shift."
"It's not good for you. You don't sleep enough."
"I sleep fine."
"You don't eat enough either. I can hear it in your voice."
You can't hear malnutrition through a telephone, but I don't say this to her. I've learned which arguments are worth having and which ones will only make her sad. "I ate today. I had a sandwich."
"A sandwich isn't a meal."
"It was a big sandwich."
She hums. "Sunday," she says. "Come for dinner."
"Umma."
"I'm making galbi. And the radish kimchi you like. The one with the pear."
"I have to work."
"You always have to work."
"I do always have to work."
The silence stretches between us. I can hear her kitchen on the other end of the line. Water running, a cabinet closing. She's doing the dishes. She always calls me while she does the dishes because it's the only quiet time she gets in the house.
"Your father asked about you," she says finally.
The air in my lungs goes tight. "Did he."
"He asked if you were eating. If you were warm enough. The weather has been bad and he saw on the news that western Nebraska had a storm."
"Millfield isn't western Nebraska."
"I know that. I told him. He still wanted to know."
I look down at my shoes. They're wet from the snow in the parking lot. There's a small puddle forming on the linoleum beneath them.
"Tell him I'm fine."
"Tell him yourself. Come for dinner."
"Umma."
"Just dinner, Jenny. You don't have to stay. You don't have to talk about anything you don't want to talk about. Come for an hour. Eat. Come home."
I close my eyes. There's a version of me that gets in the car on Sunday and drives the forty-five minutes to Omaha and rings the doorbell and steps into the warm kitchen that smells like my childhood.
There's a version of me that sits at the table across from my father and lets him not look at me while my mother fills both of our plates and pretends nothing's wrong.
I've been able to imagine that version of me for two years. I haven't been able to become her.
"I can't this week," I say. "I'm sorry."
The silence on the other end of the line is longer this time.
"Okay," she says. "Next week, then."
"Maybe."
"Maybe." She lets the word sit between us. "Eat something tomorrow. Real food."
"I will."
"I love you, ?? ?." Our daughter.
"I love you too."
I hang up the receiver. The puddle under my shoes has spread. I take a paper towel from the roll above the sink and squat down to wipe it up.
Lisa is still on the couch when I straighten. She doesn't say anything, but she looks up from her textbook and gives me a careful look that's not quite pity and not quite sympathy.
"You want some tea?" she says.
I blink. "What?"
"I'm making tea." She gestures vaguely at the kettle on the stove that I hadn't noticed she put on. "There's enough for two."
It's the first time in maybe a month that Lisa has offered me anything. I don't know what to do with it.
"Sure," I say. "Thanks."
She gets up and crosses to the kitchen, and we stand together in the narrow space while the kettle works toward a whistle. She doesn't try to talk to me and I'm grateful. She hands me a mug — chamomile, because that's what she has — and goes back to her textbook.
I take the tea to my room and leave the light off. I sit on the edge of my bed, hold the mug between my hands, and let the heat work through my palms.
In the corner, my violin case leans against the wall. The shape of it is familiar in the dark. I look at it.
I don't open it.
* * *
Farkas
The girl at the Orange Julius takes out the trash at nine-ten.
I've watched her do it for three nights now. The same routine. She bundles the bags, props the back door open with her foot, and drags the trash to the dumpster in two short trips. The whole thing takes her four minutes. She's slight, no more than nineteen, and she walks like her feet hurt.
Tonight she doesn't see me until my hand is already on her throat.
I pull her into the shadow beside the dumpster. Something muffled breaks against my palm. Her eyes find mine in the dark and the panic in them is immediate. She struggles. They always struggle.
I need little from her. I open my jaw and her eyes go wide and white. The bite is shallow. I drink only what I need to open the door.
Her memories spill into me. I sift through her recent days. The bright lights of the food court. The sticky counter at the Orange Julius. Her manager's red face. The smell of orange concentrate. The other workers.
I find her.
The woman from the parking lot is there in this girl's memories.
Behind the Mr. Burger counter, her dark hair tied back, her face tired in the bright light.
The girl saw her tonight. They passed each other in the back corridor.
The woman lifted a hand in a brief, automatic wave.
The girl waved back. There was no conversation, and never has been.
But the girl has seen the woman every night for eight months, and so I see her too.
Eight months of brief glimpses. The woman scraping the grill.
The woman taking out trash. The woman behind the register laughing at something an older red-haired coworker said.
There's a name on the woman's chest. A white plastic tag pinned to her polo. Jenny.
I hold the name in my mind. Jenny. I shape it without speaking it. Jenny.
The girl's body sags against me. I've taken less than half a pint from her.
I lower her to the concrete and set her against the wall beside the dumpster.
Her chest rises and falls. She'll be unconscious for an hour.
She'll wake with a headache and a strange wound and a gap in her memory of the last twenty minutes that she'll fill with stories she half-believes.
I wipe my mouth and step back into the deeper shadow.
The metal door of the food court service corridor stands forty feet away. The corridor runs the full length of the rear of the building and connects to every restaurant through narrow back hallways. I've moved through this corridor many times and never used it for anything that mattered.
It matters tonight.
I cross the lot and slip through the door. The corridor is empty, lit by failing fluorescent tubes that buzz and flicker. I move along the wall until I reach the back hallway of Mr. Burger.
The hallway opens onto the kitchen and the prep area. From the dark of the hallway, I can see through into the bright box of the restaurant. The fluorescent lights are punishing. The whole space is too clean and too lit, every surface reflecting back in white and chrome.
She's at the grill.
Jenny.
Her back is to me. Her hair is pulled into a low ponytail and a few dark strands have escaped and stick to the side of her neck where she's been sweating.
She's scraping the flattop with the long-handled spatula, the same way she scraped it the night I first saw her.
The motion is mechanical. Her shoulders move with each stroke, the muscle and bone of her shifting beneath the thin polo.
There's a grease stain on the back of her shirt that she doesn't know about.
The red-haired woman from the girl's memories is at the registers. She says something I can't hear. Jenny doesn't look up but her head tilts slightly, listening. The red-haired woman keeps talking, her hands moving in expressive gestures. Jenny says something back. The red-haired woman laughs.
Jenny smiles.
It's a small smile. It doesn't last. But it transforms her face for the second it's there, and the air goes out of me as if her shoulder were pressed against my chest again.
I've been alive for over a thousand years. I've stood in the courts of kings. I've watched armies march and cities burn and women laugh in the firelight after long nights of celebration. None of it touched me. None of it ever touched me.
She smiles, and something in me goes still and stays still.
I watch her until she finishes the grill and begins to mop.
I watch her until she and the red-haired woman walk out of view toward the back of the restaurant.
I watch the empty kitchen for a long time after that, the fluorescent lights buzzing above the abandoned counter, the grease in the trap cooling, the smell of it drifting through the hallway and into the corridor where I stand.
Then I leave.
The girl by the dumpster has begun to stir when I pass her.
I don't look down. I cross the lot and disappear into the trees that border the access road, and from there I move north and west on foot.
The snow has begun to fall in earnest. By the time I reach the farmhouse, my coat and my hair are dusted with it.
Inside, I stop at the kitchen table. The phone sits in front of me, its cord curled against the wood.
I lift the receiver.
I set it back down.
I don't know what I'd ask for yet. I know her name. I know her face. I know the set of her shoulders and the way she smiles when no one's paying attention. It's more than I had this morning. It isn't enough.
I go to the interior room and sit on the floor and close my eyes. In the dark behind my eyelids, she scrapes the flattop. She tilts her head to listen. She smiles.
Jenny.
I shape the name again and again until the sun rises and the world above me goes still.