Taft

“Let her follow you around, watch you some.”

Fay followed Cyndi at a careful distance, just close enough to hear what was being said over the music, which I had finally remembered to turn back on. Later, when Cyndi gave Fay a table of her own, it was two women together, the kiss of death for tips for sweet-faced girls.

“A beer,” Fay said to me from the bar. “A strawberry margarita.”

“What kind of beer?” I said, and off she went to ask. Most of the mistakes she only made once. She was fine.

When things settled down I told Cyndi to pour the drinks and I went back to the office, figuring Marion would be home from work by now. I wanted to see how Franklin was feeling, make sure there hadn’t been any complications. My office used to be a storage closet, but it was deep and there was a little window, which seemed lucky to me. It was back through the kitchen and up three stairs, far enough away from the noise for me to sound almost like I was calling from home.

“Hello?” Franklin said.

“Franklin?” I said, and sat up, surprised by his voice. “Frank, it’s me. Hey, how’s your eye there, son? You were asleep already when I talked to your mother last night or else I would have had her put you on. Is it doing all right?”

“Fine, I guess,” he said. “It’s a little sore, but not really. Mom makes me take the aspirin whether I want to or not.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Listen to her. She knows what she’s talking about. Did you go to school?”

“Oh, sure. It’s not so bad. I got seventeen stitches.”

I thought about the needle and the eye. I thought about it seventeen times. “Did it hurt?”

“The shot hurt,” he said, his voice getting excited, “but then you can’t feel anything on the whole side of your head. You can see the needle coming down and you know it’s going in and out but you can’t feel it.”

Jesus. “Was the doctor nice?”

“He’s somebody mom works with. He’s okay. He says the scar won’t be too bad since he took so many stitches.”

“You’re not running around with rough boys, are you?”

“No, sir.”

“You’ve got to look out for yourself, you hear me?”

He told me stories about two boys he knew, Kevin and Jamal. He told me they made good grades in school, and that Jamal had a dog and that they took the dog out for walks in the afternoon. He was trying to soothe me. I knew that. I was surprised how clearly he would know what I wanted to hear. He was trying to make me worry less by explaining that Miami was the city of good boys.

“You want to talk to Mom?”

I didn’t. I’d talked to Marion plenty. “Not tonight.”

“Oh,” he said. I could hear a little disappointment in his voice. He always thought his mother and I were getting back together, which made sense, seeing how many times we had. I told him good night. I told him I loved him. When I hung up I noticed how loudly the light buzzed and I wondered if there wasn’t some way to fix it.

I didn’t like to talk to Franklin from the bar because after I never felt like going back down again. Sometimes I’d find ways to stay up there for hours, shuffling papers and filling out orders. There were things to do. Cyndi would be waiting for me when I came down. She’d say I was hiding. That was what I was doing. I opened up the desk drawer and tried to find the form to get more of those employment applications. That way I wouldn’t have to worry in the future about how old my waitresses were. The desk had one huge drawer where everything seemed to wind up, deposit slips and the night deposit bags, pens and rubber bands and boxes of staples and a snub-nosed .38 revolver. The gun had come with the desk. It belonged to the doctor who owned the bar. Belonged to him in that he paid for it, not that I thought for a minute it was registered to him. It was his idea of installing a security system, to leave a gun in the manager’s desk. All I did was move it from side to side like the scissors and the telephone book when I was trying to find something in the drawer. Sometimes, if a night seemed especially rough, I would take it out and set it on top of the desk while I counted up the money. Then it made me think of a dog, a big black dog who sat by the door and showed its teeth.

I spent a good half hour looking for things that weren’t there and then I figured I should go back downstairs and make sure nobody’d set the place on fire.

“That girl looks too young to be working,” Rose said to me when I was walking through the kitchen.

“Do you think?”

She nodded. Her apron was as clean as when she put it on in the afternoon. I wondered if she even bothered changing them each day.

“Well, I asked her. She said she was twenty.”

“She’s no twenty,” Rose said. “She may not be sixteen, but she’s no twenty.”

“She’s doing a good enough job for her first day. I guess I might as well give her a chance.” I was counting on Rose to say I should let Fay go for her own good, but she didn’t.

“She maybe needs the work,” she said. She looked at me like she does when she’s finished talking. Rose wasn’t very good at getting in and out of conversations. She just seemed to start and stop whenever she felt like it. I never knew what I was supposed to say. I went all the way to the door thinking she was going to tell me something else, but she didn’t.

In the winter we put out trays of hot snacks over Sterno cans to draw the customers in for happy hour, but that meant they all filled up on chicken wings for dinner and by the time seven o’clock rolled around and the drinks went back to full price, everybody cleared out, happy and well fed. The tables looked like chicken graveyards. Little bones everywhere. Cyndi was back at her magazine, looking up every now and then to see if any of the stragglers needed anything. Fay was at the bar, talking to a skinny boy who was leaning hard against a chair. The boy was stoned rather than drunk, you could tell that from his eyes. The way they were standing, bending towards each other, whispering, the way she reached in to turn the collar of his jacket out, I figured it was her boyfriend, though she didn’t look like the kind of girl who would have him for a boyfriend. None of my business. It wasn’t until I was all the way down near their edge of the bar that I saw how much they favored, the shape of their faces, their eyes. Fay looked up and gave me a pretty smile. “This is my brother,” she said, and put her hand on his arm. “This is Carl.”

I introduced myself and shook his hand, which was so cold to the touch that it gave me a start.

“Cold outside?” I said.

He looked a little embarrassed and made his hands into a cup, then blew inside. “Getting that way.”

“Get your brother a cup of coffee,” I said to Fay, but she didn’t go anywhere. She just stared at me. I was beginning to see a pattern here. She just stared until you came up with the answer she was looking for. “Unless you’d rather go on home. There’s nobody around. Go on home if you want.”

“That would be okay?” she said.

I told them to go on and she said how glad she was for the job and thanked me for being nice to her. “I hope I didn’t mess up too much,” she said.

“You were fine.”

“I can come back tomorrow then?”

She wasn’t even sure she had a job. “Same time,” I said.

Carl didn’t look as good once he let go of the chair, so they linked arms on their way to the door, like sweethearts. Whether he was older or younger than her, I couldn’t be sure. Kids were ageless to me. She waited until they were just outside the double glass doors to take her hat out of her pocket and pull it down tight over her ears. It made me look away, though I don’t know why.

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