Pig-Out Inn (11 page)

“Who's in charge here?” the woman asked. She had a voice deeper than I'd expected for such pastel fluff clothes.

Momma stood up.

“You?” the woman said. Maybe she'd been expecting a big farm hand kind of woman. “I'm Rosie McFee,” she said finally. “Taggert's mother.”

“Mommy,” the little girl said, “is this where Tag's living, in a restrawnt?” It was Tag's voice all over again—a growl, almost.

“Quiet, baby, hmm?” She turned back to Momma. “You're the owner?”

Momma nodded. “Marilyn Chandler,” she said, putting out her hand, which just hung there because the woman was shaking her head back and forth and saying, “My God, Cee Dubyah didn't even know your name. Where is he, Mrs. Chandler? Where's my son?”

“Dovi, go get him,” Momma said.

I flew out the back door, tripping over Stephanie and Eddie, who were plastered together on a lawn chair near the walk-in.

First I knocked on Johnny's door. “She's here for him,” I whispered. My heart was thumping like an Indian war drum as I reached Tag's cottage. There wasn't a light shining anywhere. I knocked softly, and thought I heard him say come in. He lay in his jeans in the center of the bed, barely taking up any space at all, and with his arms folded under his neck. The room smelled of Fenway and felt heavy with emptiness, like a load you could carry on your back.

“Your momma's here, Tag. Bonnie too.” He turned over onto his stomach. “She seems very nice. She's so pretty.” Tag sat up, reached under his pillow for his Red Sox shirt, and slipped it over his head. It fell around him like a tent—not like a shirt at all, just a rag that didn't remember anybody's shape. He stood up and turned away to tuck the shirt in. Even tucked in, it seemed sad the way the top gaped open over his scrawny neck. I thought maybe it was Cee Dubyah's shirt. The little gold cross lay flat on the ribbing.

He picked up a backpack stuffed with clothes and probably all the merchandise from his shop that he could ram into it. There was also a shopping bag, which I grabbed before he could start his macho act and try to carry it all.

“Whatever's left belongs to you anyway,” he said. He slapped his leg once—to call Fenway?—then remembered.

We trooped over to the restaurant. Anybody driving by would have thought we were a couple of scouts heading for a camp-out in the woods.

From the kitchen we heard murmurs of mothertalk, an easy give-and-take, which made me feel a little better about this McFee woman whose house Tag would be sleeping in later that night.

Johnny came in behind us and put his arm around Tag. “What the hey are you doing in here this hour of the night?” he teased Tag.

“I gotta get up early to get ahead of you,” Tag shot back as Johnny pushed something—I couldn't see what—into his pocket.

Bonnie spotted his face first, above the swinging door. “Mommy, look!” Tag pushed his way into the dining room. Bonnie ran toward him, stopping shyly just short of his feet. Mrs. McFee encircled them both with her sherbet arms.

“We're going home, Taggert,” she said. No scolding, no questions, no hysterics. Just “We're going home.”

“And you know what? Mommy says we can stop in El Dorado for a ice cream. And you know what else? She says I can stay up till midnight if I want, and I'm not supposed to be a pest. Isn't that what you said, Mommy? I'm not supposed to be a pest till tomorrow, so you won't want to leave again.”

It's funny. I expected some sign from Tag that he hated his mother, or was afraid of her, or some sign from her that she was hateful or scary, but it simply wasn't like that. He let her kiss his forehead, as embarrassed as most kids are when their parents slobber over them, and then he said proudly, “Guess what. I've been selling stuff again. I've got over fifty dollars.”

“Ooooh, Taggert, one day you're going to be a rich, rich man,” his mother beamed. “Will you buy us a house by the ocean? How about Malibu Beach, over in California?”

Tag shook his head. “Boston, Massachusetts,” he said, and I was proud of his mother for not asking why Boston. Or maybe she already knew about Tag and Cee Dubyah's plans at Fenway Park.

Now Mrs. McFee shook Momma's hand and said, “Thank you for looking after Taggert.”

“He doesn't need looking after. He takes good care of himself,” Momma said, smiling toward Tag.

“Well.” Mrs. McFee held her children tightly by the hand. It was as if she'd never be able to let either of them out of her sight again. And they were gone.

The next day dragged by. More than once I found myself looking for Tag out by the road, or trying to see what was missing that he might be selling out from under us. At lunchtime I automatically started fixing a plate for him, and when Stephanie asked what I was doing I said something like, “What is it, a big sin if I want to have a decent lunch for a change, instead of a bite of this and a bite of that?” But Stephanie knew, I think.

We had a pretty steady dinner bunch in and out. Some customers were even stopping at the Pig-Out instead of the Star Cafe twenty miles up the highway, because it was Wednesday, meatloaf day, and Johnny's meatloaf was becoming a legend in its own time. I had to remember to save an end piece for Pawnee.

Momma and Johnny were in the kitchen putting up salads, and Johnny was swearing at the lettuce—which, the best we could tell out in the diner, seemed to have rusty brown spots all the way through it. “Holy shee, what did the farmer do, grow this stuff at the county dump? Hogs would turn up their snouts at it.”

“Shh, Johnny,” we heard Momma whisper, while the customers all had a good chuckle and said no, thank you to the salads that came with the meatloaf.

Emile Joe Hunter said his stomach was a little squeamish. He couldn't face anything with gravy, so he'd just have a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich. “But, uh,” Emile Joe said, “you know.”

I shouted through the pass-through, “BLT, burn the bacon, heavy on the mayo, fry the tomato, and hold the lettuce.”

“You need a God-blessed computer back here when you feed me orders like that,” Johnny muttered, and I heard the cold bacon slap the grill, then the forgiving sizzle.

Palmer came in just then looking for Tag. “Where is that kid? He's always over at my station by six to mop up.”

“He's gone home,” I said, flying by with a couple of burgers crowding each other off a plate. “Want something to eat, Palm?”

“I don't want anything to eat. I want my clean-up boy.”

Stephanie had just picked up a plate with a dense hunk of meatloaf dominating a little hill of mashed potatoes and a few scrawny gray-green beans. She waved the steam away from Palmer's face. “You see,” she began explaining like a teacher with a class full of students who aren't too quick, “Tag is a victim of contemporary divorce statistics. It's a question of maternal or paternal custody.”

Palmer looked from Stephanie to me. “What's she talking about?” He tore into a package of saltines on the counter and stuffed a whole cracker into his mouth.

“Is that my dinner?” some guy at the end of the counter asked. The steam had died off by the time Stephanie got it to him. “I love cold meatloaf,” the trucker said. “Sits there in my gut like somebody poured me full of lead.”

“What she means, Palmer, is that Tag wants to live with his father, but the law's got him living with his mother, so that's where he is now.”

“Well, why didn't she say that?” Palmer asked.

I gave him a glass of ice water to wash down the cracker crumbs hanging from his mouth. “Because she's a city girl, Palm. In the city things look much more complicated.”

“Oh, good grief,” Stephanie snorted, “Wichita isn't exactly New York City, you know.”

“It's not even Philly,” one of the customers said. “Or New Orleans,” which he pronounced “Nawlins.”

“But it
is
Oklahoma City,” one of the other guys, Jenkins, said. “Same town, in two different states.”

“Am I thickheaded today?” asked Palmer. “Nobody's making any sense. Hand me a toothpick, would you, Dovi?”

“Anything else we can get you for free?” I retorted. “Want to use the phone?”

“Now why would I do that when I've got my own phone just across the road? Well, I'd better get over there since there's nobody else to mop up.”

“Aren't you having your usual bowl of chili?” asked Stephanie. “Johnny made it fresh just last Monday.” She'd learned to hold three glasses in the flat of her hand, and now she was filling them with ice, dropping only every other piece on the floor.

“I don't need no chili today. The wife's visiting her sister up in Iowa, so I'm going to a real restaurant for dinner. Well, see you girls tomorrow.”

Scurrying around the diner, we caught a glimpse of him dashing between cars to the Gas Fast across the highway. Stephanie turned to the audience at large. “Gentlemen, wouldn't you agree that that was, without a doubt,
the
rudest thing in the world? Imagine him sitting here”—she twirled around, hands extended, to take in the entire piggish kingdom—“and telling us he's going to be dining at a
real
restaurant tonight. What does he think you guys are doing here?”

“We're eating, but we ain't dining,” Emile Joe said.

I posed the corker: “Let's face it, Steph. If you had your choice of all the restaurants in the world, would you pick the Pig-Out Inn?”

“Well,
I
, of course, would pick Maxim's, in Gay Paree.” She slid a pickle wafer off someone's cheeseburger platter and sucked on it dreamily. “I guess my second choice would be Steak and Ale, where these gorgeous hunks bring you a menu engraved on a meat cleaver—can you believe it, a meat cleaver! I mean, this is a classy place on a four-lane divided road running right through Wichita.”

“Steak and Ale? They got the same thing in Oklahoma City,” Jenkins said. From the juke box, Willie and Julio crooned, “For all the girls we've loved before …”

Two days later a letter came from Hopkins, Corrwall, Punchess & Bailey, Attorneys-at-Law, saying that Momma was to appear in Wichita, in Family Court, to give a deposition on Tag.

FOURTEEN

Momma gave Johnny last-minute instructions before we left. “You're not to close up before eight o'clock at night, and hang on to all the receipts and bills for Mike, and don't experiment with any new recipes until I get back and can explain them away. Oh, and don't forget to call McCrary about the frozen fries. And be sure not to let Stephanie go off this property with that young soldier.”

“Oh, Aunt Marilyn.”

Momma flew around the diner, wiping here, tucking there, and helping herself to a handful of ten-dollar bills from the till. She wore what she called her Saturday matinée clothes—a white linen suit with a silky turquoise blouse that wasn't exactly low, but showed more of Momma than Dad approved of, and dressy white sandals with low heels. She had a rope of heavy turquoise and beige and white beads around her neck—the kind that looked elegant on her, but would have been like an anchor on me, yanking me down and underwater.

“Oh, and Johnny,” she warned, spit-curling a trail of hair escaping from her chignon, “don't cuss at the customers. Stephanie, see that he doesn't cuss.”

“Oh, I will,” Stephanie promised. She'd have made a terrific warden.

“And Johnny, when that boyfriend of Stephanie's comes by as soon as I'm out of sight, you see that they keep all four feet squarely on the ground.”

“Aunt Marilyn!” Stephanie looked shocked, and I had to get out of there before I fell apart laughing.

Momma doesn't believe in speed limits—but then, along with her theories on the sun and the moon, she doesn't understand radar either. So if there's no cop in sight she assumes she's free to drive eighty miles per hour, unless it means climbing up the back of some truck ahead of us.

We had the windows rolled down, and at eighty the hot wind was whipping through the car and half our words flew out the window, but I distinctly heard Momma say, “What do you think, Dovi? Is the restaurant business working out for us?”

“Well, are we making a profit yet?” I shouted.

“We can make expenses, meet our mortgage, pay Johnny, but—”

“We're not getting rich.”

“No. It wouldn't really be any fun if we were.”

“You'd give it all away anyway, Momma.”

“I suppose I would. Things are no better for the migrant workers in western Kansas than they were in Oklahoma during the
Grapes of Wrath
days, you know.”

Well, I had to nip that one quickly, because the way Momma's mind was spinning, we'd be out of the Pig-Out and into a grocery store in Medicine Lodge, Kansas, before the first winter freeze. “We never rent the cottages, of course, but I think the diner does really well for us, Momma. Look, without it Johnny would be collecting unemployment. Face it, who else would hire a crab like him? And where would Tag have been without our place?”

We both fell silent thinking about Tag and what lay ahead for him and for Momma in court later that day.

The deposition was given in Judge Edgar Bohanan's office—his chambers, they called it. Cee Dubyah's lawyer was there, and Mrs. McFee's lawyer, and someone taking it all down on a machine.

“Good afternoon, Your Honor,” Momma said, extending her hand across the judge's desk. She looked and sounded very self-assured and worldly, not at all like a person who had no idea what radar was. “This is my daughter, Dovi Chandler.”

The judge, who was wearing a business suit instead of one of those graduation gowns, nodded, then excused me curtly.

“Your Honor, I would prefer to have my daughter remain, since her contact with the young man in question was far more extensive than my own.”