Sliding On The Edge (2 page)

When I get to the café, there isn’t a
Help Wanted sign in the window. I walk inside anyway. Stan’s fries
are still fifty cents—within my budget—and I order one
grease-soaked box of limp potatoes. With a plop of ketchup for
color, I’m in heaven. Today’s newspaper is on an empty table, so
with my lunch or dinner—I haven’t decided which one—I shuffle
through the pages to the help wanted ads.

“
Wanted:

Part-time fry cook. Experience
Required.”

I can fry
stuff.

$8.00/hr. Midnight to four A.M. Pete’s
Dugout.

That’s down on Pioneer. Not
where I want to work
.

Housekeeping $6.50/hr. Motel
Escondido.

Hmmm. Toilets. Maybe
not.

I’m down to my last fry and
still hungry. That hundred Mom left has to last until I land a job
or . . . I pull the note out and read it again.
“
Your granma lives in a place called sweet
river.”

What are my options? Stay
here, quit school, and get a job cleaning toilets or call the
number on the back of Mom’s note
. I lay my
head on the grease-flecked newspaper and listen to the paper
crinkle under my ear.
Wanted:
under-educated sixteen-year-old to scrape crud off the floor.
Experience Required.

My stomach growls.

“
You sick or
somethin’?”

I jerk upright to face the guy
standing over me.

“
Ahh, no. Just
tired.”

“
Go sleep someplace else.
This is a restaurant, not a flophouse.”

“
You could’a fooled me.” I
grab my paper bag off the table and head for the door. He is one
big scowl and I’m not going toe to toe with a greasy grump.
Outside, I poke my head back in, flip him off, and yell, “I’m going
to the emergency room. Your grease is rancid, Pedro!”

He’s after me in a shot, and around
the corner I slip into the nearest store before he can see me. He
does a fast waddle past the window while I peek from behind a dress
rack.

“
May I help you?” A sales
girl peers over a 25% off sign at the end of the clothes
rack.

Gee, sure, yes. Please help
me find my mother, okay? She’s somewhere in New Jersey at a crap
table. There’ll be a sleazy guy with blond hair next to
her
. “I don’t think so.”

“
Are you looking for
anything special?”

Actually, I am. Some
answers would be nice for a start. Maybe a life if you got one of
those in here
. “No.” I clutch my paper bag
and the pills rattle inside their plastic bottle. “Just
looking.”
Just searching for a way
out.

She smiles and moves to another
customer.

My stomach is flipping pancakes, and I
feel like hurling. I squint my eyes and swallow. Maybe the grease
was rancid after all. Or maybe that part of my anatomy can’t stand
the idea I’ve got circulating through my brain: A place called
Sweet River.

“
Are you okay?” It’s the
chirpy sales girl again, her face curious and a bit
worried.

When I look past her into the mirror I
can see why she’s looking at me that way. I’ve turned the color of
paste. “I think I got some bad food.”

Now her face is more than worried.
She’s already seeing a big mess, one she’ll get stuck having to
clean up.

The greasy grump walks
past, back to his “restaurant.” He could have been my next
employer. Oh man. I make my decision.
I’m
trying the granny package.

After breaking the hundred for change,
I step into the bus depot phone booth. I pick up the receiver and
punch in the first ten numbers. But when I get to the last digit,
my finger freezes midair. What if—I glance at the name again—Kay
Stone doesn’t answer? I know my job options in this town, and I
can’t go back to Tuan’s, that’s for sure. He’s already changed the
locks by now, and anything I left is in Tuan’s back room. It’ll sit
there until some poor desperate sap needs something like our
aluminum pot and pays him five bucks for it like we did. I punch
the last number on the phone pad and wait.

One ring

Two.

“
Hello.” A woman’s voice is
on the other end of the phone, but it doesn’t sound like a
grandmother. It isn’t creaky or wispy. It sounds like it belongs to
someone a lot younger.
Oh, no. Mom gave me
a wrong number
.

“
Uhh. Is . . . uh . . . this
Kay Stone?”

“
Yes.”

“
Well—” I hadn’t thought
exactly how I’d say this next part, but now there isn’t any time to
choose my words. “My name’s Shawna, and my mom says you’re my
grandmother.”

The phone goes silent.

“
Are you there?” I can’t
risk her hanging up because all I have is Sweetheart’s hundred, and
I’m using a chunk of it on this call.

I can barely hear her
breathing. I hope she isn’t having a heart attack.

“
Yes.” Finally. A reply all
the way from Sweet River.

“
Well, here’s the deal. My
mom’s split and she left me this ticket to Sacramento. She said to
call you and let you know.” I wait through another long dead
silence. “I hate to rush you, but I’m running out of money on this
call and—”

“
What’s your mother’s
name?”

“
Jackie.”

“
Your father?”

Oh damn
. Mom told me once, but she’d been in her
“I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it” mood, so even though I hadn’t been
sure what she’d said, I’d dropped it.

“
I think it was Nic or Rick.
He’s dead.” I hear her swallow. Is she drinking something? I don’t
think she’s buying that I’m telling the truth. ”Hello?”

“
When does your bus arrive
in Sacramento?”

I check the schedule I’d picked up.
“About ten tomorrow morning.”

Another long silence.
These pauses are killing me
.

“
What do you look like, so I
can find you at the station?” she finally asks.

I almost say, “Dorky,” but
instead I say, “I’ve got black hair and brown eyes. I’m about
five-four, and I’m wearing a T-shirt with—” I pull the shirt front
out and check to see which one I have on, “
Bad Ass Attitude
,” I say.

She clears her throat. “I’ll meet you
at the bus station. . . Shawna.”

I hang up knowing that at least she
remembered my name.

The phone booth smells like pee, and
I’m glad to escape into the bus terminal where Lysol
rules.

“
That went well, don’t you
think?” I say to no one, just to reassure myself.

A scruffy guy sleeping on a bench
opens his eyes to slits and peers up at me.

“
I’m not talking to
you.”

“
Then put an egg in your
shoe and beat it,” he slurs through yellow teeth.

I have an hour before the bus leaves
and I’m hungry, so I grab a hot dog and smear it with mustard and
ketchup. It’s a long trip to Sacramento, and I need more in my
stomach than French fries before I get on the bus. I stash a
handful of ketchup packets in my paper bag too. Mom and I lived on
ketchup soup for a week once, before she came up with our lost kid
act. Call me crazy, but once in a while I crave some good old
homemade ketchup soup.

As I stuff the last of the hot dog into
my mouth, it occurs to me that I should have asked Kay Stone one
question. Was she Jackie’s mother or my father’s?

Chapter 3

Kay

Kay dropped the phone onto the cradle
and stared out the kitchen window. Everything outside looked just
as it had a few minutes ago. The horses grazed on the hillside.
Kenny leaned into the gray mare and held her hoof in his knobby
hand while he scraped thrush from under her shoe. Buster was doing
canine yoga, rooting out the burrs from his bushy tail and
scratching behind his ears for the fleas that even sheep dip
couldn’t kill.

But now nothing was the
same.

As Kay sank onto the chair, she
grasped the corner of the kitchen table. Once settled, she cradled
her head in her hands.

Sixteen years. Such a long
time, and no time at all.

The voice on the phone sounded so
young—and so . . . hard. Could she believe what the girl had said?
There were scams all the time to dupe the unsuspecting out of their
money. She’d worked too hard to lose everything to some con artist.
By the end of the year, she figured, she’d be out of debt—if none
of the boarders left, if none of her horses got colicky, if, if,
if. . . .

By now her coffee was cold. She walked
to the sink and poured it out. By tomorrow she had to decide what
to do. That wasn’t very much time. She needed to talk to
Kenny.

She pushed open the screen door,
walked down the porch steps, and strode toward the barn. How many
times had she traveled this distance, calling to Kenny Fargo? More
than she cared to count. He’d always been there—in a stall,
gentling a horse under his hands; in the tack room, putting things
to order; or in his trailer. He’d been the one constant in her
life, and kept her going when everyone else vanished.

So once again she was trudging out to
talk to the man who knew horses and good whisky, and so very much
more. As Kenny led her gray mare into the barn, she caught up and
stroked her favorite horse’s neck. The gray turned to nuzzle her
hair. Even as upside-down as she felt following that phone call,
the warm animal breath made her feel calm.

“
Something’s happened,” she
said.

Kenny closed the mare’s stall door and
faced her. “From your look this is going to take some time.” He
pulled a plug of tobacco from his shirt pocket and sat on the bench
alongside the wall. He heard her out, as usual staying quiet while
she spoke.

“
She sounded . . . scared.
Why is she calling me now, after so many years, after I’d finally
stopped trying to find her? What’s Jackie up to this time?” Kay
shook her head. “I don’t know if I can believe she’s who she says
she is. She is the right age, if she’s telling the truth about
that. But what if it’s a scam? What if she got my name from a . . .
a mailing label in the garbage or—” Kay didn’t know where con
artists stole information about their victims, but this could be
what was going on. But if that were it, then how would she know
Jackie’s name?” Kay turned on her heels in sudden anger. “Then
again, why wouldn’t she know her own father’s name?”

“
Seems you’re asking a lot
of questions,” Kenny said, biting off a chunk of tobacco. He chewed
slowly and let silence hang between them. The horses shuffled in
their stalls, and Buster circled until he found just the right spot
that fit his body, then he curled head to fluffy tail. “Also seems
like you’re bent on finding the answers.”

He was right. She already knew she had
to meet the bus in the morning. She had to see this girl. Talk to
her. Why had she doubted that she would? She’d had no choice from
the minute she’d heard the words, “You’re my
grandmother.”

Chapter 4

Kay

A little before ten the next morning,
Kay pulled to the curb across the street from the bus depot. She
climbed from the cab and leaned against her truck, a veteran horse
ranch vehicle. Its dents and scrapes screamed, “Look out! Uninsured
vehicle coming through.” She liked it that way. This
nothing-left-to-lose truck summed her up well, and always got her
the right of way.

The ten o’clock bus rolled to a stop,
then the door wheezed open.

Kay chewed her bottom lip. She felt
dampness under her arms and wiped her palms on her jeans. She
hadn’t had the jitters for so long that the signals her body was
sending felt foreign, yet they called back other times she’d been
on edge. Like, the day she and Peter were married, and her dress
took a bath in sweat. She was not the sweet scented bride of her
dreams by the time she’d wobbled down the aisle on those white
satin pumps. So many other things went wrong that day, she’d
blocked out the rest of her memories. From when she’d started to
sneeze after “I do,” to the end of the reception, it was all pretty
much forgotten.

Why was she thinking about her
wedding, anyway? What had that memory to do with today? She closed
her eyes and willed her heart to stop hurling itself against her
ribs.

Simmer down. You’re not
stepping into a minefield
, she
thought.
You’re meeting a young girl who
might be your granddaughter.

Minefield.

She regretted that metaphor
as soon as it flitted into her mind. It set off the slide show she
couldn’t stop:
Click
. Herself, gripping the letter.
Click
. The two men standing at the
door, jaws squared, faces set. Click. Peter leaning forward in his
armchair, his head cradled in his hands.

Kay pressed her palms against her
closed eyes, pushing back the sudden sting of old tears.