“Let me check the menu real quick,” I said, pulling one out from under my arm. “I’m new and I don’t quite—”
“Duh,” she said loudly to her friend, rolling her eyes. Her friend, also large, giggled and smacked her gum.
“You are kidding me,” Morgan said when I told her. We were huddled back by the soda machine. She turned around and eye-balled the table, hand on her hip. “How rude can you be?”
“Obviously pretty rude,” Norman said from the other side of the food window, where he was flipping burgers.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“Of course it does.” Morgan turned back around, fixing her pointy gaze right on me. “You are not stupid, Colie. Don’t let anyone make you think you are. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
She took a deep breath and rattled it off: “Regular Nachos: beans, chips, cheese, chiles. Deluxe Nachos: all the above plus chicken or beef, tomato, and olives.”
“Dull,” Norman said loudly.
“Duh indeed,” Morgan replied, grabbing a tea pitcher from behind me. “Get back out there,” she said to me, nodding toward my section. “There’s work to do.”
And the pronouncements continued.
“Good attitude, good money,” Morgan always said. “Shit attitude, shit money.”
“Oh, shut up with that already,” Isabel would groan, stabbing her pen back in her hair. I don’t know what bothered her more, Morgan’s advice or that she was sharing it with me.
Despite all of this, Morgan was always the one to crack under the pressure of a busy rush. In my first two weeks, I saw her quit twice. Three times, if you counted my first day in Colby. It was always the same, beginning with some offense in the later part of the night. She’d declare herself fed up, take off her apron and toss it down indignantly, announcing that she was quitting. Then she’d slam out the door to give someone a piece of her mind. But they had always just left, so she’d come back in, grumbling, and tie her apron on again.
Isabel didn’t even flinch during these episodes. She never seemed to get ruffled or upset; she took nothing personally. It was clear that Morgan was dramatic enough for both of them.
Some days I pulled double shifts, working for Morgan so she could wait for Mark to call. She was always incredibly grateful. Sometimes I worked for Isabel so she could sleep off a hangover or go to the beach. She wasn’t. The most I’d gotten was a bland “Thanks” tossed over her shoulder as she was coming or going. When we worked together she turned the radio up loud, so we didn’t have to talk. And after we locked up she usually drove away toward town, leaving me to walk home alone in the dark.
It didn’t really bother me. I’d spent years hearing whispers, taunts called across gyms and locker rooms, and I was thankful even for those compared to the insults right to my face. I’d been called fat and easy, slut and whore, Hole in One. So I didn’t mind being ignored. For so long, it had been all I wanted.
When I worked lunches I came home in the late afternoon, while Mira was taking her nap. She had to have one every day, just like a toddler; she said she was no good otherwise. I’d take off my shoes and creep around, exploring, all the while careful to listen for the creak of her bedroom door.
Mira wasn’t much of a housekeeper. Everything was dusty and there were cobwebs hanging from the corners of the ceiling. The first week I’d taken the initiative with my own room, washing the windows and cleaning under the bed, kicking up an entire colony of dust bunnies and some lost socks. In the downstairs closet I found three vacuum cleaners, all of which were, of course, broken, leaving me to do the best I could with a broom while I wondered, again, about Mira.
She rode her bike everywhere, even at night, when she attached an incredibly bright light to the handlebars, which occasionally blinded oncoming traffic. She lived off grilled chicken salad, homemade doughnuts, and junk cereal. She was constantly beginning projects: among other things, the living room contained a cane chair with a broken seat, halfway re-strung; a china pig with three legs, sitting next to a tube of Super Glue; and a toy bus with two missing wheels and a dented front fender, as if it had been in some kind of very small, violent accident.
I wasn’t even going to ask about that.
At night, while she sat in front of the TV—jiggle to get 11—Mira worked on her projects. Nothing ever seemed to get completely fixed, just tinkered with and then labeled with a note. I came back one day to find she’d taken apart the alarm clock in my room—which, although I reset it each day, had been consistently FIVE minutes behind—and then put it back together. She was very proud of herself until she discovered she’d left out one huge spring. Now, instead of ringing, it made this awful moaning sound. The next day I’d snuck out to the drugstore and purchased a nice, new digital clock, which I kept hidden under my bed as if it was contraband and illegal just because it worked.
The strange thing was that she had enough money to buy all new appliances, if she wanted; I’d discovered a stack of bank statements in a lower cabinet while searching for a vegetable steamer.
The evening I found the vacuum cleaners, I came downstairs to find her sitting on the back porch watching TV.
“Mira,” I said, after shoving the broom into the closet, “why don’t any of these vacuums work?”
She hadn’t heard me, her eyes fixed on the TV. I walked down the dark hallway to stand behind her chair. Then I heard my mother’s voice.
“My name is Kiki Sparks,” she was saying, right there in her trademark windsuit, blonde hair cut and curled, hands on hips in the can-do pose. She was in a fake living room set, with a plant and sofa behind her. “And if you are overweight and have given up, I want you to listen to me. You don’t have to be afraid anymore. Because I can help you.”
The music started, that same tune I knew so well; I’d seen this infomercial a million times. It was the one that had made my mother a star.