“Aw, anybody can be named Elizabeth,” I spouted, feeling brave as I extended the open autograph book and special ballpoint to her. “But Leticia, whew, that’s something else.”
Solving the pen with no trouble at all, she gave me a sassy grin. “Had your eye on the tittytatting, have you,” she teased. “Letting the customers get to know you right up front on the uniform helps the tips like you wouldn’t believe.”
“I think it’s a really great idea,” I got caught up in a rush of enthusiasm. “I wish everybody did that. Had their name sewn on them, I mean. See, mine is Donal without a d on the end, and hardly anybody ever gets it right at first, but if it was on my shirt, they couldn’t mess it up like they always do.”
Listening with one ear while she started to write, she pointed out a drawback to having yourself announced on your breast. “Like when some smart-ass leans in for a good look and asks, ‘What’s the other one’s name?’”
It took me a moment to catch on, then several to stop blushing. Thankfully, she still had her head down in diligence over the autograph page. She had whipped off her glasses and stuck them in her purse—she looked a lot younger and better with them off—and I couldn’t contain my curiosity.
“How come you wear your glasses to read but not to write?”
“Don’t need ’em for either one,” she said offhandedly. “They’re just windowpane.”
“So why do you wear them ever?”
Another one of those grins. “Like it probably says in the Bible somewhere: Guys don’t make passes at gals who wear glasses.” She saw I wasn’t quite following that. “Honey, I just want to ride from here to there without every man who wears pants making a try at me. The silly specs and the ciggies pretty much do the trick—you don’t see those GIs sniffing around, do you.”
“They’ve got something else on their minds,” I confided as if wise beyond my years. “They’re afraid they’re going to get their asses shot off in Korea.”
Frowning ever so slightly, she made a shooing motion in front of her face. “Flies around the mouth,” she warned me off that kind of language. She glanced over her shoulder toward the soldiers, shaking her head. “Poor babies.” Going back to her writing, she finished with a vigorous dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s, and handed book and pen back to me. “Here you go, pal. Signed, sealed, and delivered.”
I saw she had done a really nice job. The handwriting was large and even and clear, doubtless from writing meal orders.
Life is a zigzag journey, they say,
Not much straight and easy on the way.
But the wrinkles in the map, explorers know,
Smooth out like magic at the end of where we go.
“That’s pretty deep for me,” I admitted, so far from the end of my unwanted journey that I could not foresee anything remotely like magic smoothing the way. More like a rocky road ahead, among people as foreign to me as a jungle tribe. Still, I did not want to hurt her feelings and resorted to “You really know how to write.”
“Learned that ditty in school, along with the one about burning your candle at both ends. Funny how certain things stick with you,” she mused as I was reluctantly about to thank her and excuse myself. But then I stiffened, staring into the autograph book. “What’s the matter, kiddo?” she asked offhandedly, her next cigarette on the way to her lips. “Did I spell something wrong?”
What had stopped me cold was her rhyming signature. Letty Minetti.
“The truck stop at Browning,” I blurted, “did you work there?”
In the act of lighting up, she went stock-still with the cigarette between the fingers of one hand and the Zippo in the other. “Okay, Dick Tracy, I give.” She turned and studied me narrowly now. “How come you’re such an expert on me?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that, expert, I mean,” my sentences stumbled in retreat. “More like interested, is all. See, my grandmother used to cook there, and she couldn’t help talking about those times. She thought you were the greatest at being a waitress, ‘out front’ as she called it.”
Letty, as she was to me now, sucked in her cheeks as if tasting the next sentence before she said it. “So you’re him.”
Him? What him? I looked at her in confusion.
“Don’t take me wrong,” she said quickly. “All I meant, Dorie told me what was up when she had to quit the truck stop. To take on raising you, at that cow outfit.”
Blank with surprise, I stared back at the waitress who suddenly was the expert on me.
Letty nibbled her lip, disturbing the lipstick a bit, then uttered the rest. “When she left to be with you, she had me put flowers on the crosses every month.”