After brunch, we visited some of her friends at Whispering Pines Home for the Aged. She’d bring flowers and scandalous romance novels, sugar-coated contraband, and her loud, effusive personality. Everyone knew when Eula Darning was in the house. Once, she even started a food fight. I thought we’d be forever forbidden entrance to the hallowed halls of the aged, but it was the most fun any of them’d had in years. In fact, Marcie Grandiere, the meanest of the meanies, died a week later, swearing it was the best time of her life.
My least favorite person at Whispering Pines was Ed, whose dementia was pitiful but also made him a bit scary to be around. Eula and Ed had been an item once when they were in their fifties, but it didn’t last long. He never remembered who we were when we came and always showed us his ass, then called Gran a whore… which made us laugh. His obscenity never offended Gran because she was a hoot and actually loved the raunch. She wasn’t your typical retiring old lady with outdated morals. She had a little black book full of lovelorn suitors who she had laid to waste in the wake of her “livelier days.”
“Honey,” she would say, her fists planted on her hips as her gray-blue eyes twinkled, “I’m not a whore. I was never paid a dime.”
I honestly never knew exactly what to say to that. She was the one who encouraged my painting and pursuit of the arts, even though my teachers thought it a waste of intellect.
I moved in with Gran the day my mom was murdered by my dad. I was five. I couldn’t remember many details other than stark images from that day, so I went mostly by what I was told and the haunting dreamlike memories that randomly poked me in my sleep. A shrink helped me make peace with the horror that often invaded my psyche. Painting helped, and Gran kept me doing things that were batshit crazy. She’d get these ideas in her head, like “wouldn’t it be great if we gave peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to the homeless,” which we did. She once ran for mayor, for the hell of it. She campaigned seriously for about a week then gave it up to plant a survival garden in laundry buckets on her screen porch in case of a zombie apocalypse. She also liked to shop QVC. I was constantly sneaking into her QVC account and canceling orders she thought she’d gotten away with purchasing behind my back. She would buy the most random and useless stuff. She had actually become a post office conspiracy theorist because so much of her mail had been “stolen.” She kept me busy, and, my life constantly teetered between mundanity and insanity.
My artwork was all over Gran’s modest ranch style home. I hated to use the word cluttered, but she insisted on displaying all my “masterpieces,” as she would call them. The few she didn’t have mounted on every visible inch of wall space were the ones I happened to sell at the small art gallery in town. While she was slowing down in her old age, her sharp mind had never dulled. She always managed to mention something profound about at least one of the paintings each day.
“Now, this one reminds me of 1939, when my mom took me to the circus. I was afraid of the clowns.” She shivered, the movement causing her short, wispy white hair to flutter around her face. “Who isn’t afraid of those evil little bastards, but I loved the elephants. They seemed so sad and majestic. This reminds me of the elephants at the circus.”
“It’s a waterfall, Gran,” I would gently say, so as not to ruin her moment.
“It’s like the elephant’s sad face,” she would add kindly, making me look at the painting again. Sure enough, you could see an elephant’s face in the flow of blue, gray, and white colors composing the water.
Damn, Gran was a genius at times.
When we returned home from our jaunt around town, she and I would hunker down on the porch and read our respective books, noting this and that about something we read from time to time. After an early dinner, I left her with her Hulu — usually old horror movies — and headed into my late-night shift at the diner.
Most Sundays were slow. We had our usual truckers coming from or going to their destinations, a few drunks who needed to eat off their liquid Sunday barbeque binges, and the odd college student pulling an all-nighter on a coffee drip.
Sometimes, Sunday nights were depressing because, if I looked at my life and was honest, it often felt unfulfilled. Sunday would roll into Monday, and nothing ever changed… the grind just kept grindin’. I didn’t have a boyfriend, nor did I want one. I was working two jobs in order to pay for Parson’s School of Design in New York, which I hoped to attend one day. But after Gran’s medical bills and our living expenses were paid, it never seemed like enough money was left over to make that dream a reality.
I didn’t dwell on this worry, but it crept in sometimes. I told myself that I was doing good for the kids at the center, who needed someone to teach them a way to express the pent-up shit they held inside. Since most were neglected, they craved loving interactions and fundamental caring, which I also tried to provide. I felt like I was making a difference.
As for Ma Johnson, who ran the diner where I worked nights, I figured I was doing my part there as well. Despite her rough exterior, I tried to bring a much needed burst of joy into the otherwise gloomy diner off I-95, the route that traversed from Connecticut to New York City. So, while my dreams seemed a world away, I did my best to make my life as fulfilling as I could. And if I had my moments of disappointment… who didn’t?
This particular Sunday evening started out no differently than the others. I got into work, put on my uniform, and smoothed my hair back into a ponytail. The ponytail wasn’t really my favorite look because I preferred my wild auburn curls to be left free, but that wasn’t the best style for an eating establishment.
Waving hello to Linda Green, as I did every Sunday — mostly just to piss her off cause I knew she hated it — I got a grunt in return, which wasn’t surprising. In her late forties or early fifties, Linda was a lifer at Ma’s Diner. She started working there in her teens and would be there till her death… or so she would say. Then, every other sentence she uttered was how she was gonna get out of there and marry rich. She had married about six men, but I guessed none of them were rich enough to keep around. She smoked a pack of Marlboro Reds a day, had a teenage son who liked shooting things up and was a relatively unpleasant person. She was my partner on Sunday nights.
Ma worked twenty-four-seven, a salty woman in her late seventies. She didn’t do much at the diner but sit around, talk to the customers, and bark orders, yet she was always there. Gran thought she was a vampire or a zombie. I loved Gran for being such a horror fan, strange little woman that she was.
I was pouring coffee refills at one of the two occupied tables when a shiny black Bentley pulled into the parking lot around midnight. Linda immediately lost her mind.
“What in hell’s fury is driving into our parking lot?” she inquired, peeking out of the rusted metal blinds and peering into the dark. “Look at that car, will ya?”
Ma took an immediate interest.