Usually the best way not to think of Aldine was to do some algebra or chemistry. You couldn’t do those subjects and think of anything else, not if you wanted to wind up with the right answers, and Clare found that he did. He liked doing better than the other kids, the ones who had all the friends and the fun.
“You know what you might think about?” Mr. Petring, his chemistry teacher, said to him one day. “Pharmacy school.” It was a fine profession, Mr. Petring said. His own uncle had been a druggist and wound up with a grand house on an eight-acre walnut grove. Clare had nodded. It was preposterous of course, a Kansas farm boy going to pharmacy school, but he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He left school each day just after noon so he could bus and wait tables at the café, but when things thinned out, he worked all the harder on his studies. A pharmacist. What would Aldine think of him if that’s what he were to become?
70
Mr. McNamara had been right. Fallbrook did need a home-style restaurant. And Ellie had been right, too, in thinking that customers would like the white aprons, genial politeness, and brisk efficiency that she’d learned in the Harvey House. She’d started with one waitress and had already added another, each of them working from 5:30 when they opened until 4:30 p.m., an hour after closing.
Mr. McNamara had contacts everywhere, and had set her up with suppliers of beef and poultry, and with Mr. Ames, who went every morning to the farmers’ market in Los Angeles, and with Mr. Balize, who supplied secondhand china and cutlery that was good as new. She liked ordering supplies and cooking the food and hearing the hum of customers and, at the end of the day, she liked opening the cash register and balancing accounts. Some days they were ahead ten or twelve dollars; other days, the good days, as much as twenty or even thirty.
One day Mr. McNamara drove her and Charlotte and Neva and Clare out to the highway, but he made sure Charlotte and Ellie were sitting up front. After turning north off of Mission Road, he drove a half mile or so and told them all to cover their eyes, which they did. Then he reversed direction on the highway, pulled off to the side, and came to a stop.
“Okay,” Mr. McNamara said. “Now.”
Ellie’s eyes rose to the billboard in front of her.
Sleeping Indian Café, it said in huge red letters within a feathered arrow pointing toward town. Steaks, Chops & Home-Made Pie. Breakfast & Lunch. Closed Sunday.
“It’s wonderful,” Charlotte said. Her voice was soft and full of affection. “Really, Mister. It’s wonderful.”
“I can’t see!” Neva said from the backseat, almost beside herself. “I can’t see!”
Mr. McNamara stepped from the Packard and opened her door. Clare stepped out, too, and was standing there nodding and smiling. They all were.
“Just look!” Neva screamed, pointing up at it. “It’s us! Right up there! It’s us!”
It was a dream. That’s what it seemed to Ellie. A dream from which she hoped never to awaken.
71
Neva didn’t like her new school. She didn’t like the way the grades were all separated, and she didn’t like the way there was no stove in the room, and she didn’t like the way her teacher, Mrs. Hartshorn, called everybody Miss So-and-so or Master Such-and-such. When Neva raised her hand, Mrs. Hartshorn never called on her, and when she didn’t raise her hand, Mrs. Hartshorn might very well pass over all the raised hands and say in her old crab apple way, “Miss Price will now recite.”
Neva had made a plan for that. The next time she knew an answer, she cast down her eyes and acted like she was hoping like anything that she wouldn’t be called on, and then when Mrs. Hartshorn said, “Miss Price surely knows the answer,” Neva looked up with bright eyes and said, “Yes, I do. Columbus is the capital of Ohio!”
But a knowing look had come into Mrs. Hartshorn’s face, and Neva knew that her plan wasn’t any good after all.
It was no better on the playground, where the games were new to her. Dodgeball, tetherball, kickball, she hated them all, and instead would take her school bag and go to the far side of the building where no one else was. She would take Milly Mandy Molly out of the bottom of her bag and set her up where she could watch. Neva spent more than a week breaking twigs from a juniper bush and making a tight fence for a new fort. “It has to be tight,” she said to Milly Mandy Molly, “because right over there, under the juniper bush, the Murderous Horde is going to come, so the fort has to be strong.” She was nearly done with the fence and was arranging longer branches for the tall corner turrets when two boys found her there and looked at the fence and asked what it was.
She didn’t look at them. She knew they didn’t like her and she knew she didn’t like them. One of them wore black shoes and the other wore brown.
“It’s just a play fort,” she said.
“Fort what?”
She had named it Fort Prickly Hedge but she wasn’t going to say that because she knew they would turn it into something dirty. “I don’t know. It’s not Fort anything.”
“Maybe it’s Fort Okie,” one boy said and the other said, “Or Fort Okefenokee.”
Neva still didn’t look up at them. “We’re from Kansas,” she said.
“Well wherever Okie place you were, you came here to steal jobs.”
Neva set another branch for a corner post and said quietly, “That’s not true.”
“Is too true so get used to it.”
The brown shoes stepped closer.
“Not either true,” she said so low she hardly knew whether she’d said it, but it didn’t matter whether she did or didn’t because the boy said, “Your Okie mother came in and took away another’s job and then she gets overtime, which no one else gets, even those working years and years.”
“Who says that?”
“Everybody says that,” the boy said.
“What’s that?” the other boy said, and there was something so queer in his voice that Neva looked up and followed his eyes to Milly Mandy Molly leaning against the fence. “Is that monkey yours?”
The boy with the brown shoes laughed but it wasn’t a nice laugh at all. “You bring a stuffed monkey with you to school?”
All at once their shoes were moving toward Milly Mandy Molly and Neva sprawled out and grabbed one of the boys’ legs and tried to wrestle him down, but this just made them laugh harder and it wasn’t very long at all before they had torn off Milly Mandy Molly’s green velvet waistcoat and were shaking the straw from a hole in her stomach.
72
Ansel had begun coughing when he was near the top of the tapering wooden ladder, but he worked his way down to the ground and stood bent over until he was gasping for the next breath and tears ran down his face. Two of the Mexicans appeared but would not come too close. “Consunción,” one of them said, and kept staring at him.
“No,” Ansel said when he could, waving them away. “I’m okay.”
He made it through that day and the next.