A Short Story by Allison McCarthy
Vincent had a few hours left before he could check into a motel, so he pulled into the right lane of Route 10 to look for a place to eat. At five-thirty in the evening, he watched through his rearview mirror as, all over the highway, cars began turning off the road for food. He had been scared to eat in New Jersey, convinced that all of it would taste like the sewage he breathed in from the turnpike. Fortunately, there were lots of crummy places outside Boston to pick from: fast food joints where you could hear the sizzle of canola oil cooking fries, or large-scale pizza chains with stout delivery men running from the doors, or Chinese carry-outs exuding the stench of greasy sauce and cooked meat. Gyro stands lay scattered in between, as well as a few Indian restaurants with curry spice coming out of the bricks. None of these piqued his appetite.
Vincent starved himself to save money and time. He didn’t carry much cash in his wallet, and working on a stretch of cash and carry jobs meant that he hadn’t owned a bank card in well over ten years, either. For the last three days of the trip, he’d drunk from the same 7-11 Super Gulp cup, always refilling with Wild Cherry Pepsi in different towns across the eastern seaboard. Customers were only supposed to return to the same 7-11 where they had bought the cup, but Vincent needed to be economical. He hated lying, but loved cold soda. “Yes,” he would tell the tired, identically uniformed store clerks, “I’ve been here before today.”
Using his recently repaired car lighter, he chased every sip of cola with a cheap generic cigarette. The potent rush from the Pepsi and nicotine kept Vincent awake, kept him sharp, even after several sleepless nights on the road. Keeping a steady stream of cool air coming into the car was important, but it didn’t seem to matter much whether the windows were rolled up or down, since the smells of smoke and wind clung to the seats of his Dodge Durango.
Hours had passed before he had the chance to eat anything solid. He lacked much money to spend on dinner, but he wouldn’t be able to drive much longer on an empty stomach and nerves wiry from caffeine. When he saw the sign for the Corner Street Diner coming up on his side, he turned right over the speed bump and parked just below its neon sign.
Jerry was running out of time before he had to leave for work. The landlord had called again, wanting to talk about this month’s payment. Would he have it by the end of the week?
In his apartment complex near downtown Boston, the neighbors liked to talk to one another: yelling up from sidewalks to balconies, helping the older ones carry groceries. Occasionally, there would be a knock on his door around dinnertime, with an invitation for leftover soup, or a chance to watch the boxing fight on pay-per-view. No thanks, he’d call out from his bed or living room couch. I’ve got homework, or pasta boiling, or plants to water. In desperate moments, he’d say that he had company coming, but everybody knew that was the weakest lie.
He tied his cummerbund around his waist, then straightened his black bow tie. The clock chimed five, and he resigned himself to another late shift and the foggy feeling in his limbs that would follow him to the diner. His work shirt had an indeterminate stain near the front pocket, but normally, no one paid close enough attention to tell. Looking into his mug, he tried to force down one more sip of lemon tea, which tasted faintly of floor polish.
When he locked the door behind him, a thought stopped him at the top step. He wondered how long it would take to pass out on the job.
As Vincent walked over to the front kiosk of the Corner Street Diner, he noticed a middle-aged man with hunched shoulders and a bruise near his right eye, holding a stack of menus that he flicked back and forth. His name tag read Bobby Lee, which struck Vincent as somehow ridiculous. Most of the Bobby’s he knew had retired that name after puberty, and were now called Robert, or Bob, or Bubba.
Bobby had the slick kind of public service smile that slid on and off his face. His eyes never focused on yours, only wandered aimlessly around, searching for a customer with more money to spend than the rest. “Hi there. Booth or counter?” he asked.
“Depends,” Vincent said. He suppressed an urge to poke at the center of Bobby’s nametag, pinned just near the nipple line. “Can I smoke at the counter?”
“Sorry,” Bobby said, looking more than a little forlorn. “Massachusetts state law prohibits any tobacco use in public restaurants. Arlington police have really cracked down on us.”
Vincent’s hearty laugh turned into a cough. Some of his spittle shot right onto Bobby’s stained apron. “That kind of crap wouldn’t fly south of Maryland,” he said. “You been to Maryland before?”
Bobby blinked and wiped at his apron. Bread crumbs and bits of tomato sauce clung to the hairs on the back of his hand. “Not recently, no,” Bobby said. “Why don’t I seat you in a booth?”
Vincent followed Bobby past the dessert counter, past booth seats and kids running down the aisles, to a linoleum table with a single placemat. A pint-sized jukebox hung over the booth, advertising three songs for a quarter. “This’ll do,” he said. “Thanks.”
Bobby looked around to see if anyone in the diner was watching, then leaned in closer to Vincent. “Tell you the truth, Massachusetts only passed the law about six weeks ago.”
“Yeah?” Vincent knew himself to be the type of easygoing guy that total strangers found approachable. In a matter of minutes, the stranger would be thinking of him as if he were a sort of drinking buddy, an old friend from way back when. In the past, he’d used the fascination he attracted from outsiders to charm prospective girlfriends, or bartenders who wanted him to pay up his tab. As he got older, the attention seemed to be more of a nuisance than anything else. There never seemed to be a good way for Vincent to tell someone that if he wanted to have a conversation, he’d already be talking.
“It’s a real stinker, this rule.” Bobby pulled out a dust rag from inside his apron and began to dry wipe the table. His movements were hurried and tense, and his eyes still jumped all around the room. “All of the waiters and busboys are smokers. It used to be that they let us light one at the tables in the back during breaks, and now we can’t even do that.”
“Tell you what, everyone on my construction team smokes. When I meet up with them in Canada, they’ll likely have a pack waiting for me,” he bragged. Vincent’s laugh came out short, punctuated with a phlegm-coated wheeze. “Any job that doesn’t let me smoke, it’s not worth working, you know? Matter of fact, any job without smokers is too much for me.”
Bobby put the rag back in his apron and looked down at Vincent. “Men our age, they get used to certain privileges. Can’t tell a dirty joke, might make someone uncomfortable. Now I can’t smoke a damn cigarette without stepping on someone’s toes.”
Instead of responding, Vincent stared at the plastic covered menu, at the discolored carpet on the diner floor, and then over at a young waiter who stood in the opposite corner, writing down an order. He turned back to the aged, rather pathetic Bobby Lee and pointed over to the server. “See, that man keeps himself busy. Have him bring me a cup of coffee, would you?”
“Sure,” Bobby mumbled, but Vincent wasn’t paying the host any more attention. The radio in his car had been dead for weeks now, made him desperate for good music. He fiddled with the buttons on the jukebox, looking for a favorite song to play.
Jerry refused to look over when he heard his name called. He hated waiting tables almost as much as he hated Bobby Lee, who assigned him the worst tippers in the state. The night before, Jerry had only made ten dollars on a large party’s ninety-dollar check. Without mercy, Bobby held out his eager palm at the end of the night, demanding the usual fifteen percent cut on every waiter’s earnings. Jerry worked six days a week and still couldn’t keep up with his bills.
Bobby remained persistent, even when Jerry moved in another direction. “The old fart at table ten wants coffee,” he said.
“Ask Leslie to get it. I’m going on break,” he said.
“No can do, he pointed at you,” Bobby said. He smirked as if the conversation were an elaborate practical joke. “Besides, it’s Leslie’s turn for a break. She’s been on her feet for going on three hours. You know, she’s raising two kids all by herself?” He said this last part as a question, the kind meant to incite pity.
Jerry had been on duty almost an hour longer than Leslie, but his job required him to play the role of selfless, invisible go-fer, as far as the rest of the staff was concerned. If his back felt stiff or his legs tired out, well, he had the stamina to just soldier on. He was only nineteen, the other waiters said, and could leave any time he pleased.
“Regular or decaf?”
“Regular, I think,” Bobby said. “That fellow, he’s the cantankerous sort. As long as it goes down the right pipe, he’ll drink it.” He stopped to snort. “Cantankerous. Can’t remember the last time I used that word. Bet you don’t even know what it means, do you, boy?” The dining room door swung open. A small kick to the wood panels would have driven the door straight into Bobby’s teeth.
“It means he’s a crotchety bastard, same as you,” Jerry muttered. But by then, he had moved out of earshot into the kitchen, into safe solitude by the coffee pot.
On the walk to table ten, he sized up the lone customer: stocky build, curly gray hair, with a needle nose and the smell of gasoline clinging to his worn-out shirt. Still, he was surprised to hear a song like “Solsbury Hill” coming from the jukebox. The speakers crackled as Peter Gabriel wailed his way to the end of the first verse. The man at the table hummed in a musical, masculine growl.
“I’m Jerry, and I’ll be your server tonight,” he said. “By the way, that’s a really good track you’ve got playing.”
“Sure is. It’s an open road song,” Vincent said. He motioned to Jerry’s tray. “Is that mine?”
Jerry set the cup and saucer on the table just a few inches away from the place where the man was tapping the surface in time with the beat, and watched as he slurped eagerly at the hot coffee. “Better than Cherry Pepsi,” he said.
“Soda’s hard on your stomach,” Jerry said. He only drank water as a consequence, although sometimes he indulged in a can of ginger ale. “My mom was a nurse, and she told my brothers and me that cola eats away at your stomach lining.”
“Coffee does the same thing.” Vincent regarded Jerry with laughing eyes. ”What kind of a nurse doesn’t know that?”
What a jerk, Jerry thought. No wonder Bobby Lee had taken a shine to this asshole. “Okay,” he said. “What’ll you have?”
“Apple pie,” Vincent said. “Make sure the pie’s been heated. I won’t eat any if it’s cold.”
“Not a problem.”
“Got any vanilla ice cream you can top it off with?” All travelers knew that pie a la mode was the best way to fill up. The fruit and grains and dairy blended nutrition, not to mention the added appeal of combining cold ice cream and the warmth of the sticky pie. Mixing all of the flavors turned the dessert into something that tasted as close to normal and good as any diner had ever come up with.
“Sure,” Jerry said. “Is that all?”
“Is this a bottomless cup?” the man asked.
“Yes.”
“Then keep the coffee coming.”
*
In the kitchen, someone yelled at Jerry for standing in the way of four hot plates. He tried to move, but only succeeded in tripping over his own feet. There was nowhere to sit, and the nausea that had been building in his stomach for the past hour rose into his throat.
The kitchen manager was Carlo, only a few years older than Jerry. He came out from behind the back burner, waving a spatula. “What are you standing there for?” he asked. “Don’t you have tables?”
“I need a slice of pie,” Jerry said. He had always felt anxious when looking Carlo in the eye, especially when he was holding kitchen supplies.
“Did you put it in the microwave?” Carlo asked. “Forty-five seconds should do fine. Any longer, and the crust will melt.” He stopped and leaned in close to Jerry’s face. “You look pale.”
“It’s been a long day, boss.”
“Are you turning yellow? Your skin is looking weird.”
“No, boss, I’m white as the driven snow,” Jerry said. He ducked his head low, brushing a few bangs away from his eyes.
“Well,” Carlo said. “Well, then.”
“Maybe you need glasses,” Jerry said. “Didn’t you used to wear them when I first got here?”
Carlo turned and set the spatula onto a nearby counter. In the back corner, other servers grabbed their coats for a smoking break. “Someone told me yesterday that you were spooning ice cream from the freezer without gloves.”
“Oh.” The timer started to beep as the smell of cooked apples drifted through the kitchen.
Carlo shook his head. “We have a health inspection due any day now. If they see you doing that, this place gets flagged.”
Jerry’s mouth tasted hot and sour, a preamble to the nausea that would soon be on its way. He reached his hand down to rub at his stomach, then pulled it back just as quickly. “The crew watches me all the time, waiting for me to screw up.” He felt like doubling over, right then and there, but there were so many people around.
“We all watch each other here. If things happen that I don’t know about, it’s bad for everyone,” Carlo said.
He couldn’t hold back the bile anymore; no use in trying to disguise it. “I got to throw up, I think.”
“Jesus,” Carlo said. “Run to the bathroom. Make sure it doesn’t get on the floor.” He didn’t appreciate when employees came to work hung-over, but at least they could make sure to keep the restrooms tidy.
The slice of pie landed on the table with an audible thud. Even the waiter looked surprised at the clank it made. “Your hands are shaking,” Vincent said. “What are you on?”
“Nothing,” Jerry said. “Enjoy your pie.”
Offending some poor tired kid was the last thing on Vincent’s mind, so he laughed to put Jerry at ease. “Chances are, whatever it is you’re using, I’ve taken it myself. No worries, I used to be a dumb kid, too. We all have to get away for a while.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Jerry said. He tried to refill the coffee mug with as much force and speed as he could muster.
Vincent held his spoon over his plate in mid-air, as if waiting for permission to begin eating. “So tell me, is it coke? Speed?” he asked. He raised his eyebrows to soften the words.
“Neither,” Jerry said. “I just don’t feel very well today.”
The kid didn’t particularly seem like he wanted to chat, but Vincent was curious now. There was something about the shuffle in the waiter’s steps, the way he didn’t seem to think anyone could be sociable with him. It seemed out of place in someone so young, and also very familiar. He tried another tack. “Well, my pie doesn’t have any ice cream on it,” Vincent said.
“Oh.”
“Pie just isn’t the same without vanilla ice cream.”
“Then I better get you some.”
Jerry stood over the freezer bin, scraping the last of the ice cream out of a deep bin. It had been stupid to forget the topping on the pie, and he couldn’t get the man’s condescending smirk out of his head. His stomach lurched again, and he felt the bile slosh around his intestines. When he leaned back, he felt a sharp poke in his ribs. “You’re supposed to wear the gloves when you scoop that out,” Bobby said.
Jerry looked around to see if anyone was listening, but the others were all distracted with their own orders. “I’ve got work to do, Bobby,” he said. “Why don’t you leave me be?”
Bobby looked up to say something, but he wasn’t fast enough. By the time a retort came, the freezer was closed, and Jerry gone.
Vincent looked up at Jerry as he took his first bite, the fork sinking into both the cream and the crust. “Well,” he said, “This is just fine.”
“Thank you,” Jerry said. “Glad you like it.”
“I know you think I’m not going to tip well, since I ordered such a small meal,” he said. He wiped a bit of vanilla from his beard, then quickly licked it off from the tip of his finger. “But I mean to make my money stretch so I can pay you decently.”
“Thank you,” Jerry said. A smile stretched over his face. He hoped it looked at least a little real. “That’s very generous of you.”
“You look too young to be spending your life in a place like this,” Vincent said. “You in college?”
“No,” Jerry said. “I support myself.”
“No parents?”
“None that I talk to,” Jerry said.
Vincent looked at him for a long moment, and then shook his head. A few bits of dandruff fell from his curls.
“Tough break,” he said. “I’ve been there myself, a long time ago. It’s never easy.” He thought about the look his mother had given him when he said he wasn’t going to school or the army, down with the man, and all that youthful kind of talk. She’d been so disappointed, so confused about why her bright and funny son didn’t want to do anything more with his life. In his sixth month at the garage, his boss had joked that Vincent could take over in another five years, when he retired for Idaho. He’d known then that he wouldn’t last another five minutes in a place like that.
The kid wasn’t really looking at him so much as he looked through him. “It could be worse. I have this job. I’m not on the street.”
Vincent snorted. “This is a crap diner on a crap bypass, and the world’s most likely bigger than what you’ve seen. A guy your age should be out seeing the country, sowing his oats.” He paused, chewing on a piece of pie crust. “You ever think about getting into construction?”
Jerry looked up and saw two new tables waiting for him to come over and take their order. “Let me know if you need anything else.”
“You and I both need to get out of here,” Vincent said. He held out the empty plate to Jerry, his eyes large and wild. “Construction companies pay good money, they give you lots of chances to see different places all over the coast. I’m telling you, it’ll be the best thing that could happen to someone your age.”
“I can’t do that,” Jerry said. “I can’t up and leave.”
“Sure you can. It’s your life, kid. You can do whatever you want, whenever you want.”
“That’s nice of you to say,” Jerry said. “I’ll get you the check.”
“You’re moving slow today,” Carlo said. He had moved from behind the grill to where the dirty silverware was set. He yelled good-naturedly back and forth in Spanish with the dishwashers.
Jerry dropped the plate onto the counter, blood rushing into his face. The words came out before he could stop himself. “I don’t have to be here if you don’t want me,” Jerry said. Then he thought about where he would go if he lost this job, how the rent and the bills would be paid. What good were his words now, really. It would have been better not to have said anything at all to Carlo. If another flare-up happened, another morning where he couldn’t get out of bed, or a headache that wouldn’t clear, he wouldn’t have the money to go back and see a doctor again. He bent down, scraping to pick up the scraps of food that had fallen. His boss stared hard for a moment, until Jerry looked down at the floor.
“Not to worry,” Carlo said, “I can’t have any of my servers walking out tonight. It’ll be a full house within the hour. Just stay sharp.”
“I will,” Jerry said. “Where else am I going to go?”
As Vincent lay in the motel bed, mulling over the ceiling fan and faded green curtains that surrounded him, he was still wondering if he shouldn’t have waited in the diner lobby all those weeks ago, even if just for a few extra minutes. After he paid the three-fifty check and left a fiver on the table, he’d thought maybe the waiter boy would toss his apron aside and follow him out to the Dodge. Jerry seemed like the kind of guy in need of adventure, something Vincent was always willing to provide. But now Vincent was already in Maine. The late September beaches were filled with lapping cold water and plenty of good-looking women to bring back to his room.
He didn’t feel much like swimming today, though. He flipped through the channels with an old remote. No matter how he hard he pressed on the buttons, it still took a couple tries just to turn the volume up.
The local news said that a house had burned down in Bridgeport, with a woman and four kids trapped inside. The house was considered by experts to be a historical landmark, and the fire had been started by a lit cigarette left unattended. Firefighters did not expect to find any survivors.
Ain’t that a damn shame, Vincent thought.
He started to doze off during the commercial, but perked up when he heard the name Arlington.
The newscaster’s voice seemed far away, almost a whistle from the wind hitting the shutters outside. “A small diner in Arlington, Massachusetts recently uncovered an employee with the Hepatitis A virus.”
“Huh?” Vincent sat up.
The man talking on the TV had thick blonde hair and fleshy arms that waved toward a chart. “The virus is spread through food contamination. With an establishment of this size, the Health Department has posted an urgent vaccination bulletin for all patrons served in the last ninety days. Local health officials immediately closed the Corner Street Diner restaurant until further notice.”
“You’re kidding,” Vincent said. By now, his shoes were already tied, and he could go out the door any time.
The newscaster pressed on. “Again, all customers who were served at the Corner Street Diner in Arlington, Massachusetts are urged to come forward for a free vaccination on Sunday, June 13th. The number for the Middlesex County Health Board should appear on your screen.”
He turned the TV off, and then looked down at the remote beside him. He tried to remember what he’d eaten.
“Ice cream,” he said. “And shitty apple pie.”
He turned to his packed bags. Check-out time was noon tomorrow. The Canadian border was only a few hundred miles away, but so was Massachusetts. He needed to be in Montreal by Wednesday, but the new boss could find some understanding, when he stopped to consider the circumstances.
In the end, it didn’t matter much where he went, or how long he stayed: either direction would do. The more he thought about it, Arlington began to seem like a far-off memory, a place he had visited years and years ago.
“Can’t get sick off of ice cream,” he reasoned. His mind made up, he kicked off his shoes and rolled over until his belly touched the mattress, then quickly fell asleep.
Jerry had watched the story break on his neighbor’s crappy black-and-white TV set. Doris was the only tenant Jerry had met in the whole building. She was old and hard of hearing, and sat as close as she could to the glass without jumping into the screen.
“Didn’t you used to work there?” the neighbor asked. “I wonder if you knew whoever it was that had the illness.”
Jerry finished buttoning the top hole of his gas station uniform, then moved closer toward the old woman. She pushed her shoulders up, her limbs waiting to be rubbed, and he obliged her with a quick massage. “I didn’t really socialize with any of the other waiters. I couldn’t really tell you if they were sick or not.”
“Still,” the woman said, rattling her dinner tray, “it’s a shame that diner had to close. Why wouldn’t that person tell the employer he had Hepatutis – ”
“Hepatitis,” he corrected.
“Whatever it is,” she said.
He hoped that Doris wouldn’t hear the long pause, or the high-pitched break in his voice. “What restaurant manager is going to hire someone who has an incurable contagious disease? A person’s got to have a job.”
“And what about the people he infected? That’s just not right, Jerry,” she said. She reached up and patted his hand, but the feel of her bare skin made him pull away.
Three years of living with the sickness, and he found that he still flinched when other people reached out to him, well-intentioned as they might be. Really, no one could have guessed why he didn’t like to talk, or look too long at any one person. He thought about all of the times he’d handled the diner’s plates and bowls, scooped out ice cream without gloves, or even breathed on someone’s order, all without thinking, without trying to do any harm. It was better not to touch anymore.
“And what if it isn’t,” Jerry said. His stomach began to rumble. It wasn’t polite to vomit in your neighbor’s toilet. He smoothed Doris’s hair once over just before leaving her apartment.
________________________________________
Allison McCarthy’s work has previously been published in literary magazines such as The Baltimore Review, The Write Side Up, and Wild Child, as well as in the anthology “Into Our Clothes: A Collection of Prose and Poetry.” (Writer’s Lair, 2006).
