Grace

  To Joel and me the garage was a wonderland that housed a million things to ignite a boy’s imagination. There were large spring traps, tin washtubs, boxes of ancient National Geographics, a World War II GI helmet, and even a kerosene lantern with several containers of kerosene. Whenever we needed something we’d head to the garage where we’d either find what we were looking for or forget about it in the excitement of a greater discovery. Once we went in looking for a lamp and found a hand-pump brass fire extinguisher and an electric generator from an old telephone that produced enough voltage to knock you on your keister if you touched the contacts while someone wound the crank. To make our chess games more interesting, we attached wires to the generator—which the loser had to hold for one full crank. To this day Joel doesn’t play chess.

  On one of our expeditions we found a mattress in the rafters above the garage and pushed it down. It looked like generations of mice had made the mattress their home, but they all fled at our arrival (or died in the fall). We broomed off the mice droppings and a few dead mice, then dragged it to the clubhouse.

  There was a water spigot inside our clubhouse, one of the old orange hand-lever types. We discovered it after we started building. Since we couldn’t move it, we just built around it, later deciding it technically gave our clubhouse indoor plumbing.

  Even better than plumbing was electricity. Joel found a light socket and an old yellow extension cord, which we ran from the garage. We hung it from the ceiling and attached a light bulb. That night we brought in our sleeping bags and slept there. We stayed up playing Go Fish and Rook while eating walnuts from our trees until two in the morning. When we finally turned out the light it was darker than a cave, which kind of scared Joel. The next time we slept out we plugged in a nightlight. It lit the clubhouse in an eerie UFO alien green, which was still better than total darkness.

  One day I was sitting at the kitchen table drawing cartoons when Joel came running inside. “Hey, come out to the clubhouse,” he said excitedly.

  “What?”

  “You gotta come see.”

  I followed him out and crawled through the door to be greeted by the astringent odor of fresh paint.

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “I painted.”

  “It’s purple.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s purple.”

  Joel frowned, angry that I hadn’t appreciated his surprise and hours of work. “It’s all there was.”

  “It looks…femmy.”

  Joel turned red. “It’s all there was.”

  CHAPTER Three

  There’s a new rock and roll band called The Beatles.

  I like their music. I think they might do well.

  GRACE’S DIARY

  That summer I worried a lot. I worried that we’d live in that crummy neighborhood forever, and I worried a lot about the approaching school year. I had heard stories about inner-city schools and I lived in terror of what it would be like to go to one.

  I also worried about money, or our lack of it. Every now and then Joel and I would try to earn some, combing the neighborhood looking for work. We’d mow lawns and do other odd jobs, but it was a poor neighborhood so we never got paid much. Once we helped Mrs. Poulsen, a two-hundred-year-old lady who lived at the end of our street, clean out her garage. That place hadn’t been touched for decades, evidenced by the yellowed GERMAN STORM TROOPERS INVADE POLAND headline on a newspaper we threw out. It took an entire day, leaving us dirty and exhausted. When we’d completed the job she gave us each fifty cents. I stopped Joel from throwing his quarters at her door after she shut it.

  In spite of the wasted day, two good things came from that project. First, we acquired an old fruit dryer. It was a square plywood box with window-screen trays that slid inside, which Mrs. Poulsen had us carry out to the curb for garbage pickup. We dragged the dryer home on the back of our wagon and put it in our clubhouse. It actually worked and we began drying apricots into fruit leather, which, to us, tasted as good as any store-bought candy.

  Second, we spent our day’s earnings on milkshakes, which led to my job at McBurger Queen.

  McBurger Queen was on State Street about six blocks from our home. The name of the restaurant was my boss’s genius. My boss, Mr. Dick (that’s not meant to be derogatory, it was his actual surname), believed that by combining the names of the most successful burger joints in America he would capitalize on thousands of dollars of free advertising and make himself rich. The Queen, as we employees called it, was one of those places that had more items on the menu than a Chinese restaurant. It had sixty different kinds of malts, from grasshopper to caramel cashew (my personal favorite) and almost as many food choices, from fish burgers to soft tacos. My boss also sold water softeners and Amway products, and we were required to keep a stack of brochures for both on the front counter near the cash register.

  Mr. Dick trusted no one. He believed John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and the Pope belonged to a secret organization conspiring to rule the world. He also believed that all his employees were thieves bent on eating his inventory, which was sometimes true but not as true as Mr. Dick believed. Once one of my co-workers saw him in the parking lot across the street spying on us through binoculars. The very week I started working at the place, Mr. Dick hauled three of his workers off to take polygraph tests. I don’t know if that was legal or not, but in those days kids our age pretty much went along with everything adults said.

  I knew about the tests because Gary, the assistant manager (a forty-year-old guy with chronic, maybe terminal, dandruff), showed me the actual test results from the lie detector machine with its accompanying graph. The interrogator asked questions like: Have you ever stolen money from the till? (No spike on the report.) Have you given away free food? (Small spike.) Do you eat French fries without paying for them? (The spike went off the chart.)

  After the inquiry, one of my co-workers never returned; I still imagine him languishing in a gulag somewhere. Of course the shakedown was meant as intimidation for the rest of us and it worked reasonably well. So, for the most part, we rarely ate on the job, even the mistakes, like when someone ordered a hamburger with no ketchup and we put ketchup on it anyway. At least not without looking over our shoulder a few times before wolfing it down.

  What made Mr. Dick’s actions more ridiculous was that we were paid like sixty cents an hour. I later discovered that Mr. Dick hired kids because minimum wage laws didn’t apply. He eventually got in trouble when someone turned him in for making us pay our matching Social Security payments.

  CHAPTER Four

  Junior High School is the armpit of life.

  GRACE’S DIARY

  It’s been said that parents should give their children roots and wings. That was a perfect description of my parents. Even in a wheelchair, my father was a dreamer with his head in the clouds and my mother was the roots with both feet planted firmly on terra quaking firma. My mother was always afraid. Afraid we didn’t have enough money, afraid her health would give out, afraid something might happen to one of us. Pretty much afraid of life. When my father got sick I think it was for her vindication that the gods really were out to get us.

  Shortly after our arrival in Utah, my mother got a day job working as a cashier at Warshaw’s Food and Drug. Her job didn’t pay much, but she brought home damaged canned goods and day-olds from the bakery, which helped with the grocery bills. For years I thought that all soup cans came with dents in them.

  For most of her life my mother had struggled with depression, and our situation didn’t help much. People didn’t talk as much about depression in those days; in some religions it was still regarded as a sin. Science made people less sinful with the wonder drug Librium.

  My mother worked all day, then came home at night, physically and emotionally spent. My father just kind of moped around the house, dreaming up get-rich-quick schemes while he slowly regained the use of his limbs. Joel and I learned that if we spent much time in the house
, Dad would think of errands for us, so mostly we just hid out in the clubhouse. Then summer ended.

  Life at Granite Junior High School was dog-eat-dog. Even though I was a ninth grader, and higher up the food chain, it was still miserable. I wasn’t big like the jocks or especially smart like the geeks. I had acne and a bad haircut, which, when my dad got partial use of his hands back, was once again administered with his Ronco electric hair trimmer. The hoods, who gathered outside the north doors after school to smoke, took notice of me and made my life even more miserable. They tripped me, knocked books out of my hands, and generally harassed and humiliated me. And I worked at a burger place that paid sixty cents an hour and made you wear a paper cap. That time in my life nothing was worth remembering. That is, up until the day I found Grace in a Dumpster.

  CHAPTER Five

  A boy found me tonight as I was looking for food

  in a Dumpster. He acted like he didn’t know why I was in there,

  which makes me thinks he’s either dumb or good.

  GRACE’S DIARY

  FRIDAY, OCT. 12

  About ten yards behind the Queen, on the other side of the drive-thru lane, were two small structures. One was a sheet metal storage shed where we kept supplies like napkins, cups, industrial-sized cans of tomato sauce, and the five-pound bags of spiced soybean filler we’d mix with the beef to stretch it further; the other was a walk-in freezer. My first night working at the Queen a co-worker named Dean sent me to the freezer for a bag of frozen Tater Tots and locked me inside for nearly a half hour. I think he only let me out because it got busy and he needed my help.

  It was nearly eleven P.M. and the end of my shift when I went out to the shed to restock our shelves. With the exception of a street lamp at least fifty yards away, there was no lighting out back, and I was always a bit leery of going out there at night. Gary told me that a few years earlier one of the evening workers had been mugged by a couple hoodlums hiding out back. As usual, I looked around before I stepped out, then slid a rock under the door to prop it open. I quickly ran to the freezer, unlocked the door, retrieved a bag of lard, closed the door and snapped the padlock shut. I was walking back when I heard something. My heart froze. I looked around but saw no one. Then I heard the sound again. Someone was definitely behind the Dumpster. No. In the Dumpster.

  I quietly walked backward toward the Queen, keeping an eye on the Dumpster. Suddenly, a girl popped up; she was as surprised to see me as I was to see her. She was holding a hamburger, which she quickly dropped. She looked familiar.

  After a moment she said nervously, “I dropped something in here. I was just looking for it.”

  I realized how I recognized her; she was in my seventh period Spanish class. I didn’t remember her name; she sat in the back corner of the room and never raised her hand and only spoke when the teacher called on her. I knew she was Dumpster diving but I didn’t want to embarrass her.

  “Do you want help finding it?”

  “No, I’m okay.”

  She pushed herself up with her arms and swung her legs over the metal edge so that she was sitting on the flat rim of the Dumpster, then dropped down to the asphalt. She had short umber hair and beautiful large brown eyes—almond-shaped like my mother’s. I remembered seeing her for the first time at school and thinking she was pretty, but then she just kind of faded into the background. She was small, a few inches shorter than me. It was hard to tell what her figure was like because she wore a coat that was too large for her, but she seemed to be more developed than most of the girls my age. She stooped and lifted her schoolbag, then flung it over her shoulder.

  “You’re in my Spanish class,” I said.

  She looked even more embarrassed. “Yeah.”

  “What’s your name again?”

  “Grace.”

  I was certain I’d never heard it before. “Grace?”

  “Well, the teachers call me Madeline. My full name is Madeline Grace. What’s your name?”

  “Eric.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, though I doubt she ever knew it. I could tell she was uncomfortable. I wondered if after I left she would climb back in the Dumpster to look for more food. The thought made me sad.

  “We’re just cleaning up. Do you want to come in and get something to eat?”

  “That’s all right,” she said hesitantly, “I’ve got to go.”

  “You can have whatever you want. I get the food for free.”

  She stood there, caught between hunger and pride, her breath freezing in the air in front of her. Pride isn’t worth much on an empty stomach.

  Finally, she said, “Okay.”

  I led her in the back door past the stoves and stainless steel food prep tables, dropping the bag of lard next to the fryer.

  Dean, who had locked me in the freezer my first night, was out front mopping the dining room floor. He had turned the radio to a rock ’n’ roll station and King Curtis’s “Soul Twist” blared throughout the lobby. We walked around to the front.

  “Hey, Dean, this is Grace. I’m getting her something to eat.”

  “Whatever,” he said without looking up, mindlessly making wide half circles with the mop.

  Grace stood at the edge of the dining area, just short of the wet tile. “I don’t want to walk on your floor.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Dean said. Dean disliked Mr. Dick and to him any job done less than the boss wanted was a victory of sorts. Then he looked up at Grace and his expression changed. So did his voice. “Don’t worry about it. Really.”

  It was obvious that he liked the way she looked. I didn’t know why, but his interest in her bothered me.

  “What do you want to eat?” I asked.

  She looked back at me. “I don’t care. Anything would be nice.”

  “We have, like, everything on the planet.”

  “What do you like?”

  “The pastrami burger, onion rings, baklava, the caramel cashew malt.”

  “What’s baklava?”

  “It’s this Greek thing. It has like honey and walnuts and it’s wrapped in…uh, paper-stuff.”

  “Paper?”

  “Phyllo dough,” Dean said. “Idiot.”

  I blushed a little. “It’s good,” I said.

  She smiled. “Surprise me.”

  “The Eric Special coming up.” Stupid thing to say, I thought as I walked back to the kitchen. I wondered if she could tell that I never really talked to girls. I remembered that I still had my dopey paper hat on and quickly removed it. In ten minutes I brought out a tray crowded with everything I had mentioned and a bag of Tater Tots. Instinctively, I glanced out to the parking lot to make sure Mr. Dick wasn’t spying on us.

  Grace looked over the tray in amazement. “Wow. You didn’t have to get me everything.”

  “You don’t have to eat it all.”

  I set the tray down in front of her. She examined each item. “Is this the…bock stuff?”

  “Baklava.”

  “I’ll save that for last,” she said. She took a bite of an onion ring.

  I pointed to a plastic tub of sauce. “That’s fry sauce. My boss invented it. It’s like ketchup and mayonnaise mixed together. It’s good.”

  She dipped the ring in the sauce, then shoved the whole thing into her mouth. “Mmm…” Next she peeled back the yellow wax paper from a burger. She took delicate bites at first, each bite growing larger until she was practically wolfing the burger down.

  Dean moved next to her, leaning against his mop handle. “How do you and Eric know each other?”

  She answered with a mouth full of burger. “We’ve got a class together.”

  “Cool,” he said, which is about as original as Dean got. “So you’re what, like sixteen?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “You look like you’re sixteen.” I could tell he wanted to ask her out but wouldn’t because I was there. Not out of respect or anything; he just didn’t want to be embarrassed in case she said no. Finally he said to me, “I?
??m outta here. You can lock up.”

  “No problem,” I said.

  “Come around again,” he said to Grace. “It’s Dean.”

  He walked out the back door. “That’s Dean,” I said.

  “Yeah, I got that.”

  “He’s kind of a jerk.”

  She smiled wryly. “I got that too.”

  “I think he likes you.”

  “Lucky me.” She started on her malt. The back door shut and Dean revved his car three or four times more than usual, no doubt trying to impress her.

  “Where do you live?” I asked.

  “Just west of the school.”

  “That’s like three miles from here.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How are you getting home?”

  “I’m not going home.” She spun her cup, and drops of condensation gathered on her fingers, which she wiped onto the table. “I ran away.” She let the cup settle. “I’m never going back.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to that. I remembered that I hadn’t seen her in class for a few days. “How long ago did you leave?”

  “Monday.”

  “How come you ran away?”

  “For kicks.”

  Eating out of Dumpsters didn’t look like “kicks” to me.

  “For kicks?”

  “Yeah. I can do whatever I want. Stay out as late as I want.” She frowned. “I’m still figuring things out.”

  “What about your parents?” I asked.

  She took a long drag from her straw. Then she said, “They don’t care.”