The Center of Everything

  It is usually just boring, being at work, but sometimes it’s hard. There are decisions to make. The fries go bad after about fifteen minutes, turning limp and soggy in the warmer, so I am not supposed to cook more than we need. But sometimes when I don’t put enough in, buses pull in off the highway, and then forty-five people are waiting in the lobby, standing in five different lines in front of the counter.

  “Fries,” DuPaul will say, snapping his fingers. “Come on, Evelyn. Let’s go. Let’s go.”

  People have to wait too long when I don’t make enough. Sometimes they say they are in a hurry and will just have an apple pie instead, but they look disappointed, or even mad, shrugging as they walk away from the counter, their heads hanging down.

  But when I make a lot of fries, the lobby stays empty, and I have to throw them away. DuPaul can sense it when I have to throw fries away, no matter how far away he is. I try to bury them in the garbage, underneath hamburger wrappers and napkins. But he knows.

  “Ms. Bucknow,” he says, frowning, kicking the trash can a little so we can both see all the fries underneath the wrappers. “May I remind you that when we throw away our product without selling it, we lose money. It’s a terrible waste.”

  “I know,” I say, pushing my visor up so I can see him. “I know.”

  He tells me I have to learn to watch, to check for buses in the parking lot, to keep my eyes open. “Rhythm,” he says, closing his eyes. “You’ve got to develop a rhythm.”

  Trish is no longer the dining-room attendant. She’s the assistant manager now, and she gets to wear a special blue-and-white-striped shirt with a red tie. When I make mistakes, she isn’t as nice as DuPaul.

  “Are you stupid or something?” she asks. She pushes me out of the way and takes the fries out of the oil. They’re burned, all of them, like little brown worms. “How could you forget to put on the timer?” Her eyebrows are still frozen high on her head.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I just forgot. I’m sorry.” When Trish yells at me like this, in front of everyone, I have to work hard to think about something else so I won’t cry.

  “You’re sorry.” She dumps the burned fries in the garbage and puts another batch in. Her hands move quickly, and I can see raised scars on them, places she has burned herself. “You kids think you’re so smart out in that lobby. But when it comes down to it, you don’t know how to push a goddamn button.”

  DuPaul cuts in sometimes when she’s like this. He tells her to go easy on me, to have a little patience. I’m still young, he says, still learning.

  I hardly ever see either of them anymore, except for Sundays, when Deena drives Travis’s no-muffler car to her grandmother’s to do laundry. You can see she’s pregnant now, a little slope sticking out of the middle of her ballerina body. It takes her a full minute just to get up out of the driver’s seat. She carries the laundry basket on her hip, walking with her feet spread wide. The baby is due in November.

  My mother is on the floor next to Samuel, helping him through his physical therapy exercises, pulling his legs when he does not want them pulled, and he is screaming. She looks out the window and sees Deena. “Poor thing,” she says. “Honey, why don’t you go help her?”

  I shrug. “I’m busy.”

  “You’re reading a magazine. When’s the baby due?”

  “I don’t know. November.” I glance outside. Deena is bent over, trying to pick up a shirt that has fallen out of the basket. She leans backward, one of her arms stretched out for balance, bending at the knees as if she were trying to get under a limbo stick.

  “Evelyn,” my mother says. “I don’t know what this fight between you two is about, but at least go carry the basket.”

  “She’s fine.”

  My mother leans across Samuel, grabs my magazine. Before I can believe she is really going to do it, she swats me with it on the back of my thigh.

  “Ouch!” I stare at her in disbelief, and she does it again. I try to move away, but she leans after me, hits me again. “Knock it off!” I hold out my hands to shield myself, and she hits me there too.

  “Go help your friend, Evelyn. You big meanie. Go help your friend.” She stands up and swats me again, herding me toward the door. Samuel waves his arm from his beanbag, screeching. He’s thrilled with this, all this violence.

  “Mom, you’re being crazy. Stop it.”

  “And you’re being mean. Go help your friend.” She opens the door, pushes me outside.

  The door shuts behind me, and Deena turns around. “Hi,” she says, surprised, squinting, her hand flat over her eyes. She is standing oddly, her legs crossed, the basket resting on one of her hips. She has not yet been able to pick up the shirt.

  I reach behind me to try the door. Locked. “Hi.”

  “Haven’t seen you for a while.” She shifts the laundry basket to the other hip.

  “Yeah. I’ve been busy. School and stuff.”

  I can see now she is sweating, beads trickling down from her new short hair. She leans heavily on the rail of the stairway, one of her hands resting on her belly. She might just be standing that way because she thinks pregnant women are supposed to.

  “You need some help or something?”

  She nods. “Actually, yeah. I have to pee. I have to pee right this very second. I don’t think I’ll make it if I have to carry this basket.”

  I jog across the parking lot, and she hands me her keys and the basket. She moves past me when I open the door, knocking the laundry basket out of my hands as she goes by.

  “Sorry,” she says, but keeps walking.

  I kneel down to pick up the clothes, recognizing Deena’s pink pillowcases from her old bed, Travis’s orange T-shirt, his blue jeans. I pick them up, follow her in. Her grandmother’s apartment has not changed. It’s still dark, still crowded with furniture. I set the basket on the same table where we carved pumpkins.

  She comes back out, sliding into a chair at the table. “Thanks,” she says, breathing heavily, her eyes already closed. “Sorry about that. That’s all I do these days is pee.”

  I’m not sure what to say to this. “Do you need some water or something?”

  She nods, her eyes still closed. “It’s a vicious cycle.”

  I get her a glass of water. “Where’s your grandmother?”

  “The movies. She says she goes to get out of the heat, but I don’t know. I think she just doesn’t want to see me.” She pats her belly. “It bugs her, you know.”

  “Oh.”

  “At least she lets me come over.” She shrugs. “Okay, I’ve got to put the laundry in.” I watch her try to stand, leaning forward, pressing down on the sides of the chair with her arms. It looks difficult.

  “Let me do it.”

  “You sure?” She sinks back down into the chair.

  I bring her another glass of water. I can do this. It’s just water. It’s just giving water to a pregnant girl.

  “Thanks,” she says. “I say I’m coming over here to do laundry, but it’s really for the AC.” She grins at me, her eyes on mine. She’s trying to act normal, but she’s nervous, I can tell. “Feels good, doesn’t it?”

  I nod, sitting down. “I like your haircut.”

  She pulls her fingers through it quickly and rolls her eyes. “Travis is still mad about it. But if he likes long hair so much, he can grow his own.”

  We are quiet after this. It’s not the same as it was before, her talking about Travis. My eyes drift away from her face, downward. The baby isn’t due until November, but already, she’s so much bigger than I remember my mother being with Sam.

  “How does it feel?” I am always asking her this. She laughs. “Like you’re carrying a basketball in between your knees. And it’s always ninety degrees outside with eighty percent humidity and you’re in a bad mood.”

  “Well, it really is ninety degrees outside.”

  “That’s good to know. I thought it was just me.” She fans herself with her hand. “I’m kidding. It’s not so ba
d. I mean, physically, it’s a drag. But it’s kind of cool too. People hold doors open for you. Smile at you on the street.”

  Also, I think, watching her, it makes it more difficult for your boyfriend to break up with you.

  “But I only have a couple more months,” she says. “I keep dreaming I’ve already had the baby, and Travis is holding him. In the dream, I know everything went fine. So maybe that’s a good sign. Anyway,” she says, smiling again. “No going back now. One way or the other, he’s coming out.”

  “It’s a boy?”

  She nods, her hand resting on top of her belly. I catch sight of the small diamond on her finger. It doesn’t really sparkle. It may not even be real.

  We are silent then, listening to the washing machine chug and spin. I don’t know what to talk about. I don’t know if I should talk about school, about McDonald’s, or not. I can’t think of anything to say. I stand up. “Well, I guess I’ll get going.”

  She starts to smile, then lets it go, biting her lip. “Are you still mad at me, Evelyn?”

  I don’t know what to say. I never know what to say. I did not plan on having to talk to her today, and although I have been thinking about this question all summer, I still do not know the answer. Yes. No. A little. I sit back down. She pushes her lips together, and I can see she is trying not to cry.

  “I miss you,” she says. “I want us to be friends again.”

  Dead brown leaves rustle on the windowsill. They are already dying, the leaves of this year, dried out from the hot summer, not even bothering to change to red or yellow before they fall. I look at the sugar bowl in the middle of the table.

  “It wasn’t right, what you did,” I say.

  She rubs her eyes. “Oh God, Evelyn. You can be so mean, you know that? It wasn’t like I had this all planned out. It wasn’t like I did it on purpose. I just…” She stops. “I just didn’t not do it on purpose.” She frowns and shakes her head. “It sounds bad when I put it like that, but that’s how it was.”

  This sounds fishy to me, this logic, but I don’t tell her that. I don’t want her to start crying. Not doing something on purpose would be doing something accidentally, accidentally forgetting to take the pills, accidentally throwing them away. I think about her doing this, coming home the night I told her that Travis was going to break up with her, walking through the sleet and slush to all this dark and quiet, her grandmother asleep in the next room.

  But even though I have not said anything, she cries. Of course she does. “You’re my only friend, Evelyn,” she says. “Besides Travis, you’re it.”

  This is terrible. The more she cries, the more I wonder if there is a possibility that I am actually the mean one. Or maybe we have both been mean. The washing machine buzzes loudly, and she starts to stand up.

  I hold up my hand. “Okay. Don’t. I’ll get it.”

  “Thanks.” She falls back into her chair, sniffing. I hand her a Kleenex, and she blows her nose. “Um, my pink blouse has to be set out. But everything else can just go in the dryer.”

  I open the lid of the washer. Inside, there are new blue-and-white-striped sheets, the pink pillowcases. Everything is tangled together. Deena’s large, colorful maternity shirts are wrapped around Travis’s underwear, her bras knotted up with his socks. Something about the cold wetness of their clothes, the clean smell of the laundry detergent and the way they are all tied together, makes me feel bad about touching them. Later there will be bibs and tiny shirts in the dryer too, all of their clothes spinning together, then folded neatly in the same basket, buttons and snaps fastened by each other’s fingers.

  It’s just the way it is now. It’s just the way it is.

  “Does it look okay?” she calls out. “Nothing ruined?”

  “No.” I take out her pink blouse, lay it out flat on top of the dryer. “It’s fine.”

  On the first day of eleventh grade, Libby is back, her long hair cut short and darker than it was. She can walk, but she has to use a cane. Dr. Queen asks me to share a locker with her, since we have both lost our partners. I move my things to her locker, to the shelf that used to be Traci’s.

  Because of the cane, Libby can’t always get all the books she needs out of her locker and put others away at the same time, so I help her during passing time, holding her books. She shows me the leg exercises she has to do every night for her physical therapy, twenty-five on each side, a rubber band around her ankles for resistance.

  “My little brother’s got a rubber band like that,” I tell her. “He has to do exercises too.”

  “They suck,” she says. “Tell him I sympathize.”

  When the accident first happened, people kept saying how lucky Libby was, the sole survivor of the wrecked car. I don’t know if she feels lucky or not. She told me that over the summer, Mr. Carmichael mowed the lawn every day, sometimes for hours, going over the same strips of grass two or three times, even when it was scorching out, the air humid with no breeze to blow it away. Every day she woke up to the sound of the mower, the blades racing over the grass that was already too short. She went outside once and saw him lying in the grass, right next to the mower, his hands over his face in the bright sunlight.

  The Carmichaels are moving, she says. They’re staying in Kerrville, but moving to a different neighborhood, maybe because of her. They don’t want to have to see her all the time. Adele’s family has already moved.

  “I’m sure they’re glad I didn’t die too,” she says, turning her cane in slow circles. A pink, sickle-shaped scar runs from the outer corner of her left eye to the top of her lip, and she runs her finger over it in class when she thinks no one is looking.

  We have American government together third period, Libby and I. Mr. Chemsky is the teacher, young and with a red-brown beard, and he likes to use “so-called” as an adjective and “allegedly” as an adverb. “The so-called House of Representatives,” he says, rolling his eyes, “are allegedly elected to represent the people’s wishes in the legislative branch.” He also makes quote marks with his fingers when he talks, sometimes twice in one sentence, and it is hard to tell if he is really quoting someone or if this is just something he likes to do.

  He is doing this one sunny day in November when an office attendant walks in with a note. Mr. Chemsky takes the note from her, but waits until she leaves before he opens it, his hand cupped around it like it is from the FBI. When he is finished reading, he pauses dramatically, looking around the room. “Evelyn Bucknow, you’re to go to the office.”

  I am scared when he tells me this, and then even more scared as I leave the room, walking down the long yellow hallway to the office. Too many bad things have happened this year. There can’t be anything else. But of course, I know, really there could be. It’s not like there are rules.

  When I get to the office, the secretary says that a Dr. Love has called to relay the message that my mother had another episode and is now in the hospital, resting comfortably. My Uncle Bubba will be coming to pick me up in front of the school right away.

  I am confused for only a moment, standing there and looking at the attendance secretary, who is wearing green eyeshadow, looking grimly back at me. And then, even from inside the school, I can hear the engine of Travis’s blue Datsun.

  He waves when he sees me come through the double doors, leaning over to open the passenger door. “Say hi to Daddy,” he says. He is holding an unlit cigar.

  “She had the baby?”

  “Last night. Eight pounds, seven ounces.” He thumps a gloved hand on the steering wheel. “Cutest little fucker you’ve ever seen.”

  “I get to come in? I get to see them?”

  “You’re the first person she asked for. Her grandmother went home last night and hasn’t even come back yet, that bitch.” A box of Dunkin’ Donuts sits next to him on the seat. He sets the cigar on the dashboard, pulls out an apple fritter, and shoves it into his mouth while making a left turn. “Take one,” he mumbles. There’s a shadow of stubble from his ears to h
is throat, and he has the wild, frenzied look of someone who has been awake for too long.

  “Have you named him?”

  He inhales and exhales through his nostrils, grinning. “Jack.” He turns on the radio. It’s Prince, singing “I Would Die 4 U,” and Travis sings along. I smile without thinking about it, for the first time in a while. This is not what I would have wanted, not what I imagined when I was younger. When I sat up on the roof with him, waiting for falling stars, I did not think that someday we would be riding in a car together, going to visit his wife and baby. But it really is good to see him this happy, after so many days of watching him go to work in the khaki jumpsuit.

  When we get to the hospital, he leads me to the maternity ward, going the long way, pointing out where the pop and candy machines are, the elevator to the morgue, where he saw an old naked man being led back to his room by the nurses. He’s been in every hallway, he says; Deena went into labor at eleven o’clock the night before, and he’d had so much nervous energy that the doctors hadn’t wanted him around until the very end.

  “What this place needs is a fucking arcade or something,” he says, pushing the button for the elevator. “All the magazines are dumb. They keep the television on the goddamn Nova channel.”

  Samuel was in the neonatal unit in Kansas City, and I remember the walls and the floors being very, very white, but the maternity ward of Kerrville Memorial has light pink walls, with flowers painted close to the floor so maybe, if you were on a lot of medication, you might think they were real and really growing there. There are even oversized bumblebees, smiling, their eyes pleasantly dazed.

  I follow him to Deena’s room, right around the corner. It’s still sunny out, but you would never know it in here, with dark, heavy curtains covering the window. She is lying in the bed by the door, her head propped up by large pillows, looking up at the television high in the corner of the opposite wall. The sheets and blankets come up to her shoulders, but I can see she’s wearing her own pink robe.