All That's Left to Tell(16)

The man at the picnic table watched her looking at the menu and then said, “Everything’s good!”

She smiled at him and said, “Is that so? Any recommendations?”

“The burgers are great. That’s what we’re waiting on,” he said. “So’s the turkey. You’re not a vegetarian, are you?”

“No.”

“Good thing, because you’d be out of luck.”

The man who must have been Ed stepped out of the small screen door in his trailer. He was younger, with a blue T-shirt that read, I may be unemployed, out of shape, short on cash, and drunk, but I sure am fun! He nodded at her as he looked her over, lifted the cover of the grill and flipped the burgers, and then turned back to her and said, “Happy to help you now.” He took out a pad of paper and a pen, and she ordered a turkey sandwich.

The man at the table said, “Hell, Ed, it’s not like you got a line of folks here. Can’t you remember a simple turkey sandwich?” Ed didn’t smile, but instead gave a half salute without looking, and walked back into the trailer.

She waited at a separate table in the sun. She was unused to having nothing to do with her hands, since at the motel she was either changing sheets, sweeping floors, attending to guests, or playing games with Lucy, her daughter, who stood at the knees of the truckers and campers while they were checking in at the desk, and often asked, “You stayin’ at my house?” At the end of the day, when she and Jack lay back in bed, usually with Lucy asleep between them, she would sometimes say, “Mercy,” which was a word her grandmother had used to express surprise, but, in Claire’s case, she thought of the work at the motel, loving Lucy, attending to Jack, as a form of mercy that framed her life in ways she had, before this, never found imaginable.

“Where you coming from?” the man at the table asked.

“A little town just south of Merced.”

“And where you heading to?”

“Michigan.”

“No kidding?” He looked from her to the truck and back to her. Ed came out of the trailer with two prepared buns alongside chips, and flipped the burgers off the grill and closed up the sandwiches. When he slid them in front of the man and woman, he saluted again, and said, “Turkey sandwich is coming up.”

“It can take a while,” the man said after Ed had gone back in. “Sometimes you’d swear he’d wandered off into the woods to hunt the bird.”

The man and woman began eating their burgers. It struck her that the woman had yet to say a word. Claire looked directly at her and asked, “Do you live here in town?”

The man turned, and pointed toward the houses that lay along two stretches of road above the highway. “The blue one there. We walk up most afternoons to have lunch here with Ed.”

Finally, the woman spoke. “Michigan? That’s a long way to drive all on your own.”

“It is,” she said. “But I really didn’t have much choice.”

“Visiting family?” the woman asked.

“You could say that, I guess.”

The woman was wearing a hat with a large white brim. Claire began to feel her own scalp prickle with the heat.

“Could you say otherwise?” the man asked.

“My father’s ill,” she said. “Congestive heart failure. He’s in the hospital. So I’m going back to see him.”

The man looked down at his sandwich, and his face darkened, as if this revelation was something he didn’t want to witness. The woman said, “I’m so sorry.”

Inexplicably, Claire felt compelled to add, “The woman who called and told me he was in the hospital—I didn’t even recognize her name. I haven’t seen him in years. I haven’t even spoken to him, and I don’t even know if he knows he has a granddaughter.”

The man looked up at her again, started chewing with some speed, swallowed with difficulty, then said, “Why the hell not?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I said, why the hell not? How can it happen that a man has a granddaughter and doesn’t even know it?”

“Charlie, that’s not our business,” the woman said.

“The man has a granddaughter, Maeve. Child of his only child. And she never even told him.”

Claire watched him go back to his burger and take an oversized bite.

“How do you know that?” she asked. “How do you know I’m his only child?”

He waved his hand at her; through his teeth as he chewed, he said, “It’s written all over your face. All over your face. I’ve seen a thing or two in my time. What a shame.”

At that point Ed banged through the screen door with her sandwich in a paper bag, and walked it over to her and took her money. “Threw in a pickle and chips no charge,” he said with an apologetic smile. “Never mind him,” and he jerked his head toward the man at the table. He’d clearly overheard the conversation. “Figures he’s the local savant. Retired from the railroad, and he sits here every afternoon and guesses about the people come through. Last week he guessed someone was a circus clown. Turned out he’d done a stint as a rodeo clown, and the guy was amazed. Charlie here said he could tell by the way he walked.”

She thanked him and then climbed back into her truck, and when she came around the woman raised her hand and said, “Have a safe trip to Michigan,” but the man wouldn’t look up and just shook his head.