The People We Keep(6)
I tell her the truth to change the subject. “You know that guitar I got for my birthday?”
“Yeah.” She turns her head away from the shakers as she pours, so the pepper dust won’t make her sneeze.
“I played at the Blue Moon last night.”
“Oh, girlie!”
“Just open mic.”
“How’d you do?” she says, holding her fist to her mouth, then, “You did great,” before I even answer. “I know you did.”
“I did okay.”
“Well, where was my engraved invitation? Your dad go?”
“No.” I balance shaker lids in a pile while I’m waiting for her to finish the next pepper. She’s pouting like a little kid. “You’re busy,” I say, “I didn’t want to bother you.” Partly I feel bad I didn’t invite her and partly I’m just embarrassed for her. The pouting isn’t as cute as she thinks it is. She would have stuck out like a sore thumb in that crowd. They were all odd ducks, but Margo, she’s a different kind.
“Well, that’s not a bother; that’s exciting.” Pepper spills. She uses her hand to corral it to the end of the counter and sweeps it into the shaker. Only a little ends up on the floor. “Hey, wait. How’d you get all the way out to the Blue Moon?”
I smile. “You don’t want to know.”
“What are you doing to me?” She swats my shoulder with the towel she keeps tucked in her apron and gets up to go behind the counter. “You know I don’t have money for bail just lying around.”
“I’ll save for my own bail. I have to go to summer school anyway, may as well be for good reason. Can I pull extra shifts? Keep me out of trouble,” I say, batting my eyelashes at her. I don’t tell her Matty and I talked about saving for a wedding. She’ll get too excited about dresses and flowers or launch into another lecture about Matty and how sixteen isn’t old enough to be making the kinds of decisions that aren’t easily undone, and either way, she’ll forget I ever asked about the extra shifts.
“Hon, things are tight.” She looks me over and sighs. “Let me see what I can do. I’ll crunch numbers and check the schedule.”
“You don’t have to pay me overtime or even full on the extra shifts. It’ll be like undertime. Or I’ll just go for tips like I used to.”
She shakes her head. “I double you up on Lorraine, she’ll get pissy with me. There’s not enough tables to have two girls on at the same time.” She looks me right in the eyes. Margo can read my face better than anyone. “Let me think on it,” she says.
* * *
Margo dated my dad in high school and then they tried to date again after my mom left us. That was back when we lived over the Wash ’n Fold on Ames Street, before we got the motorhome. The whole apartment smelled like soapsuds.
When they went on dates, Margo would pick up my dad so she could see me too. She’d braid my hair or help me dress my dolls while he rounded up his wallet, shoes, and keys and checked the score on his radio one last time.
Margo always wore bright pink lipstick. Her red hair was all sprayed up like a helmet of big round bubbles, even though the other women in town were wearing their hair down and getting it feathered. She was thick around the middle, but she always wore miniskirts. When I asked my fourth grade teacher how long a paper had to be, she said, “Like a skirt. Long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to keep it interesting.” Margo’s skirts were always interesting. They covered everything, but just barely. And when she moved, you couldn’t help but watch, just in case they didn’t. She knew it too.
“You gotta maximize your potential,” she told me once, flexing her foot before slipping it back into her impossibly high pink pump. “I don’t got a bitty waist, but I’ve got killer gams. Play up what you got, toots. That’s the secret.”
I don’t know how long she and my dad tried to date. All I remember is that one day she took me to the lunch counter out at the Wal-Mart in Harristown instead of just eating at her place or making fluffernutters at our apartment. She wore shiny blue cream eye shadow. In the car on the way over, she even let me dig the little plastic tub out of her purse and smear some across my eyelids so we’d match. We had soft pretzels with big white flakes of salt; hot dogs with mustard, ketchup, and relish; and cherry slushies.
“What I want you to remember, girl, is that I’m not breaking up with you,” she said, looking me straight in the eyes. “You and me, we’re still good. Okay? You remember that.”
I tore pieces off my pretzel and shoved them in my mouth, washing them down with slushie without hardly chewing, until I got brain freeze and my eyes teared.
“It’s nothing to cry over, honey.” She spit on her napkin and wiped my cheeks hard. “Your father’s a good man, April. He always means to be a good man. He just… he gets in the way of himself, you know?”
I didn’t know, but I nodded.
“None of this is about you. No one in their right mind would leave you.” Her eyes got wide after she said it, and she put her hand over her mouth. “I mean… I mean… Now, sweetie, you haven’t even touched that hot dog yet.”
I ate it all. Every last bit, like it was my job, to show Margo how perfect I could be when I tried. I didn’t want to give her any reason to break up with me too.