Cherry Money Baby (2 page)

“I got hot water for about two seconds. Blame Cherry,” said Stew. He arranged himself in Cherry’s seat with the cereal and a carton of milk. Cherry checked the clock on the stove and sat between the boys.

“Eat quickly, all right? We gotta go soon.”

“Go where?” Stew asked.

“I got work, genius,” Cherry said. “You’re driving me, like always.”

“Can’t today,” said Stew, mouth full of cereal. “Pop’s got me driving out to Marlborough to pick up a new muffler.”

Cherry’s jaw dropped. She looked to Pop. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

He shrugged. “You can walk it. It’s not that far.”

“Work starts in five minutes, and it’s a fifteen-minute walk!”

“Then I guess you better start running,” Stew said.

“Fuck!” Cherry jumped up, knocking over her chair. “
This
is why I need a fucking car, Pop! You said you were gonna fix up one of the old junkers at the shop for me!”

Pop leaned away as if her anger were a hailstorm. “I will, soon as I can.”

“You been saying that for two years!
Goddamn it!
”

She grabbed her keys and slammed open the screen door, making for Hope Ave. at a dead sprint.

For the record: Cherry knew she was a crazy girl. She had been since forever. The oldest example, the earliest moment of craziness Cherry could recall, transpired on a humid Tuesday afternoon, after a morning spent doodling with chalk on the sticky-hot driveway. Cherry was bent over her flower, scribbling with a diminishing pink nib, when she heard shouting inside the trailer. She was seven, knees tacky with driveway grit, pink tint on her neck and shoulders from two hours in the hazy sun. The screen door slammed open.

Here the memory skips a frame. It was later, the humidity had hatched thunder and rain, and Pop sat at the kitchen table, just . . . paralyzed. Cherry’s mother dragged a flower-print suitcase to a big red sports car of a make and model that all of Cherry’s subsequent automotive education could not discern through memory’s downpour. There was a man at the wheel. Her mother did not look back or say good-bye. The suitcase’s casters jittered over the driveway where Cherry’s chalk flowers were rapidly dissolving.

She was too young to get it, what was happening, but knew she now hated her mother. In her childish understanding of the situation, the chalk, which her mother had purchased, was somehow to blame. To hurt Momma, Cherry threw the yellow Crayola chalk box at the big red sports car and screamed, “I don’t even
want
it!”

Momma didn’t notice. Trunk slam. Door slam. Lightning flash. The brake lights flared, and the red mystery car was gone, taking her mother with it.

This is what Cherry discovered about herself: while her brother hid in his room and her father stared glumly into his coffee, it was Cherry alone, seven-year-old Cherry, who, in so many words, told their selfish, disloyal, inconstant mom to go fuck herself.

She’d worked at Burrito Barn since freshman year, when it was Jeb’s Chicken Jamboree. In addition to her perfect attendance, Cherry Kerrigan was a master burrito roller. A monkey could fold a taco, but it took an artist to make the perfect burrito. Roll too tight and it exploded in your mouth, too loose and the filling landed in your lap. Burrito rolling wasn’t a career plan or anything, but she liked having something she was good at, unlike school. Working hard, getting paid — these were things to be proud of.

Cherry arrived at ten thirty, soaked through and breathing hard. Her manager glanced up from the break-room whiteboard.

“What are you doing here?”

Cherry took a drink from the bubbler. “I work here. Remember?”

“Not today you don’t.” He pointed at the whiteboard, a grid of indecipherable squiggles. “You’re working tomorrow, the twenty-fifth.”

“I can’t work on Monday. I go to school.”

The manager squinted at her, looked back at the board. “You do? How old are you?”

“Also, you didn’t tell me I had the day off.”

The manager tapped his chin with the marker, leaving an ink soul patch. “Oh, yeah.”

“So?”

“So, you’re still not working today. It’s not on the board.” He gestured to the squiggle grid as if this explained everything. “See?”

Cherry plucked the marker from his hand and wrote her name in the 10:30–4:30 slot. “Voilà. It is written.” She handed him the marker. “Okay?”

He swallowed and nodded. He was a little afraid of her. That was fine by Cherry.

The burrito station was a long table with a sneeze guard and a sink at one end. The blotter was stenciled with burrito-rolling instructions, which Cherry largely ignored. Above the sink was a three-paneled safety poster. The poster featured two characters: Red Guy and Green Guy. Red Guy was choking, and Green Guy was performing the Heimlich maneuver. Some joker had drawn a fourth panel in which Red and Green were smoking cigarettes, like they’d just had sex. The poster
did
look dirty. Once you saw it, you couldn’t unsee it. Though in Cherry’s version, Red Guy was a skinny burrito roller with her hair dyed blond, and Green Guy wasn’t green at all, but coffee colored, with a leaf-rustle voice and warm, soft hands.

Working the register was Ned, a boy Cherry knew from school. Kids called him Ned the Sped because he took special ed classes. Cherry and Ned were Speds together until eighth grade, when Cherry had graduated to Below Average while Ned stayed Way Below Average. Cherry just called him Ned. When you took special ed, you called
yourself
a Sped. You didn’t need reminding.

The morning passed. The lunch rush came and went. Cherry reheated her twentieth package of Zesty Amp-inadas. Ned was picking his nose when two girls approached the register. They weren’t local. Their fancy clothes were from catalogs with deck chairs and sailboats: visors and white polo shirts and bug-eye sunglasses that hid their features. They were probably wearing high-heeled sandals. Cherry pretended to need something under the counter and checked.

Yup.

Nobody dressed like that in Aubrey, not even in the nicer parts.

The girls read the menu, the dark-haired one tapping her chin. Her blond friend’s lips kinked at the end in a perma-grimace. The bitchy blonde mumbled something, and the pretty brunette giggled.

“Hush, Span. Not everything can be Nobu.”

She had a British accent. Because, of course.

Ned cleared his throat. “Howdy and welcome to Burrito Barn. Would you like to try our Border Burrito with Chimmi-Salsa Tater Stackers?”

The dark-haired girl gave Ned a megawatt smile that made her look somehow familiar, though maybe it was only that all rich people looked like they came from the same crystalline gene pool.

“Two . . . Win-Chiladas,” she read from the menu, her accent making the ridiculous words sound sophisticated. “And Perrier.”

“Who?” said Ned.

“We don’t have Perrier. Just soda,” Cherry said with her best customer-service smile. “I recommend cherry. It’s my favorite.”

The brunette smiled back. “Two cherry colas, then.”

The blonde made a face like she was choking something back.

Cherry rolled the Win-Chiladas, and the girls took a corner table. Ned stared at them.

“How’s the view?”

“I’m pretty sure she’s famous,” said Ned.

“How can you tell?”

“Famous people wear sunglasses inside.”

“Oh, yeah. Good point.”

It was the typical midafternoon lull. Standing still drove her ape-shit bonkers, so she wiped down her station and worked to unclog the finicky soda fountain. Her mind wandered as she worked, drifting back to her poster fantasy. The coffee-colored hands had unfastened her bra (and here was where
real
imagination took over; Cherry was seven-tenths a virgin) and were working their way south when a noise yanked her out of the daydream.

Someone was screaming. The bitchy blonde jumped to her feet. Necks swiveled. The other girl, the brunette, was doubled over like she was laughing, but no sound escaped her throat. She clawed at her collar, clutching her neck in the international sign for
Help me, I’m dying.

Burrito Barn was frozen. The patrons, the manager with his mop, Ned the Sped mouth-breathing at the register — everyone stood stock-still, staring at the choking woman like she was doing performance art.

They can’t move,
Cherry thought.

They can’t move.

I can move.

She dropped her rag, ran one-two-three steps to the counter; she swung her legs up and over, and then another four strides across the dining-room linoleum, slipping once on the spilled cola. The choking girl’s face had turned lavender, not red like the poster. Cherry slipped her arms under the girl’s and heaved. She folded her hands into a big fist and punched
in and up, in and up,
just like the poster said. The girl’s visor had fallen off, and Cherry could see the dark swirl of hair and the pale scalp underneath.

With a wet, thick hack, something popped out. The girl held her hands to her mouth and caught the gummy brown obstruction. Cherry helped her to a chair and knelt in front of her. Color was returning to her face. Damp hair clung to her cheeks and forehead. All the beauty had been squeezed out of her.

“You okay?” Cherry said.

The girl nodded, clutching the obstruction to her chest like something precious. Her eyes, tearful and bloodshot, fell to Cherry’s name tag.

“Cherry?” she wheezed, her voice the texture of powdered soap.

“That’s me.”

The paralysis in the room was broken. The girl’s friend rushed to her side, weeping, kissing her forehead. They hugged each other. A sound like rain filled Cherry’s ears.

Applause.

Cherry wandered, dazed, back to her burrito station. People clapped her on the back. Her manager appeared — he’d lost his visor, too — and took her by the shoulders. Cherry felt herself ushered into the back room, a fog filling her brain like steam from the morning’s shower. She couldn’t think. She wasn’t sure she could breathe.

“Holy shit, holy shit.” The manager literally jumped up and down. He locked the break-room door. “Oh, my God. I need to call the cops. No! The paper! No, fuck the paper. I’m calling
People
magazine.”

“I need some water,” Cherry said. The room was spinning much more than usual.

“Cherry, snap out of it. Don’t you realize what you’ve done?”

“Huh?”

“That was Ardelia Deen!” the manager said. “You just saved a movie star!”