More Than Enough (10 page)

*   *   *

If you don't want to talk to someone, you don't look at them. My little sister evidently hadn't learned that yet because she was staring right at the bum next to us. She was a beginner when it came to interacting with strangers. She still thought everybody in the world was more or less safe. It was hard not to look at him, though, with his feet covered nearly to the knee in plastic bags. Jenny stared right at the Gap bag, and the bum seized the moment, lifting that leg up and winking at her. “How do you like my galoshes?” he asked.

She looked away, pretending he wasn't there, and put her napkin in her lap. “At Janet Spencer's house,” she said, “they always put their napkins in their laps as soon as they sit at the table. Then they say grace. They fold their arms like this.” She folded her arms.

“We're not saying grace,” I said.

“They work, believe it or not,” the woman who sat opposite the bum said. The woman was extremely thin, especially in the face, where you could see the bony round shape of her eye sockets. She wore this fake fur that was matted down with water.

“I'm sure they do,” my mother said, smiling and pretending to admire the bum's weird footwear.

“You have to improvise sometimes,” the man said. “You have to be handy and work with what you've got.”

“It looks like you do just fine for yourself,” my mother said. I didn't know why she had to speak to them. They didn't look dangerous, but they were dirty and wet and had that smell of the outdoors on them. What struck me most about the woman was the fact that she had once been beautiful. Her face was too thin now and she was soaked, her wet, shoulder-length hair black as ink and stuck together in strands. But you could see the places in her face where the beauty had worn down and left her bony and tired in the eyes.

“I'm not going to tell you a story about a bus ticket I need to buy,” the man said. “This is my entire story.” He hit the bag of aluminum cans. “Instead, I'm just going to ask if you might have a little money to spare. Five dollars, maybe?” He looked at me and winked. I was astonished, then angry. That was a hell of a lot to ask for. We did not have five dollars to give away.

“Maxwell is trying the direct approach on my advice,” his girlfriend, or whoever she was, said. “Just tell them what you want. People don't like to be lied to. It's a matter of mutual respect.”

My mother was fishing through her purse. “We don't have any money to give you,” I said. But she suddenly had three dollars in her hand for him.

“No,” I said. The bum had his hand ready to grab for the money, but he held it back then, as if afraid something might bite him.

“Don't you tell me no,” my mother said.

“We can't afford this.”

My mother leveled her eyes at me. “I determine that. You got it?” I nodded, though I couldn't believe it. More than any of us, my mother understood that our family had certain limits, that we had to be careful, that we'd be lucky just to get what we needed. Besides, she had never been an especially charitable person. She'd always been defensive and careful with money.

“Kids,” the bum said, taking her money. I hated him. “Thank you very much.” Then he winked at her cigarettes on the table and said, “And maybe two or three of those for later.” That was funny because his girlfriend had been smoking nonstop since we sat down. All the same, my mother gave them three cigarettes. I didn't get it.

“Honesty is the best policy,” his girlfriend said. “Just ask for what you want. Don't make up stories. Am I right?”

They stood up, seeming to realize that it was time for them to go. The man removed an invisible hat from his head and tipped it at my mother. I didn't understand why they left then since it was still raining hard, and I watched them walk into the storm, the enormous load of aluminum cans on the man's back and the odd plastic bags fastened to his feet. They weren't hurrying, just walking in the downpour the way only people who have nowhere to go must be used to doing. It depressed me, watching them like that, though I still thought we'd been crazy to give them what we needed for ourselves, which my mother must have seen on my face when I turned around and looked at her again.

“I make the decisions,” she said. “Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

*   *   *

It turned out that our charity cases were criminals, since they'd left without paying for their coffees. The waitress had a stand-off over their abandoned table with her manager, a young guy with a soft, fat Mormon face and a skinny body, who shook his head at her, dug into his lardy cheek with his thumb and forefinger because it hurt him to say, though he kept saying it anyway, “Someone has to pay for this. It's your job to keep an eye on your tables.” This incident made me feel good; it showed that at fifteen I had sound judgment.

Our waitress—the one who had been stiffed by Maxwell and his girlfriend—was a plump woman whose chin sunk into her loose neck. Her name tag said
SANDY
. “We're sorry about your table,” my mother said.

“What happened to you, honey?” the waitress asked me. I didn't know what she meant at first. Then I remembered that my arm was still in a sling, and I felt what I'd felt over the last few weeks when people asked me about it—appreciative and self-conscious. I liked people to notice. It always surprised me how many strangers actually cared about what happened to people they didn't know.

“Just an accident,” I said.

“It's a good thing your mother's a nurse,” Sandy said, noticing my mother's all-white Oak Groves uniform. Then she read my T-shirt out loud. “Team Player. You must be on the basketball team. That how you hurt your arm?” People always thought I was a basketball player because of my height.

“No.” I hated it when I had to tell people I didn't play the sport, especially after Mr. Bryant had asked me to try out for the team. It made me feel like a failure at something I had never done.

“She must do something, though,” Sandy said, gesturing at Jenny's uniform.

“I'm on the drill team,” Jenny said.

My mother smiled. “My son is always getting hurt,” she said. I guessed she'd said that just to be pleasant and conversational, since it was hardly true. I was a cautious, unathletic kid who almost never got hurt. In my free time, I did things like read—mostly science fiction novels. I liked to sit around and think about the possibility of other planets out there being populated by intelligent life. That was one of my favorite thoughts, even though it seemed unlikely, even though I was more or less convinced that the earth was the only minuscule spot of life in all of space and time. It was nice to think that we were not entirely alone. I also liked to build models—mostly of war planes from World War II—though they were expensive, and at fifteen I was getting too old for that sort of thing. I thought a lot about war, whether I would or would not be afraid, what it would be like to kill or be killed. I thought about being a pilot, about flying, about doing that despite the fact that my vision was imperfect. (My mother would often remind me that military pilots needed to have perfect eyesight.) I wanted to see the earth, America, Salt Lake City, the Downs, my street, our little duplex from the sky, where everything, lakes and mountains, seemed tiny and insignificant and under your power. Otherwise, I did not have a lot of interests. If I didn't have my face in a book, I was watching TV. My favorite programs other than sci-fi shows were the nature documentaries about the struggles of the insect world, about microbes and bacteria, about the carnivores of Africa. That was drama, and the fact that that sort of struggle was not fictionalized, was real, gave me a charge even though I was anything but a carnivore of Africa, even though I was this pale ectomorph with straight black hair that, no matter how often I washed it, was always a little greasy and lay flat on my head. I wasn't the most handsome kid, especially in contrast to my sister and mother, who were beauties. Later, I would become better-looking. But at that time, I was in an ugly phase. The fine wire rims and oval lenses of my new eyeglasses gave me a sophisticated, intellectual look that I'd never had before. But that wasn't quite enough. With my shirt off, I was all bones, sternum, ribs, and clavicles. A triangular patch of acne above my nose flared up weekly, bloody and conspicuous because I couldn't stop myself from bothering it, picking at it. I was awkward, avoided social situations, and probably hated myself a little more than the average teenager. The fact that I'd stood up to Danny Olsen and fought him was less a reflection of me and more about a generalized anger I'd felt at that time in my life, toward nothing or everything so far as I could tell. I'd just be pissed off, bitter on some days, and had no idea what to do with it, how to use it, if anger was useful, which was not a question I knew how to answer. As I would see later, I certainly didn't know how to use it on the day that Mr. Warner died.

“That's not true,” I said. “I'm not always getting hurt.”

My mother smiled. She was not going to be dragged into a tussle in front of our waitress. She was settling down, exercising an elegant self-control. The way we appeared in front of others was important to her, and the fact that our family, always broke, always scraping by, must not have looked too good from the outside, was probably something about us that she couldn't love easily. “You two may have whatever you want on the menu,” she said to Jenny and me.

This permission was unusual, considering the fact that we rarely ate out, much less ordered whatever we wanted. “How are we going to pay for that?” I asked.

“Really!” Jenny almost jumped out of her seat.

“We'll manage,” my mother said. “Don't you want anything, Steven?”

In fact, I was starving and would have ordered the most expensive item on the menu—the New York Strip or the Seafood Fry—had I liked steak or seafood. Instead, I ordered the Dee's Double Burger with onion rings and the Double Brownie Hot Fudge Sundae for dessert. Then Jenny ordered the Seafood Fry only because it was one of the most expensive items on the menu. “You won't even like that,” I said. “It's seafood.”

“I like seafood,” she said.

“You don't know what seafood is.”

“I do, and I like it.”

“Don't let her order that,” I told my mother.

“Jenny can make her own decisions,” she said.

“Jesus. I don't understand this. I don't understand why you're letting things get so crazy.”

My mother didn't even look at me. She just informed Sandy that we were in a rush and that she'd tip generously if Sandy could make it quick. “There,” she said once Sandy had gone. “It's nice to see that you two are hungry.” She lit a cigarette, and I could see that the hand that she held the cigarette with was trembling a little, just barely, that she was still frightened or shaken up and hiding it pretty well. “Do you have your answer yet, Steven?” she asked.

“My answer to what?”

“You were supposed to be thinking about something.” I knew what she meant, but I didn't let on. “About why I work at Oak Groves. About why I had to hold a dead man in my arms today.” She waited for my response. “Well?”

“I'm still thinking.”

“I know,” Jenny said.

“This is between your brother and me.”

I had to sit there and ponder that question because in all honesty I didn't know the answer or why she was even asking the question. “I'm still thinking,” I said, because she was giving me this cold stare. Sandy had already brought our waters by that time, and I had begun to notice something very strange and more than a little unsettling. Over the speakers a very soft choral version of “Joy to the World” was playing despite the fact that Christmas had happened two months ago. That seemed wrong—Christmas music out of season. It gave me that feeling of something having passed, something out of reach and gone, the same feeling I got every year when I saw people dragging their trees out to the curb to be picked up for trash. All those dead trees lying on the curbs of a whole city—that was a depressing thing to see. They shouldn't have been playing Christmas music, not in February. “I'm thinking. I'm thinking,” I said.

“I'll give you the answer. The answer to why I work at Oak Groves is that I love you. That's the answer, Steven,” she said, though in a not particularly loving way.

“I love you, too,” I said in a not particularly loving way.

“I do it because I love you,” she said again, maybe because she was trying to convince me of it this time. But all I heard was her nerves, her shaky voice.

“I love you, too,” Jenny said in her frightened little girl's voice. At that moment, I hated the way she reverted to being a kid. I wanted to hit her. Against whatever was happening that afternoon, I was pretty sure that fear and smallness would not help us.

“This is between Mom and me,” I said to her.

“I do it because I want you to have food on the table. I do it because I want you to have insurance. I want you to be safe.”

“Thank you,” I said.

We stared at each other then for a long time, my mother smoking down her cigarette and lighting another while Jenny drew hearts with her index finger in the steamy window next to us. “Does anyone want to hear the Ten Commandments now?” my sister asked.

“No,” I said.

“I'd like to say them. I really would.”

“Later, sweetie,” my mother said to her.

The food came then—the burger, two open buns with cheese melted over the beef patties on one bun and a stack of lettuce, onion, and tomato on the other bun. The portion of onion rings was enormous, taking up the rest of the plate. I wasn't used to restaurant food—the amounts, the display—and it did seem to me as if unexpected riches sat before me, though those were not the sentiments I tried to convey when I said, “And here's the food on the table.”