Uncle Buzz nodded at the television.
Outside, the LeSabre honked. Shelby giggled and nudged Victor again. “She was worried that you’d gotten lost when you went out. She acted like you were gone for hours. Just make sure from now on you’re ready by quarter of three, and she won’t get in a tizzy. Do you have a watch?”
“No,” Victor had not had a watch since he was a little boy.
“Tell her you need one. She’ll get you one. She won’t mind.”
The Le Sabre honked again, a long, sustained, impatient honk.
“Jesus Christ Almighty,” said Shelby. “See ya, Daddy.”
Uncle Buzz lifted his hand. “Bye,” he said. His voice was very soft, and Victor wondered if this is as a result of his sickness. That along with his pronounced drawl made his goodbye sound remarkably like the bleat of a lamb. As Shelby opened the front door, introducing a gash of sunlight into the dim room, Uncle Buzz spoke again. “He can borry mine.”
Shelby turned, “What?”
“My wristwatch,” Uncle Buzz raised his head a bit from the back of the sofa where it rested. In the shard of sunlight across his face he squinted. “He can borry my Timex with the gold stretchband. It’s old, but it runs as good as ever. It just don’t stay on my wrist no more. My arms is got so thin…”
Shelby looked at Victor. Her face was calm, set, unreadable. Victor blushed.
The horn honked again. Shelby pushed open the screen door and belted out; in a voice so loud it made the hairs on the back of Victor’s neck stand up, “Just a minute! I’m talking to Daddy! Calm down!”
She tried without success to slam the pneumatic screen door, “That’s nice of you, Daddy. But I doubt your watch’ll fit Victor. Look how skinny he is. Gum’ll get him one that fits.”
She looked hard at Victor, “Let’s go before she honks at me again and I have to kill her. See you, Daddy.”
Uncle Buzz had turned back to the talk show on the television. Shelby marched out and down the steps, and Victor stood frozen in her absence. After an interminable moment he lifted his hand to Uncle Buzz. “Thanks,” he said, hardly loud enough for anyone but himself to hear. Uncle Buzz nodded, however, and Victor then hurried to the car.
The restaurant had been in the family ever since Gum’s late husband, Victor’s grandfather, bought it upon his retirement from the Coast Guard in the late nineteen-seventies, and Victor’s own father had worked there throughout his childhood until he, and shortly afterwards Uncle Buzz, entered the Coast Guard themselves. All this was explained to Victor as his grandmother showed him around the empty restaurant, pointing out the various things that would be relevant to his position as the sole busboy and dishwasher. He would have help with the bussing on Fridays and Saturdays, when, his grandmother whispered; a Mexican boy would be in to help him. “But don’t count on him too much,” his grandmother said conspiratorially, “they work hard when they come, but they don’t always come when they’re supposed to. They’re on their own time…”
Not long after his tour, the other employees began to wander in, first three blonde waitresses who all looked like the same person at different ages, a couple of bikers who did the cooking, and one small, muscular young Latino who, Gum whispered to Victor, was the one who worked hard, but only when he wanted to.
For a while there was nothing for him to do but sit at the bar and drink a coke out of a Styrofoam cup as everybody else scurried about the restaurant, getting things ready for the evening. Besides managing the place, Gum served as bartender, and she mentioned to Victor, as she set up the bar while he drank his coke and watched her, that if it weren’t for the regulars who came in every night, on season and off, to drink, she wouldn’t be able to stay in business. Shelby parked herself on a stool behind the cash register by the front door and read from a paperback book, every now and then putting it aside to chat with the waitresses, who peered curiously over at Victor.
After his grandmother finished setting up her bar, she called the waitresses over from their various stations. “Jean, Dottie, Kelli, come on over here and meet Victor, my other grandbaby. Victor’s Eddie’s boy; he lives in Raleigh with his mama. He’s going to be working here while William’s in treatment. Victor, this is Dottie, she’s been with us about ten years now, and this is Dottie’s daughter Jean, and this is Jean’s daughter Kelli. Dottie is my first cousin. So she’s family, too, all three of them are. Isn’t that something?”
“Not really,” called Shelby from the cash register, “just about all the white people down here are related. So be careful who you sleep with.”
Gum ignored Shelby. The waitresses all smiled and offered their hands to Victor one at a time. “We’re pleased to meet you,” said the oldest one, Dottie, who was short and looked like a plumper, softer, more relaxed version of Gum. “Your grandma has always said she wished you would come visit.”
All three of the waitresses were dressed identically in short black skirts and blue and white checked blouses with sailboats embroidered over the right breast. The two younger ones, Jean and Kelli, smiled at Victor with the gentle condescension of older women over young boys, then went about their business. When they had gone, his grandmother turned on the television that perched on a shelf above the beer cooler and refilled Victor’s Styrofoam cup with coke. They watched the muted television for a while, and then suddenly his grandmother turned to Victor and looked him directly in the eyes for what seemed like the first time.
“You’ve been here before!” she said. “Lord, I just remembered. We came here after your granddaddy’s funeral, me, you, your daddy, and William, and you sat here at the bar and drank a coke just like your doing now, and you were such a little thing you couldn’t even see the TV, so I had to put you in my lap. Do you remember that?”
Victor did not. To imagine himself or for that matter anyone else in his grandmother’s lap was difficult.
“Well,” his grandmother shook her head and smiled in that peculiar way he noticed she had, of smiling a smile that drew in her lips and pulled the corners of her mouth downward like a frown, but which was somehow unmistakably still a smile. “Well,” she said again, and Victor noticed that her accent was such that when she prefaced a statement with the word ‘Well,’ which she often did, it came out sounding like “whale.”
“Whale, we enjoyed having you.”
Victor had never really worked before, and he was astonished by the sheer physical and mental relief with which he took to the tasks of gathering the dishes, washing, and storing them. He had no contact with the other workers in the kitchen aside from brief and soon forgotten introductions and every now and then a curt nod, and once the dinner hours were underway, he moved from task to task at a steady pace that was almost comfortable. At one point, while he was making the rounds of the dining area to pick up the bus pans that were full, he caught a glance of his cousin Shelby perched on her stool behind the cash register/display case peering, with her glasses off, into a paperback book which she held with one hand just a few inches from her face. Not for the first time, Victor wished that he could read the way Shelby was reading, with an obvious lack of effort. To read for any amount of time, unless he was reading something sexy, usually put him to sleep. He moved on to collect the overflowing bus pan behind the bar, and with a surge of pride he could not help but feel, he overheard his grandmother say to one of the aged, overweight patrons of the bar, that he was turning out to be a good, steady worker.
It was only when the pace slowed that Victor felt a craving for a cigarette. Having left his own pack in his sea bag, he rinsed his hands and went up to the cash register to ask one off of Shelby. She looked up as he approached and smiled her