can always just take a pack from behind the bar,” she paused. “But not while there’s customers. It doesn’t matter. Here you go,” she rummaged around in the big black vinyl tote she used as a purse and held a nearly empty pack out toward him.
“Thank you,” he said, putting it behind his ear. “What are you reading?”
She picked up the book from where she laid it down on the display case beside the cash register and held the cover out for him to see. It was yellow, with the stylized silhouette of the face of a genderless figure with full features. The single word Cane was printed in stark brown letters across the top of the book.
“Oh,” he said, “I’ve never heard of it. What’s it about?”
“It’s not about anything. It’s poetry,” she said.
Victor grimaced.
Shelby laughed. Her laugh was silent, a soft rocking of her body from deep inside. “What’s the matter?” she said. “You don’t like poetry?”
Victor shrugged. Not being a reader, he hadn’t read much poetry outside of bathroom graffiti.
Shelby rocked again. “You’re a boy,” she said. “Boys don’t develop any sensibility until they’re in their twenties. If even then. I’m not even going to bother reading this to you. What kind of music do you like?”
Shelby looked at him, then lowered her brow like a gorilla, thrust out her chin, and pretended to shove her hands into pockets. It was only when she spoke, though, in an unnaturally low and gruff voice, that he realized she was mimicking him.
“Uh, I don’t know…” she said. “I like, gangster rap, I guess, and metal…” she laughed and pushed her glasses back up into her viper’s tangle of curls.
Victor blushed. Her pose, when she was mimicking him, was a pretty accurate reflection of how he was now standing, and yet it was not just him, it was an absolute caricature of the archetypical sullen disaffected teenage boy. She could have been portraying any of the younger white guys in any kitchen, in any restaurant anywhere. With an unpleasant sensation, like that of a cold shower, it occurred to Victor that he was not unique.
Shelby poked him in the chest with the corner of her book. “Move. They’re trying to pay,” Victor turned and sure enough, an ancient couple wearing matching sun visors totteringly approached the register. “Let’s go to the beach tomorrow,” Shelby said to him as she reached for their bill, “then we can talk.”
Victor nodded and went back to work with a feeling of lightness that he could not put his finger on. It was only a little later, while bent over the sink scrubbing a burnt spot off the lip of a frying pan, that it came to him that, for the first time in his memory, he was looking forward to the next day.
The day’s, or rather, evening’s work, ended with the three of them, Victor, Shelby, and their grandmother, seated in a booth across from the bar, in the absolute silence that the grandmother demanded while she counted the day’s proceeds. When this was finished, all the coins rolled and all the bills banded and zipped into a bank bag, the grandmother leaned back and lit up a cigarette.
“It was a good night, for a Monday,” said Shelby.
“Not too bad,” says the grandmother. “We could always do better,” she hung her cigarette in one corner of her mouth and spoke out of the other one to Victor. “What did you think, honey? You seemed to keep up pretty good.”
Victor nodded.
“It’s a lot busier on the weekends,” his grandmother said. “We’ll have Oliver, the little Mexican boy help you with the dishes then, take him off the line. I don’t know, though, you might be able to handle it yourself.”
Victor could feel Shelby stiffen beside him “Gum, Oliver is not a little Mexican boy. He’s Salvadorian, for one thing, and he’s almost twenty-five years old. Why do you have to be so ignorant?”
The grandmother tapped the ash of her cigarette into a tray. “Little Oliver? He can’t be no twenty-five. He’s as twenty five as I am,” she says. “Did he tell you he was twenty-five? Lord, help me.”
“He showed me his green card.”
The grandmother snorted. “My Lord honey, you know as well as I do you can’t go by that! They make them things themselves so they can get jobs here and not have to go back where they came from. For all I know, his name ain’t even Oliver.”
“If that’s what you think, then you have no business letting him work here. You’re taking advantage of him.”
“I’m paying him, ain’t I? And just as much as I’d pay a real American. Don’t talk to me about taking advantage, when I was his age, I was getting less than a nickel for every oyster I’d bring into the Beaufort market from Core sound. Everything I do here with my Mexicans is on the up and up, not under the table like a lot of places around here…”
“Blah, blah, blah,” says Shelby. Her indignation seemed spent. The next question she asked was without judgment. “Are you paying Victor under the table?”
“’Course I am,” the grandmother winked at Victor. “He’s family. He ain’t going to turn me in. Are you, son?”
Victor smiled and shook his head.
Shelby rested her chin in her hands. “You don’t pay me under the table,” she said. “I’m family.”
“You’d turn me in,” the grandmother said, and lit another cigarette.
The three Flowers returned to a dark and silent house. Uncle Buzz had gone to bed, leaving vacant the living room sofa, which the grandmother immediately stripped of its cushions and tugged into the shape of a bed. This was to be Victor’s accommodation at night until the end of the week, when the bed Uncle Buzz was waiting for at the nursing facility would be available.
Although Victor dreaded the prospect of sleeping out in the open like this, he went immediately to sleep, and woke up early in the morning to the sound of a deep and persistent bark. A pale, pearly sunlight seeped in through the closed curtains of the living room and the doorway of the kitchen. Victor rose, padded down the hallway as quietly as he could to take a piss, and then let himself out the front door to sit on the concrete stoop and smoke the first cigarette of the day.
Though it was only just past dawn, the temperature outside was already swiftly rising, and Victor returned with relief to the cool darkness of the living room. He was torn between relishing this time to himself and wondering how soon it would end. He was afraid that turning on the television would disturb the women, so there was nothing to do but pad around the living room and look at things; the living room walls were covered with pictures and tiny shelves that held knick-knacks and samplers and such. There were framed photographs set atop a large white doily that draped over the top of the entertainment center shelves, and Victor crossed the room to look at these. The largest picture, a 5x7 school photograph of a chubby little girl was clearly Shelby at the age of about six or seven, recognizable from the tiny mole on her chin and the striking, yellow-green coloring of her eyes, but in all other respects the picture looked nothing like the person she was today; the little girls hair was parted severely and braided into two stiff pigtails that hung down to her chin, her glasses were missing, and her gap toothed smile was anxious, not at all like the present Shelby’s open grin. Beside this there was a larger color picture, this one a studio photograph, of a slightly younger version of his grandmother, her hair thicker and thoroughly dyed an unnatural chestnut color. She was posed beside a broad-shouldered, unsmiling man with iron gray, slicked back hair and formidable grooves in his face from the corner of his nose to the line of his jaw. Both his grandmother and the man, whom he assumed must be his dead grandfather, were dressed as if for church, his grandmother in a plain, light blue shapeless dress and the grandfather in a