sleepy too, and asks me to turn the light back off on my way out. We hug each other, but lightly, with just one arm each, the baby still nestled in her arms. I wanted to hold him before I left, but now I don’t think I should ask.
“Congratulations,” I say. I feel suddenly large and awkward, like an adult ducking into a playhouse, too big to sit in the play chairs without breaking them.
“Thanks,” she says, and the way she smiles makes me feel more this way.
When I am out in the hallway, I turn back to look at them through the glass window of the door. The room is dark, but I can see the back of the baby’s head, his tiny head still nestled against her. I wave good-bye, but they are looking at the baby, tired-eyed and open-mouthed, and neither of them sees me.
nineteen
I DON’T HEAR TOO MUCH from them after they have the baby. I call sometimes, but usually Jack is crying in the background, and Deena just talks about how tired she is, how she’s been up with him all night. He’s a colicky baby, she says, and a light sleeper. When Travis answers the phone, his hello comes out as a yawn.
It’s okay, I tell them. I’m busy too. I am still working at McDonald’s. I told DuPaul I could keep working during the school year if they moved me down to part-time.
“Oh goody,” Trish said, standing behind him. “Goody gum-drops.”
I go in for two hours after school and eight hours on Sundays. It’s a little better now. I have convinced DuPaul I would do better in drive-thru, simply taking money from people, and giving them what they want, no real grease involved, nothing to burn.
“At least you’re not a leaner,” he said, rubbing his beard, looking at JoAnne Steely at the front counter, who was right at that moment leaning on one of the counters and looking at her fingernails. “A lot of these people come in here, saying they want to work, and they just lean around. Like it’s their lawn furniture or something. Like I’m paying them to lean.”
DuPaul has three children, two of them in college. JoAnne Steely the leaner told me he’s here because his wife died three years ago, and he moved here from St. Louis because they offered him more money. There are plaques by the time clock stating that he’s won BEST STORE MANAGER in the Midwest District, two years in a row.
“I’ve got no time for leaners,” he says, carrying in crates of orange juice from the walk-in. “No time at all.”
Travis and Deena come through the drive-thru in the Datsun sometimes, Jack strapped into his car seat in the back. He has hair now, thin wisps of dark curls that make him look even more like Travis. They are starting to look alike, I notice, all three of them. They all have the same hair. When it’s cold out, Deena and Travis wear matching blue-and-yellow jackets.
“Hey!” Deena says, looking up at me from Travis’s window. “Can you get us some free food?”
“I don’t think so,” I say. Trish is already behind me, her hand flat against my back, steering me back toward the fry vat. “This isn’t a social hour,” she says. “You’re on the clock.”
Working this much does nothing good for my skin, and my mother has started leaving little packets of Noxzema in the bathroom. This is how it is now. This is my life. I do my homework on the bus.
I’m not sure yet what I will do with the money I am making, though I have been carefully saving it from the very start. I have bought only one tape this year, Tracy Chapman’s, because I like the song “Fast Car,” even though my mother says it’s so depressing she can’t stand it and would I please stop playing it over and over.
Ms. Jenkins is my science teacher again this year, and she says she thinks I can get a scholarship to KU, but still it seems as if this extra money from McDonald’s will be good to have. If I do get a scholarship, I will still need a car to drive away in. I tell myself this when I am at work and Trish is yelling at me, her face too close to mine, and this way I don’t hear her at all.
It’s like swimming underwater, this whole year. I just close my eyes, hold my breath,