had been playing Farmer in the Dell, which I liked at first because I thought the song was about us. The farmer, his wife, the cow. There was even a nurse in it. But when we were driving home I started crying in the backseat of the car, and when my mother asked why, I’d said, “The cheese stands all alone. Poor cheese.” The boys thought that was hilarious. Poor cheese, they said for a while, whenever I would cry. That was me, standing in that dark doorway. Donald gone, Tommy going again. Poor cheese.
“Don’t start smoking, corncob,” Tommy called to me. “It’ll stunt your growth.”
My mother glared at me over her shoulder, probably glad for a reason to be mad instead of sad. “If I ever smell cigarettes on you, Mary Margaret, you’re going to wish you’d never been born,” she said.
“I’m just teasing, Mom,” Tommy said, putting his arms around her.
“You be careful, son,” she said.
“Always, Mother,” he said seriously, and then he winked at me over her shoulder and I finally ran out of the house and put my arms around his waist.
“You have to come back,” I said. I kissed Tommy on the cheek and it felt like a man’s cheek, rough and bristly.
“Of course he’s coming back,” my father said, putting Tommy’s duffel in the back of the truck. “Where else would he go?” But I noticed Tommy didn’t say a thing, just looked straight ahead through the windshield, that same look Donald had had when he drove away, that I thought of as the leaving look. And when I turned, my mother was sitting down on the back step, and I went to sit beside her, both of us quiet and still, neither of us wanting to break the silence.
The summer I was fifteen LaRhonda’s father gave me a job at the diner. I was off the books because I wasn’t old enough to get working papers, which meant that he could pay me even less than he paid the regular waitresses whose vacations I covered. Mr. Venti made it sound like my reward would come later. “You do a good job at the diner, someday you can work at the steak house, where the real money is,” he said. Like being a steak house waitress was my goal. Which it wasn’t. Ever since that talk with Tommy I’d been thinking about a plan, although I had no idea yet what it was, just what it wasn’t. No diner. No steak house. Everyone said I should be a nurse because my mother was. I was leaving that open for the time being.
“You’ll make your money on tips,” Mr. Venti said, and there was some truth to that, but not so much. When a kid you’ve known since she was playing in a mud puddle serves you pie and coffee, you’re disinclined to do more than put a dime under your saucer. Some of my father’s old friends didn’t even do that. “She don’t need the money,” I heard one of them say to another as he hoisted his big belly away from the counter and off the stool, like my parents were rich people and I was just playing at working. On the other hand, none of them ever tried to put his hand up my skirt. I was shocked the first time I saw that happen, as one of the younger women walked past a booth carrying a tray of breakfast specials. Dee saw the look on my face and said, “Grab-ass, baby. The waitress’s cross to bear.” Not just from the customers, but the grill cooks, who would mess your orders up but good if you didn’t play up to them. Except for me, again, because I knew the boss.
Mrs. Venti worked at the steak house as a hostess. My aunt Ruth said she didn’t understand that, that the Ventis surely had enough money that she could afford to stay home. “I’d just sit around and play cards,” said Aunt Ruth, who had played more hands of solitaire than maybe any person on earth. But Mrs. Venti was at the steak house most nights, in black high heels and a satiny dress with some sort of sparkle on the neck or the skirt, saying “Right this way” and cradling a pile of menus as though it was a newborn. I think she just did it to have something to do and somewhere to go. Unlike my mother, who couldn’t go to the