Miller's Valley - Anna Quindlen Page 0,25

more and men wanted them, too. But they were nice to me. I got to be an okay waitress faster than most, at least according to them, but there were still times when the place would get real busy, breakfast after church or early bird dinner on bowling league nights, and I’d get overwhelmed by a four-top with four different dinner orders, Salisbury steak (no gravy), fried chicken (no vegetable), open-faced roast beef sandwich (extra gravy), fish cakes (extra tartar sauce), and one of the others would pick my plates off the grill shelf and help me out. I think they were glad I wasn’t LaRhonda, who they’d have to be careful around all the time and who they knew from experience was not a bit friendly.

They were always teasing me about the love letters in my apron pocket that I would pull out when I was putting my tips in my bag in the back. But they weren’t love letters and they were always from the same people: Tommy, LaRhonda, Donald.

Hey sis, it’s hot in Bancock. I got you something. See you at xmas.

Your brother, Tom

(How come I was in Miller’s Valley and knew how to spell Bangkok and Tommy didn’t? Why did he say he would come home at Christmas when he hadn’t been home in more than a year?)

What’s up, MM? It’s not as bad here as I thought. There is a girl named Sandy who is from Chicago and has even more albums than I do. She tweezed my eyebrows and they look a MILLION times better! What’s up with you-know-who?

(Which who was you-know? The basketball player, the guy from the construction crew, Pete Walker, who sat behind LaRhonda in English? And why did her parents think it would do her good to spend the summer with a whole lot of girls who had been in the same trouble that she was, most of them probably the real thing?)

Dear Mimi,

I am learning to play golf. My mother got married. My stepfather is a salesman and he plays golf, too. How is everything there? My grandfather says he sees you some times. Do you still play chess?

Sincerely, Donald

Sincerely?

“Cheap bastards,” said Frances, the waitress who’d been around longest, looking at my piles of quarters and nickels as I put the letters back in my apron pocket. There were two bills from two tables I’d had first thing, one of them from the Reverend from the Baptist church who always left a nice big tip because he never had to pay for his food. “Roman collar, no check,” Frances told me my first day. I hadn’t known what it was called until then.

“I have to go,” I said, scooping the money up. I had two jobs that summer, and I couldn’t be late for the second.

Tom hadn’t been overseas for long when an old friend of my father’s named Pete Fenstermach showed up at our house in his truck. He’d pulled into the driveway with a sound from his tires that didn’t look good for the visit, had gone around to the passenger side and pulled his seventeen-year-old daughter from the cab by her arm. It was January, but she wasn’t wearing a coat, just a big old man’s shirt and a pair of jeans underneath. She tried to pull away but her father was stronger than she was. I knew her to say hi to—she was a couple of years ahead of me at school, the kind of girl, pale and big-eyed and thin, who looked pretty sometimes and other times just looked plain. It took me a minute to remember that her name was Callie.

“Daddy,” I said.

Mr. Fenstermach and Callie came in through the back door, into the kitchen. My mother put her hands on her hips and looked the girl up and down as though she knew just what she was looking for, and then she sat down hard in one of our kitchen chairs. She put up her hand as Mr. Fenstermach, red in the face, started to open his mouth.

“Pete,” my mother said in a way that shut him right up, and then to Callie, “How far along are you?”

I remember I leaned so hard against the refrigerator that I could feel it humming through the backs of my legs.

“Go see your aunt,” my father said.

“No,” my mother and I said at the same time.

“Six months,” said Callie.

“You know who did this to her?” her father shouted.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” my mother said. “You wouldn’t