me before she started her shift. She always insisted she pay me a dollar an hour. At first I said I wouldn’t take it, but my mother said, “People need their pride,” so I caved. LaRhonda said that was cheaper than the going rate, but I don’t know how LaRhonda would have had any idea what the going rate was. She never did any babysitting. All the other girls said it was because she didn’t need the money, but I’m not sure anyone would have asked her. She didn’t seem like the kind of person who liked kids much, and she seemed like exactly the kind of person who would go through your underwear drawer and jewelry box and eat all your ice cream while you were out.
“Me! Me!” Clifton always said when Callie handed him over, reaching out his arms and putting them around my neck. “You be good,” Callie said as she tied on her apron. “I’ll pick you up in the morning.” I fed Clifton at our house, gave him a bath, and put him to bed in a secondhand playpen in Tommy’s old room. “Da,” he said, pointing at a picture of Tom in his dress uniform on one corner of the bureau, but only because I’d told him that.
The diner was a couple of miles outside of town. Mr. Venti said that that was where the future was, that downtown was dying. He said that at a Chamber of Commerce lunch and some of the business owners wanted to throw him out but he owned too many businesses for them to do that. Besides, I thought maybe he had a point. My parents talked all the time about how they used to go shopping on Main Street, for my mother’s wedding suit, for my father’s tools. Now there was nothing but a Christian Science reading room with books open in the window and no one inside, an insurance office with travel posters and a sign that said PLAY IT SAFE WITH MUTUAL OF OMAHA, and the sporting goods store that stayed in business because of the high school teams and the Little League and because it sold guns. There was one place that opened as one thing or another, a used book store, a bakery, a gift shop, and then closed so quickly that sometimes it seemed like you’d imagined it.
There was nothing close to the diner except for a big parking lot where I waited with Clifton on my hip for my father to pick me up after work, a big sweaty spot on one side of my uniform where the baby sat. He was starting to walk now and didn’t like being held, but if I put a couple of barrettes in my hair they could keep him quiet, playing with them, trying to yank them out, at least until my father pulled in. My mother usually had Clifton’s dinner waiting. Callie didn’t let him get away with much, so for a baby he was pretty well behaved. We sent Tommy pictures. He was in Vietnam, a place I’d had to find on a map, fighting the Communists. I asked Callie if she wanted to send him a letter, but she didn’t.
“It wasn’t any big thing,” she’d said to me once, but at least she’d let us share the baby.
I sent Donald a picture of Clifton, too, although LaRhonda had said it was a well-known fact that boys didn’t care about babies. “Only how you make them,” she’d said, like she knew. But I was pretty sure Donald was going to like Clifton when he met him. He’d finally sent a real letter, although it was typed, as though it was more business than personal. “I am coming to visit for a week on August 2,” it said. “My grandfather is picking me up at the airport. Maybe you could come with him so he could stay outside with the car and you could come in and find me.” He did make it sound a little bit like business, but I was still happy. “Your Friend,” he signed that one.
“I sure will be glad to see that young man,” his grandfather said when I saw him at the diner. “I can’t call him a boy anymore. He’s a young man now.”
“I hope he still has that nice way about him,” Ruth had said when I told her.
I shifted Clifton from one hip to another. My work uniform usually smelled like hamburgers and donuts,