Miller's Valley - Anna Quindlen Page 0,47

he didn’t have an opinion about anything. He’d order whatever LaRhonda did at the Dairy Queen, go along with anything Steven said. “Definitely!” was his favorite word, and about as close to a sentence as he usually got, unless you counted “Praise God.” But even praising God he was the guy who would buy beer for the fifteen-year-olds who hung around the package store after every other guy had passed them by and said “Get lost.” Sometimes we would go to LaRhonda’s house and swim in her pool, lie on the chaises, and ask Fred to bring out iced tea or sandwiches, see if there were more towels in the laundry room. “Definitely,” he always said.

We usually left if the Ventis showed up. Even with the four of us there, a situation where most parents went out of their way to pretend to like one another, they were uncomfortable to be around. Their conversation went like this:

“You need more ice cream like you need a hole in the head.”

“What difference does it make what I look like? Unless I was twenty and wearing a waitress uniform, you wouldn’t even notice.”

“You’re crazy.”

“You’re disgusting.”

LaRhonda was working as a hostess at the steak house during the shifts when her mother was off, and she said she didn’t know what her mother was talking about, but at the diner we all did. After Callie shut Mr. Venti down and told him that if he fired her she would tell Tommy why, he’d turned to a girl whose mother was also a waitress at the diner. It caused all kinds of problems because both daughter and mother let Dee know that while she made the station and schedule assignments they would change them if they didn’t like them. Plus when Mr. Venti would stop by there were always angry customers wondering where their club sandwiches were when they were sitting right up on the to-go shelf waiting for a waitress who was in the back office doing who-knew-what, usually on her knees.

“The man is almost sixty!” Dee would mutter to herself sometimes, but the rest of us kept our mouths shut. I had to admit, Mr. Venti was right about one thing: Mrs. Venti was getting really fat, and to make it worse she was wearing the clothes she’d worn when she was thinner. “She’s a total mess,” LaRhonda said. “She imagines all kinds of disgusting stuff about my father.” Once Mrs. Venti came in and spilled hot coffee down the front of the uniform of the girl at the diner, but that only made things worse because then everyone was talking about what had happened. Mrs. Venti laughed so hard, in a kind of odd and uncomfortable way, that everyone knew the coffee was no accident. That was the last time we saw her at the diner. When I came over she would try to ask me questions about what was going on there, but I stayed vague. The glass of orange juice she always had in her hand smelled like it had gone bad, and Steven said that was because it was half gin. “I thought things would be different,” she said to me one day looking out the kitchen window to the big back lawn, and after that I tried not to be alone with her.

Mr. Bally came into the diner at least once a week. He was spending a lot of time in the valley. One Saturday he waited until I’d changed out of my uniform and then asked me if I wanted to join him at his table. A busman’s holiday, he called it, which I’d never heard before but looked up after. “Can I offer you a soda pop?” he said, when I slid into the booth, looking wary.

“A soda pop?”

“Why is that funny?”

“I’m sorry, but the only person I know who calls Coke soda pop is my aunt Ruth, and that’s because she hasn’t left the house in thirteen years.”

“She hasn’t left the house?”

“It’s a long story. I don’t really need anything, thank you. I’ve got to get home.”

“To work on your science project, correct? I’m still not entirely clear on the thrust of your science project.”

“Me neither.”

“But I can tell you’re a smart girl or you wouldn’t be doing all this research. So you’re smart enough to have a handle on what’s going on here. Let me just ask you one question: what was the biggest mistake they made in the original Roosevelt Dam project?”

I knew the