him, and then the invitation in his face changes to an expression of bewilderment when he realizes that Claudia isn’t coming for him after all; she is passing their table entirely. The fairy lights tremble overhead, battered by wind and fog. Waitresses swivel their hips, dancing a dangerous flamenco between the tables, trays lifted aloft for a finishing flourish. The whirring propane heaters hum a sound track for her departure as Claudia makes for the exit.
The Chicken Kitchen where Mary Hernandez works is in outer Silver Lake, across from a trendy café that sells six-dollar cups of coffee. Claudia deposits her Jetta in the restaurant’s parking lot. Crime-deterring floodlights wash the concrete patch with sterile white light. In the shadowy recesses near the back of the lot, a dreadlocked homeless man rummages through a Dumpster. He removes an empty gallon jug from the bin and shakes it three times before depositing it gently atop the piles of garbage in his shopping cart.
The evening traffic is picking up, and roving packs of hipsters throng the street, weaving between an art gallery opening, a gourmet wine shop, and a French restaurant on the corner. There is a long line at the café, the yearning for exquisite artisinal caffeine managing to trump the realities of the new economy.
The Chicken Kitchen sits between a Salvation Army thrift store and a gay porn shop. She pushes the entrance to the restaurant open, still unsure what she is doing here. Maybe I can help Dolores, she thinks, as she heaves the swinging door open and feels a wall of air-conditioning numb her face. Maybe Mary doesn’t even know what’s going on with her grandmother. Her mind works through a half-baked math formula, in which the rescue of Dolores will somehow equate to her own personal salvation.
You need to do something drastic.
Unlike the artfully lit yuppie palaces across the street, the Chicken Kitchen is illuminated by bare fluorescent tubes, which reflect off orange-painted walls and sanitized white tile. Neon signs advertise a bucket of flame-grilled chicken for $5.99, a sampler of BBQ wings for $2.99, party catering, everything Fresh! Breezy! Meaty! Overhead, metallic HAPPY HOLIDAYS streamers spin slowly in the draft from the air-conditioning unit. Young families sit in plastic booths, noshing on unidentifiable chicken parts that have been broken down and remolded into perfect spherical nuggets.
Claudia spots Mary at the end of the counter, manning a register. “Mary!” she calls softly, from her position at the end of the line. Mary turns to locate the voice, her face registering confusion, then pleasure, and then mild concern. She glances quickly behind her, where her manager—a middle-aged Middle Eastern man in tight orange polyester slacks—is lurking by the soft drink machine. Claudia waves. Mary smiles and waves back tentatively.
Claudia hesitates, considering the impulse that has driven her here. Surely Luz already knows about Dolores’s foreclosure. And how exactly is Claudia planning to offer support? She should have just gone home with the beard, a far more clear-cut response to Esme’s challenge. The longer Claudia stands there, the more muddled her intentions become, until finally the line before her has cleared and it is too late to dart back off into the evening.
Claudia steps up to Mary’s register. Mary’s braid is tucked up into a hair net that she wears underneath an orange Chicken Kitchen baseball cap. She is sweating slightly, under the band of the cap. A painful-looking pimple punctuates the tip of her nose. Mary offers up her diastemic grin, looking far too young to be working at a fast-food restaurant on a Monday night, and then turns to the boy working next to her.
“This is my film teacher, Mrs. Munger,” Mary tells him, in a low voice.
The boy nods, uninterested, and turns back to his customer.
“Not anymore,” Claudia corrects Mary.
Mary leans over the register until it presses into the top of her polo shirt. My name is Maria! reads her name tag, and Claudia wonders whether the anglicized Mary is for the benefit of the girl’s Ennis Gates classmates, another sign of her striving, or whether the Maria was a mistake on the manager’s part. “You know, I thought it was great that you told Penelope to go”—Mary glances behind her at her manager and mouths the words fuck herself. “I bet there are a lot of people who wished they’d said it first.”
“It still wasn’t appropriate,” Claudia says, growing uncomfortable. There is no possible way Mary could ever learn about her own small role in