The Talk-Funny Girl (9 page)

“Hungry?”

I shook my head, a lie without words. I don’t think I had a particularly large appetite in those years. I was finished growing. But sometimes at home there wasn’t much food in the cupboards or the refrigerator, and sometimes my parents made me miss a meal or two, or go a whole day without eating, as a penance. Once you’ve been hungry like that, no matter how much you eat, part of you always remembers the hungry feeling.

“We stop for coffee for twenty minutes every afternoon. It’s part of the deal. Boss buys.”

“Nothing for me for it. Thank you, even though.”

“Sure?” He was turning into the drive-through of the doughnut shop, a few blocks from where Emily’s had once been.

I remembered what I used to eat at Emily’s. “If they might had chocolate milk,” I said, and immediately wished I hadn’t spoken.

“And what to go with it?”

“Honey frosting on a doughnut.” The words seemed to be flying
up out of my belly and past my teeth. I looked out the side window and clamped my jaws together.

Instead of heading back to the work site, Sands drove north from the doughnut shop, out of town, and when he turned that way without saying anything, I felt as though my arms and legs went to ice. I was holding the small carton of chocolate milk in my lap. I had eaten only two bites of the doughnut.

“This is a different of a way,” I said.

“I know it.”

He was sipping coffee, driving with one hand, not looking at me. I wanted to ask where he was going but couldn’t make myself. There were dirt roads off to the sides of the highway there, and they led deep into the woods where people hunted and trapped but no one lived. The honey-dipped doughnut rested on the top of my thigh on a napkin. I listened to the truck tires against the pavement and thought about what it would be like to jump out while we were going at this speed. Into my mind came a picture of the girl on the other side of the river, and then all the things my teachers had told us about how to protect ourselves. Never ride in a car with someone you don’t know well, they had said. Never let yourself get into that situation.

But instead of turning onto one of the dirt roads, after another mile or so Sands pulled into the parking lot of the mall, a place my parents never went. I knew about it, naturally, had heard the kids talking about it, had driven past it, but had never been inside. Sands found a parking space and turned off the truck. “Finish eating, okay?”

I forced myself to chew the doughnut and sip the last of the milk. I wiped my sleeve quickly across my mouth and looked at him.

“We’re buying your work boots,” he said.

I watched him knock the glasses back up against the top of his nose; I looked at the color of his skin. I had the fleeting sense, again, that he reminded me of someone. I had the thought that I was going to get boots now and he would tell me we were going hiking in the woods,
just like he’d told me about the snack. It was part of the job, he’d say. That was his trick. “I won’t to have the money for,” I said.

“I’m advancing you the money so you don’t break your toes.”

I looked at him.

“I’m paying for the boots, and then you can pay me back when you get your earnings. Little by little if you want. A dollar a week or something. Let’s go.”

I got out of the truck and followed Sands toward the mall entrance, hanging back a few steps. Twice, he looked over his shoulder to see where I was. Just inside the front doors I stopped and stood still. It was as if they had taken the center of our town, filled the empty windows with new things, washed and polished them, turned on music and bright lights, and moved it all here. Sands turned and waved for me to follow, impatiently it seemed. We walked down a gleaming corridor of glass, light, and plastic advertisements, with radios and earrings and summer sweaters on display in store windows to either side. People strolled along in groups of two and three, holding shopping bags and pushing strollers, and it seemed to me they were people who’d come there from another state, a different river valley. Only some of the teenagers, with their eye makeup, pierced noses, patched pants, and sideways glances, seemed like a species I knew.

Sands walked along. The music flowed over his shoulders and back against my ears. He turned into a store with boots and sneakers in the window and women’s shoes with high heels and he led me all the way to the back, where there was a bench to sit on and shoe boxes on shelves. “What size are you?” he asked.

I looked at him and felt my lips quiver. “Middle of size,” I said, and one side of his mouth curled up before he could stop it.

“Your feet, I mean. Do you know?”

I shook my head and moved my eyes away from his. At that moment a boy who couldn’t have been long out of high school walked over to us. He was wearing a green shirt with a name tag pinned onto
it, and the name tag read
IAN
. I felt his eyes on me for a few seconds, and then, when I didn’t meet them, he turned to Sands and asked if he could help us.

“Steel-toed work boots,” Sands said confidently. “For the young lady.”

“What size?” the boy asked, looking at me again.

I met his eyes for only an instant. My chin sank slowly down. They were both looking at me now and I was noticing that the square of linoleum beneath my feet was chipped in one corner.

“She needs to be measured,” Sands told the boy. “She’s grown since her last pair.”

The boy hurried away and returned with an odd flat piece of metal, silver and black with lines and numbers on it. “I need you to take off your shoes,” he said, and in his voice I could plainly hear that he knew I had never been there before, knew I was foolish for not being able to say my size, knew how much smarter he was than I would ever be. He was looking at my worn jeans and sweatshirt, the dirt under my fingernails. It reminded me exactly of a time when I went to a plumbing supply store with my father, who was trying to fix our kitchen sink. The man behind the counter there had started asking my father questions about the part he needed, and my father didn’t know what to say. With each question, my father seemed to shrink into himself more and more, and at the same time I could feel the cloud of anger swelling around him and reaching out toward the clerk. The clerk, a blond man with a goatee, became less patient with each question, and his first politeness gradually turned into a tone of voice that had a lining to it of something like scorn. He seemed to me, foolishly, not to be aware of the swelling cloud of anger at all. “You have to know the model number,” he said after the string of questions, “or how am I supposed to go back into the stockroom, where there are five hundred boxes, and find the one you want?”

My father went still as stone. He had his cane in one hand—it was just a carved piece of oak—and his eyes drifted down to the floor, and
for a few seconds I thought he was going to swing the cane and break the man’s skull with it. At last, with the clerk pressing him, and other customers waiting, and me standing there watching, my father spun around on one boot and hurried out the door. On the sidewalk the parts store had set up a plastic statue, about three feet tall, of a man dressed in their store colors and holding a plastic wrench across the front of his body. The little man had a small round smile between his plump cheeks. Without, at first, having seemed to even notice it, my father swung his cane once, very hard, and snapped the head off the plastic statue so it fell over sideways and hung there by a shred. The blow made a noise like someone striking a drum. People turned to look. My father and I hurried to the truck before anyone could stop us, and all the way driving home it seemed to me that a bubble of laughter—something I almost never heard from him—was trying to force its way up from beneath the hairs of his beard. Neither of us ever said a word about it to my mother. So many years later the sink still leaked.

“You need to sit and take off your sneakers,” Ian was saying.

I sat on the cushioned bench. I was halfway done unlacing the sneaker on my left foot when I remembered that my socks had holes in them, a small empty circle at each heel. It was too late to do anything about it. Ian was kneeling in front of me, waiting. Sands was watching. I hesitated for a second, two seconds, then yanked off the shoe and tried to push my foot back against the bottom of the bench so they couldn’t see the hole. But Ian was reaching for my foot. He took hold of it, his fingers wrapping around the back, just where the hole was. He flinched. A little smile went across his face and he squeezed the muscles around his mouth to disguise it. “Ten, women’s,” he said to Sands. “We should check both feet, though. A lot of times people have different sizes of feet. Most of my customers do.”

So I peeled off the sneaker on my right foot. Another hole in the sock. The metal measuring device was cool against the back of my foot but my cheeks were hot and my eyes squeezed half-closed. In a moment Ian was off to the stockroom. Out of the corner of my eye I
could see Sands pretending to be examining the display boots, lifting one up, turning it over, flexing the sole in his hands. I thought then that I’d quit the work and tell him I didn’t want the boots and just go home to my room. I would be boyed or doused, but at least those were things I was used to. I’d started to say something about not wanting the boots after all when Ian came back into view, opening the shoe box as he walked. A sheet of tissue paper showed there.

I let him put the first boot on and lace it up. I couldn’t move. It made me think, at first, of Pastor Schect’s work boots. “These are men’s eights, we don’t have steel-toed for women or girls. How does that feel?” he asked, and I searched his words for ridicule but didn’t hear so much of it now.

I nodded.

“Wiggle your toes around some.”

I moved my toes halfheartedly.

“I can’t press in there to feel your big toe because of the steel,” he was saying. “You have to tell me whether they’re tight or pinching or anything. Let me put on the other one and you can walk around.”

When the second boot was laced up, I was told to stand and walk. I took three steps and returned and nodded again.

“You’re sure?” Sands asked me. “They’ll loosen up some but if they’re pinching you now you’ll be uncomfortable all summer.”

So he was going to let me work for the summer. I glanced at him quickly and nodded, then looked away. Ian was standing close, waiting for an answer, ready to show me another pair, to see my bad socks again, to tell his friends about it once we walked away. “Good of the size now,” I said quietly to Sands.

“They’re seventy-four fifty, but on sale this week for sixty ninety-nine,” Ian said.

“Fine.”

Sands was taking out his wallet. I was running the numbers through my mind, sure that there must have been a mistake. But when I glanced
over I saw that Ian had a bill in his hand, and the bill had the numeral 100 in one corner. “Right back with the change,” he said cheerfully.

I stood still there, staring at the wall.

When we left the store and were walking back down the corridor of shops and out into the windy cool day, I felt as though I had two blocks of wood attached to my feet, and I knew that most of my first week of work, all that pay, would go to Sands and not to my parents or my aunt or me, and I could still feel the blood in my cheeks and see the look on Ian’s face when he’d felt the bare skin at the back of my heels. But the boots were absolutely beautiful to my eye, smooth light-brown leather and a cream sole, the loops of the laces falling to either side of my ankles like ribbons on a gift. I wondered, as we walked across the parking lot, how many people were turning to look.

For the rest of that windy afternoon, with the new boots stiff on my feet but so wonderful I couldn’t stop looking at them, I loaded up the truck bed again while Sands went around the site, shifting stones into piles. From time to time I glanced at him without letting him see. When the truck was full I called to him, but before he got into the cab this time he stood and ran his eyes over the work site. I looked where he was looking and saw that the church, or what had once been the church, was still a disaster area, with weeds growing everywhere and only a small portion of the rubble sorted. Even so, I could see evidence of my own effort, and of his—a patch of clean ground and small piles of usable stones. My hands hurt. There were blisters on the backs of both heels and a pound of dust in my hair. The sun had fallen behind the hills by then and the day had gone from cool to cold, and I could still feel Ian’s eyes on me. But I had such a proud feeling then, standing there in the new boots and looking over the work we’d done. It seemed to me that Sands was having the same feeling.

“Dump’s closed now,” he said. “I can take this load over tomorrow morning.”

I didn’t say anything.

“How are you getting home, Laney?”

“Everywhere I go walking.”

“How far is it?”

“Past on the 112 Store but only not too much then.”

“That’s three or four miles from here. Your feet must be sore in the new boots.”

I looked at him and then back at the site. I moved my toes inside the boots and decided I would change back into my sneakers before making the walk—not only because of the blisters but because I didn’t want my parents to see that I had something so new and expensive. For a minute I thought of asking if I could leave the boots with him, but that would have led to more questions, so I didn’t. And then I saw that questions from him would be better than from my mother and father, so I said, “Could I to leave them here? These boots?”

Sands nodded, watching me in a way I didn’t like. I could feel his eyes on me as I changed into my old sneakers.

“How about if I drop you home?”

“I’m to walk there. I want it.”

“How about if I drop you at the store then? I have to pick up a few things for supper anyway.”

I said I thought that would be all right, but by the time he pulled the truck slowly across the sidewalk and onto Main Street, it was almost dark, and I was unused to being in a truck in the darkness, and the cold chill was running up the backs of my arms and shoulders again. I looked at the door lock to make sure it wasn’t down.