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By Root 1164 0

us with Aunt Ruth or Aunt Alma. But sometimes, if she wasn’t working too late, she would make up a bed of blankets and pillows in the backseat of her Pontiac and take us with her. She’d feed us dinner in a booth near the kitchen and let us listen to the jukebox for a while before she put us to bed in the car, telling me sternly not to unlock the door for anyone but her. While we sat in that booth, I’d watch her at work. She was mesmerizing, young and sweet-faced and too pretty for anyone to be mean to her. The truckers teased her and played her favorite songs on the jukebox. The younger ones would try to get her to go out with them, but she’d joke them out of it. The older ones who knew her well would compliment her on us, her pretty girls. I watched it all, admiring the men with their muscular forearms and broad shoulders as they sipped the coffee my mama served them, absorbing the music as it played continuously, keeping Reese from spilling her milk or sliding down under the table, and smiling at Mama when she looked over to me.

“You’re Anney’s girl, an’t you?” one of them said to me. “Your little sister looks just like her, don’t she? You must look like your daddy.” I nodded carefully.

When Glen Waddell came, Mama would get him a beer and sit with him when she could. Sometimes, if she was busy, he would carry us out to her car when Reese got sleepy, holding us in his big strong arms with the same studied gentleness as when he touched Mama. I always wanted to wait till Mama could tuck us into our bed of blankets, but she seemed to like for Glen to carry us out with all the truckers watching. I’d see her look over as he went out with us, see her face soften and shine. Maybe that was love, that look. I couldn’t tell.

My mama dated Glen Waddell for two years. People said it took her time to trust men again after Lyle Parsons died. Mama would occasionally take Reese and me with her to pick Glen up from his new job at the RC Cola plant. Sometimes he would still be working, lifting flats of soda bottles to stock his truck for the next morning’s route. All those full cases had to be loaded and the empties pulled off and transferred to the conveyor belt for cleaning and shipment to the bottling plant. He would shift each case of twenty-four bottles above his head and onto the truck with a grunt, swinging from his hips with his whole weight, arms extended and mouth sucked in against his tongue with concentration. His collar was open, his pale blue short-sleeved uniform shirt was limp, and it stuck to his back in a dark stripe down his spine. Mama would still be in her waitress dress, smelling of salt and fried food, and just as sweaty and tired as he was, but Glen would smile at her like he knew she sweat sugar and cream. Mama would lean out the window of the car and call his name softly, and he would blush dark red and start moving a little faster, either to show off his strength or to get out of there sooner, we weren’t sure.

Glen was a small man but so muscular and strong that it was hard to see the delicacy in him, though he was strangely graceful in his rough work clothes and heavy boots. There were bottle fragments on the pavement, crushed shards ground into the tarmac, and all the men wore heavy work boots with thick rubber soles. Glen Waddell’s feet were so fine that his boots had to be bought in the boys’ department of the Sears, Roebuck, while his gloves could only be found in the tall men’s specialty stores. He would pivot on those boy-size feet, turning his narrow hips and grunting with his load, everything straining and forceful, while his hands cradled cases and flats as delicately as if they were soft-shelled eggs. His palms spread so wide he could easily span half a case’s width, keeping every bottle level no matter how high he had to throw the flat.

People talked about Glen’s temper and his hands. He didn’t drink, didn’t mess around, didn’t even talk dirty, but the air around him seemed to hum with vibration and his hands were enormous. They hung like baseball mitts at the end of his short, tight-muscled