Dark Water - Laura McNeal [41]
Mostly I went because I didn’t want to call my uncle, and Hickey said he’d take me home at ten if I didn’t go AWOL on them again. Greenie tried to get me to put a pound of eye shadow on my eyelids, but I just brushed the twigs out of my ugly hair and stopped looking in the mirror at the face that of course Amiel didn’t love, and we rode in semi-silence to the quiet center of our quiet town, where the new streetlights were those ochre-yellow kind that suck the color out of things. As we were walking by a gnarled pepper tree that grows right in the center of the mostly empty parking lot, I saw a familiar car. It wasn’t red in this light—the light bled the color out of it—but it was definitely the Honda Fabricationist.
“That’s Robby’s birthday present,” I said to Greenie.
“No kidding?” she said. “I thought you said his birthday was kind of a downer.”
“It was,” I said. “It definitely was.”
Paddy O’Hara’s used to be the Packinghouse, a steak-and-salad place where the booths were covered in red vinyl. When you were sitting in the booth drinking a root beer with lemon in it (and sometimes also a maraschino cherry), you could read all the framed orange crate labels from when Fallbrook was the home of Lofty Lemons and Red Ball Oranges. When you went to the bathroom, it was like you were going to a museum, there were so many enlarged gray photographs of the real packinghouse and the people who worked there in the 1930s and ’40s, and you could get really close to their faces and wonder if they were truly happy or just looked that way for the camera. The ceilings were low and cozy then, made of that fancy tin that looks like metal doilies, and the tables were packed close together except for the big round booths in the corners where I liked to sit. The main waitress was this woman named Maureen that my father knew from Fallbrook High School, where they’d apparently had typing class together, and she would say that I was looking more like my father all the time, even though most people don’t say that. I always picked the Packinghouse for my birthday dinner, and Maureen always put extra whipped cream on my hot fudge brownie sundae and my mother told me to wish for something that couldn’t be bought or sold.
The ceilings of the new restaurant were at least twenty feet high and the crate labels were gone and one side of the restaurant was filled with a giant mahogany Irish-style bar. The biggest television I’d ever seen was broadcasting a basketball game, and when Greenie turned her head and saw who was playing, she groaned. “Let’s go somewhere else,” she said, pulling on Hickey’s arm. “It’s the Rockets,” she told me. “Hickey’s true love.”
But Hickey was leading her to a table, so we followed him. I didn’t see Robby anywhere, but I remembered there used to be a long, narrow dining room on the other side of the Packinghouse, through the doorway beside the bar that was still labeled RESTROOMS. Greenie stared gloomily at the menu and Hickey watched the Rockets. “I think I’ll have the stew,” I said finally. “I’m going to the bathroom.”
An odd thing happened on my way. There was still a dining nook tucked on the other side of the wall, but those tables were empty. No TV, no Rockets, no eaters, no Robby or his date. What I remember next was a passageway that looked exactly the same as it had when I was little. Same old pictures of smiling lemon packers, same old conveyor belts of tumbling fruit, same old Lofty Lemons crate label in a cheap wooden frame. The door to the kitchen was open, like those doors usually are, and I felt hungry and sick at the same time, as if my head were filling up with noble gases. My left temple started to ache, and I pressed my hand over that eye to make it stop. I thought I might faint, the way I did one time in fourth grade after I ran all the way to Mrs. Gilliland’s class from the kickball field. I leaned against the wall with my hand over one eye and remembered what I told Hickey about my prophetic eyeballs.
“Blue sees you here, brown sees where you’re going