What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [16]
“You need anything else?” she asked Vernon.
“Some pie,” he said. “Slow morning, so I may as well linger. Make it cherry.”
“Cal?”
“No, ma’am,” he answered, not raising his head.
Back in the kitchen, some of the younger waitresses passed the morning lull leaning up against the counters and flipping through copies of Modern Screen, cigarettes held over the sink. Had it been summer, Arlene would’ve clapped her hands to rush them back to work: she wasn’t the manager, but she was the oldest on shift, and they treated her as such, hushing their back-and-forth chitchat whenever she entered the kitchen, blushing if she shook her head disapprovingly at someone’s pleasure in getting playfully grabbed by one of the farmers. When the summer crew was around, she felt a keen sense of their being only girls. She was forty-seven years old and their chatter made her feel every bit of it. She watched them gather around the magazine when one sighed approvingly at a photograph, but paid them no mind as she prepared Vernon’s cherry pie. Vernon might tease Cal for his naïveté, but he wasn’t limited like these girls. He wasn’t like them, incapable of pushing past lazy daydreaming. He was absolutely right about things changing. How someone so young could know such a thing. She wanted to show them how things change before you realize they have. The café’s plate-glass windows, which reached from ceiling to sidewalk, had survived the’52 earthquake, and over the years even the view from them had changed. Across the street, a beautiful flower shop called Holliday’s had opened one spring, complete with an arbor over the front door. Shady, so the flowers and the potted plants could benefit from the open air even as the Valley’s wilting summer heat arrived. The TG&Y expanded, taking over a local five-and-dime, the walls between the stores torn down and the buildings merged, so now you could pull drawers of Simplicity dress patterns and pick your own fabric from a rainbow of bolts lined all in a row. Things change. A wave of tract houses went up over on the east side, every one with a wide lawn. An RCA color TV sat in the window of Stewart’s Appliances for only three weeks, gleaming and expensive, and someone actually had the money to buy it. The farmhouse where she had grown up blew down in a bad storm years and years ago.
“That’s a big hunk of pie,” said one of the girls. She puffed on her cigarette. “Is Farmer Jones staying through lunch?”
“If it’s for Cal, I’ll serve it to him,” said another.
“You girls hush before your voices carry,” Arlene admonished them. She walked out with the cherry pie and set it before Vernon Jones, who nodded his thanks. Cal remained concentrated on his newspaper, unaware of both Arlene and the sneaking glances of the younger waitresses peering through the round window of the swinging kitchen door. He wasn’t an unattractive young man—studious and hardworking, as most of the farmers’ sons tended to be—but it would take a few more years until he grew into the rugged assurance of someone like Vernon Jones. Cal was the same age as her own Dan, but her son’s demeanor and confidence were years past Cal’s—qualities she had seen her son grasp from a very young age, when as a little boy he had received the cooing attention from the other waitresses whenever she brought him along to pick up a paycheck. He’d been lanky as a teenager, but that hadn’t stopped the attention from becoming downright embarrassing, to the point that she’d asked Dan not to bring his dates to the café.
These days, he’d been seen around town with the Mexican girl who worked over the shoe store. Some of the dimmer young waitresses made mention of Dan’s lunch with his young date, not noting the displeasure on Arlene’s face, but she made herself look busy and ignored the comments. She knew any of the waitresses would scramble to get to his table, even with her on watch, but Dan had been sensible enough to understand that he wasn’t to bring that