What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [53]
Part Two
Eight
The months went on and things did not change. October rolled on through November, the December gray finally blocking out the sun. As the year wore on, Arlene took notice some days of how the morning looked through the plate-glass windows. How did Bakersfield ever get through the summer heat, the intolerably white sunlight? The only thing changing was the season, but who paid attention to that? Not the girls chattering along and unfocused while the customers waited for coffee. Not Dan, still seeing the young Mexican girl from the shoe store, sometimes even daring to come into the café with her, her little shoulders sporting a new winter jacket. What could Arlene do? Did she want things to change? The farmers noted the change, though you couldn’t tell from Vernon, who still came in during the late morning, or Cal, who joined him at the counter not fifteen minutes later. They bantered with her, and the exchanges were mechanical yet soothing to Arlene, like listening to a clock. No, not much was changing except the weather, the seasons, Arlene ending her café shifts at five with the streets nearly gone dark. Her Ford was a serviceable’52, but the engine doubted itself more and more as the chill of evening settled deep all around her. She made the nervous drive home with a certainty that her headlights would fail, but they, too, held on. It was a change she wouldn’t have wanted—the need for a new car when winter was making money scarce all around the city.
More and more, once she got back to the motel, she would find the parking lot empty and Dan nowhere to be seen. He’d taken up with that girl enough to sometimes close the front office too early in the evening, the motel mostly empty. Who knew how many customers had driven away when no one answered the knock at the front office? Tonight, the parking lot was empty for a weekend, and she knew even before she pulled up close to the front office that Dan had already left.
Every once in a while, back at the café, Cal would read the latest news about the new highway, and she would keep up her nonchalance, acting as if she wasn’t already alarmed at the current downturn in business. What was it? The lack of paint? The two new motels nearby that had come up that summer? Was her rate in line with the rest of the city? She thought about how much worse it would get if the highway diverted the traffic away, as Cal kept insisting it would.
Things change, she thought to herself, though this was a slow, creeping change, like water seeping underneath a door.
This evening was going to be like every other evening. Dan had purchased a TV for her from Stewart’s Appliances, a hefty color set to appease her for his absence, but it was a complete waste in her mind, since half the programming was in black and white. These days, she’d come home from the café so exhausted that, with Dan not around to cook for, she had started buying those new frozen dinners. Turkey with gravy, corn, cranberry sauce, and rice that didn’t taste half-bad. She sat in front of the set and found a teleplay about to start, a story set in New York City about a young couple struggling for money and living in a cramped apartment, the husband a drunk who staggered around. His voice blared out of the speakers so loudly that Arlene had been tempted to get up and turn down the sound. Something was strange about the story, these city people struggling like small-town folk, when everything she’d seen about the big city dazzled with easy luxury. Arlene watched with mild interest, turning every once in a while to the parking lot, which remained empty of customers, until she realized that the characters were never going to leave their shoddy apartment, were never going to step out into the glamour she’d seen in magazine spreads. She turned the set off, wrapped a sweater over her shoulders, and walked out to sit on the porch.
Those were the days, she thought, when she could feel change coming. Sitting on the porch as a little girl, her mother