all be standing in line for everything, even Hershey bars, I forget how that came up. It was like he didn't really care if we bought a car or not.'
'He didn't. The only job he ever gave a damn about was operating a Linotype machine like his own father. Then Linotypes got obsolete.'
'That's sad,' his daughter says.
The waitress is standing there in her green apron. 'Could I interest either of you in any dessert?'
Nelson said, 'I thought you closed up.'
'Yes well, I did, but the cook's still out back, he thinks the power may be coming back on. For dessert we have tofu, honied oatcakes, puffed goat cheese baked in little ramekins, and lo-cal frozen yogurt. That's lo-cal, not local. And lately we've put in some home-baked pics, since people kept asking. They
She is the mother, it comes to Nelson, that he and Annabelle have in common. The waitress is pure Brewer, her face squarish and asymmetrical, like a bun pleasantly warped in the oven. Good-humored suffering-sore feet, errant sons, daily complaints- radiates through her uniform. And yet, though this woman feels old to him, she is possibly not much older than they are- somewhere in her forties.
'The apple crumb sounds good,' he says, not wanting this lunch to end. For what happens next? It's not like a first date, where a second or third leads to fucking.
'I shouldn't,' his sister declares, 'but let me try the honey oatcake.'
The waitress says, lowering her voice confidentially, 'It tends to be a little dry. My advice would be to have it with a scoop of the frozen vanilla yogurt. On the house. If the power stays off, it'll all be melting anyway.'
'You're wicked,' Annabelle tells her. Her plump face beams, her eyes shine like a birthday child's as she assents. She still has, after living twenty years in the city, a country-girl innocence that, if she is taken as his date, embarrasses Nelson. In his embarrassment he studies the wall above the booths, whose theme is greenery-ferns and bushes and overhanging branches, brushed on in many forest shades. What he has never noticed before, all those noons grabbing a bite at the counter, is that a pair of children are in the mural, in the middle distance with their backs turned, a boy and a girl wearing old-fashioned German outfits, pigtails and lederhosen, holding hands, lost.
'So,' he says. 'I don't think I've told you much about my-our- father. Mom has a lot of photos and clippings back at the house- would you like to look them over sometime?' He wants to give her her father, his father, but when he holds out his hands the dust pours through them, too fine and dry and dead to hold. Time has turned the spectacular man to powder, in just ten years.
'I don't think your mother wants me in the house again,' says Annabelle.
'Of course she does,' he says, knowing she doesn't, and adding, 'It's my house, too,' when it isn't, yet.
'I thought one of you said green tea,' the waitress says, putting down two cold desserts and two steaming cups. 'The water was still hot, and they all claim it's good for you. The Japanese live longer than anybody. They had on
'Green is great,' Nelson says, to chase this motherly woman away. When the siblings have their privacy back, he says to his sister, 'This is great, meeting you. I just wish my father could have known you. He hated not having a daughter.'
'That's unusual, a bit. Weren't all men his age male chauvinists?'
'He wasn't crazy about males, me included. I think he saw other men as competition. For the women. He was very scared of his homoerotic side. He suppressed it. His only male friend, really- do you want to hear this?'
'Oh, yes.'
'-was a car salesman who was screwing my mother for a while. That made it all right somehow, to have a little male intimacy. Charlie, that was the guy's name, he died too, a couple years ago. Another lousy ticker, though unlike Dad he went the full route- triple bypass, pig valves, pacemaker, God knows what all. It worked for a while, but not forever, as you would know, being a nurse. My mother kept in touch with him, even married to Ron. That generation, once they'-he rejects the obvious verb-'once they went to bed together, they didn't get over it.' This has taken him a long way sideways. It's true, what the psych instructors at Johnson Community said, if you let somebody talk enough, everything comes out, underside first. 'So Dad and Charlie are up there in Heaven,' he ironically concludes, 'seeing us get together.'
'When will we get together again, I wonder,' Annabelle says, unironically. She has this frontal mode, part of her innocence.
How innocent can you be, at the age of thirty-nine, in the year 1999?
'Soon,' he promises. He wonders what he has taken on. 'I want to work something out. You should meet more people than just me.'
'Oh?'
'Sure,' Nelson says in confident, big-brother style. In the same style he signals to the waitress, who has been standing behind the counter, looking out at the storm through the window beside the tall aluminum urns of cooling coffee and hot water.
'I keep waiting for branches to fall,' she tells them, 'but they don't, quite.'
'Pennsylvania can't afford a good hurricane,' he kids her. 'We should all move to the Carolinas.' He hungers for a hurricane, he realizes-for an upheaval tearing everything loose.
The twilight gloom in the place does seem to be lifting. Nelson cups his hand behind the flame and blows out the candle. The waitress brings their bill handwritten on the back of a menu card torn in half: S11.48. 'I hope you have the right change, because with the power out I can't get into the cash register to make any.'
Nelson looks into his wallet and has one one and the rest twenties. The MellPenn ATMs only dish out twenties, encouraging consumers to spend faster. New bills, too. He hates how big Jackson's face has gotten, and the way it's off-center. His expression is more wimpy. They've turned this old Indian-killer into a Sensitive New Age Guy. It looks like play money.
Annabelle sees Nelson hesitate and asks, 'Do you want some money from me?'
'Absolutely not.'
The waitress may have been motherly, but he's damned if he's going to leave her an $8.52 tip. Nor does he want to take Annabelle's money: it would give the whole encounter a pipsqueak flavor. He is trapped, pinched, squeezed between impossible alternatives: dysfunctional. He could put it on a credit card but that, too, takes electricity. 'You could owe me to next time,' his sister mildly says. He ignores her and stares into his wallet at the edges of gray-green money as if a miracle will sprout.
And it does: the lights come on. The machinery of the place begins to hum all around them. 'I'll have to open up again,' the waitress complains. She taps off a dot-matrix slip and he takes a five and two ones out of the change.
Brewer is still a place where a tip of more than ten percent wins some gratitude. 'Good lunch,' Nelson tells her. 'Good and healthy. Lots of crumbs on the pie, like my grandmother used to bake.'
'Come again,' she says, but automatically, moving on sore feet to wipe their booth table and reset it with paper placemats.
Outside, the wind is bright again, whirling the droplets off the Bradford pear trees. Annabelle's booties glisten; she ties the red scarf beneath her chin, making her face look graver and slimmer. A spattering hits it, and she winces, then smiles. She doesn't know what to expect next. He wants to hand her the world but doesn't know quite how. 'That was fun,' he tells her. 'We'll be in touch.' And he kisses her on the cheek, tasting the rain, imagining her skin as half his, thinking,
'She's Dad's, all right,' he tells his mother. 'That same weird innocence, that way of riding along.'
'She wasn't just riding along the day she came here,' Janice says. 'She was determined, that little scruffy hairdo and showing off her legs right up to the crotch.'
'How would you like to have her here again? Invited this time, with some other people.'
'What other people? What am I supposed to say-this is my dead husband's bastard daughter from forty years ago? It was humiliating enough at the time, that whole nightmare, Nelson. I don't see why I should put myself through it again. I can't believe you're asking me-aren't social workers supposed to be so sensitive?'
'Not to their own families, necessarily. Mom, she's
