It was lunch time at Max’s Drug Store on Melrose, but there was only one red-leather swivel stool open in the middle of the lunch counter. The others were occupied by women shoppers drinking coffee and yakking, salesmen on their lunch hour wolfing down egg salad sandwiches, and a sailor reading the newspaper.
Anita Maloney was alone behind the counter keeping up with orders, serving, preparing, brushing away dangling hairs with the back of her hand. She was a one-woman show: with one hand juggling orders, keeping coffee mugs full, slinging burgers, popping toast and scooping quarter tips into the front pocket of her peach-colored uniform while she piled the dirty cups and plates with the other.
Anita was the reason I was here. We had been seeing each other for about four months. It had started when I stopped in at Max’s for a coffee and recognized the woman behind the counter was the girl I had taken to the senior prom at Glendale High more than thirty years before.
We had lost touch with each other. I had gone through a marriage and lost my wife Ann who wanted a husband and not a battered kid in his forties. Anita had also been through a divorce, one she didn’t want to talk about it. Anita had a daughter, grown, living on her own in L.A. I had a cat named Dash living on his own in Hollywood backyards.
Anita saw me, gave me a small smile. Good teeth. White. Even. Anita was lean, energetic, and a little washed out when she was behind the counter, definitely pretty when she cleaned up after work. She wasn’t a beauty like Ann, but we were more than just comfortable with each other.
She didn’t ask me for my order, simply bringing me a Pepsi on ice and a slice of apple pie.
“End of the counter,” she said, without moving her head. “He’s been sitting there for the past twenty minutes watching the door. When you came in, he stopped watching and buried his head in the
She handed me a fork and went down the line to a woman with a cracking voice who called, “Miss!”
I glanced up at the shining aluminum rectangle over the grill. The reflection was wavy like an image behind the August heat of a steamy street. But it was enough. At the far end of the counter, not far from the restrooms and the telephone on the wall sat a man in a purple shirt and a red scarf flung over his neck. Less than two hours earlier, I had seen someone like that attempt to beat the California taco eating record in my office.
Pancho Vanderhoff did not lift his head. I couldn’t see him clearly, but I had the feeling his eyes were rolled upward watching me work on my pie.
The pie was good. Anita wouldn’t steer me wrong. The good thing was that I felt no pain in my left shoulder. I was aware of where the pellet had gone in and then pulled out, but I couldn’t call it pain. What I could call pain was the small, sharp jab in my chipped tooth. I stopped eating.
“Not going to finish?” Anita asked.
“Frank in?” I asked.
“Always,” she said. “What’s up?”
“Be right back,” I said, getting off the stool.
Pancho glanced at me, trying not to let it show. He was bad at not letting it show. When it was clear that I wasn’t headed for the door or the restroom but toward the pharmacy counter, Pancho went back to pretending to read the paper.
Frank stood reaching up to get a bottle on a high shelf behind the counter. The white pharmacist’s jacket he wore strained as he stretched. His fingers managed to pull the glass bottle forward. It fell and he caught it deftly with a grin of relief.
“Haven’t lost the touch,” I said.
He put the bottle of white tablets on the counter, looked at his hands and said, “Once a catcher, always a catcher.”
“Catcher?”
“Glendale High,” he said.
Phil and I had gone to Glendale, but Frank the Pharmacist was definitely a decade younger than me, and, by the time he was in high school, Phil and I were long on our way-he to the war to end all wars and me to a life of poverty, confusion, heartbreak, a reasonable amount of fun and satisfaction. Not to mention the occasional pain, leading me to ask now, “What have you got for a toothache?”
“Advice,” he said, picking up the pill bottle again. The pills rattled.
“Go see a dentist. You know a dentist?”
“Not one I’d want in my mouth,” I said.
“My brother’s a dentist,” he said. “You want his number? Use my name. He’ll take care of you. Wait.”
He put down the pill bottle, reached for the pad of paper on the counter, pulled a push-pull click-click pen out of his pocket and wrote his brother’s name and phone number. He handed the sheet of paper to me and picked up the bottle again. I pocketed the paper.
“Anything I can use till I see him?”
“Let’s see the tooth.”
I leaned over, pulled my upper lip back and he leaned forward.
“I’ve seen worse,” he said, wrinkling his nose.
“That’s comforting.”
“Oil of cloves,” he said. “It’s what dentists use.”
He handed me the bottle of pills and ducked behind the counter. I put the pills down as he came up with a bottle of green liquid with a screw top. He handed the bottle to me and said, “Just dab it on with your finger. A buck ten.”
I fished out the money and handed it to him.
“See Fred,” he said.
“Who?”
“My brother Fred, the dentist.”
“I will,” I said.
I could hear the pills rattling behind me as I headed back to the counter, pausing to open the screw-top bottle and use my finger to dab some oil of cloves on what remained of my tooth. The slight pain went away, replaced by the smell of something I recognized from a recent semimeat dish Mrs. Plaut had prepared a few days earlier.
“You okay?” Anita asked.
“Peachy,” I said, sitting again.
She poured me more coffee. I drank it, avoiding the side of my mouth with the sore tooth. I’d respect it, if it would respect me, at least for a few days.
People left. Others came. Anita scrambled. She put in ten-hour shifts four days a week and sometimes she worked an extra day.
A contrast: If I said to Anita that we had to go on a high-speed chase in ten minutes in order to catch up with a guy who’d kidnapped Paul Muni, she’d say, “Sure.” And she would mean it. If I had said the same thing to my ex-wife Ann, she would have said nothing, but she would have looked at me with a shake of her head, earrings dancing, breasts heaving, and turned away to deal with something serious.
I guess I still loved Ann. I know I liked Anita more than I liked my ex-wife. Anita knew how I felt about Ann. It didn’t bother her. She wasn’t looking for another husband.
At one, the lunch counter was almost empty. People had gone back to their buying or selling. The only ones left were me and Pancho who still pretended to read the
Anita was cleaning up. Armed with my cup of coffee, I moved to the stool next to Vanderhoff.
“Henriot is dead,” I said.
“Huh?” asked Pancho, looking up from his newspaper.
“Front page, bottom, right where you were looking. French patriots killed the Vichy Minister of Information and Propaganda, Phillippe Henriot, in his bed in Paris.”
“Oh,” he said, his right cheek twitching just a bit. “Yes, I see.”
“And if you turn the page,” I said, reaching over to do it for him as Anita placed a fresh piece of pie in front of me, “you’ll see that Joe E. Brown presented a flag to the new Don E. Brown World War II American Legion Post 593. You know Brown’s son was a captain, killed in a plane crash near Palm Springs a couple of years ago.”
