thousands of years older than chess and much more complex.”
I didn’t even know chess. “No, I don’t.”
“That was to be expected. I’ll teach you.”
“I have to eat lunch.”
Dougie pushed his glasses up again. “I’ll be here when you’re ready to learn.”
“Thanks for showing me the paintings. I like the one you did best.”
Dougie beamed. “Give my regards to your mother.”
“Your regards.”
“You look sad,” Dot said. “You’re too young to look sad. I’ll bet a strawberry shake would fix you right up.”
Why do adults think kids don’t have a problem in the world that can’t be solved by sugar? “I’d rather have a cheeseburger,” I said.
Dot settled her body into the booth across from me. “You eat a cheeseburger in here almost every day. Doesn’t your mother feed you?”
“I feed her.”
Dot had two uniforms. They were both mostly white, only one had lime-green trim and the other had pink. I preferred the pink, which is what she had on then. It went better with her smile. She also had two little matching hat deals she wore on the supper shift.
She didn’t show any sign of getting up to turn my cheeseburger order in to Max. “You’re too young to be hangdog, Sammy. Start now and think where you’ll be when you get his age.” She thumb-pointed to Oly who was nodded out in his old booth next to the jukebox. I looked at him and wondered where I would be when I got his age. I could think of loads of places worse than that booth. By the time you were that old, you couldn’t have problems anyway, except it would be tough having people look at you and not care you were there.
Oly’d grown a goiter in his neck since Bill died, which made him more unpleasant than ever to look at, but, other than the goiter, his life seemed the same as ever.
“Something happened that I guess I don’t mind, only someone else does and it’s going to unhappen without any say from me. Did that ever happen to you?”
Dot looked at me awhile. It was nice of her not to treat me my age. “You ought to have a say in what happens,” she said.
“I don’t mind it not happening so much as nobody asking me what I’d do if it happened to me.”
“That is a problem.” We sat a few minutes staring into space. I stared at Dot’s hands, which were pretty much normal except for the color. They were way pink, pinker than the trim on her uniform, more like the pink of a person’s gums.
“Any chance of you telling me what it is we’re talking about?” she asked.
I scratched my nose. “I guess Maurey is pregnant. I guess. She thinks maybe she is. Pregnant.”
One of Dot’s hands flew up around mouth level, but otherwise she took it fairly well. She didn’t say anything so I kept going.
“She and Lydia are over in Dubois at the doctor finding out, but it looks kind of like she is.”
Dot’s hand went from her mouth back to the table. “Those questions weren’t just kid curiosity. I thought you two were playing I’ll-show-you-mine, you-show-me-yours.”
“We took the game another step or two.”
“I guess.”
“Now she wants an abortion.”
I looked up at Dot’s face and her ever-present smile was gone. She said, “Isn’t it funny how people who don’t want it get it and people who do don’t.”
“Do you and Jimmy want your little boy?”
“Let me turn in your ticket.”
Dot went to the kitchen and I sat looking at myself in the napkin box. The shiny sides had a design that made my face all twisted and weird, so it was possible to pretend I was a fetus. I opened my mouth in an O which looked fishy, but then I breathed out and the jaw in the napkin box went milky.
Dot brought us both cups of coffee. I filled mine with sugar and milk; she drank hers black.
“So your mother is helping her?” Dot asked. I nodded and blew across my coffee. “How about Maurey’s parents?”
“We’d just as soon not get them involved.”
A smile almost flickered onto Dot’s dimples. “Buddy’ll roast your butt on a branding fire.”
I tried not to visualize the image. “What’s an abortion feel like?”
Dot drank some coffee. “I wouldn’t know, someone told me it’s like having your guts and soul sucked away.” More visualization. I think Dot was embarrassed about using the word soul in conversation. She flushed and looked back at the kitchen as if she hoped my burger would come up.
“Abortions are illegal,” I said.
“There’s a place in Rock Springs, a regular clinic during the week, but on Saturdays and Sundays they do those things to women. I hear it’s disgusting, they wheel the women through three at a time and you can hear the doctor or whoever does it scraping the woman next to you.”
“Scraping?”
“I heard more than one woman on the number-three table freaks out and runs away half-gassed.”
I put more sugar in my coffee. What did she mean, “scraping”? And “gassed”? Did they stick a tool up there and pry loose a dead baby?
“How do you know this stuff?” I asked.
“People think waitresses are deaf. Boy, could I write a book if I had the time.”
“I’m going to write a book someday.”
Once again, Dot didn’t treat me my age. “How about I tell you the true stories and you write the book. We’ll split the money.”
A bell
I didn’t see Maurey the rest of the day, but Lydia told me the doctor had done a test and we’d know for certain Tuesday.
“What’s an abortion feel like?” I asked.
She gave me her look. “Feels like cutting your fingernails real short.”
I thought about that. “Someone told Dot it’s like having your guts and soul sucked out.”
“You discussed this with Dot?”
I told her about the clinic in Rock Springs and how the third-table woman can hear scraping on the first-table woman when she’s half-gassed.
Lydia went stern. “Sam, as far as Maurey goes, it’s getting her fingernails trimmed. You got that?”
“Why?”
“This won’t be a lark for her. I’ll brook no talk of guts and souls.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
