“Dad,” Paul said.
“You see,” I told her, “my son just got a job here, and he was telling me that-”
“Dad,” Paul said.
Finally I turned around. The woman from behind the register was standing there, glowering at me.
“What you saying?” she asked. I noticed that, hanging from her right arm, was a baseball bat.
“What’s wrong, Ma?” asked the twin who’d put the toppings on my burger.
I tried to remain calm, nonconfrontational. “I had heard, I understand that your freezer went out. For several hours.” Tried not to make it sound like an accusation, more like a statement of fact.
“What you know about my freezer?”
“It’s just that, if the meat had been thawed for some time, there’s a risk that it could be contaminated. And I understand there’s already been one man who’d eaten here at lunch-”
She raised the bat. “Where you hear this?” She turned those black eyes on Paul. “You tell him this?”
Paul’s voice squeaked. “This is my dad.”
Eyes back to me. “You get out.” She brought up the bat, ready to swing, just as her two daughters started coming around the counter.
“I’ll have to call the health department,” I said, trying to stand my ground but knowing I was a moment away from bolting.
“Go ahead and fucking call them,” said the twin. “See what happens, Mr. Big Asshole.”
There wasn’t anyone in the restaurant who couldn’t hear what was going on. No one was eating. People were getting up, leaving their unfinished burgers on their trays, not bothering to dump them into the trash.
Ma’s eyes bored into mine. “You go or I smash your fucking head in.” And then, to Paul, “You, you fired.”
He peeled off his hat, untied his apron, and tossed them over the back of a swivel chair. We both backed our way out and said nothing to each other until we were safely in the car and driving down the street. Blood was pounding in my ears.
“Way to go, Dad,” Paul said. “You just lost me my first job.”
Eldon wasn’t like the others. The others, well, they were like her father. Pigs, basically. Always with the jokes. Tit jokes. Ass jokes. Any kind of sex joke. You’re a stripper, people can say whatever they want to you. Even if you’re not a whore, you’re a whore. Grabbing your butt when they walked by, pressing themselves up against you at the bar, all hard under their jeans, even when you’re back in your regular clothes. What did she expect, exactly? The place was run by a bunch of biker types. You wanted a bunch of gentlemen? Go work someplace else, lady.
Eldon, he was one of them, but he wasn’t one of them. Didn’t even have an actual motorcycle. Had this old Toyota, the guys made jokes about him. He always treated Miranda, eighteen now, like a lady. Thought her name was Candace, though. He was the only one called her that. Everyone else called her Candy. Let’s have a lick of Candy, they said. I’d love to eat Candy, they said.
So dumb, she thought, coming up with a name like that. Thought it sounded like a good name for a stripper when she applied for the job. Stupid.
But Eldon, he called her Candace, talked to her like a person. Asked what she wanted to do with her life, like he knew she was destined for something better than wrapping herself around a pole for a bunch of horny drunks.
“I like numbers,” she said. “Maybe, like, something financial. Planning, or accounting, doing people’s books for them. I look around here, they’re wasting so much money. They could be saving a lot.”
“No shit?” he said.
“They have a course, at the college?” she said. “I’m going to see if I can take it, learn more stuff. I don’t like the dancing.”
“Yeah, you’re good though. You bring the people in.”
“They’d come in and watch anyone does what I do.”
“You should do what you want to do. You’re smart. No offense, but you’re too smart to be up there doing that, you know?”
She told him that Gary, the guy who ran the Kickstart, he kept pushing her to work upstairs, where lots of the other dancers made extra money on their backs, or their knees.
“That’s not right, him pushing you like that,” Eldon said. “Not right at all.”
He had a nice smile. Not huge. Just the corners of his mouth coming up, like he wasn’t just smiling, but he was thinking about why he was smiling. He did odd jobs for Gary, dope runs up from the city, upkeep on the Kickstart. The heavy-duty stuff, like when someone from the other gang in town started cutting in on your territory, and you had to go out and teach somebody a lesson, beat the shit out of somebody, blow up a car, that kind of thing, Eldon gave that a pass. Let Zane do it. Or Eldridge. They were fucking crazy. They were made for that kind of work.
Eldon thought it was great that Candace was going to take a course to better herself. “You got a car? If you don’t, I could drive you up to the college in my Toyota, you could check it out, this financial stuff. On days that you have a class, I could take you there, bring you back, we could get something to eat after.”
So he drove her up. She didn’t have the marks, or the money, to enroll full-time, but she was able to take a couple of courses. She was a natural. She’d dress real plain, bulky sweaters, try to look like someone else, in case some of the male students recognized her from stripping at the Kickstart. Eldon would come by when her course was over and drive her home. “Stop here,” she’d say along the way. “I gotta go in and buy the new issue of Money.”
She said to Gary-they called him Pick behind his back sometimes but not to his face-he could save some money by changing around some of the bartending shifts, he had too many people during the slow parts of the day, she could draw up a better schedule?
“The fuck you talking about?” he said. She explained it to him. He said, “Shit, you’re right.”
She had other suggestions for him, how he could negotiate better deals with his restaurant suppliers, how the girls upstairs could charge more for certain things some guys really liked. What the hell, as long as she didn’t have to do it. She told him how he could be putting his money from prostitution, and the cash from dispensing dope, in legit investments, make it look like it came through the Kickstart legally.
“How you know all this shit?” Gary wanted to know.
She shrugged. “I like this stuff.”
“Math,” Gary said, shaking his head. “I don’t get it.”
And he didn’t. Miranda figured that if he had to rely on profits from a legitimate business, he’d go tits up in no time. It was only because the markup on drugs was so high, the profits on prostitution so huge, that he managed to keep his head above water.
“You’re amazing,” Eldon said. “I’m gonna talk to Gary, see if he’ll put you in the office full-time, you won’t have to take your clothes off anymore.”
She took them off for him, though. He wasn’t the first man she’d ever slept with. But he was the first she slept with more than once. Was this what it was like for her sister and Don? How many men were there out there who weren’t total assholes? Had she and Claire found the only two?
Claire phoned her. Their dad had come out of a bar, looked the wrong way crossing the street, got flattened by a tractor-trailer hauling pigs to a plant where they’d be turned into bacon.
No shit. She had to laugh.
10
“I just want it on the record,” Paul said, “that I did actually get a job, and that I lost it through no fault of my own. Okay?”
