Marn parked across the street, got out of the car, an old beat-up Chevy, and she and her children walked across the street to the 4-B’s front door. There was a stiff, spring wind and they pushed into it, hair flying, as they crossed. Marn’s hands were white and knotted and she was gripping her kids, hard, but the kids didn’t look like they minded it. They weren’t pulling away. They didn’t look punished or grim or sad, like you might expect knowing where they came from. They looked amazed, that’s what I thought. They looked like they were walking out of the funnel of a tornado. Like they couldn’t believe the things they’d seen whirling around in there. After a few moments, I went to let them in, because they were standing in front of the old wood and glass double doors, stuck, as if the sidewalk had reached up and hardened around their ankles.
When I opened the door, Marn finally grabbed the heavy brass frame beside my hand, letting the kids go in under her arm. Marn’s skin looked parched and stiff, her cheeks were knobs of bone. She was a small woman, hair the color of twine, ears sticking through the limp strands of a braid that reached nearly to her waist. She glanced at me, eyes wide — I could see the whites nearly all the way around the intense blue iris — and she made a gasping smile that showed all her long white teeth.
Later on, I thought maybe that was the way a person looks who has just murdered her husband, because there were all sorts of rumors that she had done in Billy Peace.
Marn and her children walked in and took the last booth open, farthest from the windows. I had the ketchups in the very last booth, behind them. Their table was set for four so I took one setting off. She waved away the menu and ordered three number eights, the breakfast special with steak. Well done for all of them. Coffee, orange juice, water with ice. It had been warm the day before, but turned cold and spring-raw today. They were dressed like winter and shed their coats.
“I’ll take them,” I offered, and she handed me her children’s coats but kept hers beside her on the booth bench. “I’ve got stuff in the pockets.”
I gave crayons to the kids — a boy and girl, mouse-haired and pallid but with those dark Peace eyes. They began to color the cartoon cow and chicken figures on their place mats. They set the crayons carefully aside when the food came, bowed their heads, and folded their hands in their laps. I put the plates down before them. They stayed poised like that, just waiting. Maybe they were waiting for ketchup. I grabbed a half-consolidated bottle and put it on their table. Marn picked up her fork.
“Lilith, Judah,” she said, “pick up your forks. And just eat.”
The girl picked hers up first, watching her mother closely. Then the boy did. Marn took a mouthful of hash browns. The children watched her. They forked up hash browns and placed the food between their lips, then began to chew. All of a sudden, Marn grabbed the ketchup bottle and dumped ketchup onto their plates, first the girl’s, then the boy’s, then her own. She reached over and cut up their meat with jerky, excited, little saws of her knife. She dropped the knife with a clatter and began to shovel food into her mouth. They kids started picking up speed, and soon they were hardly stopping to breathe. When the food was gone, the toast devoured down to the crumbs and last tubs of jelly, I refilled Marn’s coffee and cleared their plates. I asked Marn if she wanted her check.
“No,” she said, her thin cheeks flushed. The children sat back in the booth, stupefied and glowing. “We’re gonna have dessert.” The children’s faces became very alert.
“Really,” she said. She scanned the room and the street outside, then got up to go to the bathroom. While she was gone, I came and gave the kids menus again. They bent over the list, their mouths forming the words.
“Banana cream pie,” said the boy finally.
“You got it,” said Marn, sitting back down at the table.
“Could I have ice cream too?” the boy asked in a small voice, then looked down at his lap.
“Chocolate sundae,” said the girl. She smiled. She had big, cute bunny teeth in front.
“With nuts?” I said.
She looked blankly at her mother and Marn nodded. I went back to the kitchen and made the desserts extra big with whipped cream on top of the ice cream and maraschino cherries stuck all over the mound.
“What the hell are you doing?” said Earl, coming up behind me.
“What’s it look like?”
“Those are way too—”
Uncle Whitey said, “Get back in your office, fathead.” Now that he was related to Earl by marriage, he enjoyed insulting him.
Earl did have a big, round, white head with pasty yellow hair that he glued to one side. He tried to run things in a military way even though he’d only lasted a week in the Marines. He hated that I brought books to work and when he saw my French book, he said, suddenly enraged, “The French are pussies.”
“Take that word back,” said Whitey, “or I’ll fight you. Thou shalt not take that word in vain.”
Earl opened his mouth, but Uncle Whitey kept talking. “Besides, my niece is going to Paris. She is in love with Paris. She’s a saucy Francophile.”
Whitey thought he was so clever.
“Okay, I take back the pussy part,” said Earl. His face was red and his neck was getting thick. “But you scrape that damn cream off there,” he said to me.
“I’ll pay for the whipped cream out of my tips.”
Often, once Earl left, we’d fry up a whole bag of popcorn shrimp and eat it. Plus I stole sugars, boxes of jelly, and especially the ketchup. I liked ketchup, hated running out. Earl couldn’t fire Whitey because Whitey had married Earl’s sister and she wouldn’t let him.
“Jesus,” said Whitey to Earl, “so what about the whipped cream? There’s no other customers. I don’t think those kids ever saw whipped cream before.”
Earl peered out the slot of a kitchen window and saw Marn. I’d forgotten that he had a crush on Marn.
“Yeah,” I said, “they’re her kids.”
“Oh,” he said, disappointed, and I knew he hadn’t realized that Marn had children, either. I put the desserts on a tray and backed through the swinging doors into the restaurant. Marn was smoking a cigarette and the children were watching her with fascination, as if they had never seen their mother smoke a cigarette before.
“Voil,” I said. The kids’ eyes opened wide.
“Oh, nice,” said Marn. She looked up at me and smiled, for real now, and she had the sweetest smile, with deep shadows at the corner of her mouth. She was almost beautiful when she smiled and looked into a person’s eyes. There was something that drew you. I could see why Billy, I guess, and Earl, had crushes on her. She had a facile, tough, energetic little body.
Earl came to the booth and started offering Marn her old job back, trying to convince her, but she waved her hand and said, “You don’t have to harangue me. I’ll start whenever.” Earl drew his head back into the hump of his shoulder, almost shy. Marn said that she’d come to town looking for Coutts, the lawyer. Earl looked over at me. I decided I’d better take down the ketchup bottles before he realized I had them all subtly balanced end to end.
“I need to get my land back,” Marn said.
That’s the first we heard of it.
“What are you going to do with it?” Earl asked.
“Start a snake ranch.” Marn raised her eyebrows and tapped a cigarette smoothly from its package.
Just then the door opened, this time with a windy crack, and a heavyset blond woman in a quilted green jacket barged through, bawling, “There you are, there you are! Defilement!”