Ruth hoped someday to write professionally. This was her dream.
Now that she was grown and Reverend Mobry had turned the pulpit over to a younger man, the waitressing job seemed a perfect fit for her. It would give her time to read. And write. Bringing drinks to people at their slot machines and gaming tables didn’t sound like a very taxing kind of job; it was definitely one she wouldn’t have to take home with her every day in the way of frets and regrets. Ruth would also have the chance to see more of her four friends from childhood, Maggie, Jane, Carrie, and Molly, both at the casino and during the free hours the five liked to spend together.
We Five applied for the waitressing jobs together and were all hired. The head of Human Resources, a Ms. Touliatis, liked it that her new applicants got along so well; they seemed much more like sisters than friends. “You’re all so, so, so cohesive!” she had marveled. “And Lucky Aces Casino needs cocktail waitresses who are cohesive.” Then Ms. Touliatis, who was forty-one and looked to Ruth as if she’d been twice run over by the ineluctably trundling steamroller of life, added through a wistful sigh: “I wish I had friends who were as dependable and devoted to one another as I see ya’ll are. By way of contrast, I just last week caught my best friend Lawanda in bed with my husband Mack. Well, not just my husband, but also our Irish Setter, Dakota. Can you imagine that? Both my husband and my dog were cheating on me!”
“I don’t think we can imagine that at all,” replied Jane, who felt a response of some sort was required.
“And then,” Ms. Touliatis went on, “there’s my other good friend—former good friend, Heidi. Heidi once made fun of my lazy eye over the loudspeaker at Kmart.” Ms. Touliatis pulled a tissue from the box on her desk and blew her nose. “A good and true friend is one of life’s great treasures.”
“That’s a fact,” said Jane.
The Mobrys had taken news of Ruth’s new job very well. “How convenient,” said the Reverend, “with the casino just down the road. And nowhere in the teachings of our socially progressive Lord and Savior do we find objections to cocktail waitressing in riverboat casinos, though the Southern Baptists would certainly have you think otherwise.”
“But do be careful,” Lucille Mobry added. “Men do get drunk in those places and try to take advantage when they can.”
Ruth nodded. “Yes, the woman who’s in charge of all the waitresses — Ms. Colthurst — she’s gonna have us all watch a training film called ‘How to Keep Their Mitts Off Your Tuches.’ I think it was put out by the New Jersey Gaming Commission.”
Lucille suddenly looked tristful. “Does this mean you won’t be living with us anymore? Are you gonna be moving in with one of your girlfriends?”
“Well, she doesn’t have to,” suggested the Reverend. “She can have the trailer out back. You can be a real working woman, Ruth, with a place of your own, but you’ll have us close at hand for whenever you need anything.”
“That’s very sweet, Uncle Herb,” said Ruth. “But if I took you up on this, I’d want to pay you rent.”
“We’ll take a little somethin’ from you if it makes you feel better,” said Mobry. The retired minister was halted by a thought. “You know, Ruth, you’ve got an awful lot of books, and I’m not sure they’ll all fit into that trailer. I might have to buy you one of those steel storage sheds and we can turn that into a little library for you.”
Ruth smiled. “That would be a funny-looking library.”
Lucille slapped the air with her hand. “Oh let’s just keep the books in her old room. Whenever she wants one, she can come get it. Oh honey-girl, I guess you can tell how hard it’s gonna be for us to let go of you. Just moving you outside into Lucius’s old trailer is gonna feel like a huge separation.”
“I’m sure everything will work out fine,” said Ruth, as she stepped over to her “aunt” to give her a kiss on the cheek.
“Unless there’s a tornado,” fretted Lucille, “in which case we’ll get to watch you fly away like Dorothy Gale.”
Mobry nodded. “You two remember when the big one touched down about a mile up the road? You recollect how much trouble we had getting Lucius out of that trailer and down into the basement?”
“Well, you don’t have to worry about me,” said Ruth. “I’ll be camped out in the basement long before the Weather Channel even puts up the Doppler radar. Me and my good friend, Little Debbie.” Ruth moistened her lips, visions of Swiss Cake Rolls and Oatmeal Creme Pies now dancing impudently in her head.
The Lucius of above mention was Lucius Redder. He’d been CGS’s building custodian since the church was founded by the Reverend and his sister in 1962. The siblings couldn’t pay him much but allowed him to live rent-free in the house trailer, which Mobry had bought at an estate sale and which he’d docked permanently in the backyard. Lucius had died in his sleep about six months earlier — right before Mobry’s retirement. No one knew how old he was, but Ruth guessed he’d reached at least ninety before he passed. Her friend Molly thought he was even older than that: “I think he was born into slavery.”
Molly said this with a straight face and nobody corrected her. “Molly isn’t stupid,” Jane had once remarked to the others. “She just doesn’t know very much.”
“This’ll work nicely,” said Lucille Mobry a few days later. She was standing inside the old trailer and giving it a good looking-over the way interior decorators do. “It needs a little fixin’ up, I’ll give you that, but Herb and I have a lot of time on our hands now. He can wedge those bed legs so you don’t roll off in your sleep, and I can sew you some nice new café curtains and re-cover this old couch. And I’ll get you a bunch of lavender sachets that’ll remove the old-man smell.”
“Don’t go to too much trouble, Aunt Lucille. I can do most of those things myself.”
“But I want to, honey-girl. And just think: you can sit out here and read in peace and quiet. You won’t have to listen to all those shows Herb and I watch now, which we never had time for before, like that funny Moesha, who looks like Stelloise’s girl Jerline, or that show where Rob Petrie is a doctor who solves crimes, but his wife Laura is nowhere to be found.”
“The television never bothered me,” said Ruth simply, thinking distractedly of what she was going to do with the big armchair next to the door with the batting coming out of it.
Jane Higgins was standing on the concrete pad outside the door to Ruth’s trailer. Ruth held the door open for her.
“Where are the others?” she asked, craning her neck to see around Jane.
“Mags’ car went into a ditch.”
“Is she all right? Was anybody with her?”
“She’d just picked up Molly and Carrie. It happened over by Carrie’s house. Everybody’s fine. The road had some ice on it and she just slid right in.”
“What are they gonna do?”
“Well, Molly’s daddy can’t drive us to the casino because his car’s in the shop with a distributor problem, and Mrs. Hale was already on her way up to Memphis for a doctor’s appointment, so Mags got the idea of calling the casino to see if they could send over one of their courtesy vans to pick us up. And guess what? They said they would.”