Big Boy

Jen Michalski

When Emma disappeared at the Bob’s Big Boy at the travel plaza in Wilmington, she was wearing a knitted green cap that looked like a frog. This much Loretta remembered. Loretta also remembered the way the girl had spun in a slow circle behind her mother, Deirdre, examining with her blue saucer eyes the tired travelers who had descended upon the Formica and leather way station where Loretta worked. It was the Friday afternoon after Thanksgiving, one of the busiest each year, and Loretta was still seven hours away from the flannel sheets she had purchased earlier in the week for her and Larry at Boscov’s holiday sale. Deirdre, an angular woman with wan, penetrating features, had leaned over, digging in her red Coach bag for her matching wallet, blocking Loretta’s view of the three-year-old girl in the ski jacket.
…..“Emma?” Deirdre had glanced behind her while waiting for Loretta to swipe her credit card.
…..“She’s probably near the Big Boy,” Loretta had responded, ripping the waxy paper from the machine and flattening it against the counter. “The kids love him. People are always takin’ pictures of him with their kids.”
…..Deirdre dropped her wallet into her bag and hurried toward the front of the restaurant, which opened out into the tiled court of the travel plaza. In one corner its wide entrance stood Big Boy, the shiny statue of a boy with a duck curl wearing checkered overalls and holding a hamburger on a plate high above his head. Deirdre was swallowed by the push of travelers who streamed into the restaurant, their bladders freshly emptied, stomachs grumbling, their faces dry and rubbed from the cold, and Loretta forgot about her until she returned forty-five minutes later, accompanied by two police officers.

***

“Some people just don’t know how to take care of kids,” Larry opined as he and Loretta stood in the back doorway of the kitchen later, smoking cigarettes. The hard orange gumball of sun had been swallowed by an undergrowth of blueberry clouds on the horizon, the way it had every winter. At least for the last 7 years, since she had married Larry Lupino, a friend of her brother who had just bought the franchise at the lip of the New Jersey turnpike. It was Loretta’s second marriage, Larry’s third.
…..“She wasn’t like that, Larry,” Loretta answered, rubbing the mole on her neck. She zipped up her parka. “She had money, looked like. She wasn’t ignoring her or nothing. You know how kids are, always wandering off.”
…..“Shit.” Larry flicked the butt into the browned weeds by the dumpster, his eyes following the descent of the Channel 9 news truck down the ramp into the travel plaza. “Just what we need.”
…..The news teams camped in front of the Big Boy that evening. But people still stopped in during the days and weeks to follow. Most were passing through from other states on the eastern seaboard and hadn’t seen the local newscasts of the little girl abducted near the restaurant. And, a few days later, the employees’ attention had moved onto other things, like the accident a few miles into Maryland in which an eighteen wheeler heading south jack-knifed into the north-bound lane. Loretta forgot, too, although she had been the last.
…..Until Deirdre came back. She was the woman Loretta had remembered in the first few days after Emma went missing, nodding and shaking her head to the state police, her jaw tight and firm and possessing, her words measured, voice quiet. Shock, Loretta imagined. Deirdre had left a neat stack of flyers with Emma’s picture on them, still in the box from the copy center. Larry had acquiesced, putting up a flyer in the women’s bathroom but had balked at taping them on the walls of the restaurant, not wanting to scare off customers. But then she had left, presumably to wait at home for news, to prepare herself for the words that would be the worst anybody could ever hear.
…..“Can I help, you, hon?” Loretta had emerged from her station. Deidre looked at her, her blue saucer eyes a grown-up version of Emma’s, although they were fractured with red and rimmed with black.
…..“I lost my child,” she whispered, and Loretta wondered whether to take her hand.
…..“I know,” Loretta said, patting her back and guiding her toward a booth. “Let me get you some soup.”

***

Deirdre had come every day after that, sitting at the same booth, staring at the entrance. Sometimes Loretta brought her soup or tea or the last slice of pie. She was unsure what Deirdre’s plan was, if her vigil was something the police had advised or whether this waiting was something she had thought of herself. All she knew was that Deirdre was staying at the Comfort Inn in nearby Newark, that her relatives had come by the first week, poking around, giving Loretta suspicious stares as if she had hidden Emma in the walk-in or something. Deirdre’s husband had come once, too, a man wearing a phone on his ear, and he and Deirdre walked around the travel plaza. Loretta hadn’t seen him after that.
…..“Don’t encourage her,” Larry muttered outside, where they shared a cigarette. It was cold and windy and his comb-over crept perpendicularly to the top of his skull. “We can’t have her here every day, scaring away the customers.”
…..“She ain’t scaring away nobody,” Loretta answered. “She always pays for her food. I don’t even give her a check.”
…..“Well, you should. If she thinks you’re okay with her here, she ain’t never gonna leave.”
…..“Christ, Larry.” Loretta took out a compact and reapplied her lipstick. “Have a heart. She lost her child.”
…..Larry didn’t care what problems pinned his employees deep in their beds or in the furthest recesses of their minds, as long as they showed up and worked. Like Penny, a waitress on second shift, whose face and arms often looked like soft, soiled fruit, and Miguel, the cook, whose wife had run off with their four-year-old son Manny last year. Miguel often worked twelve-hour days. Sometimes he would bring in the circulars from Wal-Mart and trail his finger on the color printouts of toys and school supplies.
…..See? He showed her the back-to-school advertisement a few months ago, his index finger underneath backpacks. Blue or green?
…..Have you heard from Manny and Rosetta, Miguel? She asked, watching the wormy lines of skin on his forehead bunch together.

“You doing all right, hon?” Loretta tipped the coffee pot toward Deirdre’s cup. It was a Tuesday, an hour before the lunch rush. Emma had been missing for eight days.
…..“Nothing today.” Deirdre shook her head. “Thanks for the coffee. You’re so kind to me.”
…..“It’s not anything.” Loretta leaned against the booth. From there she could look out from the mouth of the restaurant into the travel plaza. So many passed through. Some days, she felt like she had seen the entire world.
…..“I don’t want to be in the way.” Deirdre cradled her mug in her hands delicately. How those hands could lose anything, Loretta couldn’t fathom.
…..“Stop it.” Loretta looked at her own hands. “You aren’t in the way.”
…..“Still, you’ve been so kind to me. Really.”
…..Loretta fed on the diminutive smiles, the quiet, small words of thanks that Deirdre fed her. When Loretta started working at Big Boy’s, she’d sought approval through silence. Larry was the chef then, too, and he was economical with words. Order up. Hurry up. You’re not doing the overrides right. Silence, Loretta and the other employees learned, was golden. Larry had been a cook or a bartender, most of his life along the Delaware beaches, serving burgers and rail-rum margaritas. This was his only chance at success, he reminded Loretta every night, in bed, almost in apology, their only chance. Hang on for the ride or get off now.
…..“Boy, they left a mess on table 10.” Loretta eyed a milkshake glass amongst a pastiche of napkins, crumbs, and flatware.
…..Deirdre stoop up, her cup resting in her palm, her body full of sudden purpose. “Loretta, let me help. It’s the least I can do.”

***

“Maybe we should offer her a job, Larry.” Loretta followed Larry back into the kitchen.
…..“Lemmee get this straight.” Larry pulled a 10-lb bag of French fries from a shelf in the walk-in freezer. Loretta thought Larry’s upper body strength was the sexiest thing about him, his large Popeye arms bursting out of the short-sleeved white button-up shirts that he wore to work, even in winter, after he’d burned his elbow when the fold of his long-sleeved shirt unraveled and dipped in the fry grease. ”You want to pay the woman who won’t leave to stay here?”
……“She likes working.” Loretta followed him into the kitchen, where Miguel was halving an omelet with his spatula. “She won’t feel like she’s trespassing or anything.”
…..“You women are nuts,” Larry scowled as he tore open the bag and stiff, frosty French fries dived into the bubbly oil.
…..But Loretta knew she had won. She kissed his scratchy cheek, leaving a fleck of lipstick on his skin, before taking the omelets into the dining room.
…..Loretta started Deirdre off with a four-table station, explaining her shorthand for taking orders, how much ice to put into the glasses before adding the soda, where she could find napkins and straws if they ran out in the front.
…..“What did you do before?” Loretta asked as Deirdre watched her make a sundae.
…..“I’m an analyst,” Deirdre answered. “In New York. I’m taking a leave of absence.”
…..“Why were you in Delaware? Visiting family over Thanksgiving?”
…..“Yes. We were on our way back from my parent’s house in Annapolis. My husband couldn’t make it…he had to work. We should have just stayed in New York with him. But on the way home, Emma was hungry. I figured it couldn’t hurt. But I shouldn’t have indulged her. Nothing would have…happened.”
…..“Well, even if you don’t do anything, something happens to you. You might as well make something happen,” Loretta said, and the words she voiced were not ones she had ever heard. She wondered whether she was getting enough sleep.
…..“I don’t want to do anything, go anywhere, until I find her.” Deirdre took the can of whipped cream and decorated the second sundae as Loretta showed her. “I don’t know what else to do.”
…..“Well, you just keep working, hon. Let the police do their jobs.” Loretta patted her shoulder. She felt a wave erupt in Deirdre’s body before it stopped, the last gasp of a star before crumbling into the black. “You can stay here as long as you want it.”
…..Loretta felt terrible for Deirdre. Deirdre had never waitressed before, and it showed. She was too slow and mixed up orders and her mind was everywhere but her station. When she wasn’t on her phone with the missing persons department or relatives, she would stare at the Big Boy statue, as if mesmerized. Loretta would sometimes stare at Big Boy, too, but she didn’t think she saw what Deirdre saw. Loretta sometimes saw things she hadn’t noticed before, like the chip of paint that was missing from Big Boy’s earlobe, the thinned, buffed parts on his hips, where the grubby, oily hands of children had grasped, trying to hug the life out of him. Or into him.
…..Loretta decided to ask Larry to let Deirdre work the register. She was probably good with money, Loretta figured she could watch that Big Boy statue all day if she wanted. Loretta took Deirdre’s shift and became busy herself. She forgot about how old and grimy Big Boy looked, how much her knuckles hurt, her pants rubbed around her waist.
…..“She seems better there,” Larry agreed, although he was unhappy that someone other than Loretta was handling the money. “You think she’ll quit soon?”

***

Loretta noticed that Deirdre and Miguel began to take breaks together. They looked over the sales papers that Miguel brought in from various stores, nodding to each other, Miguel exposing a smile of gapped, rounded teeth, like a koala. Occasionally, they both craned their necks to look at Big Boy, who stared unseeing into the travel plaza, where the convenience mart and restrooms and pretzel stand inhaled and exhaled groups of travelers all day. Maybe Loretta was a little hurt that Deirdre was spending time with Miguel, although she understood that Miguel, despite his language barrier, would empathize with Deirdre in a way Loretta couldn’t. And maybe it was good for them, would take their minds off things. Deirdre had been coming in later, the circles under her eyes darker. She frequently went to the bathroom to cry, leaving Loretta to watch both the register and tables. One day she cried right in front of customers, a mother and grandmother and young boy. She had stood with her hands clenched, as if she would lift off from the floor, her face red and run with mascara. Thankfully Larry had been making the lunch deposit and wasn’t around.
…..Loretta hadn’t lost a child. She had been married at nineteen out of high school to her sweetheart, Rusty Holmes. Neither of them wanted kids. They were enough for each other. Rusty worked at the DuPont plant down in Seaford, and after twelve years on the line developed breathing trouble. Sometimes Loretta could still hear the labored, gravely cadence of his breath next to her, like a train building fury a few miles away. OSHA fined DuPont in 1987 for concealing records that several workers were suffering illnesses related to asbestos exposure, but by then Rusty had been on a respirator. She got 10,000 dollars from the company for his death, which arrived in a nondescript white envelope and left almost as quickly to pay off the insurance bills. Loretta lost the house, too. It wasn’t much, a double-wide a few miles off the Delmarva Speedway, where Loretta and Rusty ate hotdogs on Saturday nights and watched the late modifieds, street modifieds, and modified lites power up the concrete tracks. It always amazed Loretta that two tons of steel could move like jackrabbits. It was as close to a religious experience as she had ever had.
…..She left the only life and the only God she had ever known and moved in with her brother up in Wilmington, working as a waitress at one of the sports bars where the young professionals from Barclays and MBNA liked to drink. They looked past her at the bottles on the rail, asked whether she could make a cosmopolitan. They left soft, crumpled dollars on the bar that Loretta used on her days off to buy liters of Richards Wild Irish Rose. She met Danny in a roadhouse off Route 13. She wasn’t a waitress in Wilmington anymore. She was then using her middle thirties, before the bottom fell out of her tits and ass, to dance at an exotic club, snorting cocaine Danny gave her on the days when her body couldn’t wake up. And then just snorting it all the time. Danny got arrested when he took a swing at the bouncer and the cops found a gram in the pocket of his jacket. Loretta said some awful things to the cops and wound up getting arrested as well when she kicked at the bumper of one of the cruisers.
…..She met Larry when she hit rock bottom; she liked to joke that she found him there. He had come over to play poker one night with her brother and his friends. He won big but had passed out with his winnings on the couch, a victim of her brother’s generous shots of wild turkey. Loretta pocketed his money and bought a gram. When she slid into the house a few days later, Larry was waiting.
…..I know you took my money, Loretta. He rolled up his sleeves over his hammy forearms, but he didn’t hit her. He held out his hand. But don’t worry; I need a waitress and I’ll just take it out of your pay.
…..Loretta hadn’t lost a child. But she took that job from Larry and had been working ever since, sixty hours a week. More sometimes. They were a good team. Loretta found less time to dwell on the past, even less for the future.
…..They had found time to marry on a three-day weekend to Atlantic City. The waitress at the casino had brought out a little cake, the kind they kept on hand for birthdays, and gave them $100 in chips. In the morning they watched the sun rise on the beach, shared a cigarette. It was not so much happiness as relief. Loretta had survived.

***

“I can’t take it,” Deirdre confessed to her one day at break. They sat in the booth near the front, away from the windows, the one nobody ever wanted. Loretta had been thinking of a way to tell her that she really needed to pay more attention because the register had been short two days in a row. But Deirdre was beyond her tutoring. Loretta knew that look, those glassy, red eyes that showed Loretta her reflection and not much else. Loretta buttered an old roll. She noticed that Deirdre was no longer wearing her fancy wedding ring.
…..“Honey, you need to go home.” Loretta met her gaze. “Get some rest. This whole thing…would make anybody crazy. Go back to New York. Take some time for yourself.”
…..“I can’t leave.” Deirdre shook her head violently, angered. “Where am I supposed to go?”
…..Loretta pushed the buttered roll toward her. A peace offering.
…..“I know,” she said.
…..Later that night, as they were closing that store, Loretta asked Larry whether they shouldn’t schedule Deirdre some days off.
…..“Why the hell would I do that?” He tucked the bank bag into the back of his pants before zipping his jacket. “We don’t even take vacations.”
…..“I wish that we would.” Loretta pulled on her coat, stuffed a ladies magazine someone had left behind into her tote bag. “When’s the last time we’ve been anywhere, Larry?”
…..“Who’s gonna mind the restaurant during day shift?” Larry pushed Big Boy inside and locked the gate. “Miguel?”
…..Loretta thought that they should close down the restaurant for a week, drive as far from Newark as they could. Maybe go to one of those islands she saw in the ladies magazines, a cruise. She wondered whether there was more to her, to Larry, to them, than the restaurant, more than surviving. Maybe she was scared to find out. But it was time. She wanted to tell Larry that there were other places on the interstate where somebody could get a meal, other Big Boys, even. But she didn’t. Jim had passed away a few years ago, a heart attack. Larry was all she had left. She got in the car and smoked a cigarette while Larry scraped the ice that had formed on the windshield.

***

Larry’s patience with Deirdre wore. Loretta worked harder, cutting down on her smoke breaks, helping Deirdre out. She felt the elastic in her arms and legs fraying, the muscles in her calves knotted like scarves. But then one afternoon, Deirdre’s husband came into the restaurant and ordered a coffee, sitting in Loretta’s section.
…..“Why don’t you take him,” Loretta advised. She switched places with Deirdre. Before long, Deirdre was sitting with him, sharing a piece of apple pie. Maybe they would make up, Loretta smiled. Maybe Deirdre would realize how she was wasting her life here, waiting for a little girl who was never coming back, probably dead. It was good to get out of places like these, Loretta knew. They had a way of rubbing out the days, and you woke up one morning tying on your apron before you realized you were dead, caught in the same net on land that had originally saved you from drowning.
…..It got busy. Loretta flitted between the cashier and the tables, making sundaes for children, balancing plates of grilled cheese and hamburgers on her arms. She looked at their faces, so smooth and round, little fruits ready to be plucked. Loretta remembered when she was that young, she had silly dreams, just like them. A ballerina. A country singer. The Queen of England. She still remembered the soft, brush strokes extending the calf, the foot of a young woman performing a pirouette. It was in a book her mother had bought her at the five and dime. She could still remember that ballerina, the pink blush of her cheeks. But she could not remember any waitress who had ever waited on her.
…..After the afternoon rush had evaporated, after families were securely in their minivans on the way to grandma’s in upstate New York or Aunt Sally’s in Charleston, Loretta wandered toward the booth where Deirdre and her husband sat. Their hands lay in each others across the table, like sleeping babies.
…..“Hey folks,” Loretta smiled, wiping a spot off the table with a rag she kept in her apron.
…..“Loretta, this is Tom,” Deirdre beamed. “My husband.”
…..“Howdy,” Loretta murmured, and her legs felt so heavy. If it didn’t look funny, she would have squeezed in the booth with them, maybe put her feet up.
…..“I appreciate all you’ve done for me here.” Deirdre looked at her hands. “But I think I need to go home.”
…..“I understand.” Loretta shifted from one foot to the other. She wondered whether she could even make it back to the register. “You gotta get on with your life, hon.”
…..“Loretta!”
…..Loretta caught Larry’s eye in the back, the cock of his head directing her back to the register. Her legs were pylons that she scraped across the worn carpet, her head full of sand. She gripped the register, punched it open and counted the bills as well as she could, taking her mind off things. Four-hundred sixty-seven dollars. Not enough to get very far, if she slipped it all in her apron and told Larry she was going outside to smoke a cigarette. There was still time, a wormhole would open for her, and she could escape. If she could even move. And where would she go, could she go? Thousands of miles of interstate connected, a self-contained system of service stations and Big Boys and Larrys and Lorettas and Miguels. And maybe Deirdres, too. Wherever Loretta went, she would always wind up here.
…..She looked up at Deirdre and Tom. They made their way gingerly to the exit, arms interlaced, supporting the weight of each other. They got as far as the Big Boy statue before another customer, a heavyset man, cratered in front of them. And then they were gone. Loretta slammed the register shut and limped to the front of the restaurant to follow them, scanning the food court for them before searching the parking lot and then the bathrooms.
…..“Where’d the hell you go? I had to ring everybody up.” Larry shook his head at Loretta as she returned, alone, to the restaurant. He watched as she stood in front of Big Boy as if in defeat. He noticed her shaking and put his arm out to steady her.
…..“Deirdre,” Loretta whispered, and she grabbed Larry by the back of his head, her hands woven tightly into his whitening hair.
…..“What? What happened?” He was impatient. Larry knew time better than she. He knew that time was money, that they were losing it. She felt his hand on her waist and she wished she could pull him over her like a blanket that they could cast off into that darkness, swallowed by the silent snowfall that had started outside the windows of the restaurant.
…..“Deirdre,” she managed to say, as he guided her back inside. “She quit.”

–

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Jen Michalski’s collection of short fiction, Close Encounters (2007), is available from So New Media and her chapbook, Cross Sections (2008), from Publishing Genius. Her work has appeared widely, including McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, failbetter, storysouth, Hobart, Gargoyle, and The Potomac Review. She is the editor of the lit journal jmww.