The place we were going sold fried fish, taken, the sign insisted, daily from the Ohio River. In summer, the sign would be lit up with charmed fireflies, the large kind that turned the river breaks into a dancing field of stars. Now, though, it was March and all of the fireflies were dead. The charm kept a few still crawling around the edges of the sign, and a few more had kept a trace of their green-gold light, pulsing faintly over the restaurant’s name: Fulbright’s.
The place was closing as we came in, and a thin girl a few years younger than us stared, hands still on her broom. There was an old man reading a paper in the corner, gumming slowly at a piece of fried fish wrapped in a scrap of paper. Otherwise, the place was empty.
“Are you sure?” hissed Daisy, and I shrugged.
The beaded curtain clacked, and a skinny woman with a blue cloth tied over her hair came out. She took us both in with a cold gaze, so I felt free to study her in turn. She wasn’t white, but that was all I could say for sure. Her face was darker than mine, though not by much, and it seemed as if she had not smiled for years. Her mouth was as set as limestone, and there was nothing, she seemed to say, that could erode it away.
“Buy some food,” she said to us tersely, and then to the girl with the broom, “Turn over that sign, and get along home before your mama starts to worry.”
The old man she left alone, as if he were just another part of the restaurant, like the crackling leather on the stools to the vat of oil that hissed balefully behind the counter. Daisy asked for some pickles, and famished, I ordered a sandwich, the bread oversweet and the fried fish slathered with a lemony egg yolk sauce. The woman busied herself for a moment, wiping needlessly at the counter so she had a moment to watch us. Daisy kept her eyes morosely on her plate, but I watched insolently back. I had a bad habit of staring from the time I was a little girl, but it was fair, I thought, to stare back.
“We didn’t come here to eat,” Daisy finally said, her hands clenching and unclenching on countertop.
“I know,” the woman said scornfully. “But you might take up my time and run all the way home without buying nothing. You can sit for a little.”
“You don’t want us here any longer than you have to have us,” I said, my voice shaking just a little. The food helped, but I was exhausted. I wanted this over with, and she glared at me.
“It’s not you with the problem, is it? You look like the Toy girls, and they’re too smart for that. Too good too.”
I gave her a stony look. I knew of the Toy girls, even if I had never met them. They were the daughters of the laundry owners on Nineteenth Street. I saw them once years ago when Mrs. Baker had some business with their parents. They were as neat as pins, a few years older than me, and as our parents talked about the cleaning job, they elbowed each other and whispered back and forth while staring at me with open curiosity. Then their father left a scorch mark on some Irish linen curtains, and we had no further business with them. Some of the other girls at school would call me Jordan Toy sometimes, but it was a vague sort of insult.
“So you then,” she said to Daisy.
“Yes, me,” Daisy said in the smallest voice I had ever heard from her. “Please, my father will just die…”
The woman shrugged.
“Thirty-five dollars,” she said, and Daisy flinched.
“I don’t have that much, but—”
“How much do you have now?” she asked in irritation. “You didn’t come with nothing, did you?”
“No! No, I didn’t…”
Flustered, Daisy pulled out her pocketbook, spilling ticket stubs and receipts and dried flower petals everywhere. Her fingers were shaking so much that I finally took it from her, pulling out the crisp bills. It was thirty dollars not thirty-five, and the woman shrugged philosophically. She tucked the bills into the same pocket where our food money had gone and nodded.