“Here about the job?”
I jump back, hoping what I was looking at isn’t obvious. A short, skinny girl with spiky black and purple hair smiles at me. She has a ring in her nose, right in the middle like a bull, and holes in her earlobes filled with what look like tiny black tire rims.
“Yeah,” I say, straightening up. “April.”
I offer her my hand, and she shakes it. Her grip is weak, palm icy and damp.
“Carly. You done this before?” Her voice sounds scratchy, like she has a bad cold.
“Um, I waited tables for like five years.” I try to look in her eyes, but it’s impossible. There’s too much else to look at. Tattooed blue wisps, like the tips of tentacles, creep from her shirt collar, reaching up the left side of her neck. “After school and stuff.”
“Any experience as a barista?”
I shake my head. I don’t even know what a barista is. “I’m quick to the uptake,” I tell her. It’s what Margo always said when she bragged about me to other people.
Carly sighs. “I was hoping for someone with experience.” Her eye shadow matches the streaks in her hair. She looks back at the line of people. She’s already done with me.
I will myself not to cry. Not to think about icy pin needle showers forever and ever.
“Thanks anyway,” I say, head down, hair falling. Hoping to get to the door before I lose it.
“Hey, wait,” Carly says. “Going home for Thanksgiving?”
“No.”
“Well, there you go. You’re hired.” She laughs and it’s this weird little cackle that reminds me of stepping on dry leaves. “Everyone and their roommate will be out of town that whole fucking week. If you can work through break, I’ll train you myself.”
“Thank you,” I say, trying not to smile too wide.
“Can you start tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
“Come in after the morning rush. Ten thirty. Half pay for training. Once I don’t have to hold your hand, it’s five fifty an hour, shift meals, and your cut of the tip jar at the end of the week. Okay?”
I nod.
Carly hands me a piece of paper. “Fill this out and give it to Bodie when you’re done,” she says, pointing to the blond guy.
“Thank you.”
“Ten thirty,” she says, and walks into the back room without saying goodbye.
I can’t fill out half the form. I don’t have an address. I don’t have a phone. I don’t even know which street the campground is on. I write my name, and then, under work experience, I write Waitress, Margo’s Diner, Little River, NY, 1990–94. It’s the only thing about me that’s still true.
— Chapter 9 —
There are two more nights before the campground closes. I think maybe I should pull a few numbers from the roommate ads on the bulletin board, but who’s going to take in some girl with nothing but a car full of crap and a dwindling wad of crumpled dollar bills to her name?
I wander around town looking in store windows, hoping an answer will come to me. Just outside The Commons there’s a tall brick building that reminds me of my high school and would seem just as menacing, except there’s a guitar store on the first floor with a big shiny window to show off the beautiful curves of rows of guitars hanging on the walls.
I’m not used to seeing stores for just one specific thing you wouldn’t starve without. Even the auto parts store in Little River sells livestock feed and canned goods too. It feels like I’m starving without a guitar. If I still had mine, I wouldn’t notice the cold in the campground and I wouldn’t feel hungry right now. I could play until my fingers throbbed and then walk around with fresh indents in my calluses to help me remember that the world can disappear and I can float in sound and breath and nothing else has to matter.
There’s a twelve-string acoustic hanging front and center in the window. The finish looks silky, not shiny like mine was, and I can tell even through the glass that it would feel nice to hold. Set into the neck are pearly bits carved into flowers and leaves and a squawking bird. A white paper price tag hangs from one of the tuning pegs, spinning in an air current, not easy to see. I don’t know how much a guitar costs, but I know I don’t have guitar money. My dad bought the one he gave me when he was seventeen. When I was a kid, before it was mine, every time he lifted that guitar from the case, he’d strum it and smile. “That’s why you spring for the big guns, Ape. That’s why.” He saved summer construction job money for two years to buy it. I step closer to the window, tip my head, squint hard, and manage to see $1,849 handwritten in pencil before the tag spins away again. If I added up all the money I’ve made in my whole life, I don’t think it would be eighteen hundred and forty-nine dollars.