Laura Lippman - Every Secret Thing

Alice began to feel as if they were singing a song to each other, like one of the old R &B songs her mother used to put on the stereo late at night, sitting in the dark with a glass and a cigarette. Alice wasn’t supposed to know about the cigarette, but she did because the music always woke her up and she crept to the top of the stairs, listening, too. She knew that smoking was bad, really bad. They taught this in school every year, beginning in first grade. But she couldn’t begrudge her mother those middle-of-the-night cigarettes, not even when she finally figured out her mother was smoking dope, which was even worse than tobacco. The nuns said you should call the police if your parents used drugs, or talk to the priest. But Alice wasn’t falling for that.

“I am really, truly looking for work, maybe not as hard as I could, but I am looking. It’s just-this is my first summer, my first real summer in so long. I want to have a little fun.”

She felt guilty, guilt-tripping her mother. It was too easy. Besides, she didn’t want to dribble her power away, didn’t want to squander it on small things. She had always been a saver-Helen called it “hoarding”-the type of child who put away her Christmas and birthday checks until the small amounts became medium ones. She had saved for things her mother found ridiculous, items that Helen would not buy for Alice no matter how inexpensive. “I’d rather have one pair of well-made Italian shoes than twenty pairs of shoddy, so-called stylish ones.” Actually, Helen had been known to treat herself to both. “But I’m a grown-up,” she would remind Alice. “My feet have stopped growing.”

Alice needed money to buy the things she knew would transform her. All she wanted was to be popular, and-slowly, surely-she had been inventing that girl. A girl who lived in a strange house, yes, with a strange mother, sure, but also a girl who was still cool enough to be friends with someone like Wendy. Helen’s approach to life, her preemptive disdain for the things that she could never have, was not Alice ’s way. She would rather be a minor star in a major constellation than to be a lonely, mediocre sun in an inferior solar system. That was the only thing she remembered from the high school astronomy unit taught at Middlebrook. Their sun was average, mediocre.

But it made her feel horrible, thinking such thoughts about Helen. Helen, who hadn’t had to be a mother, who truly chose to bring Alice into the world. She had been very candid with Alice about this, explaining how she had fallen in love with a man and they had rushed into things and the next thing Helen knew, she was pregnant and he was dead in a car crash. “Just like the president’s father,” she said, referring to the old president, the one who had been in charge when Alice went away. His father had died, too, before he was born. And his father was kind of a bum, too. Helen hadn’t made that connection, but Alice had figured it out. A good father didn’t die in a car crash before his baby was born. That only happened to a father who was out doing something he wasn’t supposed to do.

“Do you know what your horoscope says, Mom? ‘Aquarius: It’s time to see the world through fresh eyes. Be a friend to get a friend. Virgo, Pisces predominate.’ ”

“Lots of eyes in the horoscope today.”

“Do you know where that baby is?”

“What?”

“The doll’s head. Did you put it away in the basement or attic?”

“Oh, gee, I don’t know, baby. Why do you want that old thing?”

“I don’t know,” Alice said. “I miss it. I like things to stay the same.”

“Well, they don’t, baby. That’s the one thing I can guarantee you. Nothing ever stays the same.”

The last customer of the day at the Bagel Barn was a tapper. She leaned forward from the waist, so she was eye level with the wire baskets of bagels, and hit the glass with her index finger the way a kid plink-plink-plinks the same key on a piano. Her nails were manicured-a tapper’s nails tended to be manicured-but relatively short, with clear polish, and Ronnie wondered why anyone would pay to get her nails filed straight across.

“Two sesame-no, three sesame, two poppies.” Tap, tap, tap . “Are the sunflower seed good? No? Yes? Okay, four plain, two sun-dried tomato.” Tap, tap, tap . “How many is that?”

“Eleven,” Ronnie said.

“Do you do thirteen for the price of a dozen?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Everyone else does.”

Ronnie shrugged, at a loss. Clarice, the Saturday manager, caught Ronnie’s eye and tried to share a smile with her, but Ronnie was scared to do anything with her face. O’lene, the kitchen worker, brushed her hip against Ronnie’s as she edged by, already starting her part of the closing routine, and Ronnie allowed herself a small bump back.

“It’s the end of the day,” the tapper wheedled. “You’re just going to end up throwing these away.”

“I’m not allowed, ma’am. I’m sorry.”

The woman continued to tap. It was almost as if the sound were part of her thinking process, as if she needed the tick-tick noise of her finger to get her brain to work.

Such end-of-the-shift customers were common on Saturdays, when people always seemed surprised by the 3 P.M. closing. The rest of the week, Ronnie’s shift ended without complaint, but Saturdays always saw some last-minute person, usually a woman, harried and disorganized.

For all that, and despite the crummy pay and early morning hours, Ronnie liked the Bagel Barn. On weekdays, once the morning rush ended, it was a gentle place that ran to solitary, undemanding folks who seemed to have a lot of time to sit and stare out the window while their coffee cooled. She worked the cash register, which paid less than the prep jobs, but she preferred it. She didn’t like the idea of touching other people’s food, because she didn’t want anyone handling hers. Sometimes, glancing over her shoulder, she would see Clarice place her broad hands on the back of the serrated bread knife and press it down through a fully loaded bagel. The tomatoes, so juicy this time of year, would spurt out the sides, leaving smears of red and small seeds on the cutting board. The sight made Ronnie queasy. Not the juice so much as Clarice’s black-and-white hands bearing down on the bagel, squeezing the life out of it. When Ronnie got hungry, she ate one of the sweet bagels, whole, like a cookie.

The best thing, in Ronnie’s opinion, was the limited menu. The Bagel Barn knew it was a place that sold bagels, and didn’t try to be anything else. After 11 A.M., you could get sandwiches-or sand-wishes, as Clarice called them in her lisp, which came and went depending on the fit of her dentures-but they came on a bagel. You could get an open-faced pizza, even, with tomato sauce and cheese, but you still had to have it on a bagel.

Yet there were always a few people who expected to be the exceptions, who asked for things they couldn’t have. Can I get that on whole wheat? No. Do you have French bread? No. Do you have focaccia? Ronnie didn’t even know what that was. Do you have lattes? No, no, no, she would say politely, trying not to show how much she enjoyed saying no. She did not understand where people got off, thinking they could have stuff that wasn’t on the menu. The menu was a kind of law, she thought, and people should obey it. Like a speed limit, or cleaning up after your dog. If they had allergies, they could go somewhere else. The menu should be-what was the word? The one printed on those fake checks that came in the mail, showing her parents what it would be like if they won a million dollars in a sweepstakes. Nonnegotiable, that was it. “Am I asking you?” Ronnie’s father had bellowed when his children expressed a preference for something other than the meal that sat in front of them. “Am I asking you?”