Orson Card - Feed The Baby Of Love

When Rainie Pinyon split this time she didn't go south, even though it was October and she didn't like the winter cold. Maybe she thought that this winter she didn't deserve to be warm, or maybe she wanted to find some unfamiliar territory -- whatever. She got on the bus in Bremerton and got off it again in Boise. She hitched to Salt Lake City and took a bus to Omaha. She got herself a waitressing job, using the name Ida Johnson, as usual. She quit after a week, got another job in Kansas City, quit after three days, and so on and so on until she came to a tired-looking cafe in Harmony, Illinois, a small town up on the bluffs above the Mississippi. She liked Harmony right off, because it was pretty and sad -- half the storefronts brightly painted and cheerful, the other half streaked and stained, the windows boarded up. The kind of town that would be perfectly willing to pick up and move into a shopping mall only nobody wanted to build one here and so they'd just have to make do. The help wanted sign in the cafe window was so old that several generations of spiders had lived and died on webs between the sign and the glass.

"We're a five-calendar cafe," said the pinched-up overpainted old lady at the cash register.

Rainie looked around and sure enough, there were five calendars on the walls.

"Not just because of that Blue Highways book, either, I'll have you know. We already had these calendars up before he wrote his book. He never stopped here but he could have."

"Aren't they a little out of date?" asked Rainie.

The old lady looked at her like she was crazy.

"If you already had the calendars up when he wrote the book, I mean."

"Well, not these calendars," said the old lady. "Here's the thing, darlin'. A lot of diners and what-not put up calendars after that Blue Highways book said that was how you could tell a good restaurant. But those were all fakes. They didn't understand. The calendars have all got to be local calendars. You know, like the insurance guy gives you a calendar and the car dealer and the real estate guy and the funeral home. They give you one every year, and you put them all up because they're your friends and your customers and you hope they do good business."

"You got a car dealer in Harmony?"

"Went out of business thirty years ago. Used to deal in Studebakers, but he hung on with Buicks until the big dealers up in the tri-cities underpriced him to death. No, I don't get his calendar anymore, but we got two funeral homes so maybe that makes up for it."

Rainie almost made a remark about this being the kind of town where nobody goes anywhere, they just stay home and die, but then she decided that maybe she liked this old lady and maybe she'd stay here for a couple of days, so she held her tongue.

The old lady smiled a twisted old smile. "You didn't say it, but I know you thought it."

"What?" asked Rainie, feeling guilty.

"Some joke about how people don't need cars here, cause they aren't going anywhere until they die."

"I want the job," said Rainie.

"I like your style," said the old lady. "I'm Minnie Wilcox, and I can hardly believe that anybody in this day and age named their little girl Ida, but I had a good friend named Ida when I was a girl and I hope you don't mind if I forget sometimes and call you Idie like I always did her."

"Don't mind a bit," said Rainie. "And nobody in this day and age does name their daughter Ida. I wasn't named in this day and age."

"Oh, right, you're probably just pushing forty and starting to feel old. Well, I hope I never hear a single word about it from you because I'm right on the seventy line, which to my mind is about the same as driving on empty, the engine's still running but you know it'll sputter soon so what the hell, let's get a few more miles on the old girl before we junk her. I need you on the morning shift, Idie, I hope that's all the same with you."

"How early?"

"Six a.m. I'm sad to say, but before you whine about it in your heart, you remember that I'm up baking biscuits at four-thirty. My Jack and I used to do that together. In fact he got his heart attack rolling out the dough, so if you ever come in early and see me spilling a few tears into the powdermilk, I'm not having a bad day, I'm just remembering a good man, and that's my privilege. We got to open at six on account of the hotel across the street. It's sort of the opposite of a bed and breakfast. They only serve dinner, an all-you-can-eat family- style home-cooking restaurant that brings 'em in from fifty miles around. The hotel sends them over here for breakfast and on top of that we get a lot of folks in town, for breakfast and for lunch, too. We do good business. I'm not poor and I'm not rich. I'll pay you decent and you'll make fair tips, for this part of the country. You still see the nickels by the coffee cups, but you just give those old coots a wink and a smile, cause the younger boys make up for them and it's not like it costs that much for a room around here. Meals free during your shift but not after, I'm sorry to say."

"Fine with me," said Rainie.

"Don't go quittin' on me after a week, darlin'."

"Don't plan on it," said Rainie, and to her surprise it was true. It made her wonder -- was Harmony Illinois what she'd been looking for when she checked out in Bremerton? It wasn't what usually happened. Usually she was looking for the street -- the down-and-out half- hopeless life of people who lived in the shadow of the city. She'd found the street once in New Orleans, and once in San Francisco, and another time in Paris, and she found places where the street used to be, like Beale Street in Memphis, and the Village in New York City, and Venice in L.A. But the street was such a fragile place, and it kept disappearing on you even while you were living right in it.

But there was no way that Harmony Illinois was the street, so what in the world was she looking for if she had found it here?

Funeral homes, she thought. I'm looking for a place where funeral homes outnumber car dealerships, because my songs are dead and I need a decent place to bury them.

It wasn't bad working for Minnie Wilcox. She talked a lot but there were plenty of town people who came by for coffee in the morning and a sandwich at lunch, so Rainie didn't have to pay attention to most of the talking unless she wanted to. Minnie found out that Rainie was a fair hand at making sandwiches, too, and she could fry an egg, so the work load kind of evened out -- whichever of them was getting behind, the other one helped. It was busy, but it was decent work -- nobody yelled at anybody else, and even when the people who came in were boring, which was always, they were still decent and even the one old man who leered at her kept his hands and his comments to himself. There were days when Rainie even forgot to slip outside in back of the cafe and have a smoke in the wide- open gravel alleyway next to the dumpster.

"How'd you used to manage before I came along?" she asked early on. "I mean, judging from that sign, you've been looking for help for a long time."

"Oh, I got by, Idie, darlin', I got by."

Pretty soon, though, Rainie picked up the truth from comments the customers made when they thought she was far enough away not to hear. Old people always thought that because they could barely hear, everybody else was half-deaf, too. "Oh, she's a live one." "Knows how to work, this one does." "Not one of those young girls who only care about one thing." "How long you think she'll last, Minnie?"

She lasted one week. She lasted two weeks. It was on into November and getting cold, with all the leaves brown or fallen, and she was still there. This wasn't like any of the other times she'd dropped out of sight, and it scared her a little, how easily she'd been caught here. It made no sense at all. This town just wasn't Rainie Pinyon, and yet it must be, because here she was.