Lesley Kagen - Land of a Hundred Wonders

The smell of half a can of Aqua Net gets to me long before Janice Lever does. I’ve seen pictures of her all done up in her twirling costume before she got pregnant with Clever in high school. Janice was rosy-cheeked and red-lipped back then and was planning to pursue an acting career. She’s faded now. Her hips got a nice relaxation to them, though. She’s worked at the diner for years, but before Grampa hired her, Janice was a bar girl at Mr. Bailey’s place.

“Ya seen Carol lately?” Janice asks me in that snippy tone she’s ALWAYS got.

“Last night.”

“Oh yeah, where?” She’s holding coffees in one hand, Morse coding her pointy nails against the tray bottom with the other. Tap… tap… tap.

“Don’t remember,” I tell her, back to my writing.

“Well, the next time ya see her, tell her I put her belongin’s in a sack on Rudy’s back porch.” Tap… tap… tap.

Oh boy, looks like Janice and Rudy Beaumont, who owns the bait shop, are an item.

“Ya hear me?” Tap… tap… tap.

I slap my pencil down. “I am NQR, not deaf, Janice. I hear you loud and clear,” I shout. “Ya kicked your only child out and put her belongin’s in a sack on Rudy’s back porch. I’m proud of ya.”

“Ya know, it ain’t easy being a mother, so you can just get off your high horse,” she yells back.

“For cryin’ out loud, I am not on a high horse or any other kind of horse. I’m sittin’ in my usual booth at the diner!”

Hell. On top of everything else, Janice musta started up drinking again. She’s had a bushel of trouble with this in the past. Well, not the actual drinking part, she does that way above average. But the part where she shows up half naked with her sparkling baton in front of the post office singing “Return to Sender” at the top of her lungs? That’s the part she’s got the trouble with.

“Table three is waitin’ on these specials,” Grampa calls out the kitchen peek window.

“I’m on it,” Janice calls back to him, giving me one of her scalding looks, which I’m returning with my steely cold investigative eyes that I hope are portraying how rotten I think it is of her to kick Clever out again, especially since she’s knocked up. But that’s Janice Marie Lever for you. I’m pretty sure nobody would ever accuse this gal of being Selfless: Showing unselfish concern for the welfare of others.

“Sometime this week would be good,” Grampa hollers.

“How come ya want Clever to give away her baby like a free sample of fudge?” I ask her.

I’m sure she’s about to tell me to keep my nose out of her business, like she always does when the subject of Clever comes up, when sudden-like her shoulders dip, and her lips draw up, and gosh, is Janice about to start crying? Well, that’d be a first. Mad is usually what she carries around. “Next time ya see her… tell her… tell Carol I’m sorry for bein’ such a bad mama and that I promise to make it up to her someday, all right?” she says, heading off to the booth near the front door ’fore Grampa can yell at her again to get her butt in gear.

What I don’t do is call after her, “Sure thing. I’ll go find Clever and tell her that straight off, Janice,” because her saying that? Making that promise? That might mean something if it wasn’t what Janice has been promising since the beginning of time. That someday she’ll make it up to Clever for her running around and drinking and treating her daughter like she’s a hundred-pound weight been hangin’ off her neck since the day she was born. Most heartbreaking thing about all this, even though she doesn’t let on, I believe at the bottom of her heart, Clever holds out some hope for her mama’s eventual redemption. Not me.

I go back to my writing on the Miss Cheryl and Miss DeeDee story.

“Our visits to Land of a Hundred Wonders have been the high point of our lives,” says Miss Cheryl. “Who would have ever thought that…”

“Mornin’, sunshine,” Willard says, plunking down in the booth in front of me with the foxiest of looks. He’s got on a tie-dyed T-shirt and pink granny glasses that’re perched down on his nose like a canary on a stick.

“Hey,” I say, borrowing some of Janice’s pissiness. Ever since I learned about Willard wanting Clever to give her baby to that social, my bad feelings for him have multiplied faster than loaves. Why, he’s even worse than Sneaky Tim Ray. Not so obvious, if ya know what I mean, more like an on-the-way-to-going-rancid piece of meat. As an investigative reporter, I’ve developed a smell for this sort of thing.

“Have you seen Carol lately?” Willard asks.

Before I can tell him that I don’t have time to play Twenty Questions right now, that I got a deadline, Janice Lever shows up at Willard’s booth with a sigh so long it flaps the paper napkins. “Top O’ the Mornin’. What can I get for ya?” she drones.

Willard eyes her up and down, strokes his dark mustache. I wonder if he knows that he’s making eyes at Clever’s mama. Probably not. Can’t see Clever introducing Willard to her over Sunday pot roast. ’Specially since there never is a Sunday pot roast.

“I’ll start out with the biggest, chocolatiest piece of cake you have,” Willard tells Janice with a lick of his lips. “And a scoop of…”

Where was I? … in such a short time. It’s nothing but…

“Come on in here, Gib.” Miss Florida beckons to me through the cracked kitchen door.

Damnation! It’s like the whole world is in cahoots, not wanting me to finish this story so I can get going investigating the murder of Mr. Buster Malloy and Yes! Yes! Yes! That’s the important thing I’ve been trying to remember all morning. Where’s my No. 2 gone off to?

Miss Florida shouts again in that voice of hers that could raise the dead, “Right this minute.”

Damnation times two!

When I shove open the kitchen swing door, there’s Grampa bent over the deep fryers across the kitchen, his back to me. Miss Florida’s hunched over the double sink, up to her elbows in bubbles.

“I’m tryin’ to get the paper done. What the hell ya want?” I say to her, fuming.

“Mind your cursin’,” she says, following it up with a swat on my arm with her warm, wet hand.

“I was in a car crash that hurt my brain so now it’s got a blue streak runs through it. Please accept my deepest of apologies. I’m workin’ on it. It’s just that Willard’s got my goat and Janice is doin’ that nail tappin’ and ya know how that irritates my brain and if I don’t get-”

Miss Florida leans into me. “Ya shoulda told me las’ night that Carol’s mama kicked her out.”

“Sorry… I just didn’t…”

“I’m gonna keep her with me ’til the baby comes,” she says, back to rinsing coffee cups clean. “So she’s gonna need some a her things.”

“Janice just told me she left a belongin’s sack for Clever over at Rudy’s. I gotta go up to Tanner Farm right now, but I could pick it up afterward.”

With one eye, she throws off a withering look through the peek window at Janice. “Sack shouldn’t be too heavy, knowin’ her.” While I wouldn’t say the two of them were enemies, I would say they got cold shoulderin’ down to an art form. Miss Florida’s other eye is watching Grampa move from the fryers to the flat grill and back again. “Maybe we better keep this baby business on the QT for a while,” she says. “We don’ want him gettin’ even worse upset, do we?”

No, we do not. He’s called me Gibson all morning. And been bossy as hell. That’s how ticked off he still is that me and Clever went AWOL the other night over in Browntown. And if he finds out that Clever’s gonna have a baby, there’s no telling how he’d react. Besides loco , I mean.