Tom Hanks - Uncommon Type - Some Stories

“Tell me about school, sweetie,” she said. “You like school?”

Kenny told her that St. Philip Neri wasn’t like St. Joseph, the only other school he had gone to, back in Sacramento. St. Philip Neri was small, not many kids went there, and some of the nuns didn’t dress like nuns. As he savored his bottle of root beer with short, airy sips, he told his mom about the bus rides to school, how the uniforms were red plaid instead of blue plaid and they had some days when they didn’t have to wear them, and that a kid in his class named Munson made models like he did and lived in a house with a pool, but not an inground pool like at the city park, but a circular aboveground pool. From just the one question, Kenny talked all the way from Iron Bend to the Butte City cutoff as his mother smoked. When the one radio station faded, Kenny found another, then another. His mom let him signal to the truck drivers they passed to blow their air horns. He would pump his fist up and down, and, if the drivers saw him, more often than not they would send out a toot. Once, Kenny saw a truck driver looking at them in his sideview mirror and got a blast on the horn without having to pump for it. The driver blew a kiss that was probably meant for his mom, not for Kenny.

They stopped for lunch in Maxwell at a diner called Kathy’s Kountry Kafe, a place for travelers and, in season, duck hunters. The Fiat was the only sports car in the parking lot. The waitress seemed to love chatting with Kenny’s mom—they talked like old friends or sisters. Kenny noticed that the waitress had very red lips, too. When she asked what to bring for the young man, he asked for a hamburger.

“Oh no, honey,” his mother said. “Hamburgers are for anytime. At a restaurant we should order from the menu.”

“Why not, Mom? Dad doesn’t care. And Nancy lets us.” Nancy was Kenny’s stepmother.

“What say we make this a special rule,” his mother said. “Just for you and me.” This seemed like an odd rule to suddenly impose. Kenny had never been told what to order or what he could not have. “I think you’ll like the hot turkey sandwich,” his mother said. “We’ll split it.”

Kenny thought she meant a sandwich that was going to be steaming hot and was not sure he was going to like it. “Can I have a milkshake?”

“Yep.” She smiled. “I’m flexible!”

Truth be told, Kenny liked the open-faced sandwich that was swimming in brown gravy and was not too hot at all. The white bread that sucked up all the gravy was just as good as the turkey meat, and mashed potatoes were his favorite food of all time. His mom had an igloo-shaped scoop of cottage cheese on tomato slices but cut up a few bites of the hot turkey for herself. His vanilla milkshake came in the freezing steel cup it was made in and twice filled up a fancy glass. He poured it himself, tapping the steel against the glass to help it along. This was so much milkshake, Kenny couldn’t finish it.

When his mother went to the restroom, Kenny noticed all the men travelers following her with their eyes, turning their heads to watch her go. One of them got up to pay his check, stopping by the booth where Kenny sat alone.

“Is that your mommy, slugger?” the man asked. He wore a brown suit with a tie partly undone. His eyeglasses had flip-up sunshades that stuck out like small visors.

“Um-hmmm,” Kenny said.

The man smiled. “You know, I got a boy at home just like you. But not a mommy like you got.” The man laughed out loud, then paid at the register.

When his mom came back from the restroom, her lips were freshly painted. She took a sip from what was left of Kenny’s milkshake, leaving red marks on the paper straw.

Sacramento was more than an hour down the highway. Kenny had not been to his hometown since his father packed their stuff into the station wagon, the day they moved to Iron Bend. The buildings had a look of comforting familiarity, but when his mom turned the Fiat off the highway it was at a street he had never traveled. When he saw the sign for the Leamington Hotel he felt a smile on his face—his parents had both worked at the Leamington, but now only his mom did. He and his brother and sister had spent time there, tagging along on some weekends when their folks were still married. They played in the big conference room when it was empty and would eat at the counter of the coffee shop when the place was not busy. Dad would pay them a nickel for every tray of potatoes they would wrap in tinfoil for baking en masse. If they asked permission, they could get their own chocolate milk from the dispenser, as long as they used the small glasses. This was long ago; a big chunk of Kenny’s life had passed since then.

His mother parked the Fiat in the back of the hotel and they entered through the kitchen—just as Kenny remembered doing in his dad’s station wagon and his mom’s Corolla. The staff all welcomed his mother and she greeted each person by name in response. A lady and one of the cooks could not believe that Kenny had grown up so much since they had last seen him, but Kenny could not remember who those people were, though he thought he recognized the lady’s cat’s-eye glasses with the thick lenses. The kitchen looked smaller than Kenny remembered it.

When he was little, Kenny’s mother was a waitress in the Leamington Hotel coffee shop and his father one of the cooks. She wore a uniform then, but now dressed in business clothes and had an office off the hotel lobby. Her office had a desk stacked with papers and a wall covered by a bulletin board that had many index cards, all written upon in different colored inks and arranged in neat columns.

“Kenny Bear, I have a few things to do, then I’ll tell you about your birthday surprise, okay?” She was sliding some papers into a leather folder. “Can you sit here for a bit?”

“Can I pretend this is my office and I work here?”

“Sure,” she said, smiling. “Here’re some notebooks, and look, this is an electric pencil sharpener.” She showed him how to push a pencil into the opening of the machine and make the grinding noise that produced a pencil point as sharp as a sewing pin. “Don’t answer the phone if it rings.”

A lady named Miss Abbott came into the office and asked, “So this is your little man?” She was older than his mom and wore glasses on a chain around her neck. Miss Abbott would keep an eye on Kenny and would know where his mother was if he needed her.

“Kenny is going to do some work for us today.”

“Wonderful,” Miss Abbott said. “I’ll give you some stamps and an ink pad to make everything official. Would you like that?”

His mother left, carrying her leather folder. Kenny sat in her chair behind her desk. Miss Abbott brought him some stamps that said the date on them and INVOICE and RECEIVED as well as a metal rectangular box with blue ink on a pad.

“You know,” Miss Abbott said, “I have a nephew just your age.”

Kenny used the stamps and ink on a few pages of a notebook, then, bored, looked through the top drawers of the desk. One drawer had dividers that separated paper clips, boxes of staples, rubber bands, pencils, and some pens that said LEAMINGTON HOTEL on the sides. Another drawer had envelopes and letter paper that said LEAMINGTON HOTEL with a little drawing of the building at the top of each sheet.

He got up from the desk, went to the door, and saw Miss Abbott at a desk of her own, typing some kind of letter.

“Miss Abbott,” Kenny said. “May I use some paper that says ‘Leamington Hotel’ on it?”

Miss Abbott kept typing. “What’s that?” she asked without looking up.

“May I use some paper that says ‘Leamington Hotel’ on it?”

“Go ahead,” she said as she kept on typing.