Ann Patchett - Commonwealth

So they all left their cans beside Albie, who was sleeping the sleep of four Benadryls and a big slug of gin in the hot morning sun. Cal took back the other pills from Holly and his stepsisters and put them in the baggie and put the baggie back in his pocket. The candy bars were starting to melt and the gun was hot from being out in the sun and they put them all together back in the bag and headed for the lake.

When they got there, the five of them swam out farther than they would ever have been allowed to had the parents been with them. Franny and Jeanette went to look for caves and were taught to fish by two men they met standing off by themselves in a grove of trees on the shore. Cal stole a package of Ho-Ho’s from the bait shop and had no need to use the gun in the paper bag because no one saw him do it. Caroline and Holly climbed to the top of a high rock and leapt into the lake below again and again and again until they were too tired to climb anymore, too tired to swim. All of them were sunburned but they lay in the grass to dry because none of them had thought to bring a towel, but the drying-off bored them and so they decided to head back.

Their timing turned out to be perfect. Albie was awake but he was just sitting there in the field, quiet and confused amid the Coke cans, trying hard not to cry. He didn’t ask them where they had been or where he was, he just got up and followed in the line behind them as they passed. He was sunburned as well. It was just past two o’clock in the afternoon. The most amazing thing of all was that minutes after they came back to the Pinecone and stretched across the beds in the girls’ room in their damp swimsuits to watch television, the parents knocked on their door, bashful and apologetic. They couldn’t believe how long they’d slept. They had no idea how tired they must have been. They would take everyone to the movies and out for pizza in order to make it up to them. The parents seemed not to notice the swimsuits, the sunburns, the mosquito bites. The Cousins children and the Keating children smiled up with beatific forgiveness. They had done everything they had ever wanted to do, they had had the most wonderful day, and no one even knew they were gone.

It was like that for the rest of the summer. It was like that every summer the six of them were together. Not that the days were always fun, most of them weren’t, but they did things, real things, and they never got caught.

The music didn’t change. The tape churned out the same two-hour loop again and again. The management figured that either the customer would have paid up and left or be too drunk to notice before the songs began to repeat. A person would have to stay in the bar, sober and attentive, for more than two hours before realizing that George Benson was singing “This Masquerade” for a second time. That meant the only people who could be troubled by the repetition were the people who worked in the bar, and the standard of sobriety and attention knocked several of them out of the running. During the course of an eight-hour shift an employee could expect to hear the tape four times in its entirety, four and a half for whoever was closing. Franny spoke to Fred about it at the end of her first month. Fred, the better of the two night managers, oversaw the bar and the larger, busier, and less profitable hotel restaurant. He told her it didn’t matter.

“It does matter,” Franny said. “It’s driving me batshit.” She was wearing a slim black dress, sleeveless and short, over a fitted white blouse. She was wearing black high-heeled shoes. With her straight blond hair in a single loose braid, she looked like the music-video version of the Catholic schoolgirl she’d once been. Before she took the job she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to bear the indignity of the uniform, but it turned out the uniform didn’t actually bother her. It was the music. It was Sinatra singing “It Was a Very Good Year” that made her feel like she might step into the revolving door at the front of the lobby, a tray of cocktails balanced on her open hand, and swing out into the dark winter night.

Fred gave her a nod. He was not paternalistic or dismissive, though he looked like somebody’s father and gave her an answer that was in no way helpful. “Trust me. I’ve been here almost five years. You get used to it.”

“But I don’t want to be here in five years. I don’t want to get used to it.” The smallest flash of discomfort registered in the night manager’s eyes. Franny tried again. “Couldn’t you just get a couple different tapes? It could be the same people. I’m not complaining about the kind of music. I mean, different music would be appreciated but that’s not my problem. The repetition is my problem. Those people sang other songs.”

“We have more tapes somewhere,” Fred said, glancing around the tiny windowless office, “but no one ever changes them.”

“I could change them.”

He pushed up from his cluttered desk and gave her shoulder a small, conciliatory squeeze. Everyone in this place was a toucher: the waitresses kissed at the end of their shifts, the managers rested their hands on your shoulders, a busboy, not correctly tipped, could deliver a forceful hip check when squeezing past you at the dishwash station. And the customers, Jesus, the customers liked to touch. Two years in law school and not a single person had put a finger on her, but that was law school, where everyone who had made it through the first two weeks understood the concept of liability. Standing this close, she could catch just the smallest trace of vodka in the air around Fred and was surprised that she could still register the smell of alcohol. “Just wait,” he said, his voice full of reassurance. “It goes away.”

Franny trudged down the narrow hallway from the office to the kitchen where the cooks played bootlegged cassettes of NWA on a boom box coated in grease, the volume so low it barely whispered above the clanging of pots, fuck da police . The men mouthed the words and bobbed their heads, all within the low limits of the management’s tolerance.

“Little House,” Jerrell called out to her from the line. “Be sweet and get me some lemonade.” He reached across the searing cooktop and through the pickup window to hand her his jumbo Styrofoam 7-Eleven cup with lid and straw.

“Sure,” Franny said. She took the cup. The cooks, every one of them a large black man, were reliant on the waitresses, every one of them a small white woman, to bring drinks back from the bar to keep them from dying in the Sahara of the fry station.

“I count on you,” Jerrell said, and pointed at her with a raw steak before dropping the meat on the incandescent surface in front of him.

But Franny never forgot the lemonade, nor how many extra packets of sugar he liked, nor the bar pretzels needed to make up for the body’s lost salt, flushed away in the rivers of sweat that dropped onto the cooktop with an explosive sizzle and vanished. She knew what every man in the kitchen wanted in his cup. Franny was a professional. She remembered orders for tables of ten, who got the Ketel One, who got the Absolut. She could soothe a single businessman without letting him monopolize her time. Stepping out into the frozen slap of Chicago in the small hours of the morning, it was not lost on her how much better it would have been to be a bad cocktail waitress and a good law student. She had dropped out of law school in the middle (though closer to the beginning) of the first semester of her third year. She had racked up an enormous debt predicated on the salary of the partnership she would never obtain. For someone who had no skills and no idea what she wanted to do with her life other than read, cocktail waitressing was the most money she could make while keeping her clothes on. Those were her only two criteria at this point: not to be a lawyer and to keep her clothes on. She had tried regular waitressing, wearing black sneakers and hoisting trays of food, but there wasn’t enough money in it to cover the minimum payments in her coupon book. In the dark, velvety plush of the Palmer House bar, men regularly, inexplicably, left two twenties sitting on top of an eighteen-dollar check.