Her Wild Oats (11 page)

“Goodness, I almost forgot!” The customer reached into her purse and pulled out a tattered green card. “I’m a ‘Murphy’s Momma’ and I have ten breakfasts on my card, which entitles me to an extra fifteen-percent discount.”

“What’s a ‘Murphy’s Momma’?” asked Arizona, starting to sweat through her polyester uniform.

“Oh yes,” Helen said, “I should have mentioned our frequent customer program. People who sign up get a discount after ten visits. Here, click this…then type in her phone number, and press…like…so.” Another total was magically computed, and the woman handed over her Discover card. Arizona slipped it into the grooved slot in the credit card runner and waited for the green flashing light that indicated that the card had been approved. She then removed the customer’s card, pulled her own wallet out of her apron pocket, and carefully slipped the card inside.

“What are you doing?!” shrieked the horrified Murphy’s Momma. “That’s MY card!”

“Ma’am, I’m so sorry.” Arizona felt her cheeks turn scarlet. “It’s just…I’m used to…oh, here. Please accept my sincerest apology.” Arizona was so accustomed to using her own corporate credit card and putting it away carefully, that she’d forgotten that this card belonged to someone else. “It’s force of habit, I’m so sorry.”

The woman grabbed her card and stormed out of the restaurant, muttering under her breath, as Helen burst out laughing. “My dear,” she said, “I can see you’ve never been on this side of the check-out counter before. But don’t you worry. You’re a smart girl; you’ll catch on in no time.”

Arizona slowly forged an uneasy relationship with Johnny Cashregister. She had always been good at math and found it insulting that the machine didn’t trust her to do any figuring on her own, so she invented a private game that involved closing her eyes and computing the change in her head before looking at the display screen. It kept things a little more interesting.

The surprising challenges of her new job were a good thing, she told herself, because this work could be mind-numbingly boring. Now, instead of waking up disoriented and groggy from a fitful sleep and wondering what to do with her life, she was pulled out of deep, elaborate dreams by the blare of an alarm-clock-radio, the voices of Steve and Geoff, KRUM morning DJs, welcoming her to the new day in between Shania Twain and Keith Urban hits. Farm reports and goofball jokes ensued, the latter so obnoxious that she was forced to turn the radio off in disgust and jump in the shower, then quickly dress in her bright-green Murphy’s uniform. She’d arranged to rent her motel room at a weekly rate, so she didn’t have to go through the pretense of checking out and driving to the restaurant. Instead, she left her car where it was and walked through the dense morning fog, through the back-door employee entrance, to punch in.

Arizona had worked for the head of a major motion picture studio, had prepared complex memos and profit-and-loss statements on her laptop while soothing the ruffled feathers of people with enormous egos simultaneously on two separate phone lines, had designed complex tour itineraries and promotional campaigns for the stars of
Fang!
—but she had never had a job where you have to punch in, and she found the process degrading. Other workers often fielded calls from friends caught in traffic or scrambling for child care for a sick kid.

“Sure, I’ll cover you—I’ll punch you in, but you better get here soon,” she heard whispered into cell phones, nearly every morning. “I got your back.” There was something so sad and sweet about the gesture that it made her want to cry—whether because she was touched by folks taking care of each other so matter-of-factly, or by the fact that she, pathetically, would have no one to call in a similar pinch, she had no idea.

There was always a breakfast buffet in the employee break room, and Arizona learned to guzzle strong, hot coffee and gobble bacon and eggs stuffed into a biscuit in record time. Then she’d hit the floor a few minutes early, to relieve Mandy, the girl who’d been on the cash register all night. Mandy was a single mom who had to rush home and drive her children to school before getting any rest, and she was the main reason why Arizona simply could not be late. She knew that this woman had no backup plan, no family in town, no extra money for babysitters. Arizona didn’t know how Mandy did it, but she wasn’t about to add to her worries.

Then began the mind-numbing eight-hour shift behind the counter, being friendly but not too friendly, efficient but polite. She rang up breakfast tickets and gum, magazines and Mad Libs, for travelers from all over California. When there was no one to ring up, she opened boxes and stocked shelves. The novelty of watching the parade of people and inventing life-stories for them soon wore off; after just a few days they became interchangeable, or at least categorizable, by type. There was the overweight family with bratty kids, the skinny family with boring kids, the honeymooning couple, the retired golfer, the winking salesmen, flirty truckers with white strips on their fingers where a wedding band had been removed. There were attractive young adults with fancy cell phones and special food-substitution requests: no potatoes please; non-fat milk. They always acted as though they’d been placed in Murphy’s through no will of their own, as if dropped by an alien space ship from a far more glamorous and trendy planet. They’d complain about the coffee, pick at their food, and then make fun of every stupid-looking souvenir in the place before sashaying out the door while checking their email on iPhones and BlackBerries. Arizona wondered if she had looked as sleekly arrogant while on road trips for Grayson Lathrop’s studio.

Breaks were regimented and inflexible and her day ended precisely on time, no matter how many people were lined up at her register—another concept Arizona found demeaning and annoying. She’d eat some more, then walk slowly across the parking lot to her room, too tired to do anything but turn on the radio and flop, fully clothed, onto the bed. KRUM’s afternoon DJ, a guy who called himself Conman Connie and sounded about a hundred years old, was a lot more fun than the morning guys. He played all kinds of great vintage stuff—you could hear the crackles and pops on his old vinyl records—and she’d eventually fall into a deep, exhausted sleep with Kitty Wells and Merle Haggard seeping into her dreams.

By the fifth morning, Arizona felt like she’d been working the counter at Murphy’s her whole life. She knew that her inability to venture beyond the Murphy’s/motel parking lot area was a symptom of deep depression, but the craziness of not being able to leave a place where no one ever stayed didn’t change the fact of the matter. At some point she would have to deal with Jerry, her marriage, and her home. But right now, as long as they’d let her, her penance for confusion was behind the counter, negotiating life, one transaction at a time, with Johnny Cashregister.

She also knew that something had to be done about her job back in Los Angeles; Grayson Lathrop hadn’t been shy about calling her (or rather, having a secretary call her) every time he needed a phone number or misplaced a piece of paper, and she was expected back any day.

“Lathrop,” he said brusquely.

“Oh…hi,” Arizona answered, startled that he’d answered his own phone. “Um, Mr. Lathrop, this is Arizona. I need to talk to you…it’s kind of a family emergency.”

“When are you getting back? Everything’s fucked,” was his thoughtful reply.

“Well, sir, that’s the thing…I need to take a short leave of absence. It’s um, about my uncle, the one who died. They need me here for a while longer. I know I’m supposed to work out vacation time with you in advance, but I have about six weeks coming, and I was hoping…”

“I’ll have Cindy check with HR. Call me in an hour,” he barked.

Grayson Lathrop wasn’t happy, but what could he do? She did have over six weeks’ vacation coming, and he could be a hard-ass and risk losing the best assistant he’d ever had, or be a good guy and accommodate her need to take care of her family, in which case she’d owe him, right? So he green-lighted Arizona Rosenblatt’s six-week leave, even though it came at absolutely the worst time; even though without her he was, indeed, fucked. He wasn’t shy about saying this repeatedly as they worked out a compromise: she could take her six weeks, but she had to be available no less than two hours a day to answer questions via cell phone. And she had to be available, anytime day or night, for Kira Brantley’s calls. Take it or leave it.

Arizona took it. Then, not knowing why she was doing this at all but feeling compelled to start her shift on time, she put on her ugly green uniform and went to work.

Doctor, Doctor, Give Me the News

10

The second Oats got on the bus he headed for his bunk to take a nap, even though Dickie immediately popped in his compelling
Tongue of Destiny
DVD at maximum volume. Oats fell asleep almost immediately and had one vivid dream after another: Melody was coming toward him in her marching band uniform holding a kitten, then Dickie was laughing with his face contorted like a mean clown. His parents were playing a gig in a potato field and needed him there but he was late, held up by circumstances beyond his control but no one would believe it and then the dream morphed again, into a Sunday morning at Reverend Walter Little’s church in Clear Lake, where Melody was twirling her flaming batons, singing about Jesus.

The bus stopped with a lurch, and Oats was startled awake, disoriented and drooling a little, by Billy shouting, “Someone call 911!”

He opened the thin curtain that separated his bunk from the rest of the bus, and saw people rushing around, heard feet clumping on the hard metal floor.

“What happened?” he asked no one in particular.

Jeremy was on the phone to someone, saying, “We need an ambulance right away,” and Oats jumped down out of his bunk, still half in his dreams, but his heart racing so fast he could feel it thumping against the side of his chest.

“What happened?” he asked again. “What’s going on?”

Bobby Lee ran from the back of the bus to the front, his boots clomping.

“It’s Pete,” he said, breathlessly. “It’s Pete. There’s something wrong with Pete.”

They heard sirens in the distance, getting louder as the ambulance drew close. The bus door opened and two men in uniforms came in and put Pete on a stretcher and carried him to the ambulance. Bobby Lee jumped in the front with them and off they went, leaving the rest of the band in the bus wondering, “What next?”

They sat there for a while by the side of the road in the early-morning mist. No one said anything. Finally Bus Driver Dave broke the silence.

“Well, folks,” he said, “there’s a rest stop a few miles up the road. Let’s go get some breakfast while we wait to hear about Pete.”

No one had a better idea.

A few minutes later, the bus pulled into the parking lot of a classic roadside tourist joint. Oats saw a motel, a gas station, and a huge green restaurant with a creepy-looking neon elf on the roof. It was exactly the kind of place they’d been avoiding on tour because Bus Driver Dave knew all the great secret truck-stop and band-bus places that regular people never find, always cheaper and better. But this was the only place around, and they figured they could fuel up the bus, not to mention themselves, while waiting to hear from Bobby Lee about what happened to Pete.

They tumbled out of the bus, everyone—even Dickie Jaspers—looking worried and sad. Dave opened the restaurant door and Oats felt a blast of intense, artificial air-conditioning hit his skin.

“Oh man, what a place!”

Everything in there was green—the walls, the tables, the menus, the dresses on the waitresses, everything! They walked through a kitschy souvenir shop and then into a barn-sized room filled with green tables, where a chubby woman in a green apron handed out huge green plastic menus. Even the little containers of creamer were green.

Everyone was bleary-eyed and worried, but it didn’t stop them from ordering huge amounts of food. After ordering, Oats got up to look for the bathroom. Then he wandered around the gift shop for a while, looking at all the weird green items they had for sale, thinking maybe while he had the chance he should pick up some presents for his family. There actually wasn’t much he thought they’d like, but Oats found a magazine about tractors that he was pretty sure Eddie didn’t have, so he took it off the rack and walked up to the counter. He handed over the magazine, a pack of gum, and some black licorice to send home to his mom. The cash register made a grinding noise, and the woman standing behind it whispered, “Oh shit, not again!”

Oats looked up, startled.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean you. It’s just that this cash register seems to have it in for me.” She smiled, and Oats felt like he was in one of those old cartoons where the sun comes out and the little birds start singing and you see hearts dancing around in front of Bugs Bunny’s eyes. She was the most amazing-looking woman, even in her green uniform. Her long hair was golden-blond, straight and glossy hanging down her back. But it was her eyes and her smile that paralyzed him; her smile was bright and cheerful but her eyes were a greenish color and somehow sad, and the way she looked made him want to lie down with his head in her lap and stay there forever. Oats had been thinking a lot about Melody, and was actually planning to call her after breakfast, but this woman sent all thoughts of that baton-twirling girl flying out of his head. Besides, she looked like a person who didn’t go on and on about Jesus-our-Lord-and-Savior, and knew the difference between a pussy and a kitten.

*

Arizona saw the boy lurking around the magazine rack and remembered Mr. K., the manager, telling her how important it was to keep her eye on the unaccompanied kids, as they were the most likely to steal. This one didn’t seem like the stealing type though. He was cute as a button, with curly, flaming-red hair and about a million freckles; something about his posture and bearing distinguished him from the other kids who plowed through Murphy’s, dragged on vacation with their families. This one had a more confident manner. He also looked a little bit familiar, but Arizona couldn’t place the face.