Pig-Out Inn (14 page)

“Doing what?” I asked, already seeing the brown mountains of El Paso spread out before us, the clogged streets of Houston, the hotels along the river in San Antonio. I looked out the window of the Pig-Out, toward the high school I'd never have to set foot in again.

Momma stuffed a wad of cotton back into the cushion. “Oh, I'm just daydreaming. You know me. No one would buy the Pig-Out Inn anyway,” Momma said, giving me one of her supremely discontented sighs.

“Well, we could try to find a buyer,” I said hopefully.

“Your father would have a heart attack if we did this to him again.”

“You saw that school, Momma. He wouldn't want me there.”

“Never judge a book by its cover, Dovi,” Momma said, but not very convincingly.

“But you saw it from the inside. Would you and Dad want to go to Parents' Night there? Would you want Mrs. Englebrecht cheerfully calling you to bake cupcakes for the Blue and Gold banquet?”

“You're no good for me, Dovi. You cater to my weaknesses,” Momma said sadly. “It's time I settled down and grew up.” Momma looked around the Pig-Out, at the identical booths with napkin and sugar and hot pepper dispensers, and salt and pepper shakers, and ketchup and mustard bottles arranged in the same neat pattern on each table. “I am not afraid of tornadoes or rats or being poor, but, Dovi, I am terrified of boredom.”

SEVENTEEN

The next day's mail brought a letter from the Omaha modeling agency, Flair, Inc.

Dear Ms. Chandler:

I think you may have the very hands we're seeking for a jewelry store commercial. Please arrange to come to Omaha, at your own expense, for a final review of your hands, after which we might possibly be in a position to offer you a modest contract.

We are widely known throughout the Midwest. We tell our clients, “For just the right look, send up a Flair.” Remember, Ms. Chandler, Madison Avenue scouts are always monitoring locally produced commercials. It is possible that your involvement with Flair, Inc. could be parlayed into a lucrative national contract.

And remember also, you need not have the face or the body to go with the hands.

I shall look forward to meeting you as soon as possible.

Sincerely yours,

Mae Evans Bannister

Once again, before Stephanie jumped ship, we left Johnny in charge and Momma and I drove to Omaha. I slept a lot of the way, with a scarf over my face to keep the dust out of my mouth. When I was awake, I used up about half a bottle of rosewater-and-glycerine on my valuable hands. I daydreamed about seeing these hands of mine on all three major networks. I pictured a fifty-year-old woman with streaks of gray in her hair. She'd wear a lavender organdy apron over her cocktail dress and talk about how new lemon-scented Dish Delight is so good to her hands. The camera would zoom in on her gnarled, arthritic fingers, then show her in Dish Delight up to her elbows, then pan to thirty flipping pages of the calendar—and her never out of the dishwater all those days—and finally, ta-dah! My hands would wave under the nose of the camera, proving to every housewife and bachelor out in TV land that Dish Delight is a miracle! I'd use Dominique as my professional name. Dominique fit hands like mine.

Momma interrupted my lucrative national career. “I wonder if Johnny would buy the Pig-Out.”

“Johnny? He hasn't got two quarters to rub together.”

“You're right.” Miles sped by. The sun played tricks and made us believe there were puddles of water on the road ahead, which was actually so hot that the asphalt turned soft as putty. And then Momma got an inspiration. “What do you think of this, Dovi? Say we leave Johnny in charge for the winter, and we go somewhere else for a few months.”

“For the whole school year,” I said, “or no deal.” I was getting too old to do half a year in one school and half a year somewhere else.

“Oh, of course, for the whole school year.”

Why not? I wasn't about to sacrifice my life and be sentenced to four years at Spinner Joint Union High School. I didn't need cows. Why not a school in some other town in Kansas? Why not a school in some other state? Was there anything wrong with Mexico?

We were just south of the Nebraska border, outside of Concordia. Momma's throat was dry, and it was time for lunch anyway. “Let's pull into that truck stop,” Momma suggested. “It can't be bad. Look at all the diesels parked there.” Walking into the Y Cafe was just like going home for me, but I could tell it made Momma even more restless.

A waitress with blue-black hair way darker than her eyebrows came up to us with her order book and pencil poised, but she didn't say a word.

Momma whispered, “See, she wears a uniform. Maybe if we'd had uniforms …”

The uniform in question fit her better last year, I thought. And I wondered how on earth she folded the hankie sticking out of her breast pocket to look like a nest of butterflies.

“Cheeseburger,” I said, “barely breathing, hold the mayo, fries, burn 'em.” She wrote it down in that peculiar waitress shorthand we all use, then stared at Momma. Suddenly Momma was in one of her playful moods.

“Do you have beef stroganoff? I didn't see it on the menu.”

“Are you kiddin'?”

“No stroganoff. Well, how about chicken cordon bleu?”

“The only bluh thing we got is blueberry pie, but it ain't today's.”

“Is your soup homemade?” Momma asked.

“Sure. Homemade Campbell's. Listen, maybe you should go into town to the Holiday Inn.”

“No,” Momma said quickly. “I'll just have a chicken salad san, hold the chips, small dinner salad with thousand island, and a cup of decaf, black and served with my meal. Both of us on one check, please.”

The waitress looked Momma over with some admiration. “Say, you must be a working girl yourself.”

While we waited for our lunch and Momma admired my perfect half-moon cuticles for the hundredth time that day, we talked about things we seldom got to. In the next booth there was a family overflowing with children—one in a highchair, one in a booster chair, one on her knees tuning into our conversation—and there were crackers and spoons flying all over the table.

“Children,” Momma muttered. “They should be caged until they get to a civilized age. Eleven, I think, is the age of reason.” Funny Momma should say such a thing, when she had such a natural way with Tag.

“I've always wondered, Momma, why didn't you have any other children?”

“Oh, I don't know. We've always led such a nomadic life. Dad and I were just never sure another child would fit in as well as you have.”

I had? Well, sure, I always went along with the moves; Momma's enthusiasm rubbed off on me, and I trusted her to stumble across some crazy adventure around every bend. I never wanted things to be ordinary and predictable; just secure.

“Here's the thing, Dovi. What if we'd had a boy and he had some typically male attachment to the land? Can you honestly picture us as alfalfa farmers?”

Farmers!

There were a couple of kids about Stephanie's age huddled on one side of a booth, and despite the Kansas heat, the girl wore the guy's navy blue Windbreaker that said F
UTURE
F
ARMERS OF
A
MERICA
in big gold letters on the back. Like Tag's belt buckle. I pictured these two in forty years, rocking on the porch of their farmhouse. Maybe a few geese would be honking around, and the girl-woman would look just the same, only plumper, and the boy-man would look just the same, but with his hide toughened by the wide open sky. How romantic, I thought. Never mind Papaya and Honorée. Stephanie could write a book about these two right here.

But no, I didn't want to be a farmer. I didn't want a plot of stubborn land, and all the worries about rain and bugs and having to chop down the milo—or dig it up, or pick it, or whatever it is farmers do at harvest time—and fighting weeds. It's just that every so often I got this urge to stay put in one place; but I knew that if I came right out and said that, Momma would break out in a cold sweat and welts.

I also wanted to move on, but if I said
that
Momma would have some new scheme cooking for us by nightfall—a trailer park in Alamogordo, maybe.

“No, I can't see us as farmers,” I told Momma. “But there's not really anything wrong with having roots.” Momma recoiled as if I'd said leprosy, herpes, maggots. “Is it so bad to plant yourself somewhere?” I asked.

“Somewhere, no. But at a truck stop in Podunk, Kansas?”

“Okay, not in Podunk. Where, then? You said it was right for Tag to have a dependable home. What about you and Dad? What about me?”

Momma surveyed the decaying interior of the Y Cafe, so much like our own Pig-Out Inn. “I could learn to live in Spinner,” Momma conceded, without much enthusiasm, and though my heart jumped and I dared to imagine for a second what it would be like to start and finish high school in the same building (I'd get used to it, if I had to), I also saw Momma's mind racing way ahead of us both. She was thinking something like this: sure, we'll stay in Spinner. But we'll gut the silly pink booths and the counter, which is chipped anyway, and take down the pigs, and put in shelves, big wide shelves, and a bunch of thick, seasoned wood barrels for pickles or bulghur wheat, and what we'll have is an old-fashioned store. Spinner General Store. Then we'll franchise and move to St. Louis. General Stores all across the prairie.

Our sandwiches came and we got down to the serious business of eating. After a while I said, “Alamogordo?”

“What, Dov?”

“Have you considered Alamogordo?”

“New Mexico? Do you know, that's one state I've never even been in. Lord, and it has mountains and vast deserts and tumbleweeds.” She caught her breath and bit the pudgy part of her finger. “Wouldn't you just love to live in an adobe house? Imagine Indian rugs hanging on whitewashed walls. And pottery. We'd only eat off real Indian pottery. Oh, they must have computer places there for Dad, don't you think? Near Santa Fe, maybe? New Mexico is a peace-loving state, I can just feel it. It feels so—so right for us, Dovi.”

We were back in the car, the only car along the road for miles and miles. Momma dreamed her way back across the great state of New Mexico, and I looked back down the yardstick highway toward the Y Cafe growing smaller and more unreal behind us. Between us and the restaurant there wasn't a building in sight—and ahead, not a grain elevator, not a silo, not a farmhouse, not even a cow or pig as far as the eye could see. Just highway and fields, in shades so green and golden you almost had to shut your eyes when you raced past them. I half expected the Scarecrow With No Brain to pop up in a distant field, but he never did. I glanced at Momma and sensed things clicking away in her head.

Nothing out here but highway and empty wheat fields, I thought, wheat giving way to corn the closer we got to Nebraska, and a blue sky with whipped-cream clouds.

But the sky of New Mexico would be just as blue, and up in the mountains we'd be a whole lot closer to it. And who knew what adventure might be waiting for us around the winding mountain roads of New Mexico, or in the dusty desert? I was ready to give up the Kansas wheat and sunflowers. Weren't we Chandlers more like the tumbleweeds of the desert anyway?

About the Author

Lois Ruby is the author of eighteen books for middle graders and teens, including
Steal Away Home, Miriam's Well, The Secret of Laurel Oaks, Rebel Spirits, Skin Deep
, and
The Doll Graveyard
. Her fiction runs the gamut from contemporary to historical and from realistic to paranormal.

An ex-librarian, Ruby now writes full time amid speaking to bookish groups, presenting at writing workshops, and touting literacy and the joys of nourishing, thought-provoking reading in schools around the country.

No one would love to have a spirit encounter more than Ruby, so she explores lots of haunted places—Myrtles Plantation in Louisiana, Theorosa's Bridge in Kansas, dozens of ghostly locations in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and even a few spooky spots in Australia, Morocco, and Thailand. No spirits have tapped her on the shoulder yet, but it could still happen; she hasn't given up hope.

Ruby and her husband live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the foothills of the awesome Sandia Mountains.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1987 by Lois Ruby

Cover design by Julianna Lee

ISBN: 978-1-5040-1366-6

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com