On one of them once, scrawled in pen, was: sorry—didn’t have anything else to write with.
There’s a reason we use yellow cardstock for the cards now, instead of the standard white.
I pull my glove back on.
5.
In my darkest hours, I allow the possibility of a convoy of out-of-state school buses nosing into our parking lot.
For vehicles too heavy for the tracks, policy is to walk the Johns and Janes out to the vehicle. This involves wearing the converted Whac-A-Mole tray that hangs on your shoulders with two padded hooks, like bass drummers in marching bands have.
In the slots the moles once lived in are overspray canisters and sponges and curtains and wipes and gloves and brochures. Twice I’ve found a coffee can, with change in it.
As the tray only carries eight used or empty bottles, what a busload would mean is about eight thousand sloshing trips, while trying to manage the drive-through as well.
Policy during an outbreak of service like this is to wear adequate back support.
I think my father is afraid I might sue him.
He thinks it’s my back I’m worried about.
For the next twenty minutes, though, until four-thirty, no school buses appear on the horizon. Twice a blue Nova pulls up to the leading edge of the track, but each time she loses nerve, backs out.
The bathrooms a mile down at the truck stop are free, we know. “But not private.” This is written in tempura paint on our front glass.
It’s not all my father wanted the sign-people to paint, but there wasn’t room for everything he wanted them to write, not if we still wanted the words to be readable from the street. So now we have brochures.
What they document is the inevitable development of establishments such as this one.
It starts a year ago at a Bantams game, where they serve beer. Where the urinals are in constant use, pretty much. The women’s side as well. Aside from various hygienic issues (here my dad’s supplied testimony from ex-custodial workers and pictures so close-up they look like scratch ’n sniffs), the opposing team—this is supposition, but it’s hockey, too, and everything goes in hockey—somehow managed to replace the home side’s urinal cakes with urinal cakes that had some of the properties of dry ice, apparently. The result was that for the second and third periods, the men’s room was clogged with a sort of warm fog of pee: “the urine of a thousand or more gentlemen that night, mingling in your lungs.” The result of that was an outbreak of bronchitis and sinus infections like the city had never seen. One old fan’s death had even been attributed to the incident, though when Dad prints his name, he gives him his own special line, like a little headstone in the text. Like he’s surrounding him with the moment of quiet he deserves. But he doesn’t include an obituary picture, as we don’t want to be sensationalistic.
The idea of breathing urine is enough, really.
What he doesn’t say in the brochure is that some eight thousand male fans went home that night unaware, not coughing.
What he’d never say is that two of those fans were us.
To him it’s not like lying. In business, he says, all is fair, so long as it’s legal.
I don’t think he learned this in Sunday school.
6.
Prudence shows up just before five, after her yearbook meeting. She sneaks around to my window, jack-in-boxes up to eye level and flashes her camera.
“Jane?” I say in my best customer-service voice.
“No,” she says back, “Prudence, remember?”
It’s our joke.
I let her in the back door. Somewhere in the city, my dad’s having a heart attack.
“Any fish today?” she says, pulling the door shut behind her, touching the handle with only her fingertips.
I hook my head for her to follow me back to my station.
What she’s talking about is how one morning Tandy found one of the Johns in the refrigerator, courtesy, we’re pretty sure, of Roy. Swimming in the yellow-tinted water of the jug—light beer on an empty stomach—was a sluggish goldfish.
It had to be a joke, we’re pretty sure. No fish could survive the urethra. Or, the truth of it is, we can’t imagine the urethra that could be wide enough to pass a goldfish.
Because he didn’t want to mess up our numbers, my dad ceremoniously poured the chilled urine and the goldfish into tank #2.
For all I know, that fish is still in there, invisible in the hearty yellow water. Swimming through a dream it can’t wake from.
Prudence, because she’s like this, has named the goldfish Dick.
I like to watch her mouth when she says it.
Like I said, we’ve been together since grade school.
Twice a week, maybe, she’ll close her eyes and let my hand slip up under her shirt, but then she remembers something her mom told her, I think, and she’s batting me away, her hands soft, her lipstick smeared.
So, yeah. If things shone in any kind of proportion to how much you shine them, I’d be blinding people at the urinal.
She stays with me, though, and I stay with her, and lately she’s even started dropping the occasional aspirin in her coke, always waiting to do it until I’m watching. At first I thought she had a headache or something, but then she told me that when her mom was in high school, all the boys were trying to slip aspirin into the girls’ cokes. The roofies of 1972, I guess.
They work.
On her aspirin and coke, Prudence can’t hear her mom’s voice so well, and leans into me more, and laughs easier, more loopy, like it’s really getting to her this time. Like she might not remember whatever inevitable thing’s about to happen. Like it won’t be her fault.
It won’t be long, I’m pretty sure.
Until then, instead of sex, we talk about fecal matter. Intimacy’s intimacy.
Fecal matter’s the idea Prudence has been working on all week. I’m supposed to pitch it to my dad.
She sits on the floor where the drive-through customers won’t be able to see her and repeats it for me, in the voice I’m supposed to use to sell it: the obvious next step for a venture like this is a covered patio diner out front, over the smooth concrete that used to lead into the twin bays of the gas station, where the tanks are now. The tables are already there, even, from the six months the burger stand was alive. All we’d need to supply, really, is the food.
Not just any food, though.
Prudence’s idea is that the only food people would buy at a place like ours would be novelty food.
And, in keeping with the theme, all the dishes would be made-up to look like turds of one kind or another (“Poo Burger,” “S.O.S.,” “Cowpie,” “Rabbit Pellets,” “Litterbox Cake,” “Duty-Free French Fries,” etc.), and the ice cubes would be yellow, and the pitchers would be Johns and Janes, and the waiters when they delivered the food would do it with their hands in bags turned inside out, and not look happy about it.
Then, going there, it would be a dare of sorts. Just to take one bite, even though it was just sausage or ground beef or whatever. Take one bite and hold it down.
I see her in Texas History 2, designing the menu in her red, decorated spiral.
“What about soup?” I ask her, eyeing a black pickup that’s slowed to make sure this place is real.
“Tortilla,” Prudence