At the end of June, Paula Kabalevsky laid down the law. Cheryl could find a job on her own, apply for a secretarial position on the Chicago police force and ride to work with her, or she could go to community college. But she could no longer spend her days watching Van Halen jump around on the television screen in striped spandex, or Billy Idol sneer at the world while embraced by a girl in a white wedding dress.
She’d taken to hanging out on her own, reading, writing in her journal, trying her hand at another play. The fact was Cheryl didn’t know what she wanted to do, but she knew she didn’t want to work for the police. Maybe she’d take some community college classes in the fall, maybe study writing, but more than anything, she was simply rudderless.
So it was on a rudderless afternoon, after refusing all invitations to hang out with friends on the Fourth of July, that Cheryl decided to take a walk. With no particular destination in mind, she headed toward the high school, went under the railroad trestle, past the Amtrak and the commuter station, and just kept going. As she walked absentmindedly through broken glass and beer cans and coke bottles, invisible eddies of wind whipped up fast food wrappers, sending them dancing around her. She flicked her lit cigarette butt at one of the papers, half hoping to set one on fire as she made her way towards the center of Joliet.
Passing the diner where high schoolers congregated after hours for sodas, ice cream, hamburgers, and French fries, and to exchange nickel bags of pot, grams of cocaine, and to settle scores lingering from the school hallways, she noticed a ‘Help Wanted’ sign with NOW! scratched beneath the printed lettering, hanging in the window. Why not? she said to herself.
One lone man stood behind the counter in the restaurant.
“I’m here to apply for the job.”
Brusquely, the man introduced himself as Constant Kosake. At least that’s what it sounded like to her. “See that door?” he said. Cheryl turned and glanced back at the door she’d just entered. “Saturday, waitress storms out, like that!” He threw his hands up in the air. “During dinner rush!”
“I live nearby and can start tomorrow.”
He narrowed his eyes. “What experience you have?”
“Umm, none, but your sign says you need someone N.O.W.”
“What you mean?”
Cheryl pointed to the sign. The man snatched the sign from the window. “Ah … my son, Billy. He must have written this. Kids don’t want to work these days.” He handed her an application.
As she filled it out, the only person she could think of to list as a reference was Mr. Dalton. She had barely given the clipboard back to the man before he snatched it with a burly, hairy hand. “Okay, you seem like honest, good girl,” he said without looking at her application. “You start tomorrow. But if something turns up from your background check,” he threw his thumb up, “you’re outta here. I call your reference.”
At once, she began to imagine what it would be like to have her own money, spend her own money, never have to ask her mother for money again. She could take the train into Chicago and go to the big bookstores. She could buy one of those fancy writing journals she’d seen last time she’d been in the city. She’d buy an album when she wanted to, not when she had put together enough chores to earn her allowance. She’d save for a car or even buy one on a loan.
“You work six days a week, sometimes seven. Second shift—3:30 prompt. No excuse. You shadow another server. You are low waitress on totem pole. So you fill in for others. Minimum wage and tips.”
Second shift hadn’t occurred to Cheryl, and neither had working on Saturdays.
Cheryl frowned at Mr. Kosake’s tired eyes, his gleam of sweat.
“Can I talk to my mother about it?”
“Young lady, if you have to get mama’s permission, you not old enough to work.”
Cheryl glared at him. “I’m eighteen.” She held his gaze long enough, to make him uncomfortable. “Can I work my way up to first shift?”
“Go on. I got a restaurant to run.” He waved his arm toward the door in dismissal.
Cheryl eyed him again and lowered her voice as she enunciated her syllables. “I don’t think my question was that much of an imposition, sir.”
Mr. Kosake stared back for a minute before respondeding. “Running a restaurant, it makes you impatient. Talk it over with your mother. You let me know this evening if I count on you being here tomorrow.” He reached for an order pad and scrawled on it. “Here’s the restaurant’s number.”
Cheryl hesitated for a moment, and then shook her head. “No, that’s okay. I’ll be here. Tomorrow, 3:30 sharp.”
During Cheryl’s Saturday shift, she was surprised to see Mr. Dalton cramming French fries smothered with ketchup into his mouth and washing them down with long slurps from a large chocolate milkshake. “I know that guy,” Cheryl said to the older waitress who was assigned to his table.
“Someone should tell him ketchup is a condiment, not a sauce.” Cheryl burst out laughing. “He’s eating like he’s got a bad case of the munchies.”
Frank Dalton looked around until he saw Cheryl behind the counter. “I recognize that laugh.”
Cheryl kept giggling as she walked over. “I have a message from your server. Ketchup is a condiment, not a sauce to slather over everything.”
He dipped a bunch of fries into the pile of ketchup and held them up as if they were important evidence in a trial. “Perhaps for others, but I am condemned to treat my fries as carriers for my cravings for this delicious tomato concoction. He paused, as if to admire the words as they alliterated into the air.
“Do you come here often to satisfy your ketchup cravings?”
“I haven’t in the past. But the fries are so good, I might become a regular.”
Dalton confessed that Mr. Kosake had called him about a reference, and that he’d stopped by to see if she’d gotten the job. And after that first day, Dalton appeared regularly during Cheryl’s shift, and she often joined him in his booth when she was on break. Even though Mr. Kosake knew who he was, that didn’t make him any less suspicious of the older man hanging around with his youngest waitress.
“I have Billy take care of him,” he told her one day. “No, Mr. Kosake, he’s a good guy. He was the one teacher who encouraged me to write.”
Dalton began to time his visits to coincide with the end of Cheryl’s shift. As time went on, he offered to give her a lift home, but she declined. He gave her his phone number and said to call him if she needed a ride, if she wanted to talk about writing, or if she just wanted to hang out. But she didn’t. Mr. Kosake would always offer Billy as an escort home, but she waved him off, too. She could take care of herself.
Then, a few weeks later, she passed a group of kids along the train trestle, maybe they were black or Hispanic, it was too dark to tell. They started catcalling and moving in her direction. One of them started to chase her, or at least acted like he would, then stopped and laughed when she took off running. She didn’t stop until she was on her porch several long blocks later. The next day, she called Mr. Dalton and told him she’d welcome a ride home if he was still offering. Gun or no gun, she didn’t feel safe. If it was so easy for her to have a gun, maybe they had guns, too.
Dalton showed up the next evening shortly before her shift ended.