Dear Old Dead(39)
“Chicken. I mean—”
“The gentleman wants chicken,” Gregor said to the girl behind the counter.
Down at the cash register, the old woman snorted. “I don’t know what you’re helping him out for,” she said. “He doesn’t help us out any. He’s been working overtime for months now, trying to get us shut down.”
“That’s not true,” the young man said quickly.
“Keep the doughnut,” Gregor told him. “What kind of potatoes do you want?”
“Fried.” The young man was looking dazed.
“Take a couple of desserts, too.”
The girl serving main dishes was smiling pleasantly, but the woman at the cash register was scowling more fiercely than ever. Gregor went up to her and took out his wallet.
“How much do I owe you?” he asked her.
“You ask me, you owe me a lot more than you’re gonna be able to pay me. Pro-life, that asshole calls himself. Pro-himself is what I say. He’s just after the publicity.”
“What publicity?” Gregor asked.
The young man came up to the cash register with two pieces of chocolate layer cake as well as the rest of the food. Gregor was glad he had finally gotten into the spirit of the thing.
“There isn’t any publicity,” the young man said sadly. “Nobody ever notices me out there. I picket this place. With a sign.”
“A sign about what?” Gregor asked.
“About the abortions they do here. I don’t know if you knew they did that. I mean, you probably did. But I picket about it anyway.”
“Because you’re opposed to abortion,” Gregor said.
“What? Yeah. Yeah. It’s more complicated than that. Thank you for all this. I don’t even know who you are. I’m Robbie Yagger.”
“I’m Gregor Demarkian. What do you mean when you say you picket this place? You mean you walk up and down in front of it?”
“All the time,” the woman at the cash register said. “Day and night.”
“Were you picketing here the night Charles van Straadt died?”
Robbie Yagger nodded. “Oh, yeah. Except, I don’t think of it like that. I think of it as the night they had the war uptown. That brought lots of people here who aren’t here usually. People who aren’t already used to my sign.”
“Were you picketing here between six and eight?”
“You mean when the murder happened,” Robbie Yagger said. “I was around then, but I wasn’t always picketing. I came in here and had a cup of coffee sometime between seven and eight o’clock. I don’t remember exactly when.”
“That’s very interesting,” Gregor Demarkian said.
“Fourteen seventeen,” the woman at the cash register said.
Gregor gave her a twenty. “Would you mind having lunch with me?” he asked Robbie Yagger. “I mean, I’m only going to have this cup of coffee, but do you mind if I join you while you’re eating? You may be able to tell me something I need to know.”
Robbie looked down at his full tray of food and shook his head. “I’ll tell you anything you want. I haven’t been able to eat like this for months.”
Gregor’s private opinion was that Robbie Yagger probably hadn’t been eating too well before that, either, but he had to save a little of the young man’s pride. Nobody ever needed pride so badly as when he was down and out.
FIVE
1
FOR MARTHA VAN STRAADT, volunteering at the Sojourner Truth Health Center was a kind of torture. The fact that it was torture she had chosen to experience, for money, didn’t help any. She might have done all right if she had been assigned to some impersonal medical service. She could have survived a couple of years of cleaning bedpans or setting up lunch trays without too much mental anguish. Instead, she had been handed over to the Sisters and put to work in the Afterschool Program, day care for children in the first through fourth or fifth through eighth grades. Martha had first to fourth, along with Sister Edna and a young woman named Kerri Stahl who was studying education at SUNY Buffalo and thinking of opening a day-care center of her own when she got through. Martha wasn’t too happy with Sister Edna and she couldn’t abide Kerri Stahl—but she truly hated the children. The children were a nightmare come to life. Today they were making Father’s Day cards and posters—except they weren’t, exactly, because Father’s Day didn’t mean anything to most of them, they didn’t have fathers. Martha had attended a very expensive college with a ferocious speech code that had effectively prevented the discussion of real life in any of its myriad forms as it existed outside of college dormitories. She had been convinced by a parade of right-thinking sociology professors that the only reason some people said that the fatherlessness of the ghetto family was a problem was racist propaganda, and sexist, too, because what difference did fathers make? Now here she was. She didn’t know a single child with both a mother and a father in the house—or even a mother and a stepfather. And fathers might not matter in the long run, but in the short run the children certainly thought they did. It was crazy. It made Martha’s head ache just to think about it. It made Martha want to cry every time she turned off the light in her room upstairs. She wanted desperately to be downtown in her apartment, taking a shower in the walk-in stall lined with periwinkle blue ceramic tiles, lying down in the queen-size bed under four down comforters. She wanted to be sitting in Serendipity and eating cheesecake Vesuvius. She wanted a nice, sensible job in a bookstore or an art gallery or an Off-Off Broadway theater, where she would meet only the kind of people she liked.