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I garnished each sandwich with a bit of torn-off lettuce and a dill pickle. That was what another sign on the mirror promised. But when I got the dill pickle out of a jar I thought it looked like too much, so I cut it in half. I had just served a man a sandwich in this way when the woman from the till came over and got herself a cup of coffee. She took her coffee back to the till and drank it standing up. When the man had finished his sandwich and paid for it and left the store she came over again.
“You gave that man half a dill pickle. Have you been doing that with every sandwich?”
I said yes.
“Don’t you know how to slice a pickle? One pickle ought to last ten sandwiches.”
I looked at the sign. “It doesn’t say a slice. It says a pickle.”
“That’s enough,” the woman said. “Get out of that apron. I don’t take any back talk from my employees, that’s one thing I won’t do. You can get your purse and get out of here. And don’t go asking me where’s your pay because you haven’t been any use to me anyway and this was just supposed to be training.”
The gray-haired man was peeking out, with a nervous smile.
So I found myself out on the street again, walking to the streetcar stop. But I knew the way some streets went now and I knew how to use a transfer. I had even had experience at a job. I could say that I had worked behind a lunch counter. If anybody wanted a reference it would be tricky-but I could say the lunch counter was in my hometown. While I waited for the streetcar I took out the list of other places where I meant to apply, and the map that Queenie had given me. But it was later than I’d thought, and most places seemed too far away. I dreaded having to tell Mr. Vorguilla. I decided to walk back, in the hopes that when I got there he’d have gone.
I had just turned up the hill when I remembered the Post Office. I found my way back to it and got a letter out of the box and walked home again. Surely he would be gone by now.
But he wasn’t. When I walked past the open living-room window that overlooked the path beside the house, I heard music. It wasn’t what Queenie would play. It was the sort of complicated music that we had heard sometimes coming through the open windows of the Vorguillas’ house-music that demanded your attention and then didn’t go anywhere, or at least didn’t go anywhere soon enough. Classical.
Queenie was in the kitchen, wearing another of her skimpy dresses, and all her makeup. She had bangles on her arms. She was setting teacups on a tray. I was dizzy for a moment, coming out of the sunlight, and every inch of my skin bloomed with sweat.
“Shh,” Queenie said, because I’d closed the door with a crash. “They’re in there listening to records. It’s him and his friend Leslie.”
Just as she said this the music came to an abrupt halt and there was a burst of excited talk.
“One of them plays a record and the other has to guess what it is just from a little bit of it,” Queenie said. “They play these little bits and then stop, over and over. It drives you crazy.” She started cutting slices off a delicatessen chicken and putting them on buttered slices of bread. “Did you get a job?” she said.
“Yes, but it wasn’t permanent.”
“Oh, well.” She didn’t seem very interested. But as the music started again she looked up and smiled and said, “Did you go to the-” And she saw the letter I was carrying in my hand.
She dropped the knife and came to me in a hurry, saying softly, “You walked right in with it in your hand. I should have told you, put it in your purse. My private letter.” She grabbed it from my hand and right at that moment the kettle on the stove began to shriek.
“Oh, get the kettle. Chrissy, quick, quick! Get the kettle or he ‘11 be out here, he can’t stand the sound.”
She had turned her back and was tearing open the envelope.
I took the kettle off the burner, and she said, “Make the tea, please-” in the soft, preoccupied voice of somebody reading an urgent message. “Just pour the water on, it’s measured.”
She laughed as if she’d read a private joke. I poured the water on the tea leaves and she said, “Thanks. Oh, thanks, Chrissy; thanks.” She turned around and looked at me. Her face was rosy and all the bangles on her arms jingled with a delicate agitation. She folded up the letter and pulled up her skirt and tucked it under the elastic waistband of her underpants.
She said, “Sometimes he goes through my purse.”
I said, “Is the tea for them?”
“Yes. And I have to get back to work. Oh, what am I doing? I have to cut the sandwiches. Where’s the knife?”
I picked up the knife and cut the sandwiches and put them on a plate.
“Don’t you want to know who my letter’s from?” she said.
I couldn’t think.
I said, “Bet?”
Because I had a hope that a private forgiveness from Bet could be the thing that had made Queenie burst into flower.
I had not even looked at the writing on the envelope.
Queenie’s face changed-for a moment she looked as if she didn’t know who that was. Then she recovered her happiness. She came and put her arms around me and spoke into my ear, in a voice that was shivering and shy and triumphant.
“It’s from Andrew. Can you take the tray in to them? I can’t. I can’t right now. Oh, thank you.”
Before Queenie went off to work she came into the living room and kissed both Mr. Vorguilla and his friend. She kissed both of them on their foreheads. She gave me a butterfly wave. “Bye bye.”
When I had brought the tray in I saw the a
I had not found the experience hard to talk about. The presence of Leslie made everything easier and seemed to soften the behavior of Mr. Vorguilla. As if he had to show me a decent courtesy in the presence of his friend. It could also have been that he sensed a change in me. People do sense the difference when you are not afraid of them anymore. He would not be sure of this difference and he would have no idea how it came about, but it would puzzle him and make him more careful. He agreed with Leslie when Leslie said I was well out of that job, and he even went on to say that the woman sounded like the sort of hard-bitten chiseler you sometimes found in that kind of hole-in-corner establishment in Toronto.
“And she had no business not paying you,” he said.
“You’d think the husband might have come forward,” said Leslie. “If he was the druggist, he was the boss.”
Mr. Vorguilla said, “He might brew up a special dose someday. For his wife.”
It wasn’t so hard to pour out tea and offer milk and sugar and pass sandwiches, and even talk, when you knew something another person didn’t know, about a danger he was in. It was just because he didn’t know, that I could feel something other than loathing for Mr. Vorguilla. It wasn’t that he had changed in himself-or if he had changed it was probably because I had.
Soon he said that it was time for him to get ready to go to work. He went to change his clothes. Then Leslie asked me if I would like to have supper with him.
“Just around the corner there’s a place I go,” he said. “Nothing fancy. Nothing like Stan’s place.”
I was glad enough to hear that it wouldn’t be anyplace fancy. I said, “Sure.” And after we had dropped off Mr. Vorguilla at the restaurant we drove in Leslie’s car to a fish and chips place. Leslie ordered the Super Di