Large Animals in Everyday Life by Wendy Brenner

but
because
of him, and I sometimes wondered if he had actually told her to give me the cookies. She stayed on for eight years, and because she was younger than the rest of the cafeteria staff and served with a mild, surprised look on her face, while the other women scowled and had drawn-on eyebrows, my mother was popular. She knew every kid’s name and she made jokes about the food she served. She could afford to; she had chosen to be there.
    When I went off to high school we thought our arrangement had ended: the high school cafeteria workers had a union and wouldn’t even accept my mother’s application. But then she found out the company that serviced the school’s vending machines was hiring, so she became the new candy bar lady. Now only the greasers joked with her, the guys in navy tanker jackets who hung out by her machines talking about Auto Mechanics Lab and looking too old to be in high school. They were shiny-faced, actually greasy, and often red-eyed, and they clomped around the halls in black lace-up boots, jingling large bunches of keys that were attached to their belts with heavy link chains. Their girlfriends looked cleaner but wore clunky wooden sandals that made as much noise as the boys’ boots and keys, and they went around with giant combs sticking out of their back pockets. They all looked shrewd and unhappy, as though they expected to hear bad news at any moment, and my mother would tell me stories. “Kimmy Forsythe is not as dumb as she looks,” she would say to me at home. “She is the sole guardian of her four little brothers, not one but
two
of whom are diagnosed hyperactive.” Or she might say, “You should be nice to the Mazzetti boys. They don’t even hear how they sound to others, and they have a terrible time of it at home.” By now I felt I was indulging my mother, that her job was a way of ensuring that
she
was okay. One of us needed to feel that one of us was safe, but the roles had grown hazy, as roles will do.
    Occasionally some guy I’d never spoken a word to would bump into me in one of my classes and say, “You got a nice ma.” This always embarrassed me—I had it easier than the Mazzetti boys and I knew it. I wasn’t jealous of my mother’s attentions to them, and I didn’t secretly want to run away with them, or marry them, or be them. My friends and I ignored the greasers and laughed a little at their girlfriends’ clothes, but mostly we did our homework and went to movies and our boring jobs. I was a weekend hatcheck girl at a Holiday Inn and was alreadythinking of going on in art, not for the rebellion or the romance, but because of how simple my mother made ceramics look. I was never one to look for trouble.
    â€¢ • •
    I remind myself of this as I pull off of I-75, finally, safely into Georgia, at a stop called Arabi, which I know only because it’s written on the rusted pay phone in front of the gas station. Beyond the station there’s just an empty road curving away into the high tree line. “I’m coming home,” I tell my mother. “I’m on my way right now.”
    â€œThat’s odd,” she says. “I mean, not strange that you’re coming, but Charlie just telephoned for you here.” She and Charlie have never met, but they know each other’s phone voices.
    â€œI didn’t tell him I was leaving,” I say. “He’s the reason I’m coming.”
    My mother doesn’t say anything for a moment. Finally she says, “Well, I told him I didn’t know anything about where you were, since of course I didn’t. What time will you be here?”
    â€œLate,” I say. “Or in the morning.”
    â€œWake me up if you want,” she says.
    I fix my hair for a minute in the silver reflection on the phone’s coin box before walking over to the little cinder-block building to pay for my gas. Inside, a large man