In the personnel office, Edna spoke to a gray-haired woman in gold-rimmed glasses who, according to her nameplate, was Marcella Rockway.

“This is my daughter that I told you about, Abia.”

Marcella nodded. “And you’re looking for summer work? Can you type?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Abby said. “My friend is looking, too.” She turned around and dragged me forward. “She took typing last fall. She can do sixty words a minute.”

Edna gave me a brief, curdled look. Then she mastered her features and smiled at Marcella. “Her name is Frances Koslowski.”

“But everyone calls me Poppy,” I said.

Marcella gave me an imperious nod. “Is that right? And can you type sixty words a minute?”

“I can. So can Abby. She’s more accurate than I am, though.”

“You’re not . . .” she paused. “Can you see out of that eye?”

I nodded. Abby bristled, and I saw Edna put a hand on her arm.

“You’ll need to fill out these applications,” Marcella said. “You can sit over there and fill them out now, if you like.”

Abby and I took the applications and sat down on a short vinyl sofa.

“I’ve got to get back to the file room,” Edna said. “Will you be home for dinner tonight?”

“Yeah,” Abby said. “I’ll cook, if you like.”

“Sounds good.” She turned to walk out the door, and then she stopped and looked back over her shoulder. “Goodbye, Poppy. Thanks for giving Abby a ride down here today. I know she appreciates it.”

Abby and I looked at one another and, without saying a word, began filling out our applications. Abby listed our high school typing teacher, our principal, and her old shift manager at McDonald’s as her references. I listed the typing teacher, Cookie Turnipseed, and Edna Johnson. We both got jobs.

Chapter Twenty-Six

After years of steadfastly refusing to try anything more exotic than Chinese almond chicken, my grandmother had, at the age of seventy-five, discovered the Kanki Japanese Steak House when a Sunday school friend insisted on taking her there for her birthday. There were no tables at the Kanki. Instead, there were chef stations where you sat at a wooden counter, in the middle of which was a stainless steel griddle. A waitress took your order, and, a few minutes later, the chef for your station came out, wheeling a cart filled with kitchen tools. The thrill of the Kanki was watching the chef—usually a man and always Japanese or Japanese-American—prepare your food. Rapid slicing, knife flipping, and intricate juggling of the salt and pepper shakers were all standard features in the chef’s floorshow.

I liked the Kanki, though I felt rather ashamed by that. It was hopelessly corny, not truly Japanese cuisine, and yet the chef’s knife work was always amazing. Every chef in the place, from the most senior to the ones who were clearly still in training, could clean and butterfly a shrimp in a second, all the while keeping up a steady banter with the customers. Many of them spoke English as a second language. I tried to imagine myself cracking jokes in Japanese while tossing sharp knives into the air.

Nana loved it. She laughed when our chef, whose English seemed limited to the names of ingredients, took a squirt bottle full of oil and made a smiley face on the hot griddle. She laughed even more when he took the spatula and smeared the eyes to make them slanted.

“My God,” I whispered to Abby. “It’s worse than a minstrel show.”

“Enjoy your white privilege,” she whispered back. “I think this one’s going to have to stick to the visual jokes.”

He tossed off four quick shrimp appetizers and flipped them onto our plates.

My mother, who was sitting to Abby’s right, leaned over and said, “Forget what I told you about playing with your food. These shrimp are delicious, aren’t they? I especially like this ginger sauce.”

“What’s that?” Nana asked from my left. “I can’t hear a thing way down here.”

“Why didn’t you sit next to Mama?”

“Because you got in the middle,” she said. “Did you think I was going to bite your friend?”

Before I could answer, the chef interrupted us.

“Steak?” he asked. “How done?”

Nana and my mother wanted well done. The chef, who had just made a tower out of rings of raw onion, poured a jigger of alcohol into the small hole at the top and set it alight. He offered to cook their steaks on top of this volcano. Abby and I requested rare. He offered us each a slab of raw meat.

“Will the fun never end?” I muttered.

“Relax,” Abby said. “There’s nothing wrong with being silly every now and again. So it’s not Shakespeare. So what? Try to enjoy it anyway.”

“You’re really on poor old William’s case these days, aren’t you? I’m sure I could enjoy this if I had a drink. Or two.”

“What’s that?” Nana asked.

“You need to get the doctor to clean your ears out,” my mother observed loudly. “Quit poking in them with a Q-Tip and jamming all the wax down inside.” To me she added, “I’d tell you to order yourself a glass of wine, but your grandmother would have a fit. She thinks sniffing the cork will make you an alcoholic.”

“You think that, too.”

“I do not.”

“You don’t drink.”

“I’ve never wanted to. That doesn’t mean I think you’re an alcoholic. I’ve got a little more perspective than some people.”

“Thanks. I didn’t realize the topic had come up.”

She speared a piece of zucchini on the end of her fork. “You know how Nana is. She was bound to say something when you came over from Susan’s the other night and said you didn’t want to drive back to the hotel.”

“Oh, yeah? What?”

“She said she bet it wasn’t a case of ‘didn’t want to.’ More like ‘couldn’t.’”

I looked at Nana. She was on her fifth container of ginger sauce. From the moment the appetizers had dropped onto her plate, she’d been using up sauce faster than the chef could refill it. She poured at least two onto her fried rice.

“I’m not an alcoholic.”

“That’s what your grandfather always said,” she replied.

“I’m not a cannibal, either. That’s what Jeffrey Dahmer always said.”

I felt Abby squeeze my leg. “You’re not an alcoholic,” she breathed into my ear. “Remember what I said about trying to have fun?”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go all out.”

I asked the chef for a martini and a pair of chopsticks. He gazed at me for a moment, puzzled. With my left-hand, I shook a pretend drink; with my right, I made a pinching motion with my thumb and forefingers. He handed me the chopsticks and signaled to the waitress.

“A dirty martini,” I said. “Three olives, please.”

After I’d dropped the fourth piece of steak onto the front of my shirt, I began to regret my joie de vivre.

“She was always like that,” Nana told Abby. “Contrary as the day is long, and couldn’t go five minutes without dropping this or spilling that. When she was a little tiny thing, just learning to walk, I had to follow her all over the house with a broom in one hand and a mop in the other.”

“It’s true,” my mother agreed. “While I was cleaning up the powder she’d spilled in the bathroom, she’d be off in the kitchen, playing in the flour bin. I couldn’t keep up with her. None of us could.”

“Pure wild,” Nana said. “It was because she spent too much time in the playpen. That makes them wild, you know. Caging them in like that.”

“Nonsense,” said my mother. “If it weren’t for the playpen, we’d never have had a moment’s peace. She’d have gotten into the knives or drunk bleach or who knows what all.”

“Hello,” I said. “I’m sitting right here.”

Abby laughed. “I was a very calm child, or so I’m told. No colic. Slept through the night as soon as I came home from the hospital.”

“Wasn’t your mother lucky!” Nana exclaimed. “I don’t believe we got a wink of sleep until Poppy was two years old. We used to put her in the back of the car and drive all over Raleigh, trying to get her to fall asleep.”

My mother picked up the narrative. “And about half the time, she’d wake up just as soon as we pulled into the driveway. Then we’d have to start all over again.”

“Do you want to hear more?” I asked Abby. “Or would you like to eat your dinner?”

“I can eat and listen.”

“Thanks. You’re no help at all.”

Nana poked at my steak with her fork. “I don’t know how in the world you can eat that so bloody. It would make me pure sick.”

“Well, I don’t know how you can eat a steak cooked to the consistency of shoe leather. No wonder you have dentures. You wore out your real teeth.”

“Sass-box. Goodness—that blood has run all into your fried rice.”

“Don’t look if it bothers you. You eat your dinner and I’ll eat mine. We have different tastes.”

“Hmmph.” She gave my plate a disgusted look and went back to sawing her own steak. “What do you suppose is happening at the hospital?”

“Nothing, I hope,” my mother replied.

“I don’t know. The doctor said it could be any time now. He sure looked awful when we went to see him this afternoon. Did you go by, Poppy? Didn’t he look awful?”

“He looked like he was dying.”

“It’s a terrible shame, but I warned him. I always said he’d wind up either dead or crazy.”

“We all wind up dead,” I pointed out. “That’s not really an either /or. The only variable part is the crazy.”

“Poppy’s grandfather drank himself into Dorothea Dix Hospital,” Nana explained to Abby. “He had to be committed.”

“The washing machine was talking to him,” my mother said. “He blew a hole in it with a shotgun. Neighbors called the police.”

“We all tried to tell him,” Nana said, “but he would never listen to anyone. I said, ‘Hunter, if you keep drinking, you’ll wind up dead in a ditch.’ But he knew better. He said we were crazy. One time . . .”

“Abby knows all of this, Nana. The only part of my life she’s missed was that locked in the playpen bit.”

“Don’t you wonder if alcoholism is an allergy, like they say? Do you know anything about that, Abby? You’re a nurse, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know anything about it, I’m af raid.”

“I think it’s a form of narcissism,” my mother said. “It’s about wanting to be the center of attention. No one could be sick in our house, except him. I remember one time when I had bronchitis. He laid down on the floor next to my bed and wheezed louder than I did. It was ridiculous.”

“Have you thought any about the funeral arrangements?” Nana asked. “We could ask my preacher. He’s such a nice man.”

My mother sighed. “I don’t know. I suppose we might could.”

“Do we have to talk about this in the Kanki?” I said. Everyone looked at me as if I’d ordered a second martini. “It’s just . . . I don’t know. He’s not dead yet, and here we are.” I pointed to the station next to us, where the chef’s show had just started. “That guy is balancing an egg on a spatula, and we’re talking about Hunter’s funeral. And besides, what would your preacher say about him? Hunter never went to church. He said God was a son of a bitch.”

“Wash your mouth out with soap,” Nana said.

“You know what he thought of God,” I continued. “I don’t want to hear a sermon from someone who didn’t even know him. Who would do the eulogy? What would they say?”

“He liked wine, women, and song?” my mother suggested.

“He liked beer, whores, and the Wurlitzer organ.”

“We couldn’t say that,” my mother agreed. “You can’t tell the truth at a funeral.”

“Well, we have to do something,” Nana said. “He had a lot of friends.”

“Most of whom are dead.”

“A lot of them are doing just fine. And the people he worked with—they’ll be expecting something,” she went on. “And his family. Dot and Lucy and Allard . . .”

“Oh, for God’s sake, we don’t have to have Lucy, do we? And Nancy and Jake and their nasty little weasel children.”

“Don’t forget Fred,” my mother said. “I suppose someone will have to get him out of the nursing home in Selma. Maybe Dot can do that. Or Linda.” She giggled. “Definitely Linda, having to show up there and tell everyone that Fred’s her uncle.”

Abby cleared her throat. “This is none of my business,” she said, “but you might want to call a funeral home. They could take care of the arrangements for you. You’d just need to give them a general idea of what you want.”

“He wants to be cremated,” my mother said. “He left a note somewhere about it. I found it in his papers when we emptied out the trailer. It was in a strong box along with his will.”

“Hunter had a will?”

“Yes. He wrote it a few years before he ran off with Jean. I thought he’d probably changed it, but there wasn’t anything more recent. He left you and me everything.”

“And what about Nana? If they were still married when he wrote it . . .”lay

“I had everything I wanted,” Nana said. “I got the house after the first divorce, and I kept it in my name, even after we remarried.”

“I didn’t know that. I’ll bet he didn’t like it.”

“He said something to me one time, but I set him straight, and he never said another word about it.”