All-Day Breakfast (21 page)

“Sorry about that, Mom,” I said softly. “You all right in here?”

She seemed to be studying the set of orange
Childcraft
books on the bottom shelf. She wasn't capable of reacting to any situation. In the middle of the spectrum between mother and her freakish son was a single functioning person.

“Okay, we've been fed,” Colleen said at my shoulder. “We have to get them out of here, you know where? Because we have to go right now.”

“But I haven't made ham salad!” Evadare hollered from the front. “And the
tv
said snow, you should wait.”

I turned and took Colleen's hands, rubbing their thin bones beneath my thumbs. She raised her eyebrows, unsure, and wrinkles went up into her hairline. When was the last time I'd shown my teeth to smile and not to bite somebody?

“I found your Megan.”

“Next stop, Lincoln,
Nebraska,” I announced to the passengers, flinging open the back doors. The sky was sidewalk-gray and fat snowflakes flitted like moths. “If you're backtracking to North Platte, Denver or points between, you'll be switching to a new coach, and—”

“It'll be so fly!” Grace grinned with that gap in her teeth, her shoulder pressed against the sharps-disposal bin. “I call shotgun, hey—shotgun on the zombie shuttle!”

“Hell, yes! Zombie Disneyland!” Clint worked his skinny denim arms like locomotive coupling rods. “I'm a-stockin' the gift shop!”

We'd parked under a big tall sign—just as Rob Aiken had described—shaped like a red coffee pot that read
sapp bros. food & fuel
and also
greyhound
.

“We're early,” I said, “so we ought to avail ourselves of the restaurant.”

The kids started sliding out. Colleen was already striding across the parking lot on her pencil legs, leaning sideways against the wind—for all we knew Megan was waiting inside.

“No, wait. One thing,” I said. “Everybody has to call home, right now. You can't use your cell phones where we going. Franny's got a phone, who else?”

Amber and Grace held theirs up.

“Like a hundred messages from my mom,” said Amber.

“You don't call her back?”

“She'd freak.”

“Jesus, trust me, until she hears your voice she assumes you're dead, doesn't eat or sleep, and Mom doesn't deserve that, right? Tell them you'll be away from school for a while, that I'm responsible for everything, even say that Mr. Vincent knows about it.” My neck went hot as they rolled their eyes at me. “Don't tell them we're in Lincoln but tell them you're not
dead
, all right? I'll borrow somebody's when you're done.”

They nodded glumly. Harv sat on his hands on the gurney.

“You don't have to call home,” I told him.

“My mom's in Taiwan,” said Grace, with such a tight mouth I couldn't see her missing tooth.

“Leave a message. Account for yourself one way or another.”

They sat on the jump seats, phones to their ears, except Amber, who walked around and sat in the driver's seat. Colleen came out of the restaurant, showing me a quick shake of her head—no Megan yet.

With white spray-paint someone had emblazoned
Steph Eggers you rock me socks off
onto the Greyhound bus at the curb, motor rumbling benevolently like Emperor Elephant in
The Little Wretch
. “Emblazoned” was such a great word; I wanted it emblazoned on my tombstone.

Amber opened the door of the cab and slipped back down, wandering away to kick a hole through an aluminum trash can chained to a telephone pole. She swayed back toward us, mouth bunched like a fist, then fell onto Grace's shoulder and sobbed like the rest of us weren't even there, her one poor arm tight around Grace's back.

Harv crouched beneath the big revolving drum of the cement truck beside us. I stood beside him but he carried on squinting toward the far end of the parking lot.

“Is that my dad down there?” he whispered. “You know my dad?”

Between the big rigs and Camaros, an older-model motor home sat with its side door banging in the wind. A guy in a ball cap climbed the two steps and disappeared inside—only saw him from the back, but blond hair stuck out from under the cap.

“He rides with state troopers,” Harv said through square teeth.

Our mystery guy leaned out, shaking a yellow plastic tablecloth. He wore black-rimmed glasses, true, but he also sported a massive ZZ Top beard that nearly obscured his
washington huskies
sweatshirt. The wind flipped the beard up in his face as the tablecloth was torn out of his hands. He ran after it, toward the highway.

“Holy, maybe I'm getting retarded,” said Harv. “What's it say on the side there?”

“Bigfoot.”

“I can't even read! See, when Dad was filming me yesterday, he gave me my brother's old
Maxim
s to look at, and you know what's good about
Maxim
?”

“The pictures,” I said into the wind.

“Yeah, because I couldn't even read what the girl's
name
was, like not at all! I know what the letters
are
, no problem, but when they're all pushed together?”

“You were right.” Clint kneeled on the ambulance's back bumper. “They
are
actually glad I'm alive. She says Jerry's happy 'cause there's no ligament damage.”

“Waterproof mascara.” Amber finally raised her head, wiping an eye. “Thank God, hey?”

Franny sat next to Clint, eyes red, and he put an arm around her. She held her phone out to me.

I dialed and then leaned across the passenger seat up front, collecting our pop bottles and Styrofoam as though I was just killing time with the call and the focus of my entire being wasn't really on a phone ringing on a kitchen counter inside Deb's house in that hillside subdivision where everyone kept their dangly Christmas lights up all year—that I wasn't actually
willing
myself to fly to MacArthur inside the telephone line's carbon filaments just like the Atom in the old
Justice League
comic. And this was a cell phone, so even in a comic book it wouldn't have worked.

“Hey,” I practiced saying, “how are ya?”

I stayed bent over the passenger seat, head out of the wind so that Josie and Ray would be able to hear me.

“How
are
ya?” I said again.

But it just rang and rang. Not even Deb's answering machine. I stared at the numbers I'd dialed but they weren't wrong.

I backed out into the wind and found Colleen leaning over the hood, head down, her sleeves smeared with our trans-Nebraskan dust.

“You all right?” I asked.

She straightened up like I'd goosed her, then smoothed her lank hair back from her face as she held out a little red phone.

“What?” I asked.

“Drop this fucking thing in the trash,” she said through her teeth. “I called Doug to tell him where I was.”

I reached for the phone but she spun and threw the thing—it sailed over a half-dozen rows of parked cars until it clanged against a milk truck. Then she strode across the parking lot, inspecting every vehicle, her arms folded tight against her. It wasn't tracksuit weather.

The wind unsnapped
my cuff buttons as I trotted after her. Amber and Grace skipped over the parking lines, freshly eyeliner'd. It'd only been three hours since we'd finished that truckstop bacon but as I walked my legs felt hollow, knees and ankles crinkling like Dickside garbage bags—nitrite-poor anxiety suddenly fizzled at the corners of my brain, we had to eat!

“Here, hey.” I slipped Franny's phone into her hand. “Thanks.”

“Aw, you!” she grinned, hair particulated with snow. “Thanks but no thanks!”

She presented the phone again—someone's
finger
sat pinched in the halves, its open end smeared purple.

I looked at my right hand and saw that it was my finger.

“Aw, goddamn.” I slipped the still-warm thing into my breast pocket—it smelled of cough syrup, sawdust. “Let's get some of the good food in us, hey? Maybe run, okay? But nobody lose their head in here.”

“Hey, G.” Franny stumbled over the toe of her sneaker. “You might be the first guy to mean that literally.”

Clint giggled. “And I got your
back
, girl.”

“I'd give an arm and a leg for some bacon,” said Grace.

“Don't lose your, um, footing,” muttered Franny

“Keep a civil, um…tongue in your head,” said Harv.

“I'll knee you in the face,” I attempted. Good one!

Inside, a sign above the cash register said
hotbar buffet – $6.99
. I was still good at reading signs. A woman in a black skirt walked up with a stack of menus.

“Breakfast?” she asked. “Just yourselves?”

“How can we get bacon?”

“Oh,” she nodded. “Your party's just around here.”

We hustled after her between the tables. Old couples sat with teapots and putty-faced guys sat alone behind gently collapsing stacks of pancakes. What would
Deb and the kids emblazon on my tombstone, anyway?

—peter kingston giller—

where did you fuck off to, man?

and why in so many pieces?

The waitress brought her red heels together beside a round corner booth, where Colleen already sat, eyes darting, behind a cup of coffee.

“Here!” the waitress said. “And we'll have more bacon out in just a minute!”

Colleen kept gazing toward the door. “Where are Clint and the girls?” A rope of spit snapped between her teeth.

“What you mean? They're right—”

“Over at the smorgasbord.” Harv pointed. “Got their plates and everything.”

“You go ahead.” She waved a bracelet. “I'll hold the table.”

No sign of Rob Aiken strolling between the booths, so Harv and I powered our way toward the buffet like a pair of Ben Roethlisbergers. A chafing dish piled with grease-beaded bacon waited alongside hash browns, pale scrambled eggs, beans and junk. Harv heaped eggs beside his bacon. My eyebrows might've gone up.

“Trying to be polite,” he shrugged. “Did you talk to your kids?”

“No answer.” I prodded through the bacon until I had forty-five strips that I really liked. “They must be out bowling.”

“I just called home too,” he said.

“What the hell—what for?”

“Well, I thought maybe the finger-chopping thing had maybe been a joke.”

“Jeez, man. Were they there?”

“Dad picked up but when I said hi he passed the phone to Kim—that's his girlfriend you met—and she said, for my own good, I shouldn't come home anytime soon.” He clacked the bacon tongs like a pair of castanets. “I didn't plan on going home right away anyway, I totally didn't, so that was cool.”

The others were circling from the drinks station back to the table.

“Plenty of beans, Beanie Babies!” Franny called.

Under those fluorescents the turtles on her skirt really glowed.

“Try the white toast,” called Clint, bacon dangling like a cigarette. “Amazing.”

“Gosh,” said a woman behind us. “Look at that snow come down!”

“Mr. Giller.” Harv gave his plate a liberal puddle of ketchup. “Something else I've been wanting to say.”

I nodded, the bacon between my molars saturating my tongue in joy.

“It's just that a guy can only control so much,” he said.

“So…”

“That's all.”

Weird. Deb had told me the same when Lydia had first gone into hospice, the exact words.

“No, okay,” he said. “It's just there's been ten million times I've said, ‘Hey, Harv, man, this is out of your hands. Not your problem, not your fault.' I appreciate what you've done for us, for
me
especially, and you should know we all appreciate it a lot. You took us to Velouria, right, but you couldn't have known what'd happen to everybody.”

“Jesus, of course I couldn't—”

“No,” he agreed.

He lapsed into stoic chewing.

The white squares of lattice around the table must've been hypnotic because I couldn't remember eating any bacon though I was down to six pieces. The girls wiped their greasy fingers on Clint's scarf and he just sat chewing, eyes rolled back in his head.

“Oh.” Amber set her hand flat on the table. “Feel that?”

“Ah, shit,” said Grace. “That's a good high.”

The nitrite euphoria had spread to every part of my body. I shut my eyes and could've sworn I was floating above the table.

“I'm at my limit,” said Colleen.

After five minutes I started back to the buffet for thirds.

“Giller!”

From the far corner of the restaurant Rob beckoned me over, his white hair combed flat onto his forehead. He was sitting with two other guys. I balanced my behind on the edge of the seat and put down my empty plate. All three of them nodded at me, but none of them quit chewing—immediately across was Clayton the first-aid guy, with his big brown moustache and orange Dockside jumpsuit, and beside him
was a bald guy with his unzipped jumpsuit over a bald eagle T-shirt, two unsubtle staples connecting his left eyebrow to his forehead.

Need zombies?
I could've told Tom Exegesis.
Check an all-you-can-eat bacon restaurant.

Each of the three had a pyramid of bacon in front of him that must've weighed three pounds, like in those bacon-eating contests that won the English Civil War for Cromwell. Rob slid the saucer from under his coffee cup and stacked it with bacon, then the two guys pitched in too until strips were tumbling onto the tablecloth.

“Help yourself, Mr. Giller,” he said through a mouthful.