We Never Asked for Wings (9 page)

T
here was a honeymoon. After the abandonment, after the popcorn and chocolate and chase down Mile Road, after Letty begged her job back with Luna bleeding on a barstool beside her, they behaved, all of them. Letty switched to the lunch shift when school let out for the summer, and Luna went to work with her every day, sitting obediently in an oversize chair in the terminal with an empty suitcase beside her and a purse in her lap, props intended to make it look like her mother had left her there for just a moment to use the restroom. Letty worked with her eyes glued to the chair, her attention divided between her customers and her daughter.

At home, Alex took over the microwaving of Maria Elena's food, setting the table each evening the way his grandmother had taught him and reporting out long days in strained sentences: he'd patrolled the cracked wetlands, throwing stranded minnows back into the bay; he'd refilled his grandfather's bird feeders; he'd met some girl named Yesenia on the rock that they'd determined to be exactly halfway between their apartments. After dinner, they sat in a line on the couch watching television, speaking in soft, careful tones and asking questions instead of making demands (Letty:
Do you want to put on your pajamas?
Luna
: Do you want to help me?
). They were afraid to be together, but they were afraid to be apart too. Even with an empty bedroom they still slept three to a room: Alex in the twin bed pushed up against the window and Luna in the full bed on the opposite wall, her sweaty cheek sealed to her mother's, arms tight around her neck.

It lasted exactly a month. On the day after they'd eaten the very last of Maria Elena's meals, when there was nothing left in the freezer but a bag of ice, Letty looked up from making change at the register to find Luna crouched behind the bar, her long hair stuck to a bottle of simple syrup.

“What are you doing?” she hissed, swiping her daughter's hair away from the row of bottles and glancing around to make sure her manager wasn't on the floor. “You can't be back here.”

“But I'm bored.”

“So keep coloring.”

“I already finished the book. I want a new one.”

Switching to the lunch shift had cut Letty's earnings in half, and over the past four weeks she'd spent the majority of what she made at the airport gift shop. She bought coloring books and puzzles and stuffed animals, anything to keep Luna in her chair. But now the food in the freezer was gone. She needed to start buying more than milk and cereal and chips and Kool-Aid, plus there was the letter she'd received from her mother just the day before, pages and pages of everything she forgot to tell her (
Luna breaks out in hives when she eats blueberries! The dollar store on Rollins sells produce on Wednesdays!
), followed by a postscript:
The address is on the envelope, just in case you can.
Send money, she meant, though she didn't even have the decency to ask outright. Letty wanted to ignore her letter out of spite, but she couldn't bear the thought of her parents walking through that big, empty house hungry, and so she'd already started dividing her tips in her apron pocket. “I can't buy you another one,” she said to Luna, turning her daughter toward the end of the bar. “Color the backgrounds?”

“I already did.”

“Add patterns? Hearts? Stars? Tear out all the pages and make paper airplanes?” Luna shook her head: no, no, no, no. “Well, figure it out, then. You have two more hours.”

She led Luna across the rubber mat toward the door, but before they were halfway there two women entered Flannigan's, wheeling suitcases. She pushed Luna down, so the women couldn't see her behind the bar.

“Hey, there,” Letty said casually, one hand on top of Luna's wriggling head, the other reaching for bar napkins. “Have a seat anywhere you'd like.”

Go,
she mouthed to her daughter as the women hung long overcoats over the backs of two stools, but Luna stuck out her lip and wouldn't budge. There was nothing to do but drag her out. Better her customers saw than her manager, who had promised he'd fire her the first time he saw Luna getting in her way. Letty grabbed her daughter underneath the armpits and carried her protesting into the hall. The chair where she'd spent most of the past month was smeared in dried glitter glue and marker. Letty dropped her into it.

“You can't tell me this entire thing is full,” she said, picking up the book. She'd bought it only that morning. Flipping through, she found two pages Luna had missed in the middle. “See? Here. Color.”

Spinning around, she jogged back to her place.

“Can I get you ladies something to drink?”

The women were in their sixties, well groomed, one with a short gray bob and no makeup, the other with dyed blond hair and an oversize orange purse, which she placed on the bar beside her. They asked for two Cokes without taking their eyes off Luna. She had flipped over onto her back, twig legs sticking straight up the back of the chair, her hair flowing off the cushion and all the way down to the floor. With one hand she held the book in the air, and with the other she scribbled pink marker onto the page.

“She's beautiful,” said the blonde.

“Thanks.” Filling two glasses, Letty set them on the napkins. “Eating lunch today?”

They nodded. She turned to get the menus, and when she spun back around Luna stood in the doorway, holding up the colored pages.

“Sit down, please,” Letty said, in her best imitation of a patient mother. “I'll be right there.” And then, to the women: “Sorry about that. Babysitter canceled. Anything look good to you?”

The woman with the gray bob had taken a sip of her drink and puckered her lips, forcing herself to swallow. “I don't think this is Coke.”

“No?” Letty picked up the glass and smelled it. She was right; it wasn't Coke. For ten years nothing had changed at Flannigan's, and then the week she was gone, management had decided to put iced tea in the soda gun. She still hadn't gotten used to it. “You're right. Sorry about that.”

Taking a step closer, Luna shook the coloring book. The noise flapped through the empty restaurant.

“One minute,” she said to her daughter, her voice significantly less patient this time. “I'm sorry. Let me swap those out for you.”

Flinging the dishwasher open, she pulled out two tumblers and shoveled them through the ice bin in the way that was expressly forbidden. The glasses could break, rendering the ice unusable, but they didn't, and her manager didn't see. Double-checking the gun to make sure her finger was on the Coke, she filled both glasses and pushed them across the bar before dragging Luna back out into the hall.

“You
have
to stop doing that,” she whispered, her anger barely contained. “Sit down.” She picked up the book again, praying for more blank pages, something, anything, to keep her daughter occupied at least until the restaurant was empty again, and found what she was looking for: a section of the book had been glued together by some kind of butterscotch dribble from the candy the TSA officers were always handing Luna—eight or ten pages at least.

Merciful God,
she thought and almost laughed aloud, she sounded so much like her mother. She unstuck the pages and slammed the book down, victorious.

“Now
stay
.”

Luna didn't look enthusiastic but didn't protest; Letty ran back to the bar. The ladies hadn't touched their drinks.

“Coke?”

“Maybe.”

The blond woman pointed to lipstick marks on the glass. With sudden horror, Letty remembered: she hadn't yet run the dishwasher. She'd served them in dirty glasses. Biting back tears, she whisked the glasses away and dumped them into the sink.

“Maybe the Cokes just weren't meant to be,” she said, trying to smile. “What do you think? Something stronger? It's already midnight in London.”

They looked at each other, surprised. “How did you know we were going to London?”

She'd seen a pocket-size travel guide in the orange purse when the blond woman had reached inside to check her phone. But Letty didn't like to give away her secrets. She'd spent ten years trying to figure out where people were going or where they'd come from based on accents and dress and baggage and any other clues she could scavenge.

She gestured to their long coats. “It was either that, or you are the first tourists in history to believe the hype about summers in San Francisco.”

They laughed. “Sure. Give us something stronger. You choose.”

Letty made them Bloody Marys, counting slowly as she poured vodka into a shaker and then adding the rest of the ingredients, topping off the glasses with celery and green olives and umbrellas. The drinks were so full and the towers of celery and umbrellas so extravagant it took all her skill to carry them to the bar without spilling.

“Wow,” the gray bob said when Letty placed one in front of her. “Now, that's a drink.”

“On the house,” Letty said.

The women raised their glasses. The Bloody Marys were a little too brown—too much Worcestershire, probably—and just as she handed them over, Letty remembered she'd forgotten the salt.

But they were free.

Clinking their glasses, the women sipped, and then grimaced, but they did not complain.

Forty-five minutes later the women had finished lunch and sped off to their gate, tipping generously enough to almost cover the cost of the drinks Letty had bought them. She loaded the glasses into the dishwasher and turned it on, glancing up just in time to see Luna dart from her chair and disappear. Letty abandoned the wet rag on the counter and ran into the hall. Luna stood with her back pressed against the doorway, peeking around the corner as if preparing another surprise appearance behind the bar.

“Uh-uh. Not happening. Back in your chair.”

“But there's nothing to do,” Luna complained. “Why won't you buy me a new coloring book?”

Letty reached deep into her apron pocket and pulled out a pathetic collection of wrinkled dollar bills. “Because you can't eat a coloring book.”

“I'm not hungry.”

“You aren't hungry now, because you just had lunch.”

“I won't be hungry later,” she said, drawing an X across her heart with one finger. “I promise.”

“Oh, Luna.” Letty knew it was a lot to ask a six-year-old to sit in a chair for a six-hour shift, but what else could she do? Luna refused to stay home with Alex. Sara was teaching, and all Letty's restaurant friends were probably still asleep, not that she trusted any of them to watch Luna anyway. There was barely enough money to buy food; she could never afford to hire a babysitter. “Listen. We'll go to the dollar store this weekend and buy you more things to do. But right now you have to sit here. If you can't you're going to have to stay with Alex tomorrow, no matter how much you fight me.”

“No,” Luna said, crossing her arms and pushing herself into Letty's stomach. “No, no, no, no, no. You can't leave me.”

I'll never leave you,
Letty wanted to say, but she'd given up her right to ever say that again when she left them sleeping in their beds and drove to Mexico.

“Then sit down.”

“I won't.”

Luna started to cry. Letty held her tight, her grasp half comfort, half muffle, but Luna would not be quieted. She pulled her face away and took big, gasping breaths. Tears streamed down her face. Businessmen talking on cell phones crossed the hall to get as far away from them as possible, while heavily burdened mothers stopped their own complaining children to ask if they could help.

“She's fine,” Letty muttered, embarrassed by the scene they were making.

Hearing this, Luna pulled herself away and stomped over to her chair, climbing up onto the seat and then onto the back, balancing taller than the potted palm beside her.

“I am not fine!”
she screamed, a spectacle that caused the entire hallway to stop and stare.