Читать книгу Flushboy - Stephen Graham Jones - Страница 20

Because we’re a facility that serves the public, the rule is that we have to have a public restroom. In single-toilet cases like ours, there has to be a unisex sign, a lockable door, a sink with eventually hot water and soap, and a last-serviced sheet at eye level with room for employees to initial.

Never mind that access to a public restroom takes money from our register.

My dad’s solution is to arrange an obstacle course of OUT-OF-SERVICE and PISO-MOJADO signs and cones and tape all along the narrow hall, so that it’s just bad luck that whatever wily customer’s made it back this far chose now to try to use our restroom, instead of later, when it would surely have been available, or earlier, when nobody was even using it.

Just for appearances, though, we have to let every twentieth or thirtieth customer through. “At our discretion,” of course, with eye contact all around, meaning it had better not be our friends’ names that keep showing up in the guestbook, understand?

And if the freeloading customer’s name happens to be I.P. Freely or Ivana Tinkle or P. Rivers or Peter Pantz or any fake-o Indian name with ‘Yellow Snow’ in it, then it’s our asses.

My mother’s name is Gwendolyn.

It’s not what she writes in the book.

Because she hasn’t said anything yet, I don’t know what to do.

“It’s not really….out of order,” I tell her, about the restroom.

She shakes her head no, not that, and looks out to the drive-through. A tumbleweed could blow across it at any time. “Has your father called?” she asks, watching me too close.

“A bit ago, yeah.”

“And?”

“And nothing. Just being his stupid self.”

This makes her laugh. It’s not a good laugh.

Partway through it, a tear slips down her face.