Dolly

The queen of the truck stop diner

Hi everyone. I was in the middle of finishing a different story yesterday when we found out our dog, Farrow, needed emergency surgery today. That put an end to that piece so I hauled out this one. It’s an excerpt from a book I wrote awhile ago. I’m sure we’ll hear some good news soon about Farrow and I’ll be back on track hammering out something new for next week! In the meantime, thanks for your patience and I hope you enjoy this slice!~Pat

After the wedding, after the honeymoon, after packing up a small U-Haul with everything I owned, after settling in to an attic apartment in the tiny farm town where my husband was a reporter for the county newspaper, after weeks of applying for jobs at the nearby university and local social services, a large truck stop restaurant off Interstate 80 hired me to work the morning shift. Dolly, the manager, thought I’d be good for the main dining room. A week later when it became apparent that I kept forgetting rules such as the number of croutons to scatter on a salad, she moved me to the counters up front. Dolly was close to six feet tall with lacquered black hair piled up in a fancy French twist, with a luminous complexion, and Elizabeth Taylor violet-color eyes. Her lush body pressed into a tight brilliantly white starched uniform and each day she pinned a silk flower of varying colors on her label. If it wasn’t for her thick black sneakers she could have been taken as high-class beautician.

Dolly could not understand why I preferred working the counter. I would not receive any tips from the old women who sat through the morning over one cup of coffee, marking the time they were away from their empty homes, husbands passed and children gone off to cities, leaving them with nothing more than, perhaps, the family’s cantankerous cat or demented dog. The long-haul truckers who came off their routes for a quick bite folded dollar bills under their empty plates. They appreciated the food, the prompt service, the opportunity to call me honey and doll and general good-naturness about their harrassement.

By the end of my first week behind the counter we were all fixtures in each other’s lives. They greeted me with genuine warmth and I remembered their names and favorite dishes. Our casual back and forth over vaguely comforting food stuck with us all as moments of pleasure while we skidded through the rest of our day.

Dolly caught me as soon as I punched in.

“What’s that?” she said looking down at my legs.

Together we contemplated the fine mist of mud across my mandatory nude-color stockings. It wasn’t that I didn’t know the traffic along the one road out of town had sprayed rain-dampened gravel across me. I just hoped no one would notice.

“It was on my way to work.”

“And you didn’t think to clean yourself up?”

Dolly’s flat, mid-western tone could fill the narrow kitchen even when she meant to whisper, as I imagined she was trying to do now. I concentrated on the silky purple flower corsage pinned to her impressive chest, her fresh fuchsia lipstick, her overpowering scent of Jean Naté.

“I’m going now.”

She glanced at the clock on the time punch machine. “I’m docking you fifteen minutes.”

“What?”

“It’ll take you a good fifteen minutes to get that off before you’re decent to work.”

The money she’d take wouldn’t add up to much but it would be enough to ramp up the daily futility. “You know what, Dolly?”

She looked up from my muddy stockings to my sullen gaze .“What?”

I wanted to tell her how really grungy I felt even without the mud. I wanted her to see that I needed the ninety-two dollars I was averaging–that was wages and tips–for close to a fifty-hour week. I wanted to confess to her that I was coming to agree with her that I was hopeless. I wanted her to realize that I went home every day and stood in the shower, letting the water pound from me the greasy odor of her truck stop. I wanted her to know that I thought she was right–I was a mess, in more ways than one, and struggling mightily not to be.

At the very least, and once newly married herself, Dolly should want to know how much I was already beginning to stumble as a wife, hating how depended I felt upon my husband for almost everything in this cold little town.

In the end, though, I didn’t say anything because I figured Dolly pretty much understood everything about me without caring at all.

But we needed to finish this scene and send the day on its way. So I told her the clearest thought bobbing through my muddy brain: “That color of lipstick really makes your lips look gorgeous.”

Her expression quickly turned to puzzlement, then something close to revulsion, then pure dismissal, and I slunk off to wash my legs.

Did you have a Dolly in your life? Tell me all about her!