Near Love Stories
by J. B. Hogan

Still Life: Girl on Snowy Night

The boy emptied the hot silverware from the big dishwasher tray into tall, fluted metal cups, jamming each cup until it was completely full. He set the cups of silverware next to several stacks of dishes off to one side of his cleaning area then rinsed out the two deep tubs where he had already done the odious chore of cleaning the pots and pans. Watching the last of the soapy water swirl down the drain of the rusty tubs, the boy sighed and did his best to dry his hands on a mostly wet towel.

The boy, now fourteen, had been washing dishes since he was twelve. On his twelfth birthday his mother marched him uptown to the social security office where he was issued his very own number and card. His first job was at the bus station. For twenty-five cents an hour he cleaned the glasses, dishes and smaller pans for the travelers who strayed through town on their way to bigger, unknown places. The boy hated the restaurant boss, disliked the travelers, and loathed the hot humid job of dishwasher. But it was his job, his only skill.

After the bus station, he worked for his mother at thirty-five cents an hour in a restaurant she ran herself down on Dickson Street near the university. When the restaurant didn't go, he and his mother both went to work for Garland's Drive-In, a hot college spot a block and half back up Dickson. Here the boy made fifty cents an hour. His standard hours were four to midnight on Friday and Saturday nights, four to eight on Sunday. Twenty hours a week, netting him ten dollars.

Both at his mother's restaurant and at Garland's the boy, to his considerable surprise, was the occasional object of female desire - which confused, terrorized, and excited him. One of his mother's waitresses, a sweet-faced gentle girl with a lovely if somewhat stolid figure, one slow evening had impulsively grabbed the boy and hugged him. In shock and dismay, the boy pulled away and ran out the back of the restaurant to the safety of the alley behind it. He didn't know why he had run, the girl had been the object of many of his endless sexual fantasies; but he had, and he was so embarrassed he hardly ever spoke to or even looked at the girl again while the restaurant was open. It was a humiliating experience.

But he repeated it at Garland's, even worse. At Garland's, a young carhop, recently divorced and maybe all of twenty-four years old, took a liking to the boy. Like the younger girl had at his mother's restaurant, the carhop finally cornered the boy; caught him off guard down in the basement of Garland's, where the beer, meat, and vegetable coolers and the big trash barrels were. The woman grabbed the boy and hugged him, giving him a little kiss. Like before the boy panicked, ran away, ran upstairs to the safety of his dishwashing tubs. And like before he felt like an absolute fool. He was such a coward with women. He didn't know what to do with, or about, them.

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Sometimes on Sunday nights, when he got off at a reasonable hour, the boy liked to clear his head from the accumulated hubbub of Garland's by taking a short walk in the evening air up through the university and then loop back around to go home, back to the small house where he and his mother lived just a couple of short blocks behind Garland's.