Free The Potty Mouth at the Table by Laurie Notaro Page A

were turning to look at me, most of them ready to bolt in case I started to harass them for their passports, too.
    “I’m twelve!” the boy suddenly said.
    And true, technically it’s only two words, not very many, but it was a contraction and a number perfectly spoken in English without a trace of any foreign dialect or accent. Better spoken than if he had gone to any immersion school, I noticed. And undoubtedly, better than my iPhone Spanish. Plus, I thought, I don’t really know how big twelve-year-olds are, but certainly, they’re bigger than this. There has definitely been some malnutrition happening here or, at the very least, the lack of a daily vitamin on someone’s part.
    “Are you sure ?” I asked him, positive I was about to foil the script the luggage repair people had laid down to cover their trek into the terrain of child slavery.
    “ Yes, ” he said.
    Undeterred and still heartily suspicious of a young boy standing on a street corner in the middle of the day, I surged forth, determined to finish the mission I had embarked upon.
    “Why aren’t you in school?” I queried, positive that this curveball was about to break the scheme wide open.
    He shrugged. “I’m on spring break,” he replied, hisexpression of terror melting into one that consisted mainly of newfound annoyance.
    “ It’s Easter, ” he added, stretching his neck out in the way a prepubescent does when he considers an adult to be on the fat side of stupid.
    I nodded and looked down at the water bottle in my hand. Oh, what the hell. I was already here. “You want some water?” I said, stretching out my hand to pass him the water, as my other hand with the twenty tucked into my palm went slowly back into my pocket.
    “My mom just brought me some,” he said, holding up not a bottle but a Tupperware jug full of water.
    “So that’s their store,” I said, nodding over toward the strip mall. “Luggage repair.”
    “And shoe repair,” he added, pointing to the sign in front of me.
    “Wow,” I said, still nodding. “That’s great. I should get these reheeled, don’t you think? Probably. I don’t know. I shuffle a lot, I wear out the insides first. Do you know anything about that?”
    He looked me straight in the eye and shrugged.
    “Okay then, good-bye,” I said as I hurriedly walked away, for some reason not back toward my car but forward, so that I would have to go to the other side of the parking lot, cross it, and make a complete circle before I got to my car again.
    “ Hasta luego, ” he said as I walked through the gravel landscape of the bank on the corner, over several curbs, through the ATM drive-through, and over the hot, hot, hot asphalt parking lot.
    As I passed the glass door of the luggage repair shop, I was never, in my life, so glad that I hadn’t taken it upon myself to deliver a lecture about hiring undocumented children to work on hot street corners, as if our country were one big shoe factory instead of being so full of opportunity and promise.
    But I thought I knew one thing almost for sure. As soon as the tires of my car had screeched out of that parking lot, a sweaty twelve-year-old boy most likely threw a huge sign at his mother and said, “I’m not going out there again. It’s hot and a fat white lady just tried to buy me with twenty dollars and a bottle of smartwater! I want a real vacation!”
    On the bright side, I’m just glad I was never in a position to have an illegal alien in my car, because I know I would have gotten pulled over for driving erratically while I tried to fairly position the air vents toward each of us, despite the fact that I was probably sweating more, and consequentially would have been arrested for human trafficking. That, and I was relieved that I didn’t have to pay for another person at lunch.
    I do know, however, that several months later, after ordering a burrito at a drive-through at 11:30 p.m. on a Thursday and pulling out my money to pay for it at the