Free The Talk-Funny Girl by Roland Merullo

Laundromat and the empty shell where Video Nation had been, and then past another storefront that had been unoccupied for as long as I could remember, the FOR LEASE sign in the window strung with cobwebs and missing a letter or two. All that way I felt as though I was holding a thought in my hands—no boots, no boots—and fingering the edges of it.
    When I came near to the ruined church, I saw that Mr. Ivers had pulled his truck right up onto the weedy lawn and was throwing stones and pieces of concrete into the bed. The noises echoed down thesidewalk like gunshots in the woods. I took off my hat and squeezed it into my pocket because I thought it made me look young. I had a sudden urge to turn around and run, but my aunt had given me two dollars and two quarters to hold in my pocket for luck, and warned me there would be a feeling of nervousness before I actually got started. First-day-on-the-job jitters, she called it. She knew it well, she said, from all the different nursing jobs she’d had in the years when she was moving around. It was natural, like a first day at school, or a first date. (I didn’t tell her I had never been on a date; boys had asked me, three or four different times—a movie, school dances—but I said no without even bothering to check with my parents.) Aunt Elaine had made oatmeal, and given me the money, and said my mother and father would be home at the end of the day, and that they’d be proud of me for finding the job, she was sure.
    “You showed up!” Mr. Ivers said, almost the way a happy boy would say it. He looked at me almost the way a boy would look, too. Then he seemed to remember he was the boss, and a man, and he stood up straight, facing me, and immediately glanced down at my feet. “Are your boots in that big backpack?”
    I couldn’t seem to move my eyes away from him. I could see again how strong he was, just by the width of his shoulders and the thickness of his neck. He was wearing work boots and jeans and an old sweatshirt and he had brown leather work gloves on his hands. Seeing him there—throwing stones into his black truck, with no one bothering him, no police telling him to get off the lawn and stop stealing church property—made me understand that what he told me must have been true. He really had bought the church and really would be working there.
    “I can’t to have any money for boots now but I can at tomorrow maybe or another time.”
    He watched for a few seconds. “All right. Just don’t drop anything on your toes or you’ll be walking around in a cast for a month.”
    “I’m here for to work now.”
    “I’m glad. What do you like to be called?”
    “My father and my mother are calling me on Majie.”
    “May-gee? Do you like that?”
    I shook my head.
    “Marjorie then?”
    I wasn’t sure what to say. I didn’t like my name at all, I’d never liked it. “What do you want for you?” I asked him.
    “My first name is Arturo. My father’s name was Arthur and they named me after a writer they knew. But I don’t like it. As a boy when I played sports I had some friends who called me Sands. My middle name is Sanderson. You call me Sands, okay? And I’ll call you, what? Marge?”
    “Laney,” I said. It was a name I sometimes called myself in secret. “My second other name is for Elaine, like my aunt is.”
    “Good. Laney. There’s a pair of gloves for you in the cab, probably a little big, but I guessed.”
    “I have hands and feet that go big. The boys put their hands against of mine and they say it, on school.”
    “I bet they do.” He started to say something else and then stopped.
    When I put the gloves on—they almost fit—and walked around to the back of the pickup and stood near him, I felt as though the nervousness in me was being spoken to silently by a nervousness in him. It wasn’t what I usually felt around adults. In fact, I never remembered feeling it. When he talked to me, he pushed the thick glasses back up against his