Free Panorama City by Antoine Wilson Page A

father had left, she’d had to be both mother and father to them, which reminded me of your grandfather, who had been both father and mother to me, which I mentioned to Melissa, which she said she could relate to. Then she informed me that in addition to my duties bussing the trays and washing the trays and returning the trays to the counter, I would have an additional duty, which was taking the trash out. This was the nature of being the floater, new duties were always being added.
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    Melissa showed me the special dumpster corral in the parking lot, the dumpsters were surrounded on three sides by cinder block, and by chain link in the front and on top, you had to undo a padlock to get the chain link open so you could throw trash bags in there, but people still tried to throw their trash into the dumpster and so there would always be trash piled up on top of the corral’s chain-link roof, and since I was the tallest one, Melissa’s reasoning, I was now in charge of removing trash from above the dumpsters and relocating it to inside the dumpsters, which didn’t make much sense to me, I mean it didn’t make much sense why we had a chain-link roof on the corral if all of the garbage was just going to end up in the dumpster anyway, why not leave it open, why not give everyone access to the dumpster so I wouldn’t have to move their garbage? Melissa said damned if I know, her words, ask Roger.
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    I had been thinking about the kid with the skateboard, and how it would have been great if I’d had fries and a Coke with me and just handed them over when he asked for them, maybe I could have told him how much it cost, or asked if he wanted anything else, I don’t know. I had been replaying the scene in my head, and so after my shift I brought french fries and a Coke to the bus stop, but the kid with the skateboard wasn’t there, it was just a bunch of other people. I wasn’t hungry or thirsty myself, so I asked everyone at the bus stop if they wanted the fries and Coke, they were fresh, they were straight from the french fry hopper, the Coke was straight from the fountain, I had brought them for someone but he was not there, would anyone like them? No one said anything, some people pretended like I wasn’t even talking, but then again many of my fellow passengers didn’t know English, and many of those who did know English couldn’t seem to string together words in a way that made sense. I held up the bag, I held it in the air and made a gesture as if to say would anyone like this. Finally a very old woman, I had barely even noticed her sitting there, a very old woman raised her hand at me just for a moment and I gave her the bag, I said, Enjoy, compliments of, and then I said the name of the fast-food place. Now people smiled, there had been tension in the air, I hadn’t meant to cause tension, but people didn’t know what I was going to do with the bag, and now people smiled at me, and at the old woman, who opened the bag and ate the fries and drank the Coke, she seemed happy to have it. This freed me up to pull out my binoculars and let everyone know exactly how far away the bus was, which kept me occupied until it was time to board. Only once I was on the bus, only once I had taken my seat in the front row, only after I had introduced myself to the driver, whose name was Clarence, only once I was comfortably seated did I notice that the old woman on the bus bench hadn’t boarded, she remained there, sitting on the bench, she had finished her fries and Coke, she had spread the empty fast-food place bag across her lap, she was engaged in very carefully folding it up, pressing down hard on the creases, I wondered what she was going to do with it, but then the bus pulled away from the curb and she was gone, or we were, I should say.
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    After Roger returned from his trip to the lake I suggested we should remove the chain-link roof from the dumpster corral, we