Free Paper Doll by Robert B. Parker

undulated from the open windows.
    I went in. The building was divided front to back into two rooms. One of the rooms contained two pool tables and a jukebox. There were three or four exercise riders, in tee shirts and jeans, shooting pool and drinking Coca-Cola, and listening to Waylon Jennings. On my side of the archway, the dining area was filled with long plastic laminate tables. Across the back was the kitchen. A well-dressed man and woman were eating ham and eggs, grits, and toast at one of the tables. Three ample women in large hats and frilly dresses were at the table next to theirs. I walked back to the kitchen where two women were cooking. One of them was black and gray-haired and overweight. The other was white and gray-haired and overweight. Both had sweat beaded on their foreheads. The white woman wore blue jeans more commodious than Delaware. The black woman had on a flowered dress. Both wore aprons. Without looking up from the grill, where she was scrambling some eggs, the black woman said, “Whatchu want?”
    I ordered grits, toast, and coffee.
    “That it?” she said.
    “That’s all I dare,” I said. “The smell is already clogging my arteries.”
    Still without looking up, she tossed her head toward the formica tables. The white woman placed a large white china mug on the counter in front of me and nodded at the coffee in its warming pot.
    “Have a seat,” the black woman said. “We’ll bring it.”
    I poured myself coffee, added cream and sugar, and took it with me to an empty seat. The white woman came around the counter with a startling number of plates and put them down in front of the ample women. I could see how they got ample.
    I sipped some coffee. It was too hot. I swallowed the small sip with difficulty and blew on the cup for a while. Around the room there were pictures pasted up on the cinder-block wall, most of them horse racing pictures, jockeys and owners in winning circles with horses. The horses were always the least excited. They were old pictures, black-and-white blowups that had faded, the corners bent and torn from being repeatedly Scotch-taped to the uncooperative cinder block. The only thing recent was a big calendar for the current year, decorated with pictures of dogs playing poker. There was a picture, not recent, of Olivia Nelson, a cheap head shot in color that looked like the kind of school picture they take every year and send home in a cardboard frame and the parents buy it and put it on the mantel. I got up and went to the wall and looked more closely. Clearly it was Olivia Nelson. She looked like her yearbook picture, and she looked not too different from the picture of her at forty-two that I’d seen in her living room on Beacon Hill. My coffee had cooled a little and I drank some while I looked at her picture. The white woman came out of the kitchen and lumbered toward me with breakfast.
    “Where you sitting?” she said.
    I nodded at the table and she went ahead of me and set the tray down.
    “Excuse me,” I said. “May I ask you why you have a picture of Olivia Nelson on the wall.”
    The woman’s gray hair was badly done up and had unraveled over her forehead like a frayed sock. She tightened her chin and her lower lip pushed out a little.
    “Got no pictures of Olivia Nelson.”
    “Then who is this young woman?” I said, pointing to the girl in the school photo.
    Her jaw got tighter and her lower lip came out a little further.
    “That’s Cheryl Anne Rankin,” the woman said.
    “She looks remarkably like Olivia Nelson, you sure it’s not?”
    “Guess I ought to know my own daughter,” she said. Her voice was barely audible and she spoke straight down as if she were talking to her feet.
    “Your daughter? Cheryl Anne Rankin, who looks just like Olivia Nelson, is your daughter?”
    “She don’t look like Olivia Nelson,” the woman said to her feet.
    I nodded and smiled engagingly. It was hard to be charming to someone who was staring at the