Free No Heroes by Chris Offutt Page B

bread.
    â€œAre things all right with you,” I said.
    â€œGreat.”
    â€œAnd Dad?”
    â€œGreat.”
    â€œHow about the house?” I said. “The new roof?”
    â€œGreat. I’m so glad you’re here. This is the busiest time of the busiest restaurant in Morehead.”
    â€œGreat,” I said.
    There were perhaps twenty tables in the room, four of which were empty. My mother kept glancing around to see who saw us together. Other people were likewise engaged, which slowed the pace of eating. Many people were there merely to be seen—businesspeople communicating liaisons to the world, couples showing everyone that their marital problems were repaired, bosses eating with employees to display good relations. No one lunched alone at the Dixie Grill.
    A boy I’d grown up with came by the table to say hello. He was balding now and I remembered when a VISTA worker took him to a dentist. The next day he brought a toothbrush to school. Since he’d never seen one, he figured none of us had either. I inquired about his six brothers and four sisters. He worked at Guardian, the only industry around, a manufacturer of ball bearings. They tried to unionize but failed. He still lived in Haldeman, but was thinking of moving.
    â€œThey built that new school,” he said, “but it ain’t the same,” he said. “They combined Haldeman and Elliotville, and make those babies ride a bus twelve miles. Parents don’t go to PTA meetings because it’s too far away.”
    â€œDon’t they use the school for anything?”
    â€œTo vote in. They closed the voting house. But they’re going to open it again because so many people quit voting when they changed it.”
    â€œWhy’d they close the voting house?”
    â€œNo bathroom,” he said. “The state says you got to have a bathroom. Shoot, there’s some folks would vote just to use the bathroom.”
    I laughed and he returned to his table. My mother smiled brightly to a person across the room.
    â€œYou know, Chris,” my mother said. “I liked it better when you lived in Albuquerque.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI could visit.”
    I continued to nod, my head slowly moving like a marionette in the wind. To reach the rest room I had to step into a narrow hall at the rear of the restaurant. The men’s room was occupied. I glanced around and quickly went into the women’s room, where I splashed cold water on my face and wrists. As I emerged, an older woman was slowly coming through the door. She stared at me, utterly aghast to find a man in the ladies’ room. She was a retired high school teacher and she withered me with a look, shaking her head as if to say, “Christopher, you may have gone off and come back, but you have not grown up one bit.”
    I paid the bill and said hello to my freshman composition teacher from college. I nodded to a man I’d once bought marijuana from. I opened the door for my high school typing teacher, a woman I held in high esteem.
    I walked my mother back to her job at a new building that had formerly housed a Laundromat. She smiled at the door, resuming her role as a sixty-five-year-old employee in an olive skirt, the ubiquitous green of a redhead. Her hair was a different color now, but her taste in clothes was the same. She thanked me for lunch, straightened her skirt, lifted her chin, and gave me the smile of a receptionist seeing a person out. She nodded once and turned away. I watched the door close after her.
    I realized that I knew very little about my mother’s life, and that lunch had offered no insight. I didn’t even know if she was happy. I hoped that my coming home would allow her to open herself to me. She never talked of her childhood and had told me nothing of her mother. I don’t even know my grandmother’s name. She died young.
    When I was a child, some wild boys drove a hot rod along the dirt