Working the Window and Thinking about the Weekend
by Jessica Evans
This is the second Rally’s Heather has worked at. She walks to the fast food joint while Nate’s at school. The first Rally’s was all soft around the edges, deep in the suburbs. Far out where every street had thematically joined names, where dual-parent families shuffled kids from lessons to practices, stopping for fries along the way. That one was hushed voices and kind orders from Botox-moms and tired au pairs. Friendly workers who gathered together after close to share lines and buy each other booze on pay-day Fridays because it was the thing to do. Heather went along too, not because she cared about the coke or the booze but because she missed the feeling of everyone getting jumbled up together.
This Rally’s has two drive up windows like all of them but only one speaker works. The squat building is nestled against the railroad tracks in Pleasant Ridge. It’s as loud as the last one was soft, shouting employees who would never think of sharing anything, not even a pen.
Nate went back to school after he got off house arrest. He’s graduating in May, thinking about going to C State or Europe. He can’t decide which. Heather’s planning on figuring out what she wants to do once he decides. His mama lets Heather stay in their big house for free, but it’s also possible Janet doesn’t even know she’s there. Janet’s been on the Klonapin hard since her oldest daughter left home.
This week, Heather is working the lunch rush, which is better than dinner. Grease hangs differently in the air when the sun goes down. Lunch is exhausted factory workers with tired eyes and swollen hands, but dinner is angry moms tired of being invisible. On her first day, her manager Kodi told Heather to use a fake nametag when she works the window. Kodi is forty-something and sad, the kind of man who probably had dreams of becoming a ninja or slaying dragons when he was a kid. Now the closest he gets is with video games and anime porn. But Kodi sounded like he knew what he was talking about, so when Heather works the window, her name isn’t Heather anymore; it’s Maureen.
She’s working the window and thinking about the weekend when a faded green truck squeaks to a stop. It’s twelve-thirty in the afternoon and Heather/Maureen still has six hours left on this shift. Inside the truck are two white dudes with angry red sores covering their faces. The driver whistles at her like she’s a dog, tells her Maureen is a pretty name and she’d be pretty too if she smiled more. Heather/Maureen inhales sharply because this is how it always starts. The line-cook hands her a large shake and a bag of fries.
“Did you hear what I said?” the driver asks. “I said you should smile more.”
Inside the truck, the driver grips the steering wheel like it’s going to fly away. A smile slithers across the cavern that is his mouth and Heather thinks of death. His buddy nudges him, sharp elbow to thin ribs. Heather/Maureen tries to hand over the shake but the driver reaches down to the waistband of his jeans, and she’s sure they’re going to be robbed. She’s been trained for that – panic button under the windowsill, duck and cover in the case of fire. The driver maintains eye contact with Heather/Maureen, his pupils myopic, his skin pallid.
The passenger starts a low growl chuckle, wet and cancerous. His buddy's hand takes its time getting to the waistband of his Walmart jeans. If she let herself think about it, Heather probably knows what the guy is reaching for. But she stands there stock-still and stupid because she’s so tired of having to think. And just when she’s sure nothing is going to come from this meth head reaching his hand down his pants, the driver pulls out his penis, half flaccid, all sad. His buddy’s laugh is throaty and alarming, a siren call. Heather calls for Kodi.
"Some dude did it again,” she says.
Kodi sighs because there’s nothing he can do and they both know it. Calling the cops just means filling out a report, it means two of the workers will have to hide out in the shed or leave early and miss out on their pay. It means too much of the law sniffing around when they don’t need to be there anyway and it’s not like the guys will ever be caught. Heather knows it and so does Kodi. Her boss’s voice is flat when he tells her to shake it off, no pun intended.
Heather unclips her fake name tag and decides on the spot that she’s never going to be Maureen again, never going to lean out toward trucks and SUVs handing over patties and fries. She carefully unclips her headset, wipes it off, hangs it on the counter. Grabs her bag, nods to Kodi, and then walks out.
At home, Nate tells her she doesn’t need to work, that the job is stupid anyway. His new connect in Kentucky is keeping him flush, but Heather doesn’t know what else to do with her day. Last week, an old teacher called her on Nate’s phone and said Heather needed to make a change.
“Think about it,” her old teacher said before hanging up. “Imagine a life of just this. Don’t you want something more?”
The sun is setting against the railroad tracks, all creosote and loss. Heather steps over one of the rails, wishes it were the third rail of a subway, wishes there was a train, wishes she could get far away from here.
Jessica Evans is the author of LEARN TO FIND (2014), HIPPIE MAFIA (2016), and PHANTOM GRIEFS AND KITCHEN MAGIC (forthcoming, 2021). Evans earned her MFA from Spalding where her fiction work focused on the agency of female and female-identifying characters. Her work can be found in LEON Literary Review, The Louisville Review, Louisiana Review, Outlook Springs, and elsewhere. She is the EIC of Twin Pies Literary. Hang out with her on Twitter @jesssica__evans