The Never-Open Desert Diner by James Anderson Page B

her if anyone had ever tried to locate the young woman.
    “No,” she said, in a hurry to end the conversation. “Or if they did, I didn’t know about it. No one kept real records of volunteers on the reservation in those days. Every young person and their bleeding-heart brother wanted to help the noble savages.”
    “So, you don’t really know if I’m Indian or not?”
    “There are no Indians anymore, Mr. Jones. Just Native Americans. You had a head of thick coarse black hair and black eyes and reddish skin. You were a big newborn. Over thirteen pounds as I recall. If your mother gave birth to you alone, as I suspect she did, she had a tough go of it. That’s all I can tell you.”
    She hung up without saying good-bye or wishing me luck.
    That was all I ever knew. Maybe my father was Indian and maybe my mother was Jewish, which I guessed meant white. Over the years my hair turned dark brown, though it was still coarse and thick, and my skin darkened into a perpetual tan. I grew to six foot three, an unnatural height for either Native American or Jew. To my way of thinking, the only thing left that made me an Indian, or Native American, was that red blanket, and it was, if only in that way, just an old red blanket to me. After that conversation with the retired nurse’s aide, I just let it all alone.
    Ginny was looking at me through one sleepy eye. “Sorry, Ben. Don’t be mad at me, please?”
    I told her I wasn’t mad, but she couldn’t stay with me. No discussion. I winked at her, and added, “But that kid of yours is going to be mad. Don’t be surprised if he, or she, bears a strong resemblance to a Reese’s peanut butter cup.”
    She opened both eyes and stretched. “What time is it?”
    I told her it was about eight. “When do you have to be at work?”
    She yawned and closed her eyes. “Pretty soon. Did you have a chance to talk to anyone about a second job for me?”
    Before I could answer she was snoring again.
    When she left for work I was asleep, my head on a pillow of papers strewn over the dining table. It was three o’clock in the morning and I was hungry enough to wish I’d kept some of the Lacey brothers’ jalapeño corn bread birthday cake. Out of habit I opened the refrigerator door again, not expecting anything to be different. But it was. The food fairy had come after all, the pregnant teenage food fairy. While I had slept Ginny must have made a run to a grocery store. I had bread and eggs and four new cubes of butter. On the clean counter was a new jar of peanut butter and a bag of ground coffee. The saltine crumbs were nowhere to be seen, the knife was washed and put away, the sink scoured, and the empty jar of peanut butter thrown in the trash.
    I turned and looked at the empty recliner. “I don’t care,” I said. “You can’t stay here.” Then I noticed the red blanket was gone. I found it in the bedroom, folded in thirds across the end of my bed. Within a minute I was also folded across the bed, still dressed and still hungry, but filled with the pleasant anticipation of a hot breakfast when I woke up, which I hoped wouldn’t be for a long time. The appointment with the truck shop wasn’t until ten a.m.

A lmost all of Thursday was eaten up in the lounge of the shop as the mechanic divided his time between my maintenance job and the drop-ins with quick-fix emergencies. I drank coffee and thumbed through years’-old issues of
Vanity Fair, Guns & Ammo, Esquire, Easyriders,
and
People
. They all covered topics of great interest to someone else who had way more money than I ever would. Usually I spent my time stewing over my finances, which is mostly what I thought about all day Friday as I made deliveries along 117.
    I left the duplex only twice during the weekend; once on Saturday to get a new pencil and once on Sunday to buy a cheap digital calculator. The first pencil hadn’t been working for me. I did pretty well in my math classes in high school, but the figures that