Taft by Ann Patchett

of girl who would have him for a boyfriend. None of my business. It wasn't until I was all the way down near their edge of the bar that I saw how much they favored, the shape of their faces, their eyes. Fay looked up and gave me a pretty smile. "This is my brother," she said, and put her hand on his arm. "This is Carl."
    I introduced myself and shook his hand, which was so cold to the touch that it gave me a start.
    "Cold outside?" I said.
    He looked a little embarrassed and made his hands into a cup, then blew inside. "Getting that way."
    "Get your brother a cup of coffee," I said to Fay, but she didn't go anywhere. She just stared at me. I was beginning to see a pattern here. She just stared until you came up with the answer she was looking for. "Unless you'd rather go on home. There's nobody around. Go on home if you want."
    "That would be okay?" she said.
    I told them to go on and she said how glad she was for the job and thanked me for being nice to her. "I hope I didn't mess up too much," she said.
    "You were fine."
    "I can come back tomorrow then?"
    She wasn't even sure she had a job. "Same time," I said.
    Carl didn't look as good once he let go of the chair, so they linked arms on their way to the door, like sweethearts. Whether he was older or younger than her, I couldn't be sure. Kids were ageless to me. She waited until they were just outside the double glass doors to take her hat out of her pocket and pull it down tight over her ears. It made me look away, though I don't know why.

I F F RANKLIN came home, I 'd take time off. I 'd be off for as long as he could stay, since the way I saw it I had about a year built up in overtime. Cyndi could run things okay. I could check in, unless Franklin and I decided to go over to the Ozarks to go fishing. Not that I knew anything about fishing, but I didn't see how it could be so hard. The time was going to come when I would be away from the bar, simple as that. I 'd been thinking about putting Wallace on more anyway, and Fay, it hadn't been a week and already she was getting things down. She was smart, that one, and all the customers liked her because she had a sweet way. Mr. Tipton, the dishwasher, called her Little House on the Prairie. "I want Little House on the Prairie to bring me my iced tea," he said to me. "She knows how to fix it. Not like that Cyndi. She always remembers how many sugars I like."
    Of course, hiring Fay turned out to be more like hiring Fay and Carl. He showed up every night towards the end of her shift to pick her up and take her home, but it was no accident that he always got there too early. Not that anyone minded him. He took a little table near the kitchen that nobody ever sat at and did his best to keep to himself. If anyone had the time, Carl was always happy to spend it with them, but he never kept you there forever. He liked to make comments on the weather or the size of the crowd. He was always polite. He drank coffee that he paid for, even when I told him he didn't have to. He liked to make himself useful. When Cyndi dropped a glass he was right there with the dustpan and broom without anyone having to ask, and one night, a Thursday when we got busy for no reason, he went back and washed dishes for a couple of hours. He was tickled with the money I gave him. "I'd do it for free," he said. "I take up space here all the time." I put ten dollars in his shirt pocket and he went right back into the kitchen to tell Rose, who I guess he'd made friends with while he was washing. He got on with everybody. That's the kind of kid he was, no enemies. He liked to talk to me about music, not that I ever told him I played. He said that before Fay got the job, he'd never even heard of James Brown.
    "Back where I come from," he said to me, "all they sing about is Jesus. You'd be amazed at all the different ways there are to sing about Jesus."
    As far as the drugs were concerned, some nights Carl was messed up and some nights he wasn't. I could tell, having