The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane by Polly Horvath

question and continuing to calmly cut her meat into teeny, tiny bits.
    â€œHer what? Oh yes. Those things. Well, I didn’t ask for one.”
    â€œReferences?” asked Jocelyn.
    â€œNo, of course not. Well, I mean she looks okay, doesn’t she? Not like an ax murderer or anything. And, after all, if someone wants to make up a résumé and references, that’s easy enough to do.”
    â€œYes, but you can phone the references to check them out,” said Jocelyn. “That’s what they’re there for. You can find out if someone is really too old to be working.”
    I felt cornered and bored. It was all much ado about nothing if you asked me. “Yes, well, I suppose you can. But there’s nothing to stop people from having their friends pretend to be phony references. Face it, Jocelyn, my dear, if someone in your future employ wants to hoodwink you, well, they can. So you may as well just dispose of the whole nonsense.”
    â€œOr go with your gut,” Meline said, shoving rolls into her mouth. She had apparently given up on dinner and made rolls the main course.
    â€œExactly,” I said, looking at Meline gratefully. “Go with your gut. My gut says she looks perfectly okay.” I pulled my glasses down to the tip of my nose and glanced over them in the direction of the kitchen where Mrs. Mendelbaum was putting the finishing touches on a honey cake. “She looks completely capable of doing whatever a younger cook could do. Heavy lifting and such.”
    â€œHeavy lifting?” Meline asked, laughing and spraying crumbs everywhere. Jocelyn looked politely away.
    â€œYes, in the kitchen. Heaving pots of pasta water or heavy roasts and turkeys about,” I said imperturbably, returning to my meal. Girls were really very silly. Anyone could see the woman could cook and that’s what I hired her for, so what was all this talk of résumés and references? I wasn’t hiring for NASA, after all. And how the heck was I supposed to know if someone was too old to work unless they told me so? I could rarely remember how old I myself was. The only important thing about people was their ideas, and the tragedy was that they seldom had any. “I don’t even know how old you are,” I said, continuing aloud my train of thought.
    â€œI’m sixteen,” said Jocelyn.
    â€œI’m fifteen. Well, almost sixteen. Nearer to sixteen than fifteen,” Meline added. She took one foot out from under her and sat on the other one.
    â€œReally,” said Jocelyn, “it is extraordinary how you always sit with one leg under you. Like some kind of stork. Are you hatching your feet?” Jocelyn placed her knife and fork together on a diagonal in the center of her plate and sat back, looking as if she were done with dinner and us as well. Meline and I looked at her in amazement. It was not like her to be so rude. Then Meline peered down at her foot as if expecting a baby bird to indeed come crawling out of it. She put both feet on the floor and seemed disturbed.
    I spied Meline’s plate with all its leftovers and nearly untouched brisket and said, “Aren’t you hungry?”
    â€œI had a lot of chocolate,” she said.
    â€œAh,” I replied happily. I was quite pleased that my solution had worked. When I had noticed the hot dog dinners were not being greeted with enthusiasm I tried to think what I could use to tempt the girls’ apparently capricious appetites and remembered that a woman I had met at a conference had told me that women were crazy for chocolate. That they would do anything for the stuff. I remember standing back and looking at her searchingly, speculating on just how crazy she was. Then I promptly forgot the whole business, but with two hungry but appetiteless nieces this conversation had come back to me. What was the name of that chocolate this woman had spoken so lovingly of, oh yes, Godiva. I got on the Internet