Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver

Now you watch this now. Could I have a chocolate sundae?”
    Earl called to Doreen.
    She stopped in front of him and let out her breath. Then she turned and picked up a dish and the icecream dipper. She leaned over the freezer, reached down, and began to press the dipper into the ice cream. Earl looked at the man and winked as Doreen’s skirt traveled up her thighs. But the man’s eyes caught the eyes of the other waitress. And then the man put the newspaper under his arm and reached into his pocket.
    The other waitress came straight to Doreen. “Who is this character?” she said.
    “Who?” Doreen said and looked around with the ice-cream dish in her hand.
    “Him,” the other waitress said and nodded at Earl. “Who is this joker, anyway?”
    Earl put on his best smile. He held it. He held it until he felt his face pulling out of shape.
    But the other waitress just studied him, and Doreen began to shake her head slowly. The man had put some change beside his cup and stood up, but he too waited to hear the answer. They all stared at Earl.
    “He’s a salesman. He’s my husband,” Doreen said at last, shrugging. Then she put the unfinished chocolate sundae in front of him and went to total up his check.

What Do You Do in San Francisco?

    This has nothing to do with me. It’s about a young couple with three children who moved into a house on my route the first of last summer. I got to thinking about them again when I picked up last Sunday’s newspaper and found a picture of a young man who’d been arrested down in San Francisco for killing his wife and her boyfriend with a baseball bat. It wasn’t the same man, of course, though there was a likeness because of the beard. But the situation was close enough to get me thinking.
    Henry Robinson is the name. I’m a postman, a federal civil servant, and have been since 1947. I’ve lived in the West all my life, except for a three-year stint in the Army during the war. I’ve been divorced twenty years, have two children I haven’t seen in almost that long. I’m not a frivolous man, nor am I, in my opinion, a serious man. It’s my belief a man has to be a little of both these days. I believe, too, in the value of work— the harder the better. A man who isn’t working has got too much time on his hands, too much time to dwell on himself and his problems.
    I‘m convinced that was partly the trouble with the young man who lived here—his not working. But I’d lay that at her doorstep, too. The woman. She encouraged it.
    Beatniks, I guess you’d have called them if you’d seen them. The man wore a pointed brown beard on his chin and looked like he needed to sit down to a good dinner and a cigar afterward. The woman was attractive, with her long dark hair and her fair complexion, there’s no getting around that. But put me down for saying she wasn’t a good wife and mother. She was a painter. The young man, I don’t know what he did—probably something along the same line. Neither of them worked. But they paid their rent and got by somehow—at least for the summer.
    The first time I saw them it was around eleven, eleven-fifteen, a Saturday morning, I was about twothirds through my route when I turned onto their block and noticed a ‘56 Ford sedan pulled up in the yard with a big open U-Haul behind. There are only three houses on Pine, and theirs was the last house, the others being the Murchisons, who’d been in Arcata a little less than a year, and the Grants, who’d been here about two years. Murchison worked at Simpson Redwood, and Gene Grant was a cook on the morning shift at Denny’s. Those two, then a vacant lot, then the house on the end that used to belong to the Coles.
    The young man was out in the yard behind the trailer and she was just coming out the front door with a cigarette in her mouth, wearing a tight pair of white jeans and a man’s white undershirt. She stopped when she saw me and she stood watching me come down the walk. I slowed up