The Chiropractor's Assistant, Page 3

  Except for a few elderly who had hobbled over from the senior high-rise, the diner was empty. The place smelled of fresh-baked turkey, mulled cider and sweet potatoes. Ronda slid onto a stool at the counter. A waitress approached, arranging silverware, and placing a glass of water on the Formica counter.

  “The holiday special will be fine.” Ronda handed the menu back to the woman. The door opened and the bearded veteran who had staggered into the library the previous week lingered in the entryway. He looked sober and physically pulled together, but then it was only twelve-thirty. Scanning the room, his eyes came to rest on Ronda sitting at the counter.

  “You mind?” He slid onto the stool directly to her left.

  “No, not all.” The food arrived and she lowered her head.

  “Don’t make no trouble, Frankie,” the waitress spoke with mock severity. “I got my eye on you.”

  “It’s Christmas,” he returned in a soft, even tone. “I ain’t in no trouble making mood.” She took his order and went off to the kitchen.

  Jekyll and Hyde. The Vietnam vet with his elbows resting easily on the counter was not the same wild man flailing about in the Brandenberg Library. His flannel shirt and Docker slacks were perfectly clean if somewhat wrinkled, and the only disagreeable odor emanating from his body was stale tobacco. “I remember you from somewhere but can’t put a time or a place on it.”

  “The Brandenberg Library last Friday night.” Ronda sliced a piece of turkey breast, dipped it in the brown gravy and raised the fork to her mouth.

  The man groaned and ran a calloused hand over his face. “Not one of my better nights.” The waitress returned with coffee. “As I vaguely remember, a friend had to help me home.”

  “Scotty Bergeron.”

  He gawked at her in mild surprise. “You know him?”

  “We work together at the market.”

  The man nodded and sipped at the coffee. The waitress returned and placed his dinner on the counter. Hunching over the steamy food, Frankie Manning turned his full attention to Christmas dinner and didn’t say another word until the plate was empty, the last streak of gravy wiped away with the remnants of a buttered bun. “Too bad about Scotty’s wife,” he said shaking his head with a somber expression.

  The casual remark caught Ronda off guard. “He’s widowed but I’m not familiar with the details.”

  “Hit and run. Some joker in a half-ton pickup ran her down like a stray dog.”

  “How awful.”

  “DUI. It was the guy’s eighth offense. After the funeral, Scotty took a leave of absence from the university. Hardly ever left the house except to pick up a few things to eat.”

  “The college sent a chaplain over to visit. God’s appointed servant was spouting some moronic nonsense about how it was divine destiny that the poor woman got mangled and how Scotty ought to come to terms with the senseless tragedy.” He cleared his throat and fixed Ronda with a malicious grin. “Then the chaplain began preaching some gobbledygook about being washed in the blood of the lamb, and that’s when Scotty sort of lost it.”

  “Lost it?”

  “Went ballistic. Postal. Wiped the living room floor with the Catholic cleric.” Pulling a wallet from his shirt pocket, Frankie peeled several bills from a clump and placed them on the counter next to his plate. “When he got out of the hospital, the priest didn’t press charges. A month later Scotty sold his three-bedroom colonial and moved east.” He gulped down the last of the coffee. “Don’t you just love a story with a happy ending,” The vet rose and turned to leave.

  “Merry Christmas,” Ronda finally blurted. “And all the best in the New Year!”

  “Ditto.”

  

  On Wednesday of the following week a woman from the deli counter announced that she was pregnant and going out on maternity leave the middle of June. There would be ample time to recruit and train a replacement. In the late afternoon one of the part-timers, a high school girl, had an anxiety attack, hyperventilating and sobbing uncontrollably. On Christmas day shortly after passing out presents, the girl’s parents announced they getting divorced. Happy Holiday! Ronda made her lie down on a sofa in the employee lounge and breath into a paper bag, while she called the girl’s mother.

  At dusk snow started falling. The weather channel was predicting a little over a foot of heavy white stuff by midnight. Ronda had just renewed the contract with the plowing company. They would wait until closing when the parking lot emptied out to begin the clean up.

  Dwight Epstein stopped by “Any news?”

  Ronda, who was typing up some notes for an administrative staff meeting, withdrew her fingers from the keyboard. “Last Wednesday you didn’t showed up for work,” she replied icily. “Never called in your absence. That’s the third time in as many months you’ve dropped off the radar screen with no reasonable explanation.”

  “Grandmother died,” he mumbled with a hurt expression.

  “Which one?”

  “What?”

  “Was that your father’s or you mother’s parent?”

  Dwayne began to fidget, rubbing his hands on the side of his hips. His features clouded over. He poked his tongue in the left side of his mouth causing the cheek to bulge freakishly. “Mother’s.”

  Ronda tapped the snooze button on the computer keyboard and watched the screen fade to black. In no great hurry, she rose and drifted over to the file cabinet, extracting a manila folder. Pulling a half sheet of paper from the folder, she waved it in front of Dwight’s nose. “Says here you took bereavement time on February eighteenth of last year because your mother’s mother passed away.”

  “Not so!” he muttered indignantly. “Someone must of screwed up the message.”

  “Last Wednesdays, we had to pull Trudy Rabinowitz from dairy to help Scotty keep his shelves stocked.” What she didn’t bother to mention was that Scotty was so impressed with the girl that he asked if Ronda might consider transferring Dwight elsewhere and letting him keep Trudy permanently in produce.

  Yes, Ronda would do just that!

  With an inch-thick wad of letters of reprimand in Dwight’s folder, the assistant manager could ‘transfer’ Dwight straight to unemployment, tell him to clear out his locker and vacate the premises without the least concern that he would ever collect a penny of benefits from unemployment.

  

  “That nice Jewish girl, Trudy, is moving to produce the middle of next month.”

  Scotty ran his pricing gun over a row of prepackaged sliced mushrooms. “Then you found another job for Dwight.”

  “A position that uniquely suits him,” Ronda confirmed. “Got any plans for Christmas?”

  “I think you might be off by the better part of a week.”

  “Not necessarily.” Ronda stepped closer and tapped him on the forearm. “According to Wittgenstein, facts exist in ‘logical space’, which is the realm of everything that is logically possible.”

  Scotty, who was holding a blue carton of mushrooms, put the vegetables aside and didn’t respond for a good long time. “Yes, that’s so.”

  “For instance,” Ronda continued, “though it is not true that Toronto is the capital of Canada, there is nothing illogical about supposing that it might be at some future time.”

  “I think I can see where this is going.” The words tumbled from his lips in slow motion.

  “If I were to cook a teriyaki pork tenderloin roast with baked potatoes, an apple, cranberry and butternut squash casserole along with bourbon glazed panettone topped with whipped cream, then January second - not the twenty-fifth of December could be the bearded fat man in the red suit’s special day.”

  “Christmas in January.” There was a look in his eyes she had never seen before. A subtle relenting, like when the vise grip slipped effortlessly to the left and the unnerving task was done. Scotty picked up the price gun and slapped a barrage of ivory stickers on the next row of packaged mushrooms. “I’ll bring the wine.”
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  Everyone must have Two Pockets

  The dark-haired girl arrived unannounced. Though the weather was humid in the mid-eighties, she wore long sleeves buttoned at the wrists and a drab, moss green skirt that hung well below the knees. The skin was pale with an ivory texture and lush, jet-black eyebrows that lent the otherwise placid features a haughty boldness. “My name is Miriam Applebaum and I live in the slate blue house with the shutters on the corner.”

  Mark, who was seated at the kitchen table drawing up a list of building supplies, threw the pencil aside. “Yes, I know the house.”

  The Applebaums had moved into the community several years back. They belonged to an Orthodox Jewish synagogue, Beth Ohavai Shalom, off Seneca Drive. Every Saturday the congregants traipsed in and out of the temple, the men dressed in black with skullcaps and prayer shawls. The women covered their heads with scarves even through the scorching summer months. “What can I do for you, Miriam Applebaum?”

  The exotic-looking girl took several steps forward and was standing at the kitchen table now. She was medium height with a fleshy body. “Your pickup truck pulls onto the street every day in the late afternoon.” “Fournier Builders. General carpentry. New construction, interior and exterior renovations.” She recited verbatim as though reading directly from the metallic red lettering on the cab of the truck.

  An easygoing affable smile lit up her features, and the thought occurred to Mark that the annoyingly persistent Jewish girl with the long sleeves wasn’t leaving anytime soon. “I was wondering if you had an entry level position available.”

  A Chevy pickup with a blown muffler pulled into the driveway and his foreman, Kenny, lumbered up the backstairs and into the kitchen. Kenny handled the finished work – oak staircases, cornices, custom fireplace mantles, fancy trim, baseboard, windows and moldings. Noticing her strange dress, the middle-aged man gawked uncertainly at the girl.

  “This is Miriam from down the street,” Mark said. “She’s looking for an entry-level job in construction.”

  Kenny rubbed the back of his sunburned neck with a row of stubby fingers. The nail on the right index finger was blackened from an errant hammer. “What can you do?”

  Again, as if on cue, her malleable features dissolved in an eager grin. “Anything, everything. I’ve never done this sort of work before, but woman work in construction and I thought maybe …” The sentence sort of petered away.

  “Since Smitty quit, we ain’t got no helper,” Kenny ruminated, as though talking more to himself than anyone else in the room. “And we need someone to prime all that fascia and baseboard trim.”

  A week earlier, Mark placed an order with the lumber company for several hundred square feet of molding. The shipment of wood arrived bare, with no protective primer coat. Rather than return the wood, the lumberyard agreed to sell him the entire load at cost. When Mark balked, the purchasing agent threw up his hands and said, “We got no use for it either. Take the crap and we’ll eat the loss.” The senior center project was already three days behind schedule due to bad weather and now a new headache; since Smitty quit, the mountain of unpainted lumber that cost him diddly-squat was utterly useless. Think wonders, shit blunders!

  “What’s a helper do?” Miriam pressed.

  “Anything and everything,” Mark repeated what she had said a moment earlier. “One minute you’re filling a dumpster with worksite debris, the next your lugging four-by-eight sheets of plywood to where a crew is installing subfloors.” Mark stood up and leaned forward so that his nose was a fraction of an inch from the girl’s face. “Do you have any idea what you’re getting yourself into?”

  The girl never blinked. She only grinned all the more brazenly. “How soon can I start?”

  Fifteen minutes later, as she was leaving, Mark called out, “Wait up!” Lumbering to the front door, he positioned his work boot over Miriam’s string sandal and pressed down gently. “Imagine, instead of this being my foot it’s a pressure-treated four-by-four post slamming down on your big toe.” He eased the dirt-crusted shoe off her foot. “You’re gonna need a pair of steel-toed work boots when you start on Monday. Also, no skirts. Pants or dungarees but no skirts.”

  “Anything else?”

  The impish grin was beginning to grate on his nerves. “Yeah, pick up a pair of work gloves, preferably heavy-duty.”

  “Now comes the hard part,” she said, the smile wilting noticeably.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I’ve got to go home and tell my parents.”

  Later that night as Mark was preparing for bed, the phone rang. “I bought the steel-toed work boots.”

  “Where did you get my telephone number?”

  “Off the side of your pickup truck, of course.”

  “That’s nice.” He didn’t quite know what else to say.

  “And a pair of genuine rawhide work gloves, too.” When there was no reply she added. “Should I go directly to the worksite?”

  “No, just drop by my place at around eight o’clock.”

  “Good night.” She hung up the phone.

  

  Miriam Applebaum showed up Monday morning for her first day at Fournier Construction dressed in a navy blue uniform that made her look more like a janitor or maintenance worker than carpenter’s helper. “We need some raw lumber primed.” Mark brought her out back of the Brandenberg senior center where several sawhorses were lying next to a pile of molding and random boards. “The paint and brushes are just inside the door.” He pointed to the back entrance to the building. “Any questions?” She shook her head, which was covered by a dark scarf similar to the ones he had seen the other Jewish women wearing as they walked back and forth from the Orthodox synagogue on Saturday mornings.

  Mark went to the front of the building where a heavyset man with blond hair was framing the walkway for a handicapped ramp. “There’s a girl taking Smitty’s place. A nice kid. You leave her alone, okay? No foul language, ethnic slurs or dirty jokes.”

  The fellow slid a metal-shanked, Estwing hammer from his carpenter’s belt and looked up. “Why should I give her any grief?”

  “Because you’re an asshole with a warped sense of humor,” he replied and walked away.

  The previous week they gutted the interior of the main function hall, framing the structure according to the architect’s new plans. Now three palettes of drywall had to be installed before the plastering crew arrived midweek. Because the building was older construction, an extra width of board had to be doubled up to reach the ten-foot ceiling. More aggravation and wasted time. At ten-thirty Mark laid his pale blue Makita screw gun on the ground and turned to Kenny. “I gotta check on the Jewish girl.”

  Out in the back of the building he found a row of freshly painted boards lined up on the ground. “Not bad.”

  A drop of white paint was smeared across the side of her cheek. “It’s not rocket science.”

  He waved a hand at the remaining pile of unpainted boards. “We got two more piles of this stuff coming. Once the wood is done, we’ll get you inside and involved with some basic carpentry.”

  “Okay.” She dipped the brush in the can and wiped a glob of excess paint on the inner rim.

  “I met your father,” he suddenly said, shifting gears.

  She lay the brush aside momentarily. “When was that?”

  One day in late September Mark was coming home from work and spotted a heavy-set, older man standing next to a Subaru with a flat tire. Mark pulled over. “What’s the problem?”

  The bearded man, who was dressed in black pants and a white shirt, waved a tire iron in the air and glowered at him suspiciously. “Lug nut’s frozen. Won’t budge.”

  Mark went back to his truck and returned with his own iron. “Too big!” The middle-aged man exploded. “You don’t see what a little tire I got?”

  Mark pointed at the four-posted tool. “Each end has a different size socket. This one shou
ld fit your car.” Still fuming, the man reluctantly stepped aside. Mark seated the tool over the frozen nut. “Because of the T-shaped design, you get twice the torque to muscle rusty bolts free.” Bracing his legs, he leaned into the tool twisting counter-clockwise, and, after a moment, the nut slid to the left. He loosened the rest of the bolts and stood up. “Can you handle it from here?”

  “Yes, thank you so much.” There was a perceptible softening to the man’s tone, tinged with appreciation. As he was climbing back into the cab of his truck, Mark noticed a tall, emaciated youth with a wispy beard and skullcap lingering near a crab apple tree on the front lawn.

  “The younger fellow with the thin beard?” Mark asked.

  Miriam resumed painting, brushing the creamy white paint over a length of beaded molding in smooth, even strokes. “That would be my brother, Saul.” Finishing with the fancy strip, she laid it aside to dry and reached for another.

  “What does he do for a living?”

  “Oh, he doesn’t work. Saul is too busy with other pursuits.”

  “Such as?”

  “My brother spent most of last year at a yeshiva, a Jewish seminary, in Jerusalem. He’s studying to be a rabbi.”

  “He’s very devout.”

  “Yes, when he’s not chasing Jewish whores, he is the model of spiritual virtue and godliness.”

  The odd remark caught the carpenter off guard. “Where does a rabbinical student in the Holy Land find prostitutes?”

  “In Jerusalem, there are Jewish refugees recently emigrated from Russia. Many of the women arrive in Israel with no money. They can’t speak the language or find meaningful work. The more desperate girls sell themselves for a few liras.” She ran a second coat of paint over the wood to touch up the bare spots. “A handful of these downtrodden Russians also find their way to America.”

  Mark had to get back to the sheetrock, but lingered a moment longer. “Does your father know about his son’s shenanigans?”