“Just french fries and a chef salad today, hon, I’m on a diet,” Rose says, flirting with the teenager at the register.
Cash misses his wife with a blank pain in his chest, and he misses his sisters and cousins, who have known him since he was a strong, good-looking boy. Everyone back there remembers, or if they are too young, they’ve been told. The old ones get to hang on the sweet, perfect past. Cash was the best at climbing trees; his sister Letty won the story bees. The woman who married Letty’s husband’s brother, a beauty named Sugar, was spotted one time drinking a root beer and had her picture in Life magazine.
They all know. Now she has thin hair and a humped back but she’s still Sugar, she gets to walk around Heaven, Oklahoma, with everybody thinking she’s pretty and special.
Which she is. That’s the trouble with moving away from family, he realizes. You lose your youth entirely, you have only the small tired baggage that is carried within the body.
It shouldn’t matter so much to Cash. He still has most of what he started with: a talent for schemes and friendship, and all of his hair. No one can ever hold a thing against Cash, except his restlessness. For thirty years, whenever Cash started talking like a white man, his wife would put extra food on his plate and turn her back tenderly and a little abruptly. After she got sick, Cash came untethered somehow, decided they needed to ride horses and see the Rocky Mountains. She died the year after they claimed she was cured: the doctor found no more cancer in her, and she only wanted to sit down and breathe out slowly and watch her grandbaby grow, but Cash danced her around the kitchen and swore he would show her the world. She told him television was a bad influence. Probably she was right. Like those white birds he’s been seeing outside the window, it flashes its wings and promises whatever you want, even before you knew you wanted it.
Rose has nabbed a spot for them in the crowded restaurant and clears a huge mess from the table; the previous people were probably foreigners who didn’t know the McDonald’s custom of dumping your own burger wrappers. “It’s party time in Jackson, ain’t it?” Rose asks over the din, plumping down in her chair.
Cash nods. For nine months he trudged out on sidewalks dangerous with glassy shards of ice, the dirty snow piled deep and hopeless as a whole winter’s worth of laundry.
Now, for five or six weeks, the laundry is done. The streets swarm with people who will take their sunny raft trips and green-meadow pictures and spend the rest of their lives claiming Jackson Hole as one of the places they know.
The couple at the next table are speaking some language.
The woman has on little green cloth slippers that you’d think would have fallen apart long before they made it halfway to anywhere from overseas. Cash knows these women; they come into the store and go crazy over anything herbal, then they march straight over to the Trading Post and buy Cash’s earrings, Rose tells him, three pairs at a time. The Indian look is evidently big in Europe, where they don’t have any Indians. They ask Rose personal questions, thinking she is something exotic. The Americans are different, they edge around Rose in the store, not looking, as if her clothes were terribly stained and she didn’t know. Sometimes they’ll come close and snap a picture. Cash has witnessed this, and he has to hand it to her for the way she sits still, holding her tongue for once. The customers pile up their purchases by the register, dropping in one minute what it takes Cash three weeks to earn.
“That guy mopping the floor has one cute butt,” Rose states, fluffing her layers of dyed-black hair. “I feel like dropping a spoon or something just to see him pick it up.”
“Rose, you have to decide if I’m your boyfriend or your daddy. I can’t do both.”
She flashes her eyes at him. “You know how much I love you, honey.”
Cash doesn’t add anything to that. He is grateful that McDonald’s doesn’t give out spoons.
“Just think,” she says, “we could be in Paris, France or Hong Kong. They have McDonald’s in every country in the world.”
“That’s what I hear,” Cash says, but he doesn’t feel like he’s in Paris, France, he feels like he’s in McDonald’s.
“You seem depressed,” Rose observes, and Cash wonders if that’s what he is, after all. He thinks of the way you press dough down with your fist: take a big, round hopeful swelling and punch the rise right out of it. Yes, he thinks. Depressed.
Cash is off work at last. For the last ten minutes of his shift a couple stood in line arguing over whether or not to buy some expensive peaches. Cash stood silently by, wishing they would take their marriage someplace else, but Tracey rolled her eyes in a way that could not be missed, and still the couple paid no attention. The man’s T-shirt said THINK