All-Day Breakfast Read Online Free PDF Page B

four sentences it seemed long-winded. The investigation found cocaine in his system. The symptoms of Mom’s disease were still in our future and every morning she was bicycling to the accident site to look for more windshield glass to keep in her purse—I couldn’t understand her grief at the passing of an asshole, so we weren’t talking much. And what did I insist to the minister, beside the cooler at the after-service potluck?
    â€œFamilies are shit, Your Worship,” I said, waving the wasp away from my beer, “and I’m not going to have no part of ’em.”
    Yet years later, I’d set Josie up on the change table, unbutton her sleeper and put my nose under her drool-slick chin—that sour scent of pure baby.
    â€œ Hey ,” I’d say in a goofy voice. “Dat smells pretty good !”
    And she’d give a deep-throated chuckle before gazing across the room at her mother, who’d be on the couch asleep, or folding laundry, or embroidering daisies onto a curtain. Her auburn braids curled down onto her T-shirt, her sinewy shoulders creaking with strength.
    So while we were in Hoover my kids’ Grandma Jackie sat waiting in Pawnee City, with doctors, acupuncturists, massage therapists and her rattle-brained son all unable to end her latest ordeal. Their grandpa was in heaven, apparently, stapling flyers to the Pearly Gates and eyed nervously by St Peter.
    â€œJust think about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and all the wonderful happenings at that factory!” Rob Aiken shouted over the machines’ roar. “When people hear there are tours at our factory, they all jump!”
    We stood in the loading dock between a parked forklift and towers of cardboard boxes stacked on pallets. The kids shuffled their sneakers on the pebbly concrete and blinked up at the black rafters, as though the wonderment might put them to sleep. Rob had a yellow collared shirt tucked into his jeans and close-cropped white hair. He laced his fingers in front of his crotch like he was about to hoist someone over a fence.
    â€œIs there really going to be lunch?” asked Colleen. “I brought a little burrito just in case!”
    â€œYeah, oh, hot dogs!” Rob said. “Now, just through here, let’s get started. We’re going to see the pumps we use to load the res—uh, the additive with.”
    A loose-limbed guy in orange coveralls rolled up a handcart and stacked it with boxes, wagging his elbows like he had a Run-DMC song playing in his head. Rob skipped over to him, put a wide hand on his shoulder.
    â€œAh, no, pal!” Rob hollered. “Latches for the bins won’t go on until next week! If it’s ball bearings just take a box at a time, things weigh a hundred pounds!”
    The guy unloaded his boxes without a break in rhythm, and Rob turned back to us with a watery smile.
    â€œLot of guys off sick this week but we’ve got good people filling in!”
    We ambled after him through a pair of tall steel gates into the main room of the factory, smelling of machine oil and garden hoses. It was the dimensions of a football stadium. I’d done construction work during summers in college, and I wondered how many guys it had taken to build the operation in the first place, much less to keep it running. Brown and green machines filled the floor, each with white dials, blinking red numbers and ten or fifteen greased and whirring axles winding up spools of plastic two and three feet wide. If they’d replaced the banks of fluourescents and the guys in orange with gas lamps and half-starved ten-year-olds, Dockside Synthetics could’ve been an Industrial Revolution cotton mill. A few eleventh-graders looked up but mostly they just kicked their toes against the concrete or tried to give each other wedgies. Pierced-lip Willow, in jean shorts, held hands with black-clad Craig, an inch shorter than herself. Rob turned to us, chin raised