Because at this point, she would realize later, these three old men had less than a minute to live.
One of them must’ve told a joke, because now his two buddies laughed – it sounded, Carla thought, like agitated horses, it was a kind of high-pitched, snorting, snickery thing – and they all shuffled their feet appreciatively under the table. They were flaky-bald, too, and probably incontinent and impotent and incoherent and all the rest of it.
So what’s left? That’s what Carla was wondering. After you hit forty, fifty, sixty, what’s the freakin’ point anymore, anyway?
Slumped forward, skinny elbows propped on the top of her very own little plastic table, Carla used the heel of her right hand to push a crooked slab of straight dark hair up and off her forehead. Her other hand cradled her chin.
Her nose ring itched. Actually, everything itched. Including her thoughts.
This place was called the Salty Dawg. It was a regional chain that sold burgers and fries, shakes and malts, and biscuits topped with slabs of ham or chicken and a choice of gravy: red-eye or sausage. But it didn’t sell hot dogs, which at least would’ve justified the stupid name, a charmless bit of illogic that drove Carla crazy whenever she came in here and slid into one of the crappy plastic chairs bolted to the greasy floor. If she didn’t have to, she’d never be wasting her time in this joint, and she always wondered why anybody ever came in here willingly.
Then she remembered. If you were an old fart, they gave you your coffee at a discount.
So there you go. There’s your reason to live. You get a dime off your damned coffee.
Freaks.
Carla was vaguely ashamed of the flicks of menace that roved randomly across her mind, like a street gang with its switchblades open. She knew she was being a heartless bitch – but hell, they were just thoughts, okay? It’s not like she’d ever say anything rude out loud.
She was bored, though, and speculating about the old farts was recreational.
To get a better look, without being totally obvious about it, she let her head loll casually to one side, like a flower suddenly too heavy for its stalk, and narrowed and shifted her eyes, while keeping her chin centered in her palm.
Now the old men were laughing again. They opened their mouths too wide, and she could see that some of their teeth were stained a weird greenish yellow-brown that looked like the color of the lettuce she’d sometimes find way in the back of the fridge, the kind her mom bought and then forgot about. It was, Carla thought with a shudder of oddly pleasurable repugnance, the Official Color of Old Man Teeth.
She didn’t know any of them. Or maybe she did. All old men looked alike, right? And old towns like the one she lived in – Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, or as Carla and her friends preferred to call it, The Middle of Freakin’ Nowhere – were filled with old men. With interchangeable old farts. It was just another crappy fact she had to deal with in her crappy life, on her way to what was surely an even crappier future.
Her thoughts had been leaning that way all morning long, leaning toward disgust and despair, and the constant proximity of gross old men in the Salty Dawg was one of the reasons why.
Another was that her mother was late to pick her up.
Again.
So Carla was pissed.
They had agreed on 11 A.M. It was now 11:47. And no sign of good old Mom, who also wasn’t answering her cell. Carla Elkins was forced to sit here, getting free refills on her Diet Coke and playing with her french fries, pulling them out of the red cardboard ark one by one and stacking them up like tiny salty Lincoln Logs. Building a wall. A fort, maybe. A greasy little fort. She’d just had her nails done the day before over at Le Salon, and the black polish – she was picking up another french fry now, and another, and another, and another, while her other hand continued to prop up her chin – looked even blacker by contrast with the washed-out beige of each skinny french fry.
Her mother hated black nail polish, which was why Carla chose it. She wasn’t crazy about it herself, but if it pissed off her mom, she’d make the sacrifice.
The Salty Dawg was right down the street from the Acker’s Gap Community Resource