Page 10 of The Harvey Girls

“Don’t worry,” he’d murmur. “Happens all the time.”

It never happened to Charlotte, but how could Billie compete with all that… knowledge?

The spills caused the greatest concern. So public. So humiliating. She noticed that Pablocito, the middle-aged busboy, had taken to hovering near her with a damp rag in hand and a fresh mop just inside the kitchen door, ever at the ready.

Nevertheless, if her tips were any indication, she’d so far never had an angry customer.

It was just too easy to make people happy.

A sincere apology, a kind word about a tie or a hairstyle, and a free piece of pie generally did the trick.

Not that she didn’t mean those compliments—if you looked for something positive to say, a little joke to make, or an extra way to be helpful, you could always find it.

“Oh dear,” she said as she accidentally sent a fork clattering to the floor. “Clumsy as a newborn giraffe.”

“And just as adorable,” said the fork’s owner, a matronly woman traveling with her old dad, who gummed at his food like a baby and required an endless supply of napkins.

That night, when Billie and Charlotte got back to their room, Billie sifted through her small pile of tips—the first money she had ever earned all on her own. She pulled out three pennies and handed them to Charlotte.

“What on earth is this for?”

“It’s for Kansas City, when you tipped the waitress for both of us,” Billie said with a hint of told-you-so in her tone. “I said I’d pay you back.”

Charlotte scoffed. “You needn’t—”

“I pay my debts.”

Charlotte looked at the three pennies. “Well, you’ve overpaid them by twenty percent.”

Billie smiled. “Keep the change.”

As the days passed, the other girls sometimes snickered at Billie’s mistakes, but they also seemed to notice that patrons liked her.

“You’re a miracle worker with the tough customers,” Elsie said one night as they trudged upstairs after the dinner shift. “To be honest, we didn’t know how long you’d last.”

“To be honest, I wasn’t sure, either.”

“And then the shells in Phyllis’s bed—”

“She was asking for it!”

Elsie laughed and swatted Billie’s shoulder playfully.

“I didn’t know you had it in you to dish it out like that.

I thought you were too sweet—you were so kind when I was sick.

” She stopped at the head of the stairs.

“Say, why don’t you and Charlotte come and sit in the sewing room with us tonight?

You two always head to bed straightaway. ”

Billie’s heart swelled. Maybe she’d make a friend here after all.

Charlotte wasn’t interested. “I’m tired” was all she said as she slowly lowered herself onto her bed with a little groan. She never complained about the aches that clearly plagued her, but it was obvious to Billie that this was far more manual labor than the college girl had ever seen in her life.

“Suit yourself.” Billie shrugged and happily went off with-out her.

Elsie, Tildie, and a couple of the other girls were already gathered in the small room that held several couches, a treadle sewing machine, and a nicked wooden table. Billie sat down next to Elsie, who was knitting what looked to be the world’s longest woolen scarf.

“It’s for my brother,” Elsie explained. “He works in a fish cannery up in Alaska.”

Another girl, Alice, was stitching red yarn for hair onto a Raggedy Ann doll.

Billie smiled to herself. These were her people, the girls who made things with their hands and had brothers in factories.

“So,” said Tildie, who stopped her solitaire game at the table to study Billie. “Do you have a beau?”

Billie reached up to her head self-consciously. “No, I never wear them. My hair’s so straight, they just slip right out.”

All the girls laughed as Billie blinked in confusion.

“Oh, gosh, you meant it!” said Elsie. “We thought you were being funny.”

“Funny about what?”

“Not bow ,” said Tilde, “ beau ! Do you have a fella?”

“Oh!” Billie tried to laugh it off. “I was looking at the doll and thinking how mine has a bow.”

“You have a Raggedy Ann doll?” said Alice with a hint of surprise. “This is for my six-year-old niece.”

“No, no,” Billie lied. “I meant I used to. I gave it to my little sister a long time ago.” In fact it was the only plaything she’d refused to hand down to her younger siblings.

“But what about the beau?” Tildie insisted.

Billie shook her head.

“Never?” said Tildie, clearly disappointed.

Billie gave an apologetic shrug, intent on keeping her mouth shut until she could gracefully leave the room. Maybe these weren’t her people after all.

On Friday, after four days of waitressing mishaps somehow rewarded with a grand total of six dollars and thirty-five cents in tips, Mr. Gilstead told Billie she could take her dinner break and handed her a piece of mail, her first letter since leaving home.

Her first letter ever, actually, which made it a thrill simply to hold.

To ensure that the dining room was never without service, should customers walk in off the street, the girls took staggered breaks, a practice that often found Billie a bit woeful.

Left to her own thoughts and without the distraction of work or the other girls’ chatter, her mind veered toward loneliness and an endless array of questions.

What were her family members having for dinner?

It likely wasn’t as good as what she was having, and this made her feel guilty and a little sick.

What if she finally made a mistake awful enough to get her sent home?

What if she stopped making mistakes and never got sent home—only farther down the line, to a far and foreign place like New Mexico or even California?

She went out the back door of the kitchen to read the letter. It was still chilly—early April was hanging on hard to winter—but with no wind, if she stayed snug against the building, she almost didn’t need a coat.

The letter from her mother included a few details about her siblings ( Peigi’s entered an art contest for a baby food company and tied poor wee Dougal into a chair for a model ); her work ( How on earth do the Kriegers rend their clothes to shreds like that?

Are they gladiators? ); her hopes that Billie was working hard and making friends; and an admonition to go to church every Sunday.

Oh. Church.

She hadn’t forgotten about it, exactly, but last Sunday she was so tired and sad that the thought of venturing out into a strange city to find a Catholic church was completely overwhelming. Instead she’d said two Rosaries and read her favorite passage from the Bible she’d found in the dorm parlor.

It was the one where twelve-year-old Jesus leaves his parents without telling them and returns to the temple. When long-suffering Mary and Joseph backtrack, frantically trying to locate their only child, and finally find him, he answers, “Didn’t you know that I would be in my Father’s house?”

Once when the passage was read in church, Billie’s father had leaned over to his nine offspring spread down the pew and muttered, “If the lad were mine, I’d a skelped his arse for ’im.”

The idea of Da spanking the Lord and Savior of the Universe (not to mention saying arse in church) made nine-year-old Ian burst out laughing, and in short order every single one of the MacTavish children was in stitches, including baby Dougal, who was only laughing because everyone else was.

“Malcolm!” hissed Lorna.

“Wha’? Cheeky bugger deserved a thrashin’, I say.”

This only served to set off another round of snorting laughter, such that old Father Frazer paused his homily to aim a cold, hard stare in their direction, and Lorna marched them out and made them stand in the damp churchyard until they got hold of themselves.

Actually, Ian never did, and was left to sit on the stone steps tittering with his hand clamped across his mouth till Mass was over.

The memory made Billie miss them desperately, especially the part when Lorna brought them back in and Malcolm winked at her.

Lorna had tried her best to glare at him but had had to bite down hard on her lips not to smile.

Billie had seen it all. Lorna had leaned into her then and whispered “Yer father” with a scoff, but adoration shone through with the warmth of a bonfire.

Her parents loved each other, and their children.

And no matter what else befell them, it was a good life.

Now, in the tingling chill behind the kitchen with the letter in her hand, she thought it might be better after all to go to a strange church in a strange town—maybe she wouldn’t miss her family and their Mass-going shenanigans quite so much.

There was movement in the darkness to her right, and she turned quickly to see something long unfold and straighten up against the bricks.

“For the love of Jesus!” she sighed. “You scared me. What were you doing with your head down by your knees?”

“Stretching my back,” said Leif, rolling his neck from side to side. “It aches sometimes.” He nodded at the paper in her hands. “Letter from home?”

“Yes. Maw says I must go to church. But I don’t know where it is.”

“Which are you looking for?”

“Catholic.”

“Ask Pablocito. He goes every Sunday.”

She studied him a moment, his large hands kneading at his lower back. “Which do you go to?”

“Well, I suppose if I went, it’d be Lutheran.”

He didn’t go at all!

Billie wanted to ask all sorts of questions about this: Why ever not?

Aren’t you worried what God will say when you meet him on the other side?

Was it because of the incense? Because sometimes if they sat too close to the front where the altar boy swung the thurible with all that smoke wafting out, it made her eyes burn.

“Can I ask you a question?”

He turned toward her. “Of course.”

“Where do you live?”

“There’s a boardinghouse down by the train yard that a lot of railroad men stay in.”

“Did you grow up in Topeka?”