Choices by George Ella Lyon

Author:George Ella Lyon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813137391
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky

Making Something of Yourself (Daryll)

I’ll be 18 next month (the day before Thanksgiving), and I’ve got to make some choices. It looks like I will graduate in May. By some miracle, my mom says. Then what? I can’t go to college—it would be like high school only worse. Besides, there’s no money, and I didn’t do anything to win financial aid. Not only were my grades LOW LOW LOW, I can barely get a basketball through a hoop. In Kentucky that’s a crime.

But I never liked chasing things that bounce. Or roll. Or fly up and hit you in the face. I’ve thought it was dumb ever since my daddy gave me a little blue football when I was three. “Wildcat,” he’d say. “This one’s going to be a little wildcat.”

Well, I wasn’t, but he didn’t stick around to find out. For years I thought he ran off just because I couldn’t throw a football. Nobody told me any different.

What I like to do is work at the Dixie Cafe. I started in grade school, sweeping floors, taking out the trash. My mom worked there till she saved enough money to go to beauty school. “I left Dixie grease behind,” Mom says, “and took up hair oil.” Anyway, she liked working at Faye’s better. Me, I can’t stand the smell.

The Dixie smells wonderful: burgers, coffee, cigarette smoke, collard greens. You can order scrambled eggs from 5:00 a.m. till midnight, so there’s a layer of breakfast smell, too.

But what I like best is the talk, which I hear while I bus tables and mop. Sometimes I wash dishes, too, if Missy doesn’t make it. She has four kids, and one of them is always sick.

I come in right after school and work till 7:30. That’s the latest Mom will let me stay on account of my homework. And chores. And, she says, “on account of I just want to look at you.”

“Look at Peaches,” I say. Peaches is my sister. “She’s not as cute as me, but . . .”

“Oh, go on, Daryll,” Mom says. “And don’t get the bighead.”

The thing is, Mom doesn’t want me to stay on at the Dixie when I graduate. She says I should “make something” of myself. I tell her I am something. I’m a guy who likes to bus tables and listen to people talk. Mrs. Elam, who runs the Dixie, says I could work up to cashier if I came on full time in June. That would be more money. Mom could be proud of that.

But still she says, “I can’t see what you like about that wilted old restaurant.” Wilted, that’s what she calls it. No hair spray, I guess. What I like is Mr. Welch and Mr. Dearborn coming in every evening to sit in their booth by the jukebox. I like one of them ordering the fish and the other asking for the special. I like Mrs. Grady and her daughter who only come on Tuesdays because that’s Mr. Grady’s bowling night.

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