Ghosts of Tom Joad by Peter Van Buren

Author:Peter Van Buren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Luminis Books, Inc.
Published: 2014-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

I DID START talking once in a while with a woman named Jodie. She wasn’t very pretty, but she had that desperate available look in her eyes, the one women don’t see ’cause it ain’t there around women. Since we only had fifteen minutes for break every six hours, Jodie and me used to joke that we were speed-dating. “I got two kids,” Jodie told me. She was always tired, saying the one kid won’t sleep alone and insisted on crawling into her bed at night. “I told all the kids, Mama doesn’t have any more sugar, go to bed, but they keep coming around.” The older one watched the younger one all day while Jodie was at work, and at night he wanted time with Mom. Price on families is hard to measure but easy to see.

“After Chris, who used to be my boyfriend, lost his part time job and took up drinking full time, things went bad for us at home,” Jodie told me. “He’d come back later and later, and then started coming back so late it was early the next day. I knew what he was doing and, while it hurt me, it was more a problem that he was spending too much of what we had than the tomcatting. Too many times our money ran out ’fore the month did. Food bank at the Salvation Army looked like the Monroe Mall used to look, same people in line nowadays. It was first come, first served, and people with cars could get there before us that had to wait for the first bus at 4:22 a.m., so it wasn’t fair. The Salvo people tried though, letting us put our bags down to hold a place and giving us a seat inside on rainy days. Some food banks wouldn’t do that, and you’d be standing in the weather with the kids for three or four hours for boxes of macaroni and cheese.”

“Hey Jodie,” interrupted Ephraim, her Team Leader. “Can you quit break a few minutes early and clear off the end caps on aisles four and six? We got a load of those new iTablets coming in and corporate wants to give them a lot of shelf frontage before the holidays.”

“Sure Ephraim, I’ll get right to it. What do you want me to do with all the boxes of macaroni and cheese that’re out there now?”

“Just throw them away, Jodie. They’re half-stale, ready to expire. Nobody wants them. And get those tablets on the shelves right. Sales affect my bonus, corporate watches that stuff.”

I still had seven minutes left on break.

We caught up the next day, and Jodie continued remembering to me about her old man Chris.

“There was a while when things got a little better, because even though Chris was stayin’ out more, every once in a while he’d come home with a fair amount of cash. He’d smell funny, not alcohol-funny, but like he was working around paint or something. His eyes would be red

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