When his mother went to the restroom, Kenny noticed all the men travelers following her with their eyes, turning their heads to watch her go. One of them got up to pay his check, stopping by the booth where Kenny sat alone.
“Is that your mommy, slugger?” the man asked. He wore a brown suit with a tie partly undone. His eyeglasses had flip-up sunshades that stuck out like small visors.
“Um-hmmm,” Kenny said.
The man smiled. “You know, I got a boy at home just like you. But not a mommy like you got.” The man laughed out loud, then paid at the register.
When his mom came back from the restroom, her lips were freshly painted. She took a sip from what was left of Kenny’s milkshake, leaving red marks on the paper straw.
Sacramento was more than an hour down the highway. Kenny had not been to his hometown since his father packed their stuff into the station wagon, the day they moved to Iron Bend. The buildings had a look of comforting familiarity, but when his mom turned the Fiat off the highway it was at a street he had never traveled. When he saw the sign for the Leamington Hotel he felt a smile on his face—his parents had both worked at the Leamington, but now only his mom did. He and his brother and sister had spent time there, tagging along on some weekends when their folks were still married. They played in the big conference room when it was empty and would eat at the counter of the coffee shop when the place was not busy. Dad would pay them a nickel for every tray of potatoes they would wrap in tinfoil for baking en masse. If they asked permission, they could get their own chocolate milk from the dispenser, as long as they used the small glasses. This was long ago; a big chunk of Kenny’s life had passed since then.
His mother parked the Fiat in the back of the hotel and they entered through the kitchen—just as Kenny remembered doing in his dad’s station wagon and his mom’s Corolla. The staff all welcomed his mother and she greeted each person by name in response. A lady and one of the cooks could not believe that Kenny had grown up so much since they had last seen him, but Kenny could not remember who those people were, though he thought he recognized the lady’s cat’s-eye glasses with the thick lenses. The kitchen looked smaller than Kenny remembered it.
When he was little, Kenny’s mother was a waitress in the Leamington Hotel coffee shop and his father one of the cooks. She wore a uniform then, but now dressed in business clothes and had an office off the hotel lobby. Her office had a desk stacked with papers and a wall covered by a bulletin board that had many index cards, all written upon in different colored inks and arranged in neat columns.
“Kenny Bear, I have a few things to do, then I’ll tell you about your birthday surprise, okay?” She was sliding some papers into a leather folder. “Can you sit here for a bit?”
“Can I pretend this is my office and I work here?”
“Sure,” she said, smiling. “Here’re some notebooks, and look, this is an electric pencil sharpener.” She showed him how to push a pencil into the opening of the machine and make the grinding noise that produced a pencil point as sharp as a sewing pin. “Don’t answer the phone if it rings.”
A lady named Miss Abbott came into the office and asked, “So this is your little man?” She was older than his mom and wore glasses on a chain around her neck. Miss Abbott would keep an eye on Kenny and would know where his mother was if he needed her.
“Kenny is going to do some work for us today.”
“Wonderful,” Miss Abbott said. “I’ll give you some stamps and an ink pad to make everything official. Would you like that?”
His mother left, carrying her leather folder. Kenny sat in her chair behind her desk. Miss Abbott brought him some stamps that said the date on them and INVOICE and RECEIVED as well as a metal rectangular box with blue ink on a pad.
“You know,” Miss Abbott said, “I have a nephew just your age.”
Kenny used the stamps and ink on a few pages of a notebook, then, bored, looked through the top drawers of the desk. One drawer had dividers that separated paper clips, boxes of staples, rubber bands, pencils, and some pens that said LEAMINGTON HOTEL on the sides. Another drawer had envelopes and letter paper that said LEAMINGTON HOTEL with a little drawing of the building at the top of each sheet.
He got up from the desk, went to the door, and saw Miss Abbott at a desk of her own, typing some kind of letter.
“Miss Abbott,” Kenny said. “May I use some paper that says ‘Leamington Hotel’ on it?”
Miss Abbott kept typing. “What’s that?” she asked without looking up.
“May I use some paper that says ‘Leamington Hotel’ on it?”
“Go ahead,” she said as she kept on typing.
Kenny used the stamps and hotel pens on the paper, drawing lines and signing his name next to the stamps. Then he had an idea.
He took the cover off the typewriter that was on its own little desk beside his mother’s. The machine was light blue, had the letters IBM on the front, and was really big, taking up most of its special table. He rolled a sheet of paper into the workings of the typewriter and pressed on the keys, but they were dead. Nothing happened. Kenny was about to ask Miss Abbott why the typewriter didn’t work but then he saw the rocker switch that said ON/OFF and that the OFF part was depressed. He rocked it to ON and the machine hummed and vibrated. The mechanical ball with the letters on it swept back and forth once, then stopped on the left side. The carriage with the paper in it did not move, which made Kenny think the typewriter must be part computer or one of those Teletype machines.
He tried to type his name, but it came out 
That’s when he discovered that if he kept the key pressed down, the letter repeated, sounding like a machine gun—
. What confused him the most was the lack of a handle he was supposed to slap to make the page go back. There was none. There was a very big button that said RETURN on it. When he pressed that the ball moved back with a chunk and he could type a new line. This was now, officially, the most amazing typewriter Kenny had ever seen or heard of.
Kenny did not know how to type like a grown-up—like Miss Abbott or his mom—so he used just one finger, finding the letters he wanted but sometimes hitting ones he didn’t—
. By going very slowly and being very careful he finally typed his name correctly—
—and rolled that page out of the IBM. He put the date stamp next to his name along with 
.
“How about a coffee break?” Miss Abbott was standing in the door.
“I don’t drink coffee,” Kenny said.
Miss Abbott nodded. “Well, let’s see what else we can find, shall we?”
He followed her into the lobby, where Kenny saw his mother standing with a group of men. They were all talking business, but Kenny still called out to her.
“Mom!” he hollered, pointing toward the hotel kitchen. “I’m taking a coffee break!”
She turned to him and smiled and gave a little wave, then turned back to the businessmen.