In the kitchen, he asked Miss Abbott if he could get his own chocolate milk like he used to, but the dispenser no longer held chocolate milk. Just regular milk and something called Skim. Instead, Miss Abbott went to a silver refrigerator and pulled out a carton of chocolate milk, grabbed one of the big drinking glasses, and filled it to the top. This was more chocolate milk than Kenny had ever been allowed, which he thought was great. Miss Abbott got herself some coffee out of a round, glass pitcher that sat on a Bunn Coffee Service maker. They could not take their drinks back through the lobby, so they went into the coffee shop, which looked and smelled exactly the same as when Kenny was little. They sat in an empty booth, not at the counter.
“Do you remember me?” she asked him. “I worked here with your daddy. Before your mommy started.” Miss Abbott asked Kenny more questions, mostly if he liked the same things her nephew liked—baseball, karate class, and TV shows. Kenny told her they only got Channel 12 from Chico.
Back in his mother’s office he decided to write her a letter on the IBM typewriter. He started with a new sheet of Leamington Hotel paper and went very slowly.
Deear Mom,
How are you I am fine
Your friends sport car is like a racecar. I like how loud the motor goes and working the radio.
I saw you in the hotel just now and wonder what is my big surprise?????? ?
I am going to leave this letter in a place where it will be a SURPEIZE for you. After you find it right me back on this tiperighter that is so cooooool and esy to do.
Kenny folded the letter as best he could and put it into a hotel envelope and licked the seal, careful not to cut his tongue on the sharp edge. He wrote TO MOM on the front with a Leamington Hotel pen, then looked for a place to hide the letter, deciding the best place would be in a desk drawer under a few pages of Leamington Hotel stationery.
Kenny was playing with some rubber bands when his mom came back into her office. She was with a man who had dark brown skin and the straightest, blackest hair. “Kenny, this is Mr. Garcia. He let us borrow his car for the ride down today.”
“Hello,” Kenny said. “That’s your car? The sports car?”
“It is,” Mr. Garcia said. “I’m glad to meet you. But let’s do it proper, shall we? Stand up.”
Kenny did as he was told.
“Now,” Mr. Garcia continued, “we shake hands. Grab firm now.”
Kenny squeezed Mr. Garcia’s hand as hard as he could.
“Don’t hurt me.” Mr. Garcia chuckled. Kenny’s mom beamed at the two men. “Now, look me in the eye, just like I look at you. Good. Now you say, ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you.’”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Kenny repeated.
“Now comes the most important part. We ask each other a question, engage each other, man to man, see? I’m going to ask you this—do you know what ‘Fiat’ stands for?”
Kenny shook his head, because he was confused by the question and because he had no idea what was going on. No one had ever explained to him how to shake hands.
“‘Fix it again, Tony.’” Mr. Garcia laughed. “Now you ask me a question. Go ahead.”
“Um.” Kenny had to think of something to say. He was looking at Mr. Garcia’s head of thick, jet-black hair, held stiffly in place and so shiny. That was when he remembered seeing Mr. Garcia before, when he was little, when he was playing in the hotel with his brother and sister. He remembered that Mr. Garcia did not work in the kitchen with his dad, but would come in from the lobby wearing a suit. “You work here, too, like my mom, don’t you?”
Mr. Garcia and his mom shared a glance and a smile. “I used to, Kenny, but not anymore. Now I’m at the Senator.”
“You’re a senator?” Kenny knew what a senator was from the news on Channel 12.
“Mr. Garcia works at the Senator Hotel, Kenny,” his mother said. “And he has a big surprise for you.”
“You haven’t told him?” Mr. Garcia asked.
“I thought it should be your treat,” she said.
“Okay.” Mr. Garcia looked at Kenny. “I hear you have a birthday coming up, is that right?”
Kenny nodded. “I’m going to be ten.”
“Have you ever flown?”
“You mean, in an airplane?”
“Have you?”
Kenny looked at his mother. Maybe, when he was a baby, she had taken him on an airliner but he had been too little to remember. “Have I, Mom?”
“Jose is a pilot. He has a plane and wants to take you up for a ride. Won’t that be fun?”
Kenny had never met a pilot before who owned his own airplane. Where was Mr. Garcia’s uniform? Was he in the Air Force?
“What are you doing tomorrow?” Mr. Garcia asked. “Want to go up?”
Kenny looked at his mother. “Can I, Mom?”
“Yep,” she said. “I’m flexible.”
Kenny and his mother had their dinner at a restaurant called the Rosemount. She knew everybody who worked there. The waiter took away two place settings because his mom said that she was on “a special date with this young man,” meaning Kenny. The menus were as big as newspapers. He had spaghetti and, for dessert, the waiter brought him a piece of chocolate cake as big as his shoe. He couldn’t finish it all. His mother smoked her long cigarettes and drank an after-dinner coffee. One of the cooks came out, a fellow Kenny remembered from his days at the Leamington. The cook’s name was Bruce. He sat at the table with the two of them and talked with his mom for a while, mostly laughing.
“Good God, Kenny,” Bruce said to him. “You are growing up as fast as alfalfa.” Bruce could do an amazing trick—he could throw a drinking straw into a raw potato and make it stick like an arrow. On the way out through the kitchen—Mom had parked the Fiat in the back—Bruce did the trick for Kenny. Whap! And the straw almost went all the way through the potato. It was amazing!
His mom lived in a two-story building with a stairway in the middle that separated the two apartments on each floor. The living room of her place had something called a Murphy bed that folded up and disappeared into the wall. When his mom pulled the bed down, it was already made. She had a small color TV on a rolling stand that she turned to face the bed, but before he could watch it she made Kenny take a bath.
The bathroom was small and the tub was tiny, so it quickly filled up with water. On one shelf there were bath soaps and other girlie things, all in colorful bottles and tubes with flowers on the labels. On another shelf was a can of Gillette shaving cream and a man’s razor made by Wilkinson Sword. Kenny played in the tub until his fingers wrinkled and the water got cold. Pajamas had been packed in the pink suitcase from home, and, as he put them on, he smelled popcorn. His mom had made some, shaking it to life in a pot on her little kitchen stove.
“Find something to watch on TV, honey,” she called out as she melted butter in a saucepan to pour over the popcorn.
Kenny turned on the TV and it came to life immediately, without having to warm up like the one at home. He was delighted to see all the old channels, the ones he had watched before his mom moved out of the house and his dad got married again. There were shows on Channels 3, 6, 10, and 13. And, on the other channel knob, the one that turned rather than clicked, there was a Channel 40. Every channel was in color, too, except the old movie on Channel 40. He settled on a show called The Name of the Game, which was fine with his mom.
They lay on the Murphy bed together, eating popcorn. His mom kicked off her shoes and put her arm around her son’s shoulders, her fingers playing in his hair. At one point she sat up and said, “Rub Momma’s neck some.” Kenny rose onto his knees and tried to give her neck a massage, moving her hair out of the way and avoiding the little chain around her neck. After a few minutes she thanked him and said that she loved her little Kenny. They both lay back down. The next TV show came on—Bracken’s World, in which grown-ups went on and on about things Kenny could not understand. He was asleep before the first commercial.