ON THE WAY BACK FROM THE CREMATORIUM, I STOPPED at a Hardee’s for a bacon cheeseburger. I was just about to pull up to the drive-through speaker when I remembered what Helen had said about the crematorium’s ashy dust-“it gets everywhere”-and I flashed back to the small cloud that had erupted from the processor when she’d ground the bones that day. Let’s wash our hands, I thought. Maybe it was just my imagination, but the water that swirled down the drain did seem a tad murkier than usual.
I ordered the burger and a sweet tea, and while I waited for the sandwich, I went to the drink counter to get my tea. There’s no consensus in the South about the ideal sugar-to-tea ratio in sweet tea, and over the years I’ve found that the ratio can vary wildly, depending on who’s doing the mixing. I dispensed a small sample into the bottom of the cup, so I could see where on the scale this batch happened to fall. The tea was so thick and syrupy I could almost have eaten it with a fork. There had to be at least a five-pound bag of sugar in the five-gallon urn. One pound per gallon, I thought. It’s easy to remember, and there is a certain symmetry to the formula. To lower the risk of a sugar coma, I looked for lemon-one lemon per cup would probably be about right-but there was none. The next-best thing, I decided, would be to cut the tea with lemonade from the soda fountain. I filled the cup halfway with tea, then began adding lemonade, pausing to resample every few spurts. By the time I’d gotten to a fifty-fifty blend, I’d reined in the sweetness, but the tea flavor was now pretty dilute. Life is a series of compromises, I reminded myself.
As I snapped a lid onto the cup, I heard what I took to be low, sustained laughter behind me. I turned with a smile, looking to see who was laughing, and why. It took me a moment to realize that I’d been 180 degrees wrong about the sound. A young woman in a Hardee’s uniform was bent over one end of the cash-register counter, her face in her hands, sobbing steadily. She looked young-a girl, really, no more than twenty-and plump, and when she raised her face for a moment, something in it made me wonder if she might be mildly retarded.
I looked at the man behind the cash register, expecting to see him rush to offer aid or comfort. Instead he leaned toward the next customer in line and said, “Would you like to try a patty-melt combo today?” The customer-a man in a black suit and a white shirt, a red tie cinched tight at his throat-studied the menu board intently, then ordered a chicken fillet sandwich with large fries. It was as if the weeping woman at his elbow simply weren’t there. Another employee, a middle-aged woman, glanced at the girl, then looked away. As she turned back to the milkshake machine, the woman avoided my questioning gaze.
It was none of my business, I realized. Perhaps the girl’s coworkers had a good reason for ignoring her distress-maybe instead of stepping outside for a smoke when her break time rolled around, she hunched over the counter and sobbed twice a day. But somehow I doubted that, and I felt an answering sadness welling up within me. Moving slowly to her, I laid a hand on her shoulder. “Is there anything I can do to help you?”
After a moment she raised her head and looked at me, her face blotchy and her eyes swollen and bleak. “No,” she whispered, then dropped her face into her hands again and resumed sobbing.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Bacon cheeseburger to go,” announced the man at the register. I lifted my hand from the girl’s shoulder, picked up the bag, and returned to my truck, wondering why this world contained so much pain. Wondering why some people’s share of the pain seemed so much greater than others’. Wishing some of the surplus sweetness in that urn of tea could somehow spill over into that poor girl’s life.