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Trash Night
by Mary Callahan A moldy lemon burst through the split black garbage bag as it hit the ground. I stepped back a few feet. “Ewww, gross!” “Hey, anytime you want to trade places with me, just say the word!” My sister Ann yelled from inside the dumpster, where she was standing hip-deep in garbage. It was eleven at night and summer clung to our clothes. Linda, Ann, and I were emptying the huge restaurant dumpster. We owed money to the garbage company, and they had stopped picking up the restaurant’s trash. The three-week-old trash had turned sour, ripe with the smell of decay. Ann and Linda were older, already in high school. It was their job to shovel the trash out of the deep dumpster, while I hauled the bags to the curb, careful not to leave too many in one place. We didn’t know exactly what would happen if we got caught at our garbage re-homing; we just knew we didn’t want to get caught. Our restaurant was closing. Bankrupt, Tom said. Our fault. He said that too. Even I knew the problem: too many bills and not enough customers. Tom went daily to the local bars to drum up business. He was doing his part; all we had to do was everything else. I thought of the nights he would bring in ten drunken barflies just at closing time and let them order for free. “They’ll come back, and bring friends, you’ll see,” he said. They never did. Well, never sober, and during regular business hours. It wasn’t that the food wasn’t good. We sold homemade soup, hand-cut French fries, thick hamburgers that ran with juice at the first bite. The local fast food chains sold a dried-up piece of shoe leather for thirty cents. We were outmatched. Linda and I carried the last two bags to the curb. I would swear there were at least fifty extra bags lining the street that night. We were sweaty and tired, hair in messy ponytails and clothes so dirty I wasn’t sure they would be worth the wash. Ann’s shoes and pants would have been a total loss except she had thought to wear a garbage bag on each leg fastened with rubber bands. I thought of the time Ann had worked in the restaurant for twelve hours. Lasagna was on special that night, and she made my mom promise to save her a piece, but when a customer asked for the lasagna, it had to go. The customers came first. We gave up a lot for the restaurant. It would all pay off eventually, we thought. At the end, Mom got a night job as a hostess at a local diner to put more cash into the restaurant. That didn’t help for long. We had to sell off everything, all the appliances and fixtures, even the new Vulcan oven. All the long days sacrificed to the family restaurant for nothing. All that was left was garbage. |
Mary teaches writing at the University of Rhode Island and Rhode Island College. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Temper, Kmareka, and Newport Review.
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