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58 The Viewing Heather L. Colburn Eileen didn't much like working at Flo's. On her feet all night, running back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, answering to drunk customers who didn't want pickles on their grilled-cheese sandwiches. Then when she came to clean up she saw they had protested the pickles on the sandwiches by squirting ketchup out of the plastic bottle, leaving a huge mess all over the Formica table. She would go home after work at 5:00 in the morning and pull out the purple Rubbermaid dishpan and fill it up with hot water and Epsom salts. After she took off her white orthopedic shoes and stripped off her Barely Tan stockings, Eileen would just sit in the kitchen of her trailer without any lights on and soak her feet. Usually the phone would ring, but she usually didn't answer. She knew it'd be Roger. After being on her feet for ten hours, the last thing in the world that Eileen had patience for was talking to Roger. Roger was a guy she had met in high school. That was fifteen years ago. Once when she was sixteen he took Eileen to the drive-in. That's where she first learned to shotgun a beer. Roger had taken the key to his dad's Chevy Impala and poked a hole in the bottom of the silver-and-red beer can. Eileen had been scared she would choke, but she was afraid even more that Roger wouldn't ask her out again. So she knelt down on the gravel of the parking lot and gave Roger the go-ahead. He flipped the can over and Eileen chugged the whole beer in what next day at school everyone said was record time. Now Roger worked over at the Weirton plant, like almost everyone else Eileen had known in high school. He went out West right after graduation, saying he was never coming back. He was going to find himself a job in Denver that paid good, and he always promised he'd never forget Eileen and maybe he could even send a little something every so often. Seven months later Roger came back with his wife Linda. He was broke and took the first job he could find—night janitor at the power plant. Eileen had known Roger would be back. Almost everyone else came back too. Lucy, this girl who'd lived down at the end of the block at the corner of First and Loman, took off for Florida after she graduated from Morgan High. She sent her mamma a postcard, saying she had met some Cuban guy and they were going to get married. This Lucy never came back, but she did send her mamma a picture of her and her two kids sitting on the hood of a blue Firebird. Her mother put the picture up on the refrigerator , held there by two of the plastic pineapple magnets that Lucy got her for Christmas. Eileen was sitting there at the Formica table surrounded by her dark kitchen, thinking how her gold Pinto needed a new transmission and how she needed to start breakfast for Dale, straighten up the trailer, do the laundry, call her mother. Then the phone rang, as she knew it would. Eileen sighed deeply. "Forget about the laundry," she said to herself. 59 She picked up the receiver. "Eileen?" • Roger had started calling Eileen about three years ago. For a while they just talked, without seeing each other at all. Now they sometimes went to see the show at the King Cinema in Williamson, or Eileen would make Chex mix and they would watch TV in her trailer after Dale had gone to bed. She reached across the table for her pack of Marlboros. "What do you want, Roger?" "I just called to see how your shift was.' Roger's voice was scratchy and low. Eileen thought he was probably sitting on the toilet in the bathroom so Linda wouldn't hear him talking. "Roger, it's always the same old shit. You know that." Eileen pulled a cigarette from the half...