The Night Moths

The Ninth Amelia St. John drifted into the garden as the church bell chimed twelve. She wore one of those white cotton nightgowns you see in the sixty-and-up catalogs and her feet were bare. The Eighth Amelia St. John had planted only white flowers in the little fenced-in plot behind the house. Snapdragons and Montauk daisies and silver dollars and white roses that never failed to make the Ninth Amelia nervous, as if they were the remaining curse of a long dead queen. But they were the most beautiful flowers in the garden and she was drawn nightly to their siren song, kneeling as if in offering and head bowing to the remainder of the night.

She reached the fence. Down the long hill was the town. At this time of night only one building was illuminated and that was The End Diner. The Ninth Amelia gripped the weather-beaten slats and around her white night moths silently fluttered, landing on the yellow silverdust flowers. From this far away the waitresses at The End were the moths, wearing white and glowing with a muted bioluminescence, moving with the same fluttery grace. If you could zoom into that window and focus, you’d see nametags declaring ROSE or DONNA in label-maker tape pinned over ample breasts and moss green eyeshadow. But here, high above The End, the white moths fluttered toward the singular porch light while mustard-colored pollen sparkled from their legs in the runny moonlight and the gray dot on the hindwing was a little eye that never blinked.

Behind her the garden gate creaked and reflected in the Green Man mirror on a shepherd’s hook was the current Sparrow named Desiree, or Dez. The Ninth Amelia watched in the mirror as Dez removed the brown waitress’s apron. There was no sound of coins tinkling in that apron and that was the difference between the Ninth Amelia’s days at the End Diner and now: digital currency. In her day almost no one even used the credit card machines.

“You ready?” The Ninth Amelia asked.

“Yeah. Everything hurts,” Dez replied and the sound of a lighter, the suck of wind and the smell of thin cigar smoke followed the words.

“Help me dig, would you? My arthritis is terrible today. There’s room over there. By the Lunaria. Not under them, but on the far side closest to the fence.”

Dez chuckled. “My grandmother used to call them silver dollars.”

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The highways are the arteries of the United States of America, and the country roads are the veins. On July 28^th, 1980, The Ninth Amelia St. John, whose real name was Sally, ditched the post office-less, one-cop mountain town where she was born. Her name forever after to those left behind was Runaway Sally. She had another name change in her future but no one, not even Sally, knew that on the day she skipped town in the cab of a northbound eighteen-wheeler.

She waited tables only at small joints with fast turnover where the cash dropped in crumpled bills smelled of unwashed dungarees. Runaway Sally, ambition radiating from invisible antennae, focused on honing her talents. She could carry four dinner plates at once: two in left hand, one balanced on left forearm and the fourth in the right hand.

Her real power wasn’t in the technical skills to sling hash around the clock but in her innate ability to subtly shift her personality based on the customer. If you occupied a counter seat and had sharp ears, you picked up the subtle voice adjustments for each new table. Runaway Sally expertly knew what comments would enhance her tip money. It was a talent snatched from just above the halo that doesn’t have a name. By the time her reputation as that Nice Waitress grew, she was already on the road to the next place.

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July of 1990. Four weeks prior the road had deposited Runaway Sally at a diner on the Jersey Shore and she worked the 12-hour dinner-plus-graveyard shift. Dinnertime was terrorized by a professional clown the owner hired as entertainment. The kids were either utterly delighted or scared shitless of the clown and clung to masculine peach tank tops as they hid under their father’s sunburned arms, armpit hair over their heads, hoping those white grease-faced demons would squeak out a balloon animal far away.

By nine p.m. these soup-salad-dinner-desert-special people finished their rice puddings while the clown slunk back to his gold Ford Turino, tossing deflated balloons, a hand pump and smiley face stickers into the polluted back seat before tucking the pay envelope in the visor. Then the quiet hours ensued before the bars yelled their last calls. Around 2:05 a.m. the drunks swarmed through the glass doors drenched in Jekyll and Hyde intoxicated splendor that was a weird simulation of the dinner kid/clown dynamic only without the outside agitator. These night patrons were either ready to brawl over a wrong cooked egg or emptying their wallets in tip money. They devoured bowls of french fries with mozzarella cheese and brown gravy and cups of the special Clam Chowder that the menu touted as homemade but really sprang from gigantic cans of Campbell’s that winked starlight in the back dumpster. The cops strode in and the rowdiness was peeled back a few decibels while the officers ate turkey club sandwiches and called the other soup of the day “barley puke.”

By four a.m. the booths were covered in crumbs and the cigarette haze ghosted into the air conditioning vents and before the cooks performed the final grill-scrape ritual, they flipped bacon and eggs as a peace offering for referring to the waitresses as mentally and physically slow, although the waitresses didn’t apologize for retaliating by hurling little butter packets through the kitchen window and brandishing a butcher knife when the fights got heated.

Dawn broke dusty rose and the white lines in the parking lot brightened. The silently surly bread delivery guy struggled and dropped boxes of corn muffins because he was full of hatred and that racket outside was the garbage truck as it hitched to the dumpster and collected all those clinking clam chowder cans for their journey to a Bayonne landfill. In unison the streetlights extinguished as the big boat fluke fishermen, their forearms tattooed with marlins and names like Phil in antique script and carrying empty thermoses yearning for black coffee, banged in and slapped on the counter a mix of bills and coins that added up $3.65, no matter what they ordered.

But it was during one of those quiet hours before the official start of the graveyard shift that a customer, alone and a little drunk from happy hour but eating a short stack that in his mind would absorb the alcohol in his stomach like a magic sponge, asked Runaway Sally if she could be any animal, what would it be?

A sparrow, she answered while pouring coffee and never spilling a drop.

Yeah? He said around a mouthful of pancake and cheap maple syrup. Not a tiger? Not a dragon?

Dragons are imaginary. And people cage tigers. No one bothers a sparrow. And she swished away while the guy slurped his coffee, her answer already forgotten.

Sally walked to the back counter area where a lone stool was pushed in the corner next to an amber glass ashtray that was never clean. A waitress named Amelia perched on the stool, her long legs crossed over white orthopedic sneakers and her chignoned silver hair sprayed with enough Aqua Net to create a second hole in the ozone layer. Her brows were drawn in with black pencil over black lashed blue eyes and it wasn’t hard to see that at one time she had been quite beautiful, like an Elizabeth Taylor with no prospects.

Amelia held her cigarette between her middle and ring finger. No one smoked like that.

“What about a butterfly?” She asked through exhaled smoke.

“People pin butterflies behind glass.” Sally leaned against the counter and felt the blood swoosh through her throbbing soles.

Amelia nodded. “Been watching you.”

“Yeah? I’m not doing a good job?”

“You’ll wait tables for the next twenty years. But that’s alright. That’s as it should be for girls like us.”

Runaway Sally, who had spent the last ten years waitressing, was appalled. “I’m going to school someday. Not doing this forever.”

“There’s a better way,” Amelia went on as if she hadn’t heard. “There’s a diner up in New England. On the water. The End, it’s called. For girls like us. You just pay into the kitty and you’re golden.” She smashed the butt into the ashtray. This was starting to sound like a recruitment to sell make-up.

“And when I pay into this mysterious kitty, I get what exactly?” She smiled. Her lipstick was cranberry.

“Your life.” The word fell into the sudden silence of the restaurant. The cooks behind them bickered in Spanish while par-cooking fried chicken for the graveyard shift. The easy listening music suddenly stopped and the disc jockey, who went by Uncle Leo, teased the Labor Day weekend sea food, kites and chili festivals.

“You got nothing,” Amelia went on. “No bank account. Living in the apartment over this joint. Cash stuffed in the hole in the mattress but the dishwasher knows about that hole so one day very soon your dough will be gone and so will he. You’ll drift and the varicose veins pop one by one on your nice young legs and your left biceps grows much bigger than your right but that hand cramps from scooping ice cream. Soon you can’t hook up with the cops in the back storeroom anymore because the cops get younger and you don’t because time’s a bear trap. But there’s a better way. When we work together, there’s a better way.”

Sally gripped the counter. The front doorbell dinged. The drunks were here.

“Show me,” Sally said.

“We leave tomorrow.”

The first time Sally saw the house, she was overcome by a fugue state of recognition, what her childhood girlfriends squealed as déjà vu when experiencing a mental repeat. On a night off from the Jersey diner she had wandered into a movie theater where Cher was on screen in a 1960s dress and teased black hair. In this movie, Cher lived in a cottage by the ocean in New England and right then Sally knew that’s the only thing she would ever want. The house she and Amelia hiked up a long dirt road to get to was just like that house up on a cliff with the wild ocean far below to the east, and town to the west. The walkway’s bricks had weathered and to ward off unwanted guests someone had left a paper wasp nest dripping from a Japanese maple like a grandfather’s nose polyp.

A frail old woman opened the door and introduced herself as Amelia St. John and beckoned them to the backyard. Sally thought that it had to be Amelia’s mother, but there was no resemblance between the two women. And wouldn’t she have said they were going to visit her mother?

The old woman said, “We’ll do the papers first. The new set is on the kitchen table. Mind the renewal dates.”

Newly planted flowers dotted the little garden behind the house. In the middle was a small fire pit with flames poking heavenward. The waitress Amelia reached into her purse and pulled out a paperclipped packet of papers. “Hold this a second,” she said, further digging into the purse. Sally looked down. On top of the stack was a New Jersey driver’s license. The name was BEVERLY BRONSON and the photo was of the woman standing next to her.

She opened her mouth to ask but Amelia grabbed the stack and tossed them onto the fire. The flames licked the driver’s license and the stink of burning plastic rose. She turned another item over in her hand. It was a baby bracelet with the name BEVERLY in pink beads. She threw it onto the fire.

The three women watched it burn for a moment longer when the old woman raised her hand from under her skirt. There was a little silver pistol in it. She handed it to the elder waitress. “Plant the Lunaria tonight, when the sun goes down,” the old woman said. “They like to be reborn into the night.” When no one answered she said impatiently, “The silver dollar plants!” Then she turned to Sally and smiled. “I’ve got Lou Gehrig’s, you know. I waited on him when he was a young turk. Good looking man. Tipped well. Although he could’ve kept his disease to himself.” She shuffled to a large, rectangular hole on the right side of the garden. She half turned and her eyes swept the garden and finally landed on the house. “I loved it here,” she whispered and fell to her knees, gripping the fresh dirt with her fingers. Sally’s heart began the slow thumping of terror as the old woman maneuvered her body to lay in the hole, her white nightgown speckled brown.

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When it was over and they sat on the back porch swing, smoking. Sally said, “What if you’re not sick?”

“It’s whatever you wish. The Third passed away peacefully from old age. The Fourth held her hand.”

Sally shook her head. “But you’re Amelia St. John.”

“We’re all Amelia St. John,” the Eighth Amelia St. John replied.

Runaway Sally never went back to Jersey, but she worked the roadside diners for the next twenty years, paying into the kitty.

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“You talk to the Sparrow, down there at the End?” The Ninth Amelia said to Dez.

“Yeah. All good.”

She wondered about the Sparrow. Shouldn’t call her Sparrow. She’s a night moth. Like the rest of us.

“I don’t want to do this,” Dez started. Her eyes were black in the moonlight.

“I’ve had a good life. The best one, as a matter of fact. I got everything I ever wanted. How many people down there,” she gestured toward town, “can say the same?”

“Zero.”

In the years between it becoming her turn and the cancer that finally got her, she had been happy. The seasons passed in painful beauty and after all the years of hustling she had been able to experience each hour in a monk-like ecstasy, becoming one with the time and tide.

“They wait for no one,” she said aloud.

“What was that?”

“Nothing. Burn the papers. It’s time to become the Tenth.”

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