A Love Letter to Kay
grief, death, bitter old ladies, and crying in a Pizza Hut uniform.
The summer of 2020 was a grimey, disillusioned period of inebriated mourning. It was by far the worst season of my life - my mother had died a year before, and grief was still busy gnawing at my bloodied ankles. In that grief I had acquired an HIV diagnosis and a steady diet of coffee, menthols, and weed, and I had become insufferably anorexic. I began working at one of those tacky little paint-it-yourself ceramic shops where seniors would bring their grandchildren to violate overpriced coffee mugs. I brought paint to their tables and chipped it off the floor after they left. Occasionally, I would tend to children’s birthday parties with a grinding hangover and an empty stomach, slipping out to suck down cigarettes when I could. My boss was a mousey christian woman with a chestnut bob that resembled a jockey’s helmet, who was understandably put off by my general demeanor. Other than myself, she staffed the store with perky little teenage bible thumpers. They all had names like Hayleigh and Kara. They had shiny blonde hair and they were going to Tech next year. They drove cute little white cars and smelled like Flowerbomb, and their best friends were all getting married. They were so busy on weekends.
Then there was Kay. She was a shriveled old thing, frown lines permantly etched into her jowls like cracks in black asphalt. I’m convinced she was delivered from the womb scowling silently at the obstetrician rather than crying. Perhaps she laid in her crib, that frown already cemented in place, scoffing at her mother’s ill-fitting blouses and chintzy home decor. She was devoutly Christian in the sense that everybody was going to Hell for everything, which likely included herself. I think she found the idea of Paradise chintzy too. We didn’t speak to eachother at first - we really had no business doing so. We went about our duties in the store, avoiding interactions with the customers, staff, and eachother as often as possible. I disliked her simply because I disliked her grandaughter (who we also worked with,) and I knew she disliked me by the way she eyed my tattoos as if they were exposed genitalia.
Months into the pandemic, Texas state officials finally began enforcing the closure of non-essential businesses. The other girls simply stripped off their aprons and went home to their two story McMansions, while Kay and I stayed behind in desperate need of our shitty little paychecks. I was living in a friend’s guest room on a tight time crunch to scrounge up the funds for my own apartment, and her social security checks didn’t do much more than pay for gasoline. Kristen, our boss, graciously allowed us to oversee preparations for the store’s remodeling so that we could continue to eat. This meant that the two of us - a retiree with a handicap tag on her rearview and an anorexic nineteen year old - would be moving all of the stock to the back room, dismantling all of the shelves, and scrubbing the entire store from top to bottom. Kristen came by once or twice the first week, and then stopped showing up altogether. Seeing Kay hobbling to and fro lugging boxes around on swollen ankles may have been too depressing for her cheery sensibilities.
The first few days we labored mostly in silence. However, since I was always tired and hungry and she was always sore, we eventually found ourselves sitting together over our diet sodas instead of working. We got to talking and found that we shared many mutual dissatisfactions. As it turned out, she didn’t like her grandaughter all that much either. Retirement was a let down and she didn’t enjoy idle time nearly as much as she thought she would, but she couldn’t work enough to forgo her monthly checks. Her joints creaked and her fingers burned and she couldn’t see a damn thing with her glasses, but God forbid she gave anymore money to that damned optometrist, did I know how much they charged for new lenses nowadays? I found her complaining strangely endearing, her bitterness sympathetic. Often times I found myself laughing; she swore like a truck driver when she got herself going long enough. I had grown tired of condolences around my plethora of life changing problems, and I imagine she’d grown tired of being the pittied old crone as well. I didn’t pretend to feel awful for her, or turn my head to the side and raise my brows upward in mocking sadness. I would chuckle and nod and say “God, that is a bitch,” and she’d agree and sip her coke.
She’d lost her daughter to cancer about ten years prior. This, in her retelling, is what turned her grandaughter into such a selfish little bitch. I told her about losing my mother to suicide, and she clicked her teeth and shook her head. “What a way to go. Losing them in a hospital bed is almost easier - at least we all saw it coming.” She would stare out at the road and watch the cars pile into traffic when our talks veered into these mournful territories. I would tell her about my mother’s erratic behavior and the cheesy poetry I discovered in her old steamer trunk and say, “In hindsight, I probably could’ve seen it coming if I wasn’t a dumbass kid” and she would laugh again. The thing we both understood, the most constant thing about grief and mourning, was that it slid on a curved scale from gut wrenching to comical. Death tastes like morning breath and tonsil stones, and it coats the wallpaper in a greasy yellow sheen. It feels like being permanently stuck in the first half of a Claritin commercial, when everything is gray and stuffy - and that can be kind of funny.
People make the best jokes from hollowed cheeks in a hospital gown, and write the stupidest shit in their suicide notes. Cousins make ludicrous speeches at funerals, and start the most asinine drunken arguments at the wake. Can you believe she requested that song to be played? it’s just like her. Everybody spills their most tantalizing secrets at those gatherings, the belly of a ten foot catfish carved open to spill out license plates, rubber duckies, ball gags and bobbleheads. Knots in shoulders and lower backs all melt under the gravitational pull of the freshly dug grave, and Kay and I had never quite stepped away from peering over the edge. All of the pretense melts away, and maybe we just didn’t want it back. We didn’t just talk about death and pain and sadness, of course. We both had plenty to say about our coworkers and their naivety, and their shared tendencies to babble on about themselves. We were both jointly irritated by the yuppie Californians moving into town and their poorly mannered children dirtying the tables. We may have even liked a few of the same things, but those conversations were not nearly as long or as interesting.
I don’t really know how Kay felt about me. perhaps she only remembers me as the miscreant little punk with the tattooed arm and the dead mom. But after those few weeks together were over, I missed her. I got a new job at a retail store that I would only a few months later be fired from, and I continued to wonder about her from time to time. My coworkers were young and vibrant again, and I got back into the habit of smiling and not talking about sad things. I continued to neglect eating for a while after that, until I found myself facing the aforementioned firing due to my shitty attitude towards one too many customers. Anorexia and customer service do not work well together. I finally ended up as a pizza boy in a boonies town with a population of five thousand. There was one stoplight and only the main roads were well paved, the rest made up of either potholes or gravel. The allure of greasy pizza (for free) became too much to resist, and I started to eat again. My coworkers were haggard deplorables, and the environment freely allowed screaming matches and parking lot arguments.
I had free reign to manage myself and my job as I saw fit, as I was the only one willing to work the day shift. One of the other drivers, a mid-forties pervert with a tendency to hit on young women, needed frequent straightening out. I would chase him out of the store and tell him if the girl from the Subway next store showed me one more text from him that I’d smash his headlights. The acne riddled shift lead kept swapping out money in the till for counterfeits covered in Russian text. I told her if she fucked with my tips again I would put her purse through the dish washer. A customer once got in her car and followed me back to the store on my bumper, so I smoked a cigarette in front of her car and watched as she called corporate. Corporate did not answer. My behavior was as haggard as the rest of them, but it was cathartic, and it was mutualy understood. Between the releases of pent up anger, I found a lot of peace in that nowhere town as well. The unpaved roads were quiet and breezy, flocked with firewheels and creaking oaks. There were cows in pastures and dogs that chased me behind the fences. I’d occasionally bring breadsticks for the donkey up off Hawkeye, who only creeped me out at night.
I met my boyfriend and began my transition at that job, growing my hair out and eventually turning to sports bras to conceal my puffy, oddly shaped breasts as they came in. The line cooks noticed but didn’t comment, as I had laid a groundwork of being explosively tough when my buttons were pushed. That was simply the way handled ourselves there, and it kept the peace. I began to think of Kay again. I thought about how, had she been able to reliably drive on country roads, she’d be a great fit for our crew. I wondered if she was still alive. Up to that point, I’d been going by the first initial of my deadname, but I eventually decided Kay would fit me better than anything. I don’t know what she was like in her youth - we never really got around to that part of her story. Perhaps she too used to be sweet smelling and bouncy and blonde, and never had anything bad to say to anyone. Maybe she was always potty mouthed and cranky, and she would’ve enjoyed yelling at dirty middle-aged men on the tarmac with me. Maybe her and I would’ve actually liked things together.
That job drove my car into the ground. My alignment was permanently fucked, my brakes ran raw, my AC was out for two of the three summers I spent there, and I racked up a total of 240,000 miles on the spedometer. Surprisingly, I was still able to push it another year and a half before it caught on fire off of exit 470, and a little longer after that before the engine cracked. It’s the most expensive job I’ve ever worked, but I would still do it today if I could. The pay was shit but the tips were decent, and I enjoyed the hot, angry kitchen and the friendly regulars I fed. At the very least it beats retail. Truth be told, I don’t know exactly why I took Kay’s name as mine. I do think that she deserved more than the hand she was dealt. Despite all of our shared grievances, I still had my youth. I had time to scream it all out and move on, but neither of us were sure how many chapters she had left. Her estimate would have certainly been conservative if asked.
I wish I could have taken her with me. It felt so freeing to act like rotten cowboys with the guys at the pizza place, cussing eachother up and down and and airing out all of our frustration. I think she would’ve blown up, and maybe that would’ve led to crying and then laughing and then some kind of relief at the end. The estradiol helped me cry more than anything, and I’d sob in the car as I drove from house to house, and sob in the parking lot and the bathroom. It was painful and warm and tingly, and so foreign to me before that time. I wondered if Kay ever cried when she was alone, but she didn’t seem like the type. She’d call it chintzy. She’d most definitely groan if she knew I thought of her this way, as it betrayed the code of our daily talks. I couldn’t ignore, though, that I had grown beyond our sullen annoyance. I worried that in all her life before we met, she had never gotten further than that.
If Kay is still alive, I hope she’s taken the time to scream at someone or something deserving until her bones rattled, until her throat ran dry. I hope she’s sat in her driver’s seat and sobbed uncontrollably. I hope she’s enjoyed a long drive in the country, and listened to her favorite song and enjoyed a moment without any bitterness. And if none of that happened, I hope she’s looking down - or maybe up - at me, and she sees that I think about her. I hope it doesn’t irritate the shit out of her or make her wrinkle her nose in embarassment. I hope that somewhere, Kay is moving past it with me.
