Lisa Thornton
The High Plateau
My grandfather tosses chopped onion and green pepper into a pan. He squirts soy sauce and vinegar and drops in a spoonful of chili paste. His fast-moving hands add some other stuff, too. Stuff I don’t know the names of. He’ll only let me flip the burgers even though I’m one quarter Chinese.
The ash of his Chesterfield is longer than the non-smoked part. His lips are strong, and he holds the cigarette straight out with the strength of them, so the long stick of grey ash appears to be defying gravity by not falling into the vegetables. Every minute or two, he grasps the cigarette carefully between his right thumb and forefinger and taps it into a sixth pan. A line of butts stains the countertop beside him. By closing time, there will be twenty or thirty.
My grandfather didn’t say anything when I flunked out of the University of Wyoming. He didn’t say he was ashamed or anything like that. Just offered me a job back home in the restaurant, which was maybe worse. When the disc of raw meat that is the American burger option on our menu begins to turn grey, I flip it. I slide the long-handled metal spatula under the patty and toss it onto its other side. I check the dangling slip of paper to see whether to add cheese from a large block that I often scrape white flakes off of before the dinner shift because cheese only goes on this one item, so we don’t order it very often from the Sysco guy.
I wipe down the booth that me and my friends crushed into after school. Before graduation. Grandfather used to bring us a plate of shumai and let us fill our Pepsis however many times we wanted from the pop machine. The lady on the kicking-you-out-of-college committee said I wasn’t ready. She said I needed more time. Like a patty that’s still pink. I’ve got time now. I sleep until late afternoon and then ride my bike to the restaurant. Grandfather is already there, every day but Monday when we’re closed, smoking in the mop closet where he shoehorned a desk and then piled it with receipts and restaurant supply catalogues, ashtrays, and slips of carbon copy paper. He doesn’t look at the clock when I arrive through the back door and lean my bike against the walk-in cooler. He’s never asked me what next.
Last night, a guy who works on the train with my stepdad ordered take-out. He asked Grandfather at the cash register what I was doing back in town. Grandfather clenched his cigarette between his lips. My stepdad says I can get a job on the train tomorrow. He says the pay is good even at the start and I’ll be taken care of for life. Davis’s wife needed two kidneys, and she had the whole thing covered by Union Pacific, he says. Both surgeries. He always adds that last detail. My stepdad doesn’t know how to make Chinese food, either. He came here from Mexico in the seventies to work the oil fields. He’s never told me why he switched to the train, but my theory is he was too skinny to hold his own out there.
There’s only desert between our house and the restaurant. Sometimes a white-tailed deer in the yard. This is not the Yellowstone postcard part of Wyoming. It’s the Flying J Travel Plaza off I80 part. The dry part. The state pen part. The white rocks on the side of a hill arranged in the shape of a cowboy riding a bucking bronco part. The antelope bones bleaching in the dirt part. But once, riding to work, I saw a golden eagle swoop down low in the direction where I used to go camping with the guys before we left for UW, south by Battle Creek. It stretched its sharp talons in front of itself and used its wings like a parachute behind it to brake a bit, snatched a ground squirrel, and then coasted out of sight. I never saw that in Laramie.
The guy ordering take-out has his young daughter standing beside him with two pigtails and yellow leggings on. She orders an egg roll and a cup of wonton soup. I secure the plastic lid on the soup cup and run my thumb along the rim so it won’t slip off. There was always something about wonton soup to me when I was her age. The dumpling floating there where it doesn’t belong. Made better somehow by being in the soup. Better than a whole plate of wontons outside of soup. A joyful surprise. How funny to find you here, I used to think as I pushed down on the floating dumpling with my spoon. How delightful.
Lisa Thornton is a writer and nurse. She has stories in SmokeLong Quarterly, New World Writing, Cincinnati Review, and other magazines. She has been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award and the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize. Her work has been nominated for the Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Illinois and can be found on Bluesky and Instagram @thorntonforreal.
