Hope Was Here Read online

  I KNOW SURVIVAL

  I was born early and much too small (two pounds and five ounces). For the first month of my life I kept gasping for air, like I couldn’t get the hang of breathing. I couldn’t eat either…. The doctors didn’t think I would make it. Shows what they know. My mother didn’t want the responsibility of a baby so she left me with Addie, her older sister, and went off to live her own life. I’ve seen her exactly three times since I was born—when she visited me on my fifth, eighth, and thirteenth birthdays.

  Each time she talked about being a waitress. What made a good one. What were the pitfalls; what was the biggest tip she ever got.

  Each time she told me, “Hon, leaving you with Addie was the best thing I could have done for you. You need constants in your life.” She had a different hair color each time she said it.

  Books by

  JOAN BAUER

  Backwater

  Best Foot Forward

  Hope Was Here

  Rules of the Road

  Squashed

  Stand Tall

  Sticks

  Thwonk

  JOAN BAUER

  HOPE

  WAS

  HERE

  SPEAK

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by G. P. Putnam’s Sons,

  a division of Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 2000

  Published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 2002

  This edition published by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2005

  Copyright © Joan Bauer, 2000

  All rights reserved

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Bauer, Joan, date.

  Hope was here / Joan Bauer,

  p. cm.

  Summary: When sixteen-year-old Hope and the aunt who has raised her move from Brooklyn to Mulhoney, Wisconsin, to work as waitress and cook in the Welcome Stairways diner, they become involved with the diner owner’s political campaign to oust the town’s corrupt mayor.

  [1. Diners (Restaurants)—Fiction. 2. Politics, Practical—Fiction. 3. Cancer—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B32615Ho 2000 [Fic]—dc21 00-038232 CIP AC

  Speak ISBN: 978-1-101-65787-4

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  FOR PASTOR JOANN CLARK,

  LAURA SMALLEY, AND RITA ZUIDEMA—

  MIDWIVES SURE AND TRUE

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  1

  Somehow I knew my time had come when Bambi Barnes tore her order book into little pieces, hurled it in the air like confetti, and got fired from the Rainbow Diner in Pensacola right in the middle of lunchtime rush. She’d been sobbing by the decaf urn, having accidentally spilled a bowl of navy bean soup in the lap of a man who was, as we say in the restaurant game, one taco short of a combo platter. Gib, the day manager, was screaming at her to stop crying, which made her cry all the more, which led to the firing and her stomping out the door wailing how life wasn’t fair, right in front of the hungry customers. That’s when Gib turned to me.

  “You want her job?”

  I was a bus girl at the time, which meant I cleaned off dirty tables and brought people water and silverware. I’d been salivating for years to be a waitress.

  I stood up tall. “Yes, I sure do.”

  “You going to cry on me, fall apart if something goes wrong?”

  And I saw right then if you’re going to cut the mustard in food service, you’d better know how to handle turmoil. I straightened my shoulders, did my best to look like flint.

  “I’m the toughest female you’ve ever seen,” I assured him.

  “You’re hired then. Take the counter.”

  It was my fourteenth birthday, and I took to waitressing like a hungry trucker tackles a T-bone. That job was the biggest birthday present I’d ever gotten, next to getting my name changed legally when I was twelve.

  I’ve had three waitressing jobs over the last two and a half years—slung hash from Pensacola to Brooklyn—made money that most teenagers only dream about. Brooklyn was the best place yet.

  And now I’ve got to leave.

  “You ready?” My aunt Addie asked me the question.

  We were standing by the boarded-up windows of what had once been the greatest diner in Brooklyn. The Blue Box was shut up like a tomb. You couldn’t see the green vinyl booths by the window or the big oval counter that sat in the middle of the place like the center ring in a circus. There weren’t any whiffs of stuffed pork tenderloin with apricots or country meatloaf with garlic mashed potatoes or Addie’s famous cinnamon ice cream dripping down that deep-dish apple pie of hers with crust so buttery it would bring cabdrivers to their knees in pure reverence. Anyone from Brooklyn knows cabdrivers don’t bow the knee for much.

  The sign wasn’t lit up like it had been for those sweet eighteen months that Addie had been chief cook and part owner with Gleason Beal, Slime Scourge of the Earth.

  I stood there remembering how Gleason had stolen the money from the cash register one night; how he’d cleared out the business bank account and headed off for parts unknown with Charlene the night waitress and our money. We’d limped by for a few months on what we made daily, but when the furnace died ($10,000) and the roof started leaking ($4,000) and the monthly bills came due, we were toast. Addie had to close the place down before the bill collectors did.

  Bill collectors are like cheap tippers—they always leave bad feelings behind.

  I touched the boarded-up window. I’d invented a sandwich here when I was fifteen—the Keep Hoping. It had layers of smoked turkey, sun-dried tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and chopped salad greens with red wine vinaigrette on a sourdough roll. People ordered it like mad, too, because hope is something that everyone needs. It was a sandwich for our time.

  I took out my blue pen and wrote HOPE WAS HERE in tiny letters on one of the boards. Hope is my name. Whenever I leave a place I write this real small someplace
significant just to make the statement that I’d been there and made an impact. I’ve never defaced anything—never carved it into a tree or painted it on a sidewalk or a street sign. I wrote HOPE WAS HERE in half-inch-tall letters above the rotating dessert case at the Ballyhoo Grill back in South Carolina before we moved to New York. It’s one of the ways I say good-bye to a place. I’ve had tons of practice doing that.

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  Addie squared her shoulders. “Let’s do it.”

  We walked across the street to the old Buick that was packed to the hilt with everything we owned and had a U-Haul trailer chained to the back.

  It was May 26. We were heading to Mulhoney, Wisconsin, to start work in a diner there that needed a professional manager and cook (Addie), was short on waitresses (me), and was giving us an apartment. The man we were going to work for had been diagnosed with leukemia and needed help fast. I don’t mean to sound ungenerous, but working for a close-to-dying man didn’t sound like a great career move to me. I had to leave school right before the end of my undistinguished sophomore year, too.

  I hate leaving places I love.

  We were about to get into the car just as Morty the cabdriver double-parked his Yellow taxi.

  Good old Morty. The first time I waited on him, he unloosened his belt a notch before he even looked at the menu.

  I knew I had a true believer.

  I raised my hand to a great tipper.

  “You always took care of me, kid!” He shouted this from across the street as a UPS truck started honking at him to move his cab.

  “I tried, Morty!”

  “Wherever you go, you’ll do okay. You got heart!”

  The UPS driver screamed something heartless at Morty, who screamed back, “Watch your mouth, big man in a brown truck!”

  I didn’t know what kind of customers I’d get in Wisconsin. Miriam Lahey, one of my two best friends, had given me a NEW YORK FOREVER T-shirt as a good-bye present and said solemnly, “There’s a lot of cheese where you’re going, Hope. I’m not sure how this affects people long-term. Wear this shirt and remember who you are.”

  Miriam straightened her faux-leopard vest, flipped back the five earrings dangling from her right lobe, and hugged me hard.

  We got in the car. Addie started it up. “On to greener pastures,” she said and drove the Buick forward. It groaned with the weight of the U-Haul as we headed down Atlantic Avenue, the best place I’ve ever known in my whole life.

  She grabbed my hand and gave it a squeeze.

  Addie never promised that life would be easy, but she did promise that if I hung with her the food would be good.

  * * *

  Believe me when I tell you, I know about survival.

  I was born too early and much too small (two pounds and five ounces). For the first month of my life I kept gasping for air, like I couldn’t get the hang of breathing. I couldn’t eat either; couldn’t suck a bottle. The doctors didn’t think I would make it. Shows what they know. My mother didn’t want the responsibility of a baby so she left me with Addie, her older sister, and went off to live her own life. I’ve seen her exactly three times since I was born—when she visited on my fifth, eighth, and thirteenth birthdays.

  Each time she talked about being a waitress. What made a good one (“great hands and personality”). What were the pitfalls (“crazed cooks and being on your feet all day”); what was the biggest tip she ever got ($300 from a plumber who had just won the instant lottery).

  Each time she told me, “Hon, leaving you with Addie was the best thing I could have done for you. You need constants in your life.” She had a different hair color each time she said it.

  Addie’s been my number-one constant. She stood by me in the hospital at my little oxygen tent telling me to come on and get strong. The doctors told her to give up, but giving up isn’t Addie’s way. She’d wanted a baby all her life, and after three miscarriages and her no-good husband, Malcolm, deserting her for that thin-lipped dental hygienist, I was her last chance at motherhood. So I guess I pulled through because somehow I knew Addie needed me.

  Because of this, I don’t buy into traditional roles. My favorite book when I was little had pictures of baby animals, like foxes and lambs and ducklings, who were being raised by other animals, like dogs, geese, and wolves.

  Addie said it was our story.

  But my mom, Deena, left me with two things. One I kept—her gift of waitressing; the other I threw away—the name she gave me at birth, which, I swear, was Tulip.

  How a person can look at a two-pound baby all wired up in a hospital box and think Tulip is beyond me. On my eighth birthday I asked Mom why she named me that. I remember her laughing and saying she’d seen a movie set in Holland and the actress was running through a bed of tulips as happy as could be.

  “I wanted to think of you that way,” she cooed in her breathy voice. “Happy and free. Running through tulips.”

  My good friend Lourdes, who has her own name challenge, said it could have been worse; that movie actress could have been running through a field of poison ivy or snapdragons. It took me twelve years to break free of the curse—kids teasing me, shuddering when the teacher called on me in class. By the time I was fourteen I’d been to six different schools and lived in five states, because although Addie was a great cook, the restaurants she worked for kept going belly-up. I know firsthand about change and adaptability. But Tulip is not a name you adapt to, so on my twelfth birthday Addie let me change it legally. She made me think hard about what I wanted to be called, got a book of names with their definitions that we pored through. And when we came to Hope, I knew I’d found it. I think hope is just about the best thing a person can have.

  Addie said I had to think doubly hard about a name like Hope because it’s a lot to live up to. People expect things from Hopes that they don’t expect from Pattys and Lisas and Danielles. People expect Hopes to be cheerful and positive. So I wrote out the name on a three-by-five card and carried it around with me for a month—HOPE YANCEY. At the end of the month Addie asked, “You think you’re up to carrying that name?”

  I said I was.

  “Okay, Hope Yancey, let’s make it official.”

  I got all dressed up, and Addie and I took the bus to the courthouse in downtown St. Louis, where we were living at the time. The clerk who processed my papers at the courthouse said if anyone deserved the name Hope, it was me. I made her hopeful just standing there.

  I wasn’t feeling too hopeful at the moment.

  Addie was flying on the interstate to Wisconsin, the land of lactose.

  I stared out the window as the Buick roared west to whatever.

  2

  We’d been driving for hours. Addie was talking in stressed-out blurts.

  “Got to find a sausage wholesaler who knows the power of bratwurst.

  “Got to move in fast with the butterscotch cream pie, then introduce the flank steak.”

  I looked in the backseat of the Buick, piled with the cardboard cartons of my life. When you move a lot, you have a few things you bring with you that have stood the test of time: I’ve got my Webster’s dictionary, because words are important. I’ve got my Roget’s thesaurus, because sometimes finding the right word requires assistance. I’ve got my Replogle globe, because you’ve got to keep a world view, you can’t just live like you’re the only person on the planet who matters. I’ve got my eleven scrapbooks of most of the places I’ve lived, complete with photographs and all my significant comments about people, places, and food. Addie says it’s easy to go to a new place and feel like you don’t have a history, so you have to lug your history around with you or it’s too easy to forget.

  I’ll tell you why I keep my scrapbooks. It’s in case my real father shows up. I never met him, don’t even know his name. My mother says she doesn’t know who he is either. You’d think she’d try to zero in on an important thing like that. But to tell the truth, I’m not sure she’s being honest. I’ve got th
is feeling that my dad’s out there searching for me. When he bursts through the door and tells me he’s spent a fortune on detectives who’ve been looking all over the world for me, I’m not going to sit there like a dumb cluck when he asks me what I’ve been doing. I’m going to yank out my eleven scrapbooks filled with my experiences and innermost thoughts on life lived in three time zones in America.

  I was a Girl Scout for three months when we lived in Atlanta. I couldn’t get those square knots down for anything, but I got the big concept.

  Be prepared.

  Addie always told me, “It’s more important to get the big concept than be an expert in the small stuff.”

  Here’s the big concept I was thinking about today. I don’t expect life to be easy. It hasn’t been yet and I’m not holding out for smooth sailing in the future. Not everyone likes this philosophy, but it makes sense to me because when life hits the skids, I don’t have to regroup as much as the people who walk around in a cloud like the world owes them a joyful existence.

  Harrison Beckworth-McCoy, my best male friend at school, always said that was the thing he liked most about me. He had given me a good-bye present, and I was opening it now as Addie pushed the Buick through Ohio. Inside the box was a small glass prism that caught the sun. A hand-printed note from Harrison read, “New places always help us look at life differently. I will miss you, but won’t lose you.”

  Harrison was always saying sensitive things like that, which put him instantly on Jocelyn Lindstrom’s male sensitivity chart. He was the only male either of us knew who had made the chart consistently over twelve months. Donald Raspigi, who occasionally said sensitive things like “Nice sweater,” had been on twice.

  Enter memories, sweet and sour.

  Harrison and me baking enormous mocha chip cookies for the high school bake sale and having them stolen on the Lexington Avenue subway.

  Harrison’s African fighting fish, Luther, who ate Chef Boyardee Ravioli without chewing.

  Harrison reading my mother’s photocopied annual Christmas letter that she sent to family and friends—“Dear Friends …” (She’d cross out “Friends” and write in “Addie and my little Tulip.”) Harrison commenting that motherhood should be like driving a car—you should have to pass a test before you get to do it legally.