GREAT BLUE

      It all started with black olives, the bogus kind, the ones that look like patent leather and taste worse. They were the first thing we agreed on, this new male possibility and me. We agreed that we hated them and we wondered why, in a desert city where streets were lined with shining olive tree after tree and sidewalks were greasy with the crushed fruit, you could rarely find the real thing, the wrinkled ones that taste of garlic and pepper, and the craft of the one who picked and put them up.

      The bogus babies were everywhere, in pizzas, in salads and even on the freebie bonne bouches we served at Coyote, the nouveau Southwestern restaurant the new man and I worked at. Coyote was predictably turquoise and beige and red rock pastels. A long-tailed neon coyote howled over the bar, snout pointed up, moon left to the imagination of those who might have one. Which, as the new man Ben saw it, our customers did not.

      “Rich punks, Mollie,” Ben said to me on his fifth day with us. “I hate ‘em and I hate myself for hating ‘em.” He had a Masters in Biomedical Engineering and a brain courtesy bad genetics aided by anything you could chug or smoke. At Coyote he washed dishes and I, his equal in genes and bad choices, arranged carved vegetables on the saguaro-shaped dishes the waiters hustled out to the R.P.s—and we gossipped.

      Ben was a gossip champ. He had wit and malice honed wicked as the edge on the sous-chefette’s pet knife. Felice was five feet nothing, about thirty inches around her most abundant parts and she loved Roy Orbison immoderately, rest his soul. We were treated all hours to Mr. O’s sweet ’n sour reminders of all the graveyard loving we’d ever done. Most times, somebody was huddled off in a corner sobbing into their apron. Felice would turn up the volume and check out my creations.

      Ben’s fifth night with us, I’d finished setting up a plate of jicama, poblano peppers and pickled carrots carved into suns, moons and lizards.

      “Mollie,” Felice said, “those are regular little art darlings. You’re wasted here.”

      Ben snickered.

      Felice glared at him. “You’re always wasted.”

      “Not too wasted,” he drawled, “to remind you again to get rid of the fake olives. Talk to Stu. He’ll listen to you.” Stu was the maitred, who in fact didn’t listen to anybody. “Tell him I’ll pick and put up our house brand. They grow everywhere. They won’t cost us a penny.” His eyes went snakey, his voice alluring. “Come on, Felice, I’ve got a truck. I like to steal. Mollie can help, right?”

      I nodded. I hadn’t had a date in a while. And the guy needed a pom pom girl.

      “Yeah,” he said, “the Midnight Gypsy Olive Company. My truck, my buddy here and my old man’s recipe. A sure winner.”

      Felice patted him on the butt and told him the boss was rich but dense and wouldn’t go for it. “Besides,” she said, “if you want to run goodies so bad, why don’t you just truck on down to your old pals in Meheeco and bring us back a little surprise. I’ll front the money.”

      “No way,” he mumbled. And that was that.

      I couldn’t figure out why Ben was so obsessed with those olives. He wasn’t some organic hippie fossil and he didn’t seem the type to drop a thirteen-dollar jar of sun-dried tomatoes in his shopping cart. He was an ordinary looking guy about forty, tall, sweet-skinny and ginger-haired, presentable enough to get by anywhere. Only if you looked close or knew the routine could you tell that his sharp jeans and shirts came from Catholic Charities, his spit-shined cowboy boots from Goodwill.

      I was starting to love the way he talked—and I really loved the way he listened. We both loved books. I’d watch him on his break, sitting in the shadow of the fake adobe wall, smoking a joint and reading. That was when he looked most happy. Otherwise, his happiness seemed stretched thin. Sometimes when he got really loaded, he’d stand over the sink, moving slow, talking about rats and lethal dosage. He’d swear they do shock monkeys, they do squirt hairspray in those poor rabbits’ eyes.

      By that point, it was usually past closing. I’d turn from cleaning and he’d be head down on his arms on the baker’s table. I’d finish up, turn out the lights and throw his jacket over his shoulders. By morning, when I came to set up, he’d be gone.

      Around Lent, the customers thinned out. Ben guessed that with religion being back in style, they were doing penance for the tubs of ganache they inhaled the rest of the year. “Shit,” he said, “why bitch about R.P.s? If they’ll eat those plastic olives, they’ll swallow anything.” He was three bowls to the wind, up to his elbows in greasy suds, his fine broad shoulders moving with the work and driving me crazy. He had on his favorite Goodwill shirt. It was polyester, with blue-green flowers on lime paisley and about a hundred pearly-bronze snaps to set off its Western cut. The sweetest part was that somebody had made it for somebody else who’d loved it so much that the collar and cuffs were frayed clear through.

      “Now, rich punks,” I said, “would never appreciate that shirt. Just you and me and Tessa and Duane. We’re the only ones who love that shirt.”

      “That Tessa,” he said, “putting all that work into this shirt, after graveyard shift at the diner and getting the kids off to school—and Duane not even her real hubby.”

      He’d begun the Tessa/Duane story almost as soon as he and I started talking. He’d