Blacks working the ovens. The characters in the story are all based on people I knew. Someone asked me which character in the collection I most related to. I said it was Corky, the drug addict grill chef. Peter Ustinov really did come into a restaurant where I was working in Washington.
Nothing evokes memory like smell.
I remembered the summer after eighth grade when my brother painted my parents house to pay for a lawyer after he d been arrested for drugs. When he finished painting, he went to jail. It was a painful time. I was lonely and felt no one would understand how I was feeling. I felt responsible for myself.