I swallowed. “Are you serious?”

Paul looked over my shoulder. “You could get, like, cheeseburger disease from eating this. I can’t talk to you anymore. They might figure out what I’m telling you. Just don’t eat this, Dad. I don’t want you to fucking die on me.” He paused a moment. “I think the fries are okay, though. They’re actually pretty good.”

He turned to go back to his post and this time I grabbed his arm. “Wait a second. Are you telling me, all these people here, they’re eating potentially contaminated food?”

Paul shrugged. “Yeah, they are. But they’re not my dad.”

“Paul, cheeseburg-hamburger disease can kill people. It’s that E. coli virus or whatever. You can’t mess around with that. If these people are eating this stuff, they’ve got to be told. Has anyone been sick yet?”

“Some guy came in a while ago, said he got a bad burger at lunch, felt like he was gonna puke. He talked to Conan over there,” he nodded toward the woman on the register, “and she practically threw him out the door. She’s a fucking linebacker.”

I swallowed hard. My mouth was starting to feel very dry. Paul could see that I was pondering what to do.

“What?” he said. “What are you thinking?”

There was an elderly couple at one table, cutting a burger in half with a plastic knife. At the next table, a guy who looked like some sort of city worker, orange vest and jeans, hard hat on the seat next to him, chowing down on a double burger. And then, two tables over from him, a mother with two small children. She was unwrapping the foil covering on burgers for each of them.

“Kids,” I said, to myself as much as to Paul.

He looked around. “What?” he said.

“Kids can die,” I said. “They can die from hamburger disease. It can cause kidney failure.”

Paul’s eyes were getting wild with panic. “Jesus, Dad, what are you going to do?”

I was feeling pretty panicked myself. What, exactly, was I planning to do?

And then I just acted, without even thinking. I took a few steps over to the mother feeding her kids, bent down, and said to her quietly, “Don’t give them that.”

She looked at me, pulled back in surprise. “Excuse me?”

Paul, behind me, said, “Dad, what the hell are you-”

“The burgers,” I said, ignoring him. “Don’t let them eat the burgers. They had a power failure here. There might be a risk of E. coli and-”

“Oh my God,” she said, reaching across the table and grabbing the burgers out of her children’s hands.

“Mouuum!” one whimpered angrily.

The guy in the orange vest turned around, looked at me. “What did you say?”

“I just, I heard, the burgers, they may not be safe to eat,” I whispered urgently.

“Fuck,” he said.

The mother whirled around. “Do you mind?” She nodded toward her small children.

The guy in the vest turned around and tapped the older woman, the one sharing a burger with her elderly husband, and whispered something to her. He pointed at me, and when the woman caught my eye, I nodded.

“Dad,” Paul said.

“Thank you so much for telling me,” the mother said. “We come here all the time, although the kids usually want to go to McDonald’s for a Happy Meal and-”

“Dad,” Paul said.

“You see,” I told her, “my son just got a job here, and he was telling me that-”

“Dad,” Paul said.

Finally I turned around. The woman from behind the register was standing there, glowering at me.

“What you saying?” she asked. I noticed that, hanging from her right arm, was a baseball bat.

“What’s wrong, Ma?” asked the twin who’d put the toppings on my burger.

I tried to remain calm, nonconfrontational. “I had heard, I understand that your freezer went out. For several hours.” Tried not to make it sound like an accusation, more like a statement of fact.

“What you know about my freezer?”

“It’s just that, if the meat had been thawed for some time, there’s a risk that it could be contaminated. And I understand there’s already been one man who’d eaten here at lunch-”

She raised the bat. “Where you hear this?” She turned those black eyes on Paul. “You tell him this?”

Paul’s voice squeaked. “This is my dad.”

Eyes back to me. “You get out.” She brought up the bat, ready to swing, just as her two daughters started coming around the counter.

“I’ll have to call the health department,” I said, trying to stand my ground but knowing I was a moment away from bolting.

“Go ahead and fucking call them,” said the twin. “See what happens, Mr. Big Asshole.”

There wasn’t anyone in the restaurant who couldn’t hear what was going on. No one was eating. People were getting up, leaving their unfinished burgers on their trays, not bothering to dump them into the trash.

Ma’s eyes bored into mine. “You go or I smash your fucking head in.” And then, to Paul, “You, you fired.”

He peeled off his hat, untied his apron, and tossed them over the back of a swivel chair. We both backed our way out and said nothing to each other until we were safely in the car and driving down the street. Blood was pounding in my ears.

“Way to go, Dad,” Paul said. “You just lost me my first job.”

Eldon wasn’t like the others. The others, well, they were like her father. Pigs, basically. Always with the jokes. Tit jokes. Ass jokes. Any kind of sex joke. You’re a stripper, people can say whatever they want to you. Even if you’re not a whore, you’re a whore. Grabbing your butt when they walked by, pressing themselves up against you at the bar, all hard under their jeans, even when you’re back in your regular clothes. What did she expect, exactly? The place was run by a bunch of biker types. You wanted a bunch of gentlemen? Go work someplace else, lady.

Eldon, he was one of them, but he wasn’t one of them. Didn’t even have an actual motorcycle. Had this old Toyota, the guys made jokes about him. He always treated Miranda, eighteen now, like a lady. Thought her name was Candace, though. He was the only one called her that. Everyone else called her Candy. Let’s have a lick of Candy, they said. I’d love to eat Candy, they said.

So dumb, she thought, coming up with a name like that. Thought it sounded like a good name for a stripper when she applied for the job. Stupid.

But Eldon, he called her Candace, talked to her like a person. Asked what she wanted to do with her life, like he knew she was destined for something better than wrapping herself around a pole for a bunch of horny drunks.

“I like numbers,” she said. “Maybe, like, something financial. Planning, or accounting, doing people’s books for them. I look around here, they’re wasting so much money. They could be saving a lot.”

“No shit?” he said.

“They have a course, at the college?” she said. “I’m going to see if I can take it, learn more stuff. I don’t like the dancing.”

“Yeah, you’re good though. You bring the people in.”

“They’d come in and watch anyone does what I do.”

“You should do what you want to do. You’re smart. No offense, but you’re too smart to be up there doing that, you know?”

She told him that Gary, the guy who ran the Kickstart, he kept pushing her to work upstairs, where lots of the other dancers made extra money on their backs, or their knees.

“That’s not right, him pushing you like that,” Eldon said. “Not right at all.”

He had a nice smile. Not huge. Just the corners of his mouth coming up, like he wasn’t just smiling, but he was thinking about why he was smiling. He did odd jobs for Gary, dope runs up from the city, upkeep on the Kickstart. The heavy-duty stuff, like when someone from the other gang in town started cutting in on your territory, and you had to go out and teach somebody a lesson, beat the shit out of somebody, blow up a car, that kind of thing, Eldon gave that a pass. Let Zane do it. Or Eldridge. They were fucking crazy. They were made for that kind of work.