Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [34]
“But I made a lot more than that,” I told her.
“Honey, the tax people don’t need to know that.” Her voice was patient. “Then when you’re in the pot, just report your share. That way we all report the same amount. They expect that.”
“Yeah, they don’t know nothing about initiative,” Mabel added, rolling her hips in illustration of her point. It made her heavy bosom move dramatically, and I remembered times I’d seen her do that at the counter. It made me feel even more embarrassed and angry.
When we were alone I asked Mama if she didn’t think Mr. Aubrey knew that everyone’s reports on their tips were faked.
“He doesn’t say what he knows,” she replied, “and I don’t imagine he’s got a reason to care.”
I dropped the subject and started the next week guessing on my tips.
Salesmen and truckers were always a high guess. Women who came with a group were low, while women alone were usually a fair twenty-five cents on a light lunch—if you were polite and brought them their coffee first. It was 1966, after all, and a hamburger was sixty-five cents. Tourists were more difficult. I learned that noisy kids meant a small tip, which seemed the highest injustice. Maybe it was a kind of defensive arrogance that made the parents of those kids leave so little, as if they were saying, “Just because little Kevin gave you a headache and poured ketchup on the floor doesn’t mean I owe you anything.”
Early-morning tourists who asked first for tomato juice, lemon, and coffee were a bonus. They were almost surely leaving the Jamaica Inn just up the road, which had a terrible restaurant but served the strongest drinks in the county. If you talked softly you never got less than a dollar, and sometimes for nothing more than juice, coffee, and aspirin.
I picked it up. In three weeks I started to really catch on and started making sucker bets like the old man who ordered egg salad. Before I even carried the water glass over, I snapped out my counter rag, turned all the way around, and said, “Five.” Then as I turned to the stove and the rack of menus, I mouthed, “Dollars.”
Mama frowned while Mabel rolled her shoulders and said, “An’t we growing up fast!”
I just smiled my heartbreaker’s smile and got the man his sandwich. When he left I snapped that five-dollar bill loudly five times before I put it in my apron pocket. “My mama didn’t raise no fool,” I told the other women, who laughed and slapped my behind like they were glad to see me cutting up.
But Mama took me with her on her break. We walked up toward the Winn Dixie where she could get her cigarettes cheaper than in the drugstore.
“How’d you know?” she asked.
“ ’Cause that’s what he always leaves,” I told her.
“What do you mean, always?”
“Every Thursday evening when I close up.” I said it knowing she was going to be angry.
“He leaves you a five-dollar bill every Thursday night?” Her voice sounded strange, not angry exactly but not at all pleased either.
“Always,” I said, and I added, “And he pretty much always has egg salad.”
Mama stopped to light her last cigarette. Then she just stood there for a moment, breathing deeply around the Pall Mall, and watching me while my face got redder and redder.
“You think you can get along without it?” she asked finally.
“Why?” I asked her. “I don’t think he’s going to stop.”
“Because,” she said, dropping the cigarette and walking on, “you’re not working any more Thursday nights.”
On Sundays the counter didn’t open until after church at one o’clock. But at one sharp, we started serving those big gravy lunches and went right on till four. People would come in prepared to sit and eat big—coffee, salad, country-fried steak with potatoes and gravy, or ham with red-eye gravy and carrots and peas. You’d also get a side of hogshead biscuits and a choice of three pies for dessert.
Tips were as choice as the pies, but Sunday had its trials. Too often, some tight-browed couple would come in at two o’clock and order breakfast—fried eggs and hash browns. When you told them we didn’t serve breakfast on Sundays, they’d get angry.
“Look, girl,