Fay
Fay was at the counter shelling peas into a colander when we came in. The kitchen window was open and the box fan in it was pushing warm air around the room.
Kenzie went straight upstairs to shower. I heard the water start. Then I went over and stood next to my wife.
“Rusty takes her tips,” I said. “Every night. I watched him do it.”
Fay’s hands stopped. She held a pod halfway open, and three peas rolled out onto the counter. She did not pick them up.
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“He what?”
I told her. The bank bag, the bucket, the quarters rattling. I told her that Kenzie figured close to six hundred dollars. I told her Kenzie had not looked up.
Fay set the pod down. She wiped her hands on the dish towel, slowly, one finger at a time, the way her mother used to do. I have been married to her for twenty-two years, and I know that is what she does when she is trying not to cry.
“He’s been struggling,” she said finally. “Since the new automatic went in out on the highway. A friend at the bank told me he’s behind on the note. He’s been carrying that place on his back for eleven years.”
“I know it,” I said.
“That doesn’t make it right.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
She looked at me. “What are you going to do, Lowell?”
That was the question. I could have called the state labor office about the wages. I could have driven back over there that minute and walked into his office and had it out with him. I could have told him what I thought of a grown man emptying a child’s tip bucket into a bank bag. I could have said it loud enough for the whole street.
And then what? Fay would be stuck between her daughter and her brother at every Thanksgiving and every Christmas and every birthday for the rest of her life. Their mother is eighty-one and lives in the nursing home on the west side of town. She asks after Rusty every Sunday. She would hear about it by Tuesday.
A fight with Rusty would cost Fay more than it would ever cost him. That is the plain truth of it.
“I’m going to get her out of there,” I said. “Quiet. And I’m going to find her something that’s hers.”
Fay picked up the three peas off the counter and dropped them in the colander. “All right,” she said. “But don’t you shame him, Lowell. He’s still my brother.”
“I won’t shame him,” I said. “I won’t have to.”