The Tip Jar With Grandma’s Name

My uncle Rick wanted it. Rick is Grandma’s oldest boy, fifty-five years old, and he had spent thirty years working for other people at the refinery and the rail yard. He had always said he wanted something of his own.

He borrowed against his house. The bank carried the rest on a note, and the note came due on the first of every month, four thousand one hundred dollars, whether the drivers stopped or not.

I was proud of him at first. We all were. Grandma cried the day he got the keys.

She said she never thought she would see the day one of her boys owned the place she had worked her whole life.

Then summer ended, and the tourists stopped coming through on their way to the parks, and the diesel price went up, and fewer drivers stopped. Rick started looking gray around the mouth.

In August he called a meeting of the staff in the dining room.

There were four of them: Grandma, the cook, a part-time girl who quit two weeks later, and a high school boy who washed dishes after school.

He told them the place was family now. He said everybody would pull together.

And then he said that from now on, the tips would go in the till, because the tips were money the business made, and the business needed every dollar to survive the winter.

Half Her Pay

Grandma’s tips ran about a hundred and fifty dollars a week. The drivers are good tippers, most of them, and they always have been for her. Her paycheck from Rick came to about the same.

So when he started sweeping her tips into the till, he took half of what my seventy-six-year-old grandmother made for standing on her feet from six in the morning until one in the afternoon.

She did not tell me. Of course she did not tell me.

I found out from the cook, who caught me in the parking lot one Saturday in September and said, Callie, somebody needs to know about this, and it is not going to be me who tells your uncle.

I went home and I looked it up on the computer that afternoon. An owner keeping a waitress’s tips is against the law.

It is not a gray area. The state labor office has a number you can call, and I wrote it down on the back of an envelope.

The next afternoon, a Sunday, I drove out to Grandma’s house after church.

She lives in the same little white house on the east edge of town she has lived in since 1971, with the clothesline in back and the chokecherry bush by the steps.

We sat on her porch in the sun with our coats on.

She had made a pot of coffee, because she always makes a pot of coffee, even on her day off, even after forty-seven years of pouring it for other people.

I told her I knew. I told her about the labor office and the number on the envelope.