Page 73 - WTP Vol. X #7

confronted me about it.
“Have you been fudging his timecard?”
“No. The guy called in sick; I’m not lying to you.”
“He called you?”
“Yeah.”
He looked me in the eye sadly, like he’d never had to say something like this before.
“He gets one more chance.”
I nodded.
I wasn’t sure what I’d do if I had to track Tony down on Friday, but thankfully he was out of money, so he came in with the shirt on and everything.
“You can’t cash your check at the liquor store,” I told him. “They might see that. Go to Russ’s.”
“Okay,” he said, hungover as all hell. “I showed up, thought, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, you did. But you’ve been flaking all week. I can’t cover for you. Can’t you see I’m standing up for you here?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Don’t worry, Pops. I just celebrated a bit. I’ll make you proud.”
And he did. The next Friday, he got paid and still came to work the next day. It went on like that for two more weeks; he didn’t even take days off. I had to tell him to stop showing up Saturdays and Sundays because we couldn’t afford to pay him overtime, and Tony offered to take off Tuesday and Wednesday since he wanted to be there to help the old folks gas up on the way to church. Paul was long gone by then, on to some other town where they were turning some other small business into the same old nonsense with the same stupid 2-for-1 deal on Red Bulls.
Patty was proud of me, because she thought I was doing it to give Tony a leg up. At dinner one night, she said she kept running into people from church who were saying nice things about me.
“Mrs. Foster—you know her, right?”
“The old lady in the green house. Of course I do.”
(continued on next page)
"M
a straw worth fighting over. He didn’t have to tell Tony to get out because some giant corporation was worried
it would look bad if a guy who had nothing asked for change in the only spot he could get enough change to survive which happened to be on property that was theirs because they were rich and the rest of us were not. "
aybe that wasn’t the
last straw, but it was
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