Part 3 — Booth Six Bench
Inez lowered her cane and patted the vinyl seat beside her. She had been sitting on it every morning for thirty years.
“Lift the cushion, Bonnie. Gary thinks nobody checks the hollow.”
The whole diner was silent. A man at the counter stood up to see.
The cushion of booth six came away in my hands. Beneath it was a plywood box, hinged at the back, and inside it, stacked in four coffee cans, were rubber-banded stacks of twenties and fifties.
Inez counted it right there, twice, because she always counts twice. Forty-one thousand, two hundred fifty-six dollars, to the dollar.
Gary took one step toward the booth, and the cook Luis, who had said let it go, quietly stood in front of the grill with a spatula and did not move.
“Gary, I did your books,” Inez said, “and I knew it was a pool that never paid out. I thought you were saving it for a rainy day. I did not know you were saving it from the people who earned it.”
An eighty-eight-year-old woman had been sitting on the answer every morning over her oatmeal, and she turned out to be the only person in that room Gary could not out-talk.
The Nevada Labor Commissioner came on Monday morning. The office confirmed that tips belong to the workers and that an owner who keeps them must repay them with penalties. Inez signed a statement and asked for a copy for herself.
The money was divided by a clerk with a clipboard, and Inez was proud to see that it went by shifts and hours, not by Garys opinion. Every waitress and busboy who had worked there for three years got a check.
Inez also did something nobody expected. The diner was in her name, as it turned out, and Gary had only been running it. She made him an hourly manager with a signed agreement, and she took over the books.
My knee had been replaced at the hospital in Elko forty-one days before. They gave me a new brace and a chair at the front, and I came back on a Wednesday to a clean section and a brand new pair of orthopedic shoes sitting on the counter, with a card from the crew.
Luis took the apron from my hands and tied it on me himself.
At seven that morning I sat down in booth six, on the seat that had held a fortune. Inez pushed over a bowl of oatmeal with extra brown sugar.
“Sit, Bonnie,” she said. “Your feet are not on the clock.”