You Only Get Letters from Jail Read Online Free Page B

her home on Thursday and by Saturday she was out on the lot wearing a pair of cutoffs with the front pockets hanging under the ragged bottoms like rabbit ears. They were short, and when she got hot, she took the bottom of her T-shirt and pulled it up toward the neckline, tucked it under, and pulled it through so the shirt turned into a bikini top with sleeves, and when she was bent over working soap on the tires, there were cars that honked as they turned the corner, not a lot, but quite a few. My dad brought me into the office to file. My job was to wash the cars. He paid me five bucks a car on Saturdays to wash the week’s dust off every one, shine the chrome, try to divert the customer’s eyes to the glare of the sun off the clean hood and not the ding in the fender or the rust on the bumper.
    â€œHow much are you gonna pay me to file?” I asked. “This isn’t five bucks a car.”
    My dad took out his comb and slicked his hair back off his forehead. When he was working he kept it greased up and shiny, but he was on day three of a beard that made him look tired and rough.
    â€œI’ll pay you five bucks an hour,” he said.
    â€œFive bucks an hour! I can’t earn any money on that.” Most Saturdays I could walk with sixty bucks in half a day. If I put in four hours filing I’d get twenty. “Washing cars is my job. Why can’t she file and I go out there on the lot?”
    â€œBecause she’s good for business,” he said. As he finished his sentence a car came around the corner and honked. She raised up from the yellow bucket and waved a soapy hand toward the driver and he honked again, longer than necessary.
    â€œHow much are you paying her?” I asked.
    Darlene Mason looked up from a stack of finance slips. “Twenty a car.” She looked back down, licked her thumb, and started counting the pink papers again.
    â€œTwenty a car?”
    â€œShe’s good for business,” my dad said, and he checked his hair in the round mirror that hung on the wall beside the door and then he pulled the office door open and stepped out on the lot.
    â€œTwenty a car?” I said to Darlene.
    She didn’t look up. She just picked her cigarette out of the ashtray, took a drag, and went back to adding.
    My dad was Big Ed, or Fast Eddie, or just Ed, depending on the commercial. He ran several of them on the local channels—Ed Harvey’s Used Cars. If you can dream it, youcan drive it . He had made a lot of money when I was a kid, and then new cars got less expensive and used cars just seemed cheap and his inventory started gathering dust. He moved a few cars every week, especially if he put on the gorilla suit and did the commercial where the girl in the bikini was stretched out across the hood of the Vette, holding up a sign that said “Make Me An Offer.” The girl was Darlene Mason and she was pretty several years ago, I guess, and in the pictures on her desk she was beautiful, but she’d had a couple of kids and everything looked loose in the yellow bikini now, and something had happened to her balance, because she had a hard time holding her position on the hood.
    It was June and one o’clock and hotter than hell and there was no way I was going to file a bunch of carbon copies in folders that didn’t have any titles that made sense. I didn’t have my book with me, just my backpack and nothing in it except my best friend Ronnie’s story he’d written about Superman killing a hooker. I had started reading Salinger, but switched to Kafka when my algebra teacher made a crack about me and Holden Caulfield being “two peas in a pod,” and I couldn’t go back to reading the book after that—not because I was mad about the comparison but because I hate the saying “two peas in a pod” and I knew that every time Holden made a decision I would hear that overrated algebra teacher and his comment. Or maybe