“But all I got—”

He pats his pockets.

“I don’t have—”

Defeat tugs his sights down to the gummy vinyl flooring. What could he tell the birthday boy?

Those sad green eyes give a flicker, as if filling with understanding. Maybe she sees it in him, too. Recognizes a fellow less-than. The tip of her tongue runs over a chapped lower lip, swabbing it into a grin. “Tell you what.”

He bends over the counter, closing in as if for a secret.

“Yeah?”

“If all’s you got is cash, we’ll call it sixty even,” she says. “A deposit sort of thing.”

He slaps down his third and final twenty onto the counter like a winning poker hand. She collects it with all the ceremony of a high school janitor.

“So I’ll get that twenty back when we—when I check out, then, right?”

No answer. She is occupied. Engrossed in the demanding task of counting cash—one, two, three, yes, it’s all there, sweetheart. Did she really not hear him or what?

“You working the graveyard shift, ma’am—miss? That’s fine because I got to be heading out at seven sharp myself. Will you still be here? Or will you let the next person on know about our little arrangement here?”

The TV pulls a gray chuckle out of her. He offers up a nervous laugh, too, trying to remind her he’s right in front of her, and has asked her a question that needs an answer, and now. She taps the three bills flush.

“Done misspoke,” she says.

“Okay? As in?”

“As in not so much a deposit.” She sets the bills in the desk drawer. Turns a key. “More like a service charge.”

$230.62

As much as Papa claimed to appreciate irony, this would have been beyond him. Henry could never tell Papa that he owed his first job—and now his first paycheck—to one of the skinnies.

For whatever reason, despite having a good decade or so on Henry, Al had taken a liking to him way before this shelf-stocking gig. They met in a parking lot, the social gathering point of all towns like theirs. That first night, Al’s rosy cheeks had flushed even ruddier when his hand met Henry’s. He slapped away the tenner Henry offered to get in on the night’s shards. It was his treat, dude. From then on out, it seemed Al derived a big-brother satisfaction in dosing Henry up with booze and drugs, dragging him along to house parties and motel-room benders like some rescue mutt Al had trained to snort lines and recite grimy jokes.