They parked near a diner and went in. It was fairly full, but they found a couple of stools near the end. When the waitress had come, taken the order and gone again, Skip began to toy with a pencil on a paper napkin. He muttered to Eddie, “I’ll bet it’s at least fifty grand.” He wrote it out on the napkin: $50,000.00, and Eddie broke into a sweat. They were right in the open, under lights, next to other people. He grabbed the napkin and shoved it in his pocket and Skip laughed.

“What’s the matter, Eddie?”

“Well, that just wasn’t smart.”

“Who says?”

“I do.” But Eddie didn’t back it up with a glance at Skip; he fiddled with the coin receiver for the juke box, reading the array of record titles, finally dropping in a dime for a tune.

“You got a complaint? You want to run this show?”

“It’s still your show,” Eddie said stiffly.

Skip stared for another moment and then his mood underwent one of its quick causeless changes. He stuffed the pencil into his coat pocket and slumped on the stool, bracing his head with his hand. “Oh, what the hell.” He began to watch an old man working behind the counter, cleaning off the dirty dishes into a big tin tray. The man was about sixty, going to fat, had watery eyes and almost no hair, wore a white tee shirt and a white duck apron. His big arms were pocked with scars and a network of broken veins. “See him? You know what? In a few years that’s you and me, Eddie old boy. Restaurant swampers. Or dishwashers. If we’re lucky. If we aren’t lucky we’ll be hobos, freezing in rags in a culvert.”

Eddie felt cornered. “Ah, don’t start singing the blues for Chrissakes.”

But Skip slumped lower, his eyes dull. “Figure it out. I’m twenty-two. You’re almost as old. Who’re we trying to fool, going to night school, me taking typing and bookkeeping and you studying metalwork. Who’s going to hire us when we finish?”

Eddie looked at him. “We could get a break.”

“Who from? Some personnel manager? Some cluck too dumb to want to know what we’ve been doing up to now?”