Mr. Dick trusted no one. He believed John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and the Pope belonged to a secret organization conspiring to rule the world. He also believed that all his employees were thieves bent on eating his inventory, which was sometimes true but not as true as Mr. Dick believed. Once one of my co-workers saw him in the parking lot across the street spying on us through binoculars. The very week I started working at the place, Mr. Dick hauled three of his workers off to take polygraph tests. I don’t know if that was legal or not, but in those days kids our age pretty much went along with everything adults said.

I knew about the tests because Gary, the assistant manager (a forty-year-old guy with chronic, maybe terminal, dandruff), showed me the actual test results from the lie detector machine with its accompanying graph. The interrogator asked questions like: Have you ever stolen money from the till? (No spike on the report.) Have you given away free food? (Small spike.) Do you eat French fries without paying for them? (The spike went off the chart.)

After the inquiry, one of my co-workers never returned; I still imagine him languishing in a gulag somewhere. Of course the shakedown was meant as intimidation for the rest of us and it worked reasonably well. So, for the most part, we rarely ate on the job, even the mistakes, like when someone ordered a hamburger with no ketchup and we put ketchup on it anyway. At least not without looking over our shoulder a few times before wolfing it down.

What made Mr. Dick’s actions more ridiculous was that we were paid like sixty cents an hour. I later discovered that Mr. Dick hired kids because minimum wage laws didn’t apply. He eventually got in trouble when someone turned him in for making us pay our matching Social Security payments.

CHAPTER Four

Junior High School is the armpit of life.

GRACE’S DIARY

It’s been said that parents should give their children roots and wings. That was a perfect description of my parents. Even in a wheelchair, my father was a dreamer with his head in the clouds and my mother was the roots with both feet planted firmly on terra quaking firma. My mother was always afraid. Afraid we didn’t have enough money, afraid her health would give out, afraid something might happen to one of us. Pretty much afraid of life. When my father got sick I think it was for her vindication that the gods really were out to get us.

Shortly after our arrival in Utah, my mother got a day job working as a cashier at Warshaw’s Food and Drug. Her job didn’t pay much, but she brought home damaged canned goods and day-olds from the bakery, which helped with the grocery bills. For years I thought that all soup cans came with dents in them.