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together in a hot little one bedroom trailer house that baked in the August sun.
I stuck my fork into a sausage, causing the platter to wobble and rattle on the table. I tried to be more careful, not wanting to draw attention to myself, but it rattled some more. I looked up and the waitress was grinning at me.
“Looks like you got the warped platter, Paul.”
“As usual,” I said, as I stuck a napkin under its corner.
I finished my breakfast and sleepily stared through the café listening, for the umpteenth time, to a popular country song called, “These Hands.” The words haunted me, “Lord above hear my plea, when it's time to judge me, take a look at these hard working hands.” I looked at my young, smooth dishwater hands with a freshly healed cut from a broken glass in the dish water. I thought of myself as a hard-working man who had just finished a night’s labor.
Would I someday be an old man trying to get into heaven on the weight of my hard working hands?
The waitress came back, sat across from me and chatted for a while. When she got up she asked, “you want anything else?”
Since I wasn’t old enough to buy cigarettes I asked, “How about a pack of Luckys?”
She took my thirty-five cents and returned with the cigarettes. “See ya tomorrow,” she said.
I left and walked down Broadway. It was already getting hot. The short fat cop was a few blocks down the street with his trustee, emptying pennies from
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