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around the café early in the morning eating and sobering up. Who wants to join the Air Force and spend the whole time in Moses Lake? The army would send me to basic training in California, and everyone I knew thought California was the place to go.
On the far side of the lake I turned on to Stratford Road. It was getting hotter and the loose gravel was hard to walk on. My dreams faded as heat and fatigue brought me back to the task of walking home. The combination of working all night and sleeping in the daytime left me perpetually fatigued.
A few weeks earlier Bill had approached me and asked, “How would you like to earn some money?”
“Doing what?”
“We need a graveyard dishwasher at the café. It pays union wages,” he said enthusiastically, trying to make it sound like a real good job.
“Okay, I’ll do it,” I agreed. That night at midnight I started my first real job, a job with a weekly paycheck. I felt important. But, now I was tired of it. I felt like a zombie. Trudging through the heat I told myself,
I’m quitting. I can’t work when school starts, anyway.
I reached highway 11-G and crossed over into Black’s Addition, a community of cheap houses, trailer houses, diseased Dutch Elm trees and lots of dogs. When I got home Mom and Bill were there. I announced my decision to quit working.
Bill said, “Can you come in Saturday and wash windows?”
I said, “yes” and that was all there was to it.
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