"I know there's a line." He did not lower the bill. "I'm asking you to skip it. That's what the five is for." And then, louder, so that the bakery woman and the van owner and Mrs. Prochazka could all hear: "Come on. Your family's going to need every dollar you can scrub up. Might as well start with a real car."
It was not the worst thing anyone had ever said to me. I had heard worse on the bus. It was the way he said it, in that clean country club voice, with my mother's shoes in it, and the folded five held out flat between his fingers. I stood there on the wet gravel with the brush dripping down my wrist, and I could not think of a single word in the English language.
Dennis could.
I had not seen him come down off the van. One second he was on the roof and the next he was standing beside me, barefoot on the gravel, his jeans rolled up and his T-shirt soaked dark down the front, a sponge still in his hand. He set the sponge down on the hood of the Fairmont, very carefully, the way you set down a cup of coffee that's too full.
"Back off, man," Dennis said.
He said it quietly. That was the thing everybody got wrong later, when the story went around Elyria and grew in the telling. He did not yell. He said it the way you would say it to a dog getting too close to the road.
Win looked at him. Win had a choice in that second, and I have since come to believe that he knew it was a choice, and that he made the wrong one on purpose, because the right one would have cost him something he could not afford to lose in front of the line of cars.
He got out of the Corvette.
He shut the door behind him with a soft fiberglass thunk, and he stood up to Dennis, which meant looking up, because Dennis had four inches and fifty pounds on him, and he said, "Or what, Okonski? Your dad's going to get laid off at me?"
I don't know what Dennis would have done if Win had only said that. I have thought about it. Dennis's father had been put on short weeks in March. Dennis did not talk about it. I think he might have let it go.
But Win did not stop there. Win flicked the folded five-dollar bill at my chest. It bounced off my wet shirt and fell onto the gravel, into the stream of hose water, and floated a few inches toward the drain, and Win said, to me, not to Dennis, "Pick it up, Haydu. It's more than your old man sends home."