who had been a bar pilot for thirty years and now sat on the end stool every day from six until the pinochle game started at the Moose Lodge, had said, "Ten percent where? Not here. Here it's twenty," and nobody had argued with him.
The other thing on the Zenith that week was Tylenol. Some lunatic in Chicago had put cyanide in the capsules and seven people were dead, and every station was showing the same footage of men in white coats pulling bottles off drugstore shelves. That's the kind of fall it was. You couldn't trust a headache pill, there was no football because the players had gone on strike, and the jukebox, which Toivo had bought used from a tavern in Seaside in 1971 and which still took a quarter for three songs, played "Jack and Diane" so many times a day that Toivo had threatened to pull the record and nail it to the wall.
I mention all that so you'll understand what the money was like. I was thirty-nine years old. I had a daughter, Jodie, who was seventeen and a senior at Astoria High, and a son, Petey, who was ten and needed braces in the way that a house needs a roof, which is to say the dentist had used the word eventually in a tone that meant soon. My husband, Keith, had been my ex-husband since 1975 and was supposed to send two hundred dollars a month from Kodiak, where he worked on a crabber, and sometimes he did. I rented the bottom half of a house in Uniontown, up the hill from the bridge approach, for two hundred and ten a month, from an old Finnish widow named Mrs. Lahti who lived upstairs. My car was a 1973 Pinto wagon with a heater that worked only when it wanted to. I made a dollar and seventy-five an hour plus tips, and the tips in October 1982 were the kind of tips you got from men who were afraid of their own mailboxes. A good day was twenty dollars. That Tuesday I'd made six dollars and forty cents by ten o'clock, and two of those dollars were Eino's, who tipped me the same two dollars every day because he said it was cheaper than a wife.
So I wasn't flush. I want that clear, because later on Irja made a story out of what I did, and in her story I was some kind of saint with a pocketful of change, and I wasn't. I was a tired woman with a stack of bills under the sugar canister at home and one thing on my mind besides money, and that thing was my daughter.
Jodie had been going with a boy named Darrell Tolan since July. He wasn't a boy, exactly. He was twenty-two, and he'd been laid off from a gyppo logging outfit up the Lewis and Clark River in the spring, and he drove a 1972 Chevelle the color of a ripe