, I had trouble summoning the courage to discuss or object to the increasing demands She made. And I knew that if I told my mother how unhappy I was she would tell me to quit.Then one day, alone in the kitchen with my father, I let drop a few whines about the job.
*sits cup of coffee down*
“Listen. You don’t live there. You live here. With your people. Go to work. Get your money. And come on home.”
Little by little, I got better at cleaning Her house—good enough to be given more to do, much more. I was ordered to carry bookcases upstairs and, once, to move a piano from one side of a room to the other.
She began to offer me her clothes, for a price.
I started working at Pizza Hut in December 1989, when I was a freshman in high school. Having a job also kept me out of the house.
On my first night, the dishes piled up after the dinner rush: plates, silverware, cups and oily black deep-dish pans, which came clean only with a lot of soap and scrubbing in steaming-hot water. I couldn’t keep up, and stacks of dishes formed on all sides of me. Every time I made a dent in the pile, the call came back for help clearing tables out front, and I returned with brown tubs full of more dirty dishes.
I asked Jeff when I could do something different. “Do you know why you’re still doing dishes?” he asked. “Because you keep complaining about it.” Nobody likes to work with a complainer, he said. But, he promised, if I continued to leave a clean station and not complain, next week he would put me on the “make table,” where pizzas were assembled before being put into the oven.
I reported for my after-school shift, I saw my name penciled not in the “dishes” box but in the “make table” box. I was ecstatic.