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His struggle with his expectations of himself and the imagined expectations of his father had looked physically painful, especially when surrounded by baby furniture that was all supposed to be about joy. She could feel sorry for him, and even have to restrain herself from smacking him, but she couldn’t blame him.
She moistened her finger on the little sponge next to the register and began to count the money in the till—something else to do so she didn’t think about Karl and his inner-little-boy struggles with his grown-up self. The register made satisfying crunching noises as the Z-tape printed out. Her brain must make similar noises when she thought about her situation and how easy it would be to pack her bags and move into Karl’s apartment to play family. He cared for her; Vivian didn’t doubt that. He would be faithful and honest. Frustrations or not, they were friends. It would be so easy to believe that was enough.
When he kissed her, she believed it was enough.
She looked down at the money in her hand and sighed. She’d lost count. It would have to be recounted—this time with actual attention paid to it. The longer she spent counting the money, the further away her bed got. She restacked the bills and started over. Then began the long process of checking credit card receipts against the record in the till. And checks from the few old Poles whom Susan still allowed to pay with a check.
Healthy Food was full of traditions—things that were “just the way they were when Pawel’s mother was still alive,” to quote the old-timers. Grandfathering in people who could pay with a check—a privilege that was not passed down to children—was cute and homey. An ancient cash register that had to be repaired every two weeks and an old dial-up credit card machine were not. Vivian would love one of those fancy systems with the credit card slot attached to the monitor. Then there would be only one receipt for the customer to take and one receipt for her to count.
Vivian had suggested the idea to Susan once. Her mother-in-law’s response had been a halfhearted “I’ll think about it” followed by “people love to chat while we ring them up. Would a faster system make them think they had to hurry along?” And that was the rub of having a restaurant passed down from Milek to Milek. Modernizing anything was too easily seen as an affront to tradition. Some people still complained about the new, clear sneeze guards over the food, even though it was incomprehensible to Vivian that people could prefer the green light the old sneeze guards had cast on their mashed potatoes.
Being in Susan’s position when the waitress uniforms finally disintegrated into rags would be terrifying. But also an awesome challenge.
The first week or so Vivian had worked the register at Healthy Food, someone had counted the register a second time. Not out of suspicion, but to make sure she’d done it right. It hadn’t taken long for Edward and Susan to realize that Vivian was never wrong in her count. She hadn’t counted money in her years of dealing, but she’d counted almost everything else. Now Vivian prepared the deposit with no one looking over her shoulder, a new feeling of trust after years under the 360-degree cameras. Fate had an ironic sense of humor.
Her chores for the night done, Vivian set the register so it would be ready for the morning, packed the deposit away in the safe and helped out until Susan was ready to go home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
KARL SAT AT one of the big round tables with the one old man too feeble and the two teenagers too cool to dance at the wedding reception. He was neither, but—he looked out over the conga line snaking around the dance floor—the abandonment everyone else seemed comfortable with just wasn’t his thing. He could walk around the room, talk with people and otherwise be social—but no dancing. The thought of a conga line made him shudder in horror.
Vivian’s exuberance made it difficult for her to hang on to the person in front of her, but she laughed every time her hands slipped off Chuck Biadala’s shirt and he turned back to admonish her for not keeping up. She’d not known a single person from the neighborhood the first time she’d sat at Healthy Food’s register and started ringing up customers. She’d been a stranger—an outsider—and not just because she wasn’t Polish. She wasn’t from Chicago, she hadn’t gone to Mass or Catholic school with these people and she was suspicious of sweet cheese pierogies, but her smiles and kindness had integrated her with the neighborhood. Now, when he walked around Archer Heights with his wife, she seemed to know more people than he did.
