Baby Talk

Annie opened her mouth. For a second, nothing came out. “Who is it?”

“Building maintenance. Here to take care of the rodent problem.”

“Oh,” Annie said, relieved. She almost laughed. Now that she was leaving, the manager had finally decided to do something about the mice.

“Can you come back later?” Annie paused, then added, “In an hour or so?” She took satisfaction in knowing that Neal would be home then—maybe the man would fill the apartment with noxious fumes and it would smell awful. Maybe an entire army of dying mice would come crawling out of the woodwork—that would serve Neal right.

“I’ll be back later,” the man said, sounding a little miffed. Annie sat still as she listened to him walk away.

She scribbled off the rest of her short and not-quite-truthful note to Neal, promising herself that she would call him when she got to Chattanooga and explain in more detail. As bad a husband and father as he was, he at least deserved that much.

* * *

Neal’s few moments of self-righteous supremacy at Snell’s Flowers were short-lived. When Mildred handed him his final paycheck—the first and only Snell paycheck he would ever receive—Neal at first thought she had made a clerical error. The amount was quite a bit less than he expected. When he questioned her about this, she went over the math with him and he realized, with quite a shock, that he was being paid less than minimum wage. A dollar an hour less, to be exact.

He stormed back into old man Snell’s office, or at least pushed his way in as forcefully as a man can do with a bad foot and an aching shoulder.

“What is this crap?” Neal said, tossing the check on the old man’s desk.

Snell merely glanced it. “What’s the problem now, son?”

“You’re trying to pay me less than minimum wage, that’s what.”

“So?”

Neal was almost beside himself with anger. “It’s illegal!”

“No,” Snell said smugly. “Not for part-time employees, it’s not.”

Neal was confused. “What the hell are you talking about? I’m not a part-time employee—I worked forty hours a week.”

“No, sir, you did not. Look at the paycheck. You worked thirty-five hours a week, like all the other delivery boys. Seven hours a day, five days a week. Eight to four, with one hour off for lunch.”

Neal picked up the check and stared at it.

“And, in this Great State of Georgia, you don’t have to pay a part-time employee minimum wage.” He gave another smug smile.

“You...why didn’t you tell me you paid less than minimum wage?”

“Don’t recall you askin’.”

Neal could not believe what the old man was trying to pull. He hadn’t asked how much the job paid, because he assumed it was minimum wage...but now that he thought about it, the ad he saw in the paper had said DRIVERS WANTED—PART & FULL TIME.

“Look,” Neal said, “I worked eight hours a day, or even more. You gave me more deliveries at four-thirty. Five o’clock, sometimes. I didn’t get back here until almost six on some days.”

“Well, we gave you a little extra work only because you were a tad slow with your deliveries. Which is only natural, you bein’ new and all.”

“What? That’s not true! I made my deliveries faster than any of the other...” Neal’s voice trailed off—there was no point in arguing with Snell. The sneaky son-of-a-bitch would just have another snappy comeback for whatever Neal said.