For What It’s Worth

The bossman pressed a stack of sweaty bills into Rudy’s cracked palm. His weekly pay was always filthy: creased, ripped, and worn to the point of illegibility. Nothing like the crisp bills he had seen in commercials or dreams. But the warehouse hadn’t asked questions after his release, and choice was a luxury sold to people with clean slates.

“Don’t spend it all in one place,” Mr. Monroe chuckled, his fat belly bouncing with each syllable of laughter. Rudy considered how far his fist would need to sink into that doughy flesh before the bastard would scream.

He had given the warehouse twelve years. It had worn through his right hip, leaving him with a limp that seemed to worsen every winter. His hearing was bad before prison, but a decade of grinding metal and power tools had finished the job. His left ear was useless.

He forced a smile and turned heel to leave. Limp or no limp, Rudy could have skipped out of the warehouse. Tonight was too big to waste with petty aches and pains.

"Hey, Rude-man!" Someone shouted over the grinding machinery. Miraculously, Rudy had heard it. It was Bucky, the kid who treated the warehouse like a reunion, not work.

            “Ya’ comin’ out for drinks tonight?”

Rudy started to shake his head before Bucky could even finish the question. Punishment for last night's 'quick drink’ still throbbed behind his eyes.

“Sorry, man. Got other things biting.”

Rudy barely heard the man click his tongue, but he kept walking to his pickup. His phone buzzed as soon as he turned the key. Rudy thumbed at the cracked screen. It took three tries to open the damn thing up.

A loud sigh slipped from his lips as he read the text:

rent due tomorrow, don’t miss another payment.

The cash burned in Rudy’s pocket. It was just over one month’s rent. But it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going home tonight.   

Another text sat unanswered on the screen from an unsaved number:

She’s a waitress at the Larkspur Diner over in Boone County. Shift tonight 6-12.

Rudy swallowed hard. He wasn’t ready, but it didn’t matter.

He was twelve years too late, and he had to see her face.

Rudy’s old pickup puttered to the front of the diner as he killed the engine. The neon lights glowed back at him from the wet sidewalk, and the street light flickered overhead. It was 7:30. Her shift had already started.

He considered limping in, letting her come to him. Maybe he would get lucky and sit in her section. No need to try to pick her out of a lineup, or awkwardly question the first waitress he saw about her.

His hands gripped the steering wheel. The seatbelt held his ribs tightly in place like it knew he wasn’t going anywhere.

For someone who rehearsed a speech a hundred times-–maybe more—he couldn’t remember a damn word of it.

It was bright inside the diner, and it seemed crowded. He couldn’t shake the feeling that she would laugh at him or scream. There were so many chances to get it wrong.

His eyes shifted. Across the street, a dive bar squatted like a waiting excuse. Fewer cars in the parking lot, fewer eyes inside. He didn’t even think as his hand turned the key again, and he guided the car into the half-empty lot.

Rudy decided that he would have one drink. Liquid courage.

Just one glass to steel his nerves. Then he could walk into that diner and be a father again.

The dive bar was just as grimy as Rudy had expected, and nobody batted an eye when he limped to the nearest stool and slumped into it.

The whiskey was in front of him before he knew it. He had also swallowed it and ordered another before he knew it.

Two drinks in and his nerves buzzed with something like charisma. The bartender smiled at him, and he mused that were he a younger man, he would have a smooth line for her. She was pretty in a worn-out way: smoker’s wrinkles, no apologies. But tonight wasn’t about her.

He waved her over.

“What’s the deal with that diner across the street?”

She furrowed her brow, then glanced toward the door as the bell chimed. Another patron. She looked back at him.

“It’s a diner,” she laughed, “Sells food. Why don’t you ask her?”

She tilted her chin, and Rudy followed the gesture. A waitress with long dark hair and tired eyes. The same tired eyes he saw in the mirror.

“Shelly!” He called, the drinks giving him the courage he had sought. Nothing.

His stomach dropped. Maybe she used her full name now. Maybe she didn’t remember his voice.

“Michelle!” He tried again and caught her eye. He waved her over, the whiskey burned hot in his veins.

She looked at him warily as she tugged off her nametag and peeled off the little paper tiara, half fast food uniform and half relic.

She slid onto the stool beside him like she was sitting next to a ghost.

“Tracy,” he said to the bartender, “Anything my daughter wants, it’s on me.”

Michelle gave him a quick, guarded smile. She ordered a vodka soda and waited.

“Shelly,” Rudy began, voice thick, “I’m sorry. For all of it. I thought it’d go back to normal after I got out, but when you and your mom stopped visiting, I didn’t know how to fix anything, and I was too scared to try. I should have been there, I should have seen you grow up.”

It was not the speech he practiced, but it was the truth, made only slightly less coherent by the alcohol.

Michelle’s face softened. “Dad, this is a surprise,” she said gently. “Why don’t we go sit in the back and catch up?”

Rudy spent the next hour hearing all about Shelly’s life. She talked about high school like she was reading a script: prom, graduation, the usual beats. Her smile was easy and her voice soft, but her stories were hollow. No inside jokes, or tangents. She was guarded.

He didn’t tell her that he had spent the last however-many years on the warehouse floor, letting it grind away at his body.

“Can I ask what changed your mind?” he asked somewhere between drinks.

She blinked. “Changed my mind?”

“Well, about all of it. You wanted to be an artist. You were great.” He couldn’t find the encouraging words he wanted. “And when I found you on Facebook last year, you told me to stay out of your life. You called me a stranger.”

An emotion he didn’t recognize flashed briefly in her eyes.

“I wasn’t that good, and I was like, a little kid.” She deftly ignored the sensitive topic.

“You were nine when I–” he hesitated, “went away.”

They both sipped their drinks.

“And you were really good. You won art contests against adults who had been doing it their whole lives. You got a scholarship to art school before you were even in middle school. Why not take it? How did you end up here?”

Michelle’s face flashed now with an emotion he definitely recognized. Anger.

“I don’t really know that you have any right to judge my position in life.” She spat at him venomously before taking a deep breath and continuing, “Besides, the scholarship wouldn’t have covered it. I could afford to take out loans, probably, but the application alone cost like… more than Mom could spare, back then.”

Rudy thumbed the stack of bills in his pocket. Fathers provide, after all.

She noticed.

“Last year was… a bad time,” She said slowly, brushing her brunette hair behind her ear. “But I think people deserve forgiveness. Don’t you?”

She reached across the sticky table and touched his chapped hand. It didn’t feel like how she used to hold his hand. But people change. They grow up.

“Michelle, I know I was a coward,” Rudy said, finally. He pulled the stack of bills from his pocket and slid them across the table.

Michelle looked at the stack with wide eyes. It had to be over a thousand dollars.

“No, Dad, I couldn’t take that.” Her face was unreadable. “That’s yours.”

“No, please.” Rudy pushed the cash closer to her. “It’s for you. I want to see your name in a gallery someday.”

She hesitated, but not with shock. It was a calculation.

“Let me run to the ladies' room,” she said. “Write your number down. I’ll call you when I get into art school.”

Michelle pushed a half-soiled napkin across the table to him and smiled one last time. Her hair fell over the cash as she turned and rose from her seat.

A sense of pride bloomed in Rudy’s chest. He hastily scribbled on the napkin before realizing it was the only paper on the table. Michelle and the money were gone, and the bell above the door chimed once more.

Rainwater seeped through Rudy’s jeans, cold, and the runoff in the gutter licked at his boots. He’d chased her, Michelle, or whoever the hell she was. But she was gone, like she was never there.

A shadow joined him. Tracy, the bartender, lit a cigarette with one hand and held it out to him with the other.

“I’d offer you a smoke, but this is my last one. Want to share?”

“I’m not a smoker,” Rudy muttered, but took it anyway. The first drag tasted like burnt paper and cheap perfume. Still, it numbed the edges of panic bouncing in his stomach.

The smoke hung around them in the wet air, and the neon signs buzzed like insects, filling the silence.

            “She got me good,” Rudy finally said, “Hook, line, and sinker.”

            Tracy didn’t need to answer. She was used to people confessing.

            His eyes glazed over as he stared across the street, into the diner window. A waitress smiled as she refilled someone’s coffee, blonde hair twisted into a loose bun behind the paper tiara.

            There she was—his daughter. The real one. He could have picked her out of a crowd of strangers with his eyes closed. She hadn’t really changed all that much, not in the ways that mattered, anyway. Same head tilt before she told a joke, same fire in her eyes when the recipients laughed.

            “She’s beautiful,” Tracy said softly, putting a hand on Rudy’s shoulder.

            “Yeah,” he rasped. “No thanks to me.”

Rudy tore his eyes away from Shelly, still facing him from the window. Facing him, but not seeing him.

“I should’ve known,” he said. “That girl in the bar, she didn’t laugh the same. Didn’t talk the same. Didn’t hate me the same.” He trailed off and stared down at the ground next to him. “I wanted it to be true so bad, I ignored everything that told me it wasn’t.”

“You were desperate,” Tracy said, exhaling another cloud of smoke that obscured the view of Shelly. “Desperation makes people do a lot of things.”

            “A lot of stupid things.” Rudy corrected and took the cigarette back. “I gave her every cent I had. I knew it wouldn’t buy her forgiveness, but I thought it could buy me another shot.”

            He wiped at his eyes with the sleeves of his flannel. They smelled like motor oil.

“I told myself that I could be her dad again. That she would let me try to be more than the guy who left her, ruined our family over a stupid mistake. But that girl—my real girl—she told me to stay gone.” He gestured to the diner. “She meant it.”

            Shelly was in another window now, but she was still laughing. Grown up. Whole.

“I don’t belong in her life,” he said, voice cracking as the tears wet his cheeks, “And she’s better for it.”

            The cigarette burned lower between his fingers. He passed it back to Tracy before it hit the filter.

            “Sometimes the story you tell yourself is the only thing keeping you from walking into traffic.”

            Tracy didn’t say anything. She just flicked the ash into the gutter and passed him the last drag.