Done in Fifteen Years novel · Chapter 13 of 32
Chapter 13: The Crew
I stood in Vernie's doorway barefoot and looked at the three of them.
"You quit," I said.
"Last night, after close," the night pitman said. "Left our aprons on Darrell's desk."
"All three?"
"All three." He shifted his knife roll to the other arm. "He had a new fella on the fire Friday. Some boy from a steakhouse in Dallas. Brisket came off gray."
"Gray," one twin said.
"Like a sidewalk," said the other.
Vernie came up behind me with her broom and looked them over.
"Who are these?"
"My crew," I said, before I'd thought about it.
The night pitman's face did something under the ponytail.
He'd worked beside me eleven years.
He'd never once heard me say "my" about anything at Kilgore's.
"Well, your crew's letting the flies in," Vernie said. "Get inside. Have y'all eaten?"
"No, ma'am."
"Then you're useless to me. Sit down."
She fed them pancakes and the twins ate eleven between them.
Macey came down the stairs in her sleep shirt and looked at the three of them eating.
"Are we a restaurant now?" she said. "Like, a real one? With staff?"
"Looks like it."
She took the cash drawer out from under the register and started counting the float.
Vernie put them in the bunkhouse by the barn, where the hay crews used to sleep.
It had four iron cots, a wasp problem and one light bulb.
By noon the night pitman had walked every inch of the brick pit with his hands behind his back.
"One pit won't do it," he said. "Not five days a week."
"We don't have money for a smoker."
He pointed his chin at the barn.
Behind it, half sunk in the weeds, was an old two-hundred-fifty-gallon propane tank.
"Vernie," I called. "What's that tank?"
"That's a tank," she called back from the porch.
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