He Lost His Place Protecting Me, So I Took the Whole Family novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: The Counting Table

I did not bring bread to Ermal's house.

I brought it to the back kitchen of Kafe Gjoka on Pelham Parkway, at ten o'clock the next Sunday morning, in a paper bag.

The kitchen was long and hot and smelled of onions and coffee.

A dozen women sat at the steel table in the middle of it.

They wore aprons over their church dresses, and they all stopped talking when I came in.

In front of them lay the week.

Bills in rubber bands, coins in paper sleeves, receipts in a shoebox, a pile of folded tens from the lunch counter.

Lule sat at the head with a black ledger open in front of her and a pen in her fist.

"Sit," she said.

I sat at the foot of the table, where the widows sat.

Nobody had told me that, but I knew it.

Lule pushed the ledger down the steel the whole length of the table until it stopped against my hands.

"My eyes are bad this year," she said. "Count."

Ten women looked at me.

I opened the ledger.

The pages were full of numbers in six different hands.

At the bottom of every page there was one more number, in pencil, that did not match.

The pencil one was always lower.

I picked up the first stack of bills and began to count.

I did it aloud, in Albanian, in the voice I used at the register.

"Two hundred. Four hundred. Six hundred."

I wrote each total in ink.

At eleven o'clock the back door opened, and Ermal's driver walked in with the cold at his back.

He was the young man in the leather coat from Luan's sidewalk.

He looked at me, and at the ledger, and his mouth went flat.

"Where's Lule's girl? She does the sack."

"Lule's girl is counting," Lule said.

"I'm not here for a conversation. Ermal wants the bag."

"He'll have the bag."

I finished the last stack and added the column twice.

The women had gone quiet in a way that I could feel on the back of my neck.

I stood up with the ledger in both hands.

"Four thousand, one hundred and sixty dollars," I said. "Written in ink."

I tore a strip off the bottom of the page and folded it into the paper sack with the money.

The driver took the sack and weighed it in his hand.

"Ermal takes half," he said.

"Then he can take half of what's written," I said. "Tell him I counted."

He stared at me.

"Tell him the old man's number is four thousand, one hundred and sixty," I said.

"He can explain to his father why the sack is light."

He did not answer.

He turned and went out, and the back door banged.

For a moment nobody breathed.

The old woman beside me had folded Kafe napkins for thirty years.

She laid her palm flat on the steel.

"Thirty years nobody wrote it down," she said, to nobody.

"Now it's written," Lule said.

She did not look up from her coffee, but her mouth moved.

I went home through the cold with my hands shaking and my apron still tied on.

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