In my neigh­bor­hood, when you were young and wanted money, you looked to the sky. Sum­mer rains meant lawns to mow, and when snow came down, it looked like dol­lar bills.

One win­ter, after years of watch­ing my older brother go out in the morn­ing and come back at night with a roll of bills, I decided to scoop up some cash myself.  I got up early, buck­led my boots, grabbed the coal shovel from the garage, and tramped into the work­ing world.  Only three houses down the block, I found my first cus­tomer, an old lady who agreed to my rate of two dol­lars if I would do the dri­ve­way as well.

I started the job enthused, but soon slowed.  The snow was thick, the dri­ve­way was long, and hours later, only halfway done, I was try­ing not to cry.  At one point, I looked up and saw my brother and mother car­ry­ing shov­els; I assumed that they were going to earn their own money, but they were com­ing to help.  Real­iz­ing that, I did cry.  After we fin­ished, my brother told me that he charged two dol­lars for a side­walk and ten dol­lars for a dri­ve­way, and more if the snow­fall had been heavy.

I should have learned some­thing about nego­ti­a­tions from that expe­ri­ence, but I didn’t.  I con­tin­ued to make bad deals.  I agreed to keep a neighbor’s dri­ve­way cleared for ten bucks a week; that win­ter, 1979, had the largest snow­falls on record.  I took babysit­ting jobs with­out set­ting a rate in advance.  I helped friends rake leaves and do chores, and after­wards real­ized they were get­ting paid for my labor.

Clearly, I was never going to be one of those Junior Achieve­ment phe­noms who pay for col­lege with a busi­ness run from a bed­room.  I needed to be on someone’s pay­roll, so, at four­teen, I sub­mit­ted an appli­ca­tion to a local donut shop.  You could work that young with parental per­mis­sion which mine were happy to give.  They had started work­ing even ear­lier, and this way at least they would know where I was.

I learned a lot at this job, includ­ing how to make donuts and cof­fee, how to run a cash reg­is­ter, and how to deal with drunks who would stag­ger over from the neigh­bor­ing bar, squint at the huge sign that said “DONUTS,” look at the trays of donuts in the win­dow, and then ask, “You got any­thing to eat here?”  When the bar closed at 2 am, they would come over in groups and indis­crim­i­nately buy sack­fuls, some of which they left on the side­walk as they wan­dered into the night.

I was there at 2 am because my boss also taught me how to keep two sets of time cards: one for him and one for the state which had child labor laws pro­hibit­ing a minor from work­ing in the mid­dle of the night.

The shop did well enough for the owner to drive a new white Porsche which he called a Por-sha, insist­ing the name had two syl­la­bles.  Some­times we would announce our inten­tion to mop the “Floor-sha” or that work­ing there made us feel like “Whore-shas,” but we were care­ful to do this when his son wasn’t around.  Although he often would rip into his father, he didn’t like it when we did.  Some­how the son also man­aged to drive a new car, even though employ­ees made less than min­i­mum wage.  The owner could pay us this way since tech­ni­cally the store was a restau­rant and the­o­ret­i­cally we received tips. No one, how­ever, ever tips a donut coun­ter­per­son, no mat­ter how drunk they are.

One morn­ing, after I’d done a clos­ing shift, the boss called and told me to come in imme­di­ately.  When I got there, he asked why I had left the register’s change sack forty dol­lars short.  I hadn’t.  I had sorted out the usual hun­dred in change, writ­ten “$100,” as I always did, then locked it in the floor safe.  He showed me the sack.  Across from the date, it said, “$60,” but it wasn’t in my handwriting.

“Look,” I said, “the num­ber has been erased.  You can see the smudge.”

“No,” he said, “It hasn’t.  This is a warn­ing.  Don’t do it again.”

I couldn’t believe he couldn’t see the obvi­ous dis­col­oration, but, going home, I real­ized why.  If I had done it, it was a mis­take.  If the num­ber had been changed, it was theft, and that meant it had to be one of only a few who knew the com­bi­na­tion, includ­ing his son. And, of course, it couldn’t be him.  It couldn’t be the son who I had seen giv­ing away dozens of free donuts and, who, more than once, had given friends a twenty with their change when they had paid with a ten.  It couldn’t be the son who never had to close or work the late shift deal­ing with drunks.

I wasn’t sur­prised.  That first time work­ing, try­ing to earn money shov­el­ing snow, I learned that fam­ily mem­bers pro­tect each other.

There was, how­ever, another valu­able les­son here.

At work, write with pen.

In addi­tion to a donut shop, Joe Mills has worked in pizze­rias, cof­fee shops, a chem­i­cal waste facil­ity in the Utah desert, a lab­o­ra­tory devoted to cli­mate research, an Indi­ana state park, and numer­ous non-descript offices.  He now teaches at the Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina School of the Arts.

www.josephrobertmills.com