“Well, I never!” Ginny said, got up, and strode out, as regal as a giraffe.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Kendra said under her breath. “She didn’t even glance toward the cloakroom where she’d expect me to be. I’m going to give her the respect she’s due as my mother, but I am going to quit toadying to her. She doesn’t care.”
Ray White approached Kendra, his face aglow in a triumphant smile. “You got nothing to worry about, kid. She wasn’t planning to pay. I got rid of her.”
Kendra stared at the man for a minute, whirled around, and rushed to the ladies’ room as tears cascaded down her face. She washed her face, pushed out her chin, and went back into the dining room. “Don’t let it get ya, kid. She oughta be proud of you. If she’s not, it’s her loss. Pick up table seventeen.”
Lunch hour ended, and the two waitresses didn’t report at five o’clock, so Kendra worked the dinner hour, too.
When she crawled into bed past midnight after having soaked her swollen toe again, she had counted nearly two hundred dollars in her own tips plus eighty dollars in tips left at the cloakroom. She didn’t think the money she’d earned was worth the humiliation of seeing her mother attempt to pull a fast one, though, and of having had to report her to the management.
“Papa is right. She’ll drag me down if I let her.”