Toby was sitting on the curb behind the diner, holding a dish towel against a bleeding lip. His apron was ripped. A few feet away, his boss, a big man named Sal, had a lanky teenager pinned against the dumpster by the collar while another boy sprinted down the alley. Sal looked at me, then held up something that glinted under the security light.
It was a set of military dog tags on a beaded chain. I knew them before I saw the name. They had hung on my husband’s neck for twelve years and in Toby’s room since the funeral. “Your son has been paying these punks forty dollars every Saturday for five months,” Sal said. “They told him it was the only way he’d ever get his father’s tags back.”
The boys had taken the tags from Toby’s backpack in the school locker room last fall. At first, they demanded fifty dollars. Then they said the price had gone up. Every Saturday, they waited by the diner’s back door to collect his paycheck, promising the tags would come next week. Five months of paychecks, gone. The cash I saw him counting was what he planned to hand over next. When he refused once, they shoved him into a ditch. That was the torn sleeve.
Toby never told me because he didn’t want to add one more sad thing to my life. He thought he could handle it alone, the way he thought his father would have. Sal had noticed the boys weeks ago and had been watching. That night, when Toby saw them waiting again, he tried to give them his whole paycheck. Sal stepped outside, grabbed the older boy, and knocked over a stack of crates doing it. That was the crash.
The police arrived ten minutes later. The second boy was found within the hour. Both were charged with extortion and theft, and their parents repaid every dollar Toby had handed over. Toby didn’t care about the money. He sat in the back of my car holding his father’s dog tags against his chest the whole way home, and for the first time in years, he cried in front of me.
He wears the tags every day now, tucked under his shirt. With the repaid money, he finally bought his bike, a secondhand red one that Sal helped him fix up behind the diner. He still washes dishes every Saturday. Sal says he’s the best worker he has ever had, and he comes to dinner at our house once a month. And Toby and I made a deal. No more carrying things alone, for either of us.
