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percent of the money. That was obvious. But I knew that Ray, if given the choice, would reach for the immediate gratification of getting the top-producing salesperson. I got the longer-term better pick by choosing Esther.
    Fve found that whenever I offered the other guy the bigger piece, I got what I wanted and it always tasted better.

    Trying to swallow my anxiety along with my breakfast, I looked back at the door and thought, I just don't have enough time, money, or help, and in three days Pm going to have a whole lot of salespeople with a whole lot of needs, walking right through that door!
    For the first time in my life, I felt really alone. I put my coffee aside and thought about calling my mom, but I didn't. Ever since I left home with Ray against her wishes, I had been determined not to need her anymore.
    I glanced at my watch. It was 6:30 a.m. Mom would be beginning her morning routine about now. I could see her running through the house putting everything in order, and I wished she could be here with me to whip everything into shape. She'd know exactly what to do.
    School day. Edgewater.
    "Good morning, everyone!" Mom's voice boomed as she ripped the covers from each of our beds. Dazed, I made my way to the kitchen table, took a cereal bowl from the stack, and stumbled to the stove for my one scoop of hot Quaker Oats.
    "Good morning, Mom," I mumbled.
    "Good morning, Barbara Ann," she smiled back.
    I sat down as I always did in my assigned seat next to the bathroom door, and stirred milk and brown sugar into my oatmeal as it cooled. My brothers and sisters were all doing the same. At 7:00 a.m. sharp, with only three spoonfuls to go, Mom declared breakfast over. We had twenty minutes to wait in line for the bathroom to brush our teeth and comb our hair, and then put on the clothes Mom had placed at the foot of our beds.
    "Where's my socks?" Eddie yelled to no one.
    "Where's my socks?" was a question you only asked once in our house. Every sock in our house was stored in the two square drawers on the skinny wall between the bathroom and the stove. The top

    drawer was filled with the girls' white nylon socks, and the bottom
    with the boys' navy eotton socks.
    Mom pulled Eddie by his ear into the kitchen, opened the bottom sock drawer, and pointed.
    "Socks,"' she pronounced slowly with emphasis, "are always in the sock drawer." She left Eddie rubbing his ear and darted off to sort the laundry.
    My mother had a routine for everything. When she sorted the laundry, she started by dumping it all in the middle of the living room floor. Then she divided it into the "white pile" and the "color pile." and subdivided those into "heavy'' and "light" fabrics. Next, she placed the four piles atop four dirty bedsheets, tied a knot in each, and slung them two-to-a-shoulder into the kitchen. By day's end, Mom sorted, washed, hung, folded, and put away eight loads of laundry.
    She prepared for school mornings the night before, painting our white bucks on top of the living room radiator with Kiwi shoe polish and her two-inch Sherwin-Williams paintbrush. Early on, she painted the radiator white so her late-night drips wouldn't show.
    Then Mom made our lunches in less than two minutes. First, she plopped a tub of Skippy peanut butter, a jar of Welch s grape jelly, and a five-pound bag of Mcintosh apples on the kitchen table. She dealt out twenty slices of Wonder Bread into two perfectly parallel rows and, with her ten-inch icing knife, spread the top row with peanut butter and the bottom row with jelly. Then she flipped the top slices onto the bottoms, halved each sandwich on the diagonal and wrapped each in waxed paper. After punching open ten brown paper bags, Mom dropped a sandwich and an apple inside. At noon the next dav, we opened our bags to find one apple and a concave peanut butter and jelly on white.
    "C'mon, c'mon!" Mom yelled to us every morning at ^:2(). as she stood by the door guarding our white bucks warming in size order