The old man in the tuxedo carried the silver dollar on a small velvet pillow, the way a page might carry a crown, and he stopped at the casket of my grandmother and bowed from the waist. He was well past eighty, thin and straight as a candle, with white hair combed back and a bow tie of real silk. His shoes shone. Behind him in the doorway stood a younger man in a dark suit who had held his arm and then, at a nod, let it go. “My name is Vincent Castellano,” said the old man, in a voice like gravel in honey. “I built the Golden Palm Casino in 1974. And I have waited fifty years to say a thing to Pearl.”
My mother, in the front row, in her black suit with the tight collar, shifted. She had planned the service, forty minutes in a funeral home, no eulogy, because, she told me, Grandma Pearl was only a waitress and nobody would come. “In 1971,” Vincent said, “I was twenty one. I was a dealer at a downtown joint. I owed two hundred and four dollars to a man who broke people for a living, and I had eleven. I was going to climb on a bus to nowhere.” He closed his eyes. “That night, a cocktail waitress named Pearl brought me a ginger ale at my table.”
“She sat across from me on her break. She said, Honey, you look like a man about to run. I said I was. She asked how much. I told her. She took the coffee can where she kept her tips and counted out two hundred and four dollars, every bill, every coin, and pushed it across the table. On top she set a silver dollar, a Morgan, and said, For luck. I said I could not take it. She said, You can, and you will pay me back when you are able.” He lifted a hand. “I did not pay her back for five years. She never asked. And in all that time, she told no one.”
A silver dollar on a velvet pillow was carried in by an old man in a tuxedo and gave one granddaughter the afternoon to bring her mother back to the waitress she had been ashamed of.
“When I finally returned the money, she refused it. She said, Vincent, use it to be somebody. But she let me keep the silver dollar, and she said, Hold on to it, and when you are rich, bring it back to me.” He looked down at the pillow. “I became rich. I forgot. For nearly forty years I forgot, and I am ashamed. Then last spring I found the coin in a drawer, and I went looking for her, and I learned she had retired to a trailer in Pahrump.” His voice broke. “I meant to visit in September. I put it off. Forgive me, Pearl. An old man puts things off.”
I turned to my mother. Her face was stone. She had been raised in a rented house in North Las Vegas, with a mother who worked nights and slept days, and she had told me since I was small that she would never wait on anyone, never carry a tray, never count coins. She had gone to UNLV on the tip jar and become an accountant, and she had been, all her adult life, ashamed of the money that paid for it. I watched her hands open and close in her lap. I loved her. I did not know how to say so, in a room like that.
Vincent Castellano placed the pillow gently upon the casket. “Pearl never accepted money from me,” he said. “But she cannot refuse it now.” He nodded to the younger man, who stepped forward with a leather folder. “In her name, the Golden Palm Group has established the Pearl Scholarship, which will pay full tuition at UNLV for the child or grandchild of any cocktail waitress, bartender, or dealer who has worked on this Strip ten years or more. Tiffany, I understand you want a master degree in social work. The first seat is yours.”
My mother rose. She walked to the front on legs that seemed not to belong to her, and she stood before the old man in his tuxedo, and for a moment she could not speak. “Mr. Castellano,” she said at last. “My mother carried a tray for thirty two years so I could carry a briefcase. I told her I did not want a funeral that looked like her job.” She turned to the casket. “Mama, I was wrong. I wanted a service nobody would be embarrassed by. You never embarrassed anyone. You carried the whole Strip on your feet, and not one of us thanked you.” She began to weep, openly, and the old man took her hands.
Then they came. I had no idea. The chapel held thirty chairs, and we had set out twelve, and now people were standing along the walls and out the doors and into the parking lot, in the Nevada heat. Dealers in black vests, pit bosses, a retired showgirl in a feathered hat, bartenders, bellmen, cooks from the casino kitchens. Four hundred people, someone said afterward. They had come on their one day off, from all over the valley, because the word had gone through the Strip like a wire. Every story began the same way. She brought me coffee when I was new.
The service lasted three hours. The funeral director, a patient man, brought in extra chairs and then gave up and let the doors stand open. At the end, my mother asked if she might say the closing prayer, and she did, in a clear voice, with Vincent Castellano holding her elbow. We buried my grandmother in the small cemetery in Pahrump, in the hot wind, among the creosote and the sagebrush, under a blue and very large sky. Vincent asked that the silver dollar go with her, in her hand. My mother said yes before he finished the sentence.
That fall, my mother and I drove to the Strip together. She wore her good coat. We went to the Golden Palm and sat in the cocktail lounge, where a young waitress in a tight black uniform brought us two ginger ales on a tray. My mother looked at the tray. Then she did something I will never forget. She laid a twenty on it, then another, then a third, and she said softly to the girl, You are doing a fine job. The girl smiled. And my mother, who had never in her life carried a tray, watched her go with shining eyes and whispered, Tell me about the tips, Tiffany. How did she do it?
