The Bikini Car Wash (21 page)

Andi laughed.

Walt pulled the truck to a stop at the curb in front of faded, crumbling row houses.

“Mrs. McKenna,” Jelly announced.

For a person who could not read or write, she had a fantastic memory. She knew every house on every street they visited and all the clients who lived there.

The two got out and walked to the back of the truck. Walt let down the tailgate and opened the hot food compartment of the delivery cabinet and began retrieving the container with the day’s entree and vegetables. He set them on a tray.

Jelly opened a white paper bag which he filled from the adjacent cold food compartment—a half pint of milk, a container of sliced fruit, a couple of pats of butter. From a giant plastic bag a dinner roll was added on top.

“Okay, that will do it for Mrs. McKenna,” he said.

“Pop!” Jelly complained. “She is going to want her dessert.”

“You could tell her we were robbed and then we could eat it,” he teased.

“We don’t joke about our job,” his daughter said firmly.

“No, we don’t,” Walt agreed. “We’ve got a little bit of pudding here to give her.”

“That’s good,” Jelly said. “’Cause I think she eats that first.”

Pop made sure both compartment doors were fully closed. Maintaining quality temperature during the food transport was one of the most important aspects of his job. Afterward, he just leaned against the truck and watched his daughter work.

Jelly walked slowly and carefully to Mrs. McKenna’s front door. She rang the doorbell and waited patiently for the older lady, getting around on a walker, to answer.

Because the older woman had trouble navigating, she allowed Jelly to walk into her house. His daughter would put the hot food on the table and the cold food in the refrigerator.

A minute later, Jelly, laughing and waving, was on her way back to the truck.

“Mrs. McKenna is silly,” she told him enthusiastically. “She’s going to hook up reins to her Chihuahua and make her walker into a dogsled. That’s very silly.”

“Yes it is,” Walt agreed, as he headed the truck down the street for their next delivery. He was pretty sure Mrs. McKenna had thought up that story and saved it all morning to tell Jelly.

That had been one of the surprises of bringing his daughter along with him. When the sheltered workshop that she’d attended since high school closed down in the bad
economy, Walt had been very concerned. With ordinary people out of work all over town, what would happen to the sudden influx of handicapped people who were hard to place even in boom times? These special people accustomed to daily interaction, useful occupation and paychecks that they’d earned on their own, suddenly found themselves alone at home with nothing to do.

Walt had looked into other workshop situations, but it would have meant moving Jelly out of town and into a group home in a nearby city. The two had talked about it. But he and Ella just couldn’t send Jelly away. Then Ella died and Andi came home. After that, Jelly had no interest in going away.

So, he’d decided to take her on deliveries with him. Initially he’d had her stay in the truck. Then he got her to help him get the right meals on the tray. Finally he’d allowed her to go to the doors. He wasn’t at all sure how his frequently crabby, occasionally disoriented clients would take to having Jelly as their delivery girl.

They loved her. From the very first day, everyone just treated her wonderfully and seemed delighted to see her.

Of course, Walt loved Jelly and he knew her to be lovable. But the world wasn’t usually like that. As an amateur student of human nature, he watched and waited and tried to understand the meaning of the day-to-day reaction.

It took him several weeks, but he finally hit on what he believed to be going on. These people, these older, vulnerable people who were much in need of care from their community and reminded daily of the abilities and faculties slipping away were being given an opportunity to give back. A person who was, in her own way, more vulnerable than they, showed
up at their door. By being nice to Jelly, it was as if they could say, “yes, I still have value to this community.”

“Mr. Lassiter,” Jelly said a few blocks later as they pulled to a stop in front of a modest duplex.

They got out, did their job. They put together the components of the meal. Once more he deliberately forgot the dessert. It was important for Jelly to keep focused on the details. If he didn’t make mistakes, she might not watch so carefully.

Mr. Lassiter met her at the door. He was a very tall, very thin man in his mid-eighties. He took his meal from Jelly and gave her some wild animal stickers that had arrived in his junk mail. Jelly was as delighted with his gift as if it had come from a fancy store and cost a fortune.

“I can use these to decorate my picture books,” she told the old man. “I love my picture books and I love these pretty animals.”

In a few moments they were on their way again.

Down one street, up another, they made their way through Plainview’s older neighborhoods, where most of the senior citizens tended to reside.

Jelly was mostly content to watch the houses go by, but sometimes she could be chatty and silly. Walt had grown accustomed to listening to her. And to her repetitive jargon. Walt actually enjoyed it, although he’d been counseled to discourage it.

“It’s not good to let her rely on this TV dialogue,” the doctor had told him. “She should be forced to communicate in a more conventional manner.”

Walt nearly rolled his eyes as he remembered. Conventional communication! This from the medical establishment locked into code words no one else could understand.

Multiple developmental delay.

Atypical skills progress.

Impeded cognitive function.

“My daughter is retarded,” he’d stated flatly one day.

“We don’t use that word, Mr. Wolkowicz,” he was told.

“Why not? It’s a good English word that everybody on the street understands.”

“It’s a pejorative word. Young people use it as a slur.”

“Then I want my daughter to get used to hearing it on a kinder level,” he said. “We can’t stop the world from making noise, but we can all choose to filter it through our best experience.”

As he drove through the streets with his daughter, Walt was certain that he and Ella had done the right thing. They had kept her close, protected her from the worst of the world and given her as much freedom and independence as she could manage.

Jelly was their shining accomplishment. Walt was pretty sure that no one from the outside would see it that way. Andi was so smart, so focused, so hardworking. They were both extremely proud of her. But Walt was pretty sure that given any environment, Andi would have thrived. She just had it in her to be an achiever. He was equally certain that if they had allowed Jelly to be hauled off to an institution, she would not have prospered into the young woman at his side.

When they didn’t turn on Weymouth Avenue, Jelly voiced a protest.

“Pop! Mrs. Feldheim!”

“Remember,” he said. “Mrs. Feldheim isn’t there anymore.”

“Oh yeah,” Jelly said, nodding slowly. “Did she take a
powder?” the young girl asked in a deep voice reminiscent of a tough New York City detective.

Walt masked his chuckle by clearing his throat. “No, she’s not dead,” he reminded her. “She’s gone to live in a nursing home, closer to her children.”

“Is that bad or good?” Jelly asked him.

“It’s neither, sweetheart, it’s just different.”

Jelly thought about that for a moment.

“I don’t like different,” she said.

“I know.”

“I wish nothing is ever different.”

“Changes can be good,” he told her.

She looked at him uncertainly.

“Mom died,” Jelly said. “That wasn’t good.”

“No, it wasn’t,” he agreed. “But then Andi came home.”

Jelly’s face immediately brightened into a big smile. “I like Andi,” she said.

“Me, too.”

“New things are always going to happen, Jelly,” he told her. “Some of them will be good, but some of them will be bad. But what we need to try to do is accept the bad and try to find the better parts of it.”

Jelly squinted at him, her brow furrowed. “Bad is just bad.”

Walt nodded. The gray areas of life were hard enough for typical people to cope with. He wasn’t sure he really could make Jelly understand.

“It was very sad and bad for your mom to die,” he said. “But we don’t cry about it all the time, do we?”

“Mom would want us to live happy,” Jelly parroted what she’d been told.

“And how do we do that?” he asked.

“We remember the happy times,” Jelly answered. “That’s why I have my picture books. So I can remember.”

“That’s right,” Walt said. “We remember the happy times and it helps us live happy. And then new things happen that are happy, like Andi coming home.”

Jelly nodded.

Walt knew that if he was ever going to try to speak to her, now would be a very good time.

“I’m thinking of some other new things that will make us happy,” he said.

“Okay,” Jelly said.

“I know you like my friend, Rachel,” he said.

“She’s nice.”

“Yes, she is,” Walt said. “And I want her to spend more time with us.”

“Okay.”

“I want her to live with us,” Walt said. “So we could see her day and night.”

Jelly’s face clouded over immediately. “She can’t have my room.”

“No, I wouldn’t give her your room,” he reassured her.

“If you give her Andi’s room, Andi will crowd me.”

“I wouldn’t give her Andi’s room either,” Walt said. “She would share my room with me.”

Jelly thought about that for a long moment.

“Is she your girlfriend, Pop?”

“Yes, she is.”

“Then you need to marry her,” Jelly said.

A COOL FRONT
blew into Plainview and with it a drenching rain. That shut down the car wash in a way that the Merchants and Citizens Alliance for Morality never could. Pete’s Jungle Jeff Safari binoculars just sat on the windowsill gathering dust as he attempted to concentrate on the ad sheets for next week’s paper. It was ridiculous that, in a job market as bad as this one, that he hadn’t been able to find some competent person to do this job. Though, since finding out that Andi had been turned away, Pete was fairly sure that others might have been as well. It was in Miss Kepper’s authority to do that, but Pete really wished that she hadn’t. And he wasn’t sure how to change the status quo. If he just walked in and took away some of her responsibilities, it might look like retaliation for her leadership of M-CAM. And when you were the boss, how things looked really made a difference.

He glanced down at his work and sighed. It was fine. It highlighted a few selected items and offered some coupons to
those who had an appreciation for them. But it was boring, ordinary, lacking anything that would compel the reader to say, “This is my store. This is where I shop.”

The big-box chains had national ad campaigns with catchy jingles or rock era anthems to get stuck in a customer’s head. Guthrie Foods couldn’t afford more than a Web page and a weekly insert in the local paper. And he felt as if he wasn’t even making the best of that.

He stopped what he was doing and pulled the notes he’d made out of his desk.

Make friendliness and familiarity as much of a product in their store as coffee or bread.

How did he do that? How did he convey that?

He’d tried to talk to Harvey about it one morning. Harvey said it was a fine idea. Pete hadn’t needed approval, he needed feedback and some ideas about how to implement it. None of that had been forthcoming.

He headed for his little refrigerator to get another bag of Mallomars, but resisted at the last minute. He was trying to cut back.

Out of habit he walked over to the window. The rain was still coming down with intensity. Watering all the summer lawns and garden flowers, but trapping everyone inside houses and buildings full of gray gloom.

Then he noticed a light on in the car wash. Andi was there. She must be doing paperwork or sorting supplies or something. Pete immediately walked across the room. Grabbing an umbrella from the stand he headed out. In the hallway just outside the door, he stopped abruptly, turned around and went back to his desk. He gathered up his ad sheets and his notes about his new store advertising concept, wrapped them
in a couple of large plastic bags and went looking for just the help he needed.

As he traversed the puddles in the parking lot, Pete didn’t second-guess himself too much. Yes, she’d made it clear that she didn’t want to get involved any further with him. People who didn’t want to get involved really ought to stay out of close proximity. He had not done that. But then, he was not at all opposed to the idea of being further involved with her. He had made a point of showing his material support for her business and her employees with coffee or sandwiches. And he’d tried to show his personal interest by giving her a ride home. He was hoping to wear down her objections. Maybe their timing wasn’t perfect, but time changes. And when Andi felt settled enough, secure enough, through her grief enough to start looking around for a boyfriend, Pete wanted to be standing right in front of her.

But today, this was not about her. This was about him.

He lowered his umbrella as soon as he stepped beneath the overhang. Through the glass he could see Andi inside. She was seated in front of a makeshift table with papers spread across it. A small lamp provided a working light casting a welcoming glow that was like a halo around her.

He tapped on the door glass. She glanced up and smiled. She had such a gorgeous, feminine smile. Pete couldn’t imagine how he once thought her to be kind of butch. She waved him in.

“I hope you haven’t brought me something to eat,” she said. “You are feeding us so well I’m beginning to think that’s your method of closing us down. Get us all so fat our customers are repulsed.”

Pete laughed. “Guys are almost never repulsed by near-naked women, no matter what their body shape might be.”

“You may be right,” she said. “But my theory is that I can show a lot less skin when I have less skin to show.”

“Actually you can’t eat this,” he said. “But I was hoping you’d take a look at it.”

“Sure.” She began stacking her papers, each pile perpendicular to the one beneath it.

“What are you working on?” he asked.

“Ordinances for defining sexually oriented businesses,” she said. “Your father is going to come at me with both barrels. I’ve got to be ready.”

Pete nodded sympathetically. “I shouldn’t interrupt.”

“No, please,” she told him. “I’m getting cross-eyed reading all this legalese.”

Pete stripped the plastic bags from his rolled-up papers and laid them out on the top of her table.

He didn’t say anything. He just let her look at what he’d done. He dragged up a chair and seated himself beside her.

She pointed out a typo which was quickly corrected.

“What do you think?” he asked.

Andi glanced over at him and back at the ad mock-up. “It looks fine, Pete,” she told him.

“Exactly,” he said. “It looks fine. Boring, unspectacularly fine.”

She grinned at him. “Were you hoping for a grocery ad masterpiece?”

He shrugged, his words self-deprecating. “I’ve been wracking my brain trying to transcend the ordinary. My brain is now completely wracked, so I’m hoping your head has some wrack space.”

“Hey, what kind of advice can I offer?” she asked him.
“Add some photos of women in swimsuits and you’ll triple your readership.”

“Well, there is that, but it’s not quite what I was looking for.”

He watched her surveying the mock-up. Giving it her complete attention.

“Tell me what you are looking for.”

Pete tried. “I’ve…I’ve been looking for some kind of new advertising concept,” he said. “I know I need to give customers a reason to come to my store, a reason beyond the weekly coupons. My big-box competitors have coupons that are just as good as mine. They can undercut prices. They have national ad campaigns. I’m not sure if
I
were just a guy out there looking for a place to buy bologna and cheese, if
I
would have any good reason to come to Guthrie’s.”

“That doesn’t sound hopeful,” Andi said.

“Then just like ten days ago, I stumbled on it,” he said. “I just realized what it is that I need to sell, but I don’t know how to sell it. I don’t know how to express my feelings into some kind of marketable slogan.”

“Okay,” she said. “Try to explain it to me.”

She had turned her attention to him. She was eyeing Pete with the same degree of concentration that she’d used to survey the mock-up. It was intense and dispassionate. Pete felt almost intimidated by the naked vulnerability of exposing his thoughts and feelings to her. He reminded himself that
he
had come to
her.

“Sunday mornings are, like, the worst,” he told her. “Everybody is tired and it feels like we’re the only people who have to work and it’s just not the best day.”

She nodded.

“But this particular Sunday…well, this was
our
Sunday,” he said. “It was the Sunday after our Saturday night together.”

He could see Andi’s guard go up immediately. There was wariness in her eyes. She adjusted her stance, folding her arms across her chest.

“I was just so…I was so happy,” he said. “I was happy and relaxed and feeling great. And my employees picked up on that. They were happy and relaxed and feeling great, too. It was contagious. None of them had spent the previous night wearing out the bedsheets with sexy you. But they all began to smile and laugh and be as optimistic and in tune with the world as I was.”

Andi said nothing.

“I realized that I could reset the tone of the business,” he told her. “I think that I can make Guthrie Foods a sunnier, happier place to work. We’re implementing a new cross-training program and I think we can use that to add a sense of camaraderie that maybe we’ve been missing.”

She nodded.

“At Guthrie’s we’re a family,” he said. “We’ve been a family for eighty years or more. We always talk about that in staff meetings, and it’s become nearly a cliché. But what I think we’ve got is one of those families that doesn’t know or like each other that much. Maybe it’s time that we become friends.”

He allowed Andi to think about that for a moment.

“Making the workplace more fun, creating a sense of closeness, that’s very good for employee retention,” Andi said. “Although in this economy, I can’t imagine you’d have a lot of trouble with turnover.”

“We don’t,” Pete said. “Our resignation rate is the lowest it’s been in a decade. But this isn’t about keeping our employ
ees. It’s about keeping our employees happy. That Sunday, the staff caught the smiling, optimistic bug from me. And I immediately saw them transmitting it to the customers. We had the most consistent customer service we’ve had in a long time. Far fewer patron problems or complaints. Everybody was glad to be in that building. They were enjoying buying their groceries there.”

Andi leaned back in her chair, eyeing him thoughtfully.

“That’s what I want to sell,” he said. “I want to sell, ‘hey, you want to come to Guthrie’s because it’s not a miserable, boring experience to buy groceries.’”

Andi chuckled. Pete heaved a sigh of relief when he heard it. He was worried that having mentioned the effects of their fabulous hookup, she might just turn off from listening to the rest.

“I don’t think ‘miserable’ and ‘boring’ are words typically suggested for any advertising slogan,” she said.

“Right,” he agreed. “And this is where I get stuck. How do I say the positive things that I need to say, without pointing out the negatives of the status quo?”

She took out a pad of paper, tore off a few pieces for him. Pete dug his pen out of his pocket.

“Let’s take, like, a minute and write down positive words,” she suggested.

They did that. Then they looked at their lists, marked the synonyms, and came up with two that shared large places on each list.

“Friend and home,” she said.

Pete chuckled. “That sounds more like your dad’s job with the meals on wheels.”

Andi laughed, too. “I think we can work with this,” she said. “I think we can come up with a slogan that says these two things to people.”

Pete liked how she used the word
we. You should have put that one on your positive list, Peterson,
he thought.

“But now we’re back to the mock-up,” he said. “Even if we have a great slogan, just printing it in big letters on our grocery ad doesn’t change a thing.”

Andi agreed.

The two sat together silently staring at the mock-up.

“How big do these coupons have to be?” she asked suddenly.

“Huh? How big? I don’t think size matters.”

“At least in coupons,” she said, grinning.

“What!” He laughed, feigning insult. He was sure that her sudden influx of humor meant she had a great idea.

“Why don’t we change the ad to be less about groceries and more about people.”

“Oooookay,” he said, slowly thoughtfully.

“What if part of the ad was a lighthearted look at some of your employees. ‘Joe Smith, butcher, wins local bowling tournament.’ Or ‘Jane Jones, cashier sees youngest of four sons sworn in as Eagle Scout.’”

“Now that’s an interesting idea,” he said.

“It forces everybody on the staff to pay more attention to each other and it draws the customers into that familiarity. ‘Yeah, I know Joe, he’s the guy who butterflies those pork chops for me.’”

“Oh, wow. That could be great,” Pete agreed.

“You wouldn’t have to use your whole page. Just a little portion of news up here, maybe a photo.”

Pete was nodding, the synapses in his brain now firing at warp speed. “It would draw people to the ad. Even those who don’t clip coupons or look for bargains would stop on this page.”

“And it’s easily transferable to your Web site,” she said. “Those people who get their news from the Web instead of the local paper would have a reason to stop by your site. And if you’re going to go to the trouble to put up weekly news, of course you can put up your specials and your printable coupons.”

“That’s a great idea,” he said. “It’s an absolutely great idea.”

“It makes Guthrie’s itself a source of hometown news,” Andi said. “None of those national retailers are going to be able to do that.”

“Hometown news,” Pete repeated, just above a whisper. “Guthrie Foods Hometown Friends.”

She nodded. “How about…maybe… Shop at Guthrie’s: Wholesome Foods from Hometown Friends.”

“That’s great!” he said. “That’s just exactly what I want to say.” He repeated the words aloud.

Andi nodded and laughed. “It is great.”

“It’s exactly it.”

“Exactly.”

“Once you hear it, it’s so obvious.”

They were both laughing, celebrating the success of their collaboration and repeating the words and marveling at how perfect they were in conveying the feeling they wanted. In a rush of certifiable silliness they even tried them in different voices. First a high halting soprano, then low and languid as Barry White, with a thick Polish accent like immigrant grandparents and even as quacky as Donald Duck, the words were good.

In the midst of those buoyant moments, without fore
thought or agenda, Pete leaned forward and kissed her. It seemed totally reasonable and natural. Yet as soon as their lips touched, it was something more.

A friendly peck instantly turned into total recall of the well-matched passion they’d shared.

“Bad idea,” she told him as she wrapped her arms around his neck.

“Sorry, so sorry,” he whispered against her throat.

The rain against the windows provided the barest minimum of isolation, but it was enough to make both of them incautious. Pete’s brain was fuzzy with testosterone, but still he marveled at how good she was at this. How naturally she seemed to know just how to move her lips against his own.