The Bikini Car Wash

by Pamela Morsi

  A long silence ensued at the kitchen table. Andi still felt sick and scared and somehow guilty. Should she let Pop enjoy the happiness he’d found? Did she owe it to her mother’s memory to make things as tough on him as she knew how?

  “I just wish you would take this slow, Pop,” she said. “You and Mrs. Joffee, you’ve both changed. You’re different people than you were in high school. How can you be sure that it will work out for you two?”

  Pop chuckled lightly. “Andi, there are no guarantees. Surely you’ve learned that already,” he said. “Love does sometimes fade. Marriages do go bad. But life is short. It’s also dangerous and complicated. None of us can risk letting something go that might be so very good.”

  Andi thought about Pop’s words again as another smattering of gravel hit her bedroom window. She got up and walked over to peer outside.

  Pete was standing in the driveway. He waved to her and then called out in a loud whisper. “May Andi come out and play?”

  She quickly put on some shorts and a T-shirt. She carried her sneakers down the stairs. He met her at the front door with a kiss.

  “Sorry about waking you up,” Pete said. “But I missed you.”

  “You’ve got it bad, Grocery-boy,” she said.

  “I do,” he admitted. “Truly, I do.”

  Andi sat down on the steps and pulled on her shoes. Pete took the opportunity to slide his hands along her body.

  “Let’s run,” she said.

  “Run? That was not exactly the exercise I was thinking about,” he admitted.

  She playfully slapped away his hands. “Run first, sex later.”

  They headed down Jubal Street toward’s 12th. The heat of the day had been whisked away by a soft steady breeze. Except for crossing Grosvenor, the streets were mostly empty. She followed her usual path through the neighborhood and toward the track. The movement. The rhythm. The breathing. She needed it. She needed it to help her let the rest of things go. To let it all go. All the worries over the business. All her concerns about Tiff and Cher-L. All the unsettling information about her parents. Just her feet hitting the pavement one step after another, somehow that made it all better. And to have Pete beside her, that was best of all.

  She noticed however, after only a few moments, that Pete was no longer beside her. He fell behind and she realized that he was farther and farther back. Finally when she reached the sidewalk at City Park, she pulled to a stop allowing him to catch up.

  “What’s the deal? You usually set the pace. Have you got a cramp?”

  He shrugged. “I just don’t run that well in my loafers.”

  “Oh gosh!” Andi said, looking down at his feet. “I guess I didn’t notice you are still in your store clothes.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, the tassels on these loafers were never meant to fly.”

  Andi was shaking her head in disbelief. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I just wasn’t thinking of anything but me.”

  “Hey, it happens,” he agreed.

  He reached out a hand and she took it. They continued around the perimeter of the park at a much more sedate stroll.

  “So, surely you didn’t just come from work,” she said. “It’s got to be later than that.”

  He glanced at his watch, but then had to stop and press on the LED to read it. “Twelve-seventeen,” he said. “I got off at nine and went by to pick you up.”

  Andi slapped herself in the head. “I should have called.”

  “It’s okay. Cher-L told me that you were having dinner with your dad. Did you have a good time?”

  “I wouldn’t describe it quite that way.”

  “Okay…what’s up?”

  “Pop announced that he’s getting married.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well that’s great! I mean. Is it great or not?”

  Andi shook her head. “I have no idea,” she said. “You’ll never guess who’s the lucky bride.”

  “Don’t tell me it’s Mrs. Meyer, I don’t think I could bear it.”

  “It might be better if it was,” Andi said. “It’s your neighbor.”

  “My neighbor?” he repeated.

  “Rachel Joffee.”

  “Oh wow! That’s wild. Do Dave and Seth know?”

  Andi nodded. “They were at dinner,” she said. “Jelly’s already calling them her brothers.”

  “Jeez, I bet that was a kicker.”

  “I’m still reeling.”

  “She’s a nice person,” Pete said. “And you have to admit that, for a senior cit, she’s pretty hot.”

  Andi covered her ears. “I’m not listening,” she said.

  Pete laughed. “Is that something your sister does?”

  “It must be genetic.”

  He wrapped an arm around her waist.

  “I’m being an idiot, aren’t I?”

  “You’ll never hear that from me,” he said.

  “I guess I hear it from myself.”

  “Is it Mrs. Joffee specifically that you don’t like?”

  “I don’t really like thinking of Pop with any other woman but my mom. I thought they were perfect together. But I guess I got that wrong.”

  She quickly explained her father’s revelations about both his lifelong attachment to Rachel and Andi’s mother’s lost love.

  Pete whistled appreciatively.

  “That is a lot to take in,” he said.

  “I just feel like everything I ever thought I knew about my family was wrong,” she said.

  “I…think maybe I understand,” Pete said.

  She glanced over at him, surprised.

  “Not like it’s the same thing at all,” he said. “It’s totally different and I don’t want you to think I’m equating it at all.”

  “But?”

  “I was in Junior High when I found out that my dad was unfaithful to my mother,” he said. “Now, unlike you, I always knew there was something not quite right about our family. But I always assumed it was some sort of failure in me. My father was never happy with me. No matter what I tried to do, somehow he never completely approved.”

  Pete chuckled humorlessly. “He still doesn’t. Anyway, when I found out that he played around and that he had women all over town and even Miss Kepper at the office. I was just stunned. I was angry, too. But mostly I was just stunned. It seemed like every family photo was a lie printed on a page.”

  Andi nodded.

  “Now, I didn’t know your parents, except in passing,” Pete continued. “But everything I know about them seemed true and genuine. And I feel very certain they could never have raised such cool daughters if their relationship had been totally flawed.”

  “Pop says he loved my mom,” Andi told him. “That he just loved her differently.”

  “Do you have trouble believing that?”

  “No, not really,” she admitted. “It’s just that every relationship I’ve had in my life, I’ve held it up to the mirror of my parents’ marriage and found it lacking.”

  “So now you’ve discovered that the bar you set was perhaps unrealistically high,” Pete said.

  Andi sighed and nodded thoughtfully.

  “That’s lucky for me, I think,” he added grinning.

  Andi put an elbow in his ribs in retaliation. “Hey, you’re making jokes and I’m having a crisis here,” she said, though her tone was just as irreverent as his.

  He wrapped his arms around her, as if defending himself from further digs, but in fact he pulled her into an embrace. “I love you, Andi,” he said. “And if your standards ever get low enough to love me back, well that would be pretty amazing, wouldn’t it?”

  “My standards are outrageously high,” she assured him. “And I’ve become so picky. No man will do for me who hasn’t had at least one dry run on this marriage thing. He needs to be a recovered high school hottie who now owns his own business. He’s got to stand up to his holier-than-thou neighbors, put up with his holier-than-nobody father and be ab
le to play basketball with my sister. And I think I need to add the ability to run for several blocks wearing loafers with tassels.”

  “Good grief,” Pete said. “With those requirements you sound very much like a woman destined to be alone…almost.”

  He kissed her then. It was a sweet, tender kiss, completely chaste and totally intimate.

  “Let’s walk over to my house,” he suggested. “And I’ll hold you all night long.”

  “What about your car? It’s parked in front of my house.”

  “That will sure fake out the gossips, won’t it.”

  They laughed together and began walking faster.

  “It’s going to be all right, Andi,” he told her. “This thing with your dad, give yourself some time. Grief is different for everybody. Your father may be ready to move on. And you can be okay with that. But you don’t need to let it rush you. Give yourself the time you need to be okay with the loss of your mom.”

  Chapter 19

  PETE WAS HAVING a particularly good day. That was to be expected, he thought. Peterson, you’re a lucky guy. After a gloriously sleepless night, he’d eaten breakfast at dawn with the woman he loved and then walked her home. From there he’d come on into work very early and in the quiet solitude before the store opened, he’d managed to put together the very first of his new “Hometown Friends” ads. He’d set it up as a sidebar accompanying the typical coupons for crackers and bath tissue and skirt steak. Their first “featured friend” was Nell Zawadzki from the bakery.

  Pete looked at the little bio piece and smiled. Who knew that Nell, in her white coat and plastic hairnet, had managed to send four children to college. Three to state university and one to M.I.T. She’d grown up in Plainview, married a high school sweetheart who bagged groceries at Guthrie’s. He got her a job when he left to be an electrician’s apprentice. She was still in the bakery after forty-five years and had no plans to retire.

  “I love my job,” she was quoted in the article. “The wonderful people I meet every day coming into Guthrie Foods make my work such a pleasure.”

  Pete smiled. That was exactly what he wanted. That was exactly what Guthrie Foods needed. And although he recognized his own contribution to this very welcome development, he knew that Andi had played the most important role.

  He opened the store, which surprised his cashier supervisor, Phoebe Johannson.

  “Am I not on first shift this morning?” she asked, concerned.

  “You are absolutely on first shift,” he confirmed. “I’m in my office early this morning and I thought I might as well open up. I was coming downstairs anyway for a cup of coffee.”

  He was in a great mood and once more he saw how easy it was to set the tone in the whole store.

  Back in his office, he did the final proofreading on the layout. The last thing he wanted was having his ad show up on the late-night shows as some blooper that read, “maxipads, assorted flavors.”

  A few minutes before nine Miss Kepper arrived, greeting him with the perfect mixture of supervisor respect and longtime acquaintance familiarity.

  “Would you like me to run that over to the newspaper?” she asked.

  “No, but thanks. I want to do it myself this first time, so I’m sure they understand exactly what I’m wanting from this and don’t second-guess me and screw it up.”

  She nodded and politely retreated to her own office.

  At exactly nine o’clock, Pete went over to his window and utilizing the Jungle Jeff Safari binoculars he took a gander over at the car wash. At first the place looked deserted. Then he spied Andi crossing the street. Dressed in a bright pink sundress and wearing a big hat and flip-flops, she was ready for her workday.

  “Amen to American entrepreneurship,” he whispered aloud.

  On his way to the offices of the Plainview Public Observer, he stopped at the car wash to drop off a bag of Guthrie Foods’ own handmade paczki, a kind of Polish jelly doughnut, from Nell’s grandmother’s recipe. Just showing up with food was enough to get him a smile and a kiss.

  “Totally worth it,” he told Andi.

  The meeting with the ad supervisor at the paper went well. He was a little hesitant at first. It wasn’t what they’d always done and he was not completely amenable to change. But Pete was flawlessly patient and polite. Within an hour, the guy was on board with doing exactly what Pete was paying him to do.

  It was closing in on eleven o’clock before he got back to the office. He heard his father’s voice before he saw him. Hank was seated on the edge of Miss Kepper’s desk. He was flirting with the old gal. It was all Pete could do not to roll his eyes.

  He gave his father a quick nod and “hello,” hoping against hope that he was there only to see Miss Kepper.

  “Pete, I need a word with you,” he father said, loudly.

  “I’m in my office,” he answered without hesitating or turning back. Hank would find him without any help or invitation and he’d tell him exactly what he thought. Pete had no doubt about that.

  He retrieved a bag of Mallomars out of his fridge. But he only ate one. They still tasted really good, but the truth was, they no longer seemed to comfort him as they once had. Maybe he didn’t need that kind of comfort anymore.

  Pete was perusing the distribution center plan-o-gram when his father walked in. Hank groaned as he took a seat.

  “What’s wrong?” Pete asked. “Are you getting too old for my stairs?”

  Hank shook his head. “I think I overdid it at the golf course yesterday,” he answered. “I only played eighteen holes, no more than usual, but it was hot and maybe I didn’t drink enough water. Whatever, I woke up this morning feeling pretty achy and sore.”

  “Sorry about that,” Pete said.

  “When’s your mother coming home?” Hank asked. “She’s been gone all summer.”

  “I got an e-mail from her a couple of days ago,” he answered. “She was headed out on a Li River cruise to see Karst topography.”

  “What the devil is that?” Hank asked, grumpily.

  “I don’t have any idea,” Pete admitted. “But she sounded very enthusiastic about it.”

  Hank shook his head. “Don’t marry a woman who isn’t interested in the store,” he warned.

  “I won’t.”

  Hank snorted. “The way you’re headed, you’ll never find any woman at all.”

  Pete didn’t rise to the bait, he only smiled and cast a surreptitious glance out the window.

  “Men who don’t get enough sex go crazy, you know that,” Hank warned.

  “I’ll try to keep that in mind,” Pete said.

  “But I didn’t come here to talk to you about sex,” Hank said. “Not even about you going behind my back to support that Bikini Car Wash.”

  “I didn’t go behind your back,” Pete said. “I did it right in front of your face.”

  “Humph,” Hank snorted, as he ran his hand thoughtfully along his aching arm.

  “I came here to ask you to give up on this dadgummed cross-training,” Hank said.

  “Oh, you heard about that.”

  “Doris tells me everything, you know that,” he answered.

  “Our first cross-training day went very well,” Pete told him. “I’m going to keep it up. Once a week for a while and then maybe add some more. I don’t actually want people doing each other’s jobs, but I do want them competent enough to do them. And knowledgeable enough to appreciate what their coworkers are doing.”

  “That’s just business school crap,” Hank said. “We don’t do that here at Guthrie’s. We want people to gain competence in their own job, not get confused about who does what.”

  “We didn’t do that at Guthrie’s,” Pete said, surprised at his own lack of anger at the interference. “Times have changed, Dad. We’re working with a really short staff. If someone is sick or late or quits, we don’t have all those part-timers you used to have to fill in. Now we’ve only got us. And each one of us has got to be able to fill in where we can.”


  “In my day…”

  “In your day it was different,” Pete said. “You ran a great store, you made a lot of money for the company, you were a big success. You made the decisions that worked for you, that worked for then. I’ve got to make the decisions that work for me and work for now.”

  “You don’t just throw away the past like it’s washed up.”

  “I would never do that,” Pete said. “Guthrie Foods is a tradition in this town. Tradition is important. But if we can’t compete then tradition won’t save us.”

  His father sat there staring at him silently for a long moment.

  “I guess you’re right,” he said, finally.

  Pete tried to keep his jaw from dropping. “You know, I didn’t want to retire,” he told Pete. “I wasn’t ready to quit. But your mother said she’d divorce me if I didn’t hand the business to you. Maybe I should have let her. I never see her anymore anyway.”

  For a moment Pete didn’t know what to say to that. Finally he asked the only question he could. “Do you want your old job back?”

  “Would you give it to me?” Hank asked.

  Pete sighed heavily. “Not happily,” he answered. “But yes, I would.”

  Hank’s whole face changed. He didn’t look as pleased as he looked flabbergasted.

  “Why would you do that?” he asked. “That’s crazy to give this up.”

  Pete shrugged. “I can build something else if I need to,” he assured his father. “I love this job. But you’re my father. And if you want to sit in this chair, I think you’ve probably earned the right to do so.”

  Hank just looked at him and finally chuckled. “Well, I didn’t expect you to give in,” he admitted. “You are so much like your mother. If you didn’t look like me and play sports, I’d have a hard time believing you’re my son.”

  “But I am,” Pete told him.

  “Yes, you are,” Hank answered. “And I like having you as the head of Guthrie Foods. I just wish…I just wish things were a lot more like they used to be.”