by Pamela Morsi
Tiff shrugged. “I don’t mind Gil being the hero,” she said. “Right now, I think he needs that. And Caleb needs it, too.”
The tap, tap, tapping of the paintbrush against the window went on and on. It was time-consuming and exacting. Too much paint on the homemade paper stencils and they just fell apart. But when a line was done and the paper pulled away, it looked very good. And that little bit of satisfaction kept the women working for the rest of the afternoon.
Finally finished with their deliveries, Pop and Jelly arrived to help, just as Tiff and Andi were beginning to tire out.
“It looks nice,” Pop told them. “You girls do real good work.”
“She’s not a girl, she’s my mom,” Caleb corrected him.
Jelly tried her hand at the task, but she couldn’t seem to limit the amount of paint she got on her brush. No matter how carefully she listened, she continued to get a lot when she needed just a little. The paint would run on the paper and down the window, requiring hasty cleanup.
“This is a crime scene!” she declared after her third disaster.
“The paint roller is better for you,” Andi said.
Her sister nodded in agreement. “The paint roller is better for me,” she repeated.
“Why don’t you help Caleb finish the back of the building?” Andi suggested.
This worked perfectly. Jelly loved to be of help. She needed to be needed. And because the boy was smaller and couldn’t reach the high places, he truly needed her. Caleb wasn’t as bored as when working by himself.
With Andi, Tiff and Pop tap, tap, tapping, the price list slowly but surely became a visible reality on the window. And, just as surely, the opening of the bikini car wash was headed their way.
Jelly sat on the back porch with her friend Tony. She had her photo book with the big bright purple flowers on the front. There were words on the front that Jelly could not read. Tony could and did.
“GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN! GIRLS JUSTWANTTO HAVE FUN! GIRLSJUSTWANTTO HAVE FUN! GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN!"
“Shut up and listen,” Jelly demanded.
He complied, sort of. Under his breath he was still whispering and bobbing his head to the rhythm of the words.
Jelly opened the slick creaky pages of photos. Almost every one featured the two sisters.
“This is me and Andi in Easter bonnets,” Jelly said.
“Andi’s my girlfriend. Andi’s my girlfriend.”
“This one is Halloween,” Jelly continued. “I’m a princess and Andi is a pirate.”
“Jack Sparrow, got to find the Black Pearl.”
She continued to point out the moments of the girls together. Sometimes they were dressed for Sunday school and sometimes for backyard picnics. Always two girls side by side.
Then Jelly stopped and examined a photo that showed only one of them. With glasses and braces, dressed in damp coveralls Andi stood with Pop in front of the car wash building looking up at him adoringly.
Jelly smiled. “My sister, Andi, knows a lot about washing cars.”
“GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN!” Tony blurted out again.
10
WALT WAS AS NERVOUS as he could ever remember being. He’d hardly eaten a thing at dinner. Andi and Jelly had made pancakes; even they couldn’t mess that up. And it was the best meal served in his house in a long time. After a busy and eventful day, he should have been exhausted, but he was unable to sit still.
“I’m meeting some of the guys tonight at Superior Lanes,” he’d told Andi as they cleared the table. He’d tried hard to sound nonchalant.
“Oh, okay,” she’d answered. “Who are you bowling with?” He should have anticipated the question, but he was caught flat-footed. What if he named someone and Andi saw them and then mentioned it?
“Rob Sowa and Angus Bender,” he told her. He was pretty sure she wouldn’t see either of those fellows, unless she was wandering around the graveyard. Both had been dead for several years.
He cleaned up, slicked up and pretty much snuck out while the girls were down in the basement watching TV. He backed out into the street and then ground the gears unpleasantly as he shifted the old truck from Reverse into First.
Walt winced and gave himself a mental scolding. He needed to get a handle on himself. He was not some hormone-crazed teenager. He was a steady, serious, retired guy. With studied deliberateness, he eased up on the accelerator and gripped the steering wheel.
He resorted to an old trick he’d learned from military training: mission silence. Shutting up all the noise in his head except for what he was doing. He was driving out to the interstate. He would do that perfectly and allow no extraneous thoughts to distract him.
The army had taught him how to do that. Of all the things they’d taught him, there were very few that he ever used. If he’d known it before he joined up, maybe he wouldn’t have needed to volunteer. But, back then, he’d been desperate to get away from his anger, frustration and disappointment. Military service was his ticket out of town. His best friend, Paul, had joined up with him, worried about Walt going off alone. They had planned to do their service together. But then the army discovered that Walt had grown up speaking Polish with his grandparents. And that he had a natural aptitude for Slavic languages. He’d ended up sitting in a listening post in West Germany. Paul had gone to Southeast Asia.
At the bowling alley Walt parked the truck in an obvious spot beneath the light pole. He was in complete control of himself again. Still, lurking underneath that calm was an anxious excitement that he couldn’t completely tamp down.
He locked up the truck and touched the key card in his front pocket before making his way to the front door of the Superior Lanes. Once inside, he glanced around to see if there was anybody he knew. The place was busy, active, loud. There might be a recession on, but you couldn’t tell it by this place. Spotting no one familiar, Walt headed toward the far end of the building. He came to a deserted hallway beneath a neon sign with an arrow. RESTROOMS. He strode purposefully in that direction, but when he got to the door marked MEN, he didn’t even hesitate. He continued on to the end of the hallway and out the back exit.
A hundred yards away, across a mostly deserted parking lot, was the side door to a Vacation Inn Express, a low-cost, national chain motel, newly built to cater to business travelers and people driving along the nearby interstate.
Walt touched the key card in his pocket for perhaps the thousandth time. And with a careful eye out for anyone who might observe him, he hurried across the distance.
He slid the card down the reader and heard the click of the lock releasing. He pulled open the door and went inside. His footfalls were silent on the carpeting as he walked to the elevator.
His nervousness, held at bay for the drive, now returned with full force, along with an anxiety that was wholly new.
Now, he thought, now, after all these years, all these dreams, what if it’s a disappointment? What if I am a disappointment?
On the third floor he got off and followed the directional signs to the number she’d given him. When he reached the appropriate door, he hesitated only an instant as he took a deep breath and then with fumbling hands he used the key card again.
Inside the narrow room with its nondescript furniture and window view of the bowling alley, she sat on the edge of the bed. Her brown eyes were huge with the same kind of uncertainly that he felt himself. But it was her elegant, beaded after-five attire that caught him off guard. Inexplicably a smile spread across his face.
“Hey, Rache,” he said. “Don’t look so scared. It’s only me.”
Dressed in beige silk and pearls, she was seated, back straight and legs crossed elegantly at the ankle, her matching handbag clutched in her lap.
He held out his arms to afford her a better view of his own wardrobe choice, jeans and a polo shirt bearing the name of a local sports team.
“Obviously I’m underdressed for this occasion,” he said.
She smiled up at him.
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“I’m pretending to be on my way to the Juvenile Diabetes Gala,” she said. “And you?”
He shrugged. “I’m out for a night of bowling.”
“Whoever imagined that we would turn out to be such liars,” she said.
Walt shrugged as he took a seat beside her. “We’ve had a lot of years of practice,” he admitted.
She nodded and sighed. “We sure have,” she said. “I’m tired of it,” she said.
“Me, too.”
He wrapped his arm around her waist. “Have I told you, ‘I love you’ yet today?”
She feigned serious concentration. “No, I don’t believe you’ve actually mentioned it.”
“I need to get that on my calendar, so that I don’t forget,” he teased.
“Perhaps I could buy you one of those smartwatches like my boys have,” she said. “They go off with little buzzing noises right and left to remind them of some important something.”
“Really?”
“Yes, you just program in what you want and it buzzes to remind you.”
He nodded solemnly. “So I could get a ‘tell Rachel you love her’ reminder every day?”
“Absolutely,” she said.
“You should get a marketing campaign together,” he told her. “If you could get the word out on this before Father’s Day, I think you’d get rich.”
She grinned broadly at him. It was a smile unchanged for forty years. “I’m already rich,” she told him in a manner both teasing and matter-of-fact. “Rich enough to attract a much younger man. One who wouldn’t show up in his bowling shoes.”
“These aren’t bowling shoes,” he said, looking down at his two-toned suede ankle boots.
“Well, you certainly could have fooled me.”
“Take that back, woman,” he said. “I don’t let gals speak badly of my comfortable footwear.” He grabbed her foot and held it up to near eye level. “Especially when they are wearing something like this? Two thin leather straps attached to a ladder. How much did these set you back?”
“Those are designers,” she answered. “I don’t remember how much they cost, but I do think they could probably be exchanged for a mountain of bowling shoes.”
He pulled the strappy sandal off of her foot which he set on his knees and began massaging its aching muscles. “Now, doesn’t that feel better?”
She didn’t answer, but made almost a purring sound.
Walt planted a kiss on her instep.
“That’s a good start,” he said.
“A good start for what?”
“I want to kiss every inch of you,” he told her. “And I was always the kind of guy who started out at the bottom.”
He placed his second kiss on her ankle and she laughed. “I think kissing every inch of someone is something that you do to a twenty-year-old. Most of my inches are now covered with wrinkles.”
“You know,” he said. “I should have done it when we were twenty. But I didn’t. We didn’t. That was then and this is now. And now...well, kissing is about the only service I’m absolutely sure I can perform.”
“Oh, Walt, don’t worry about that.”
“I do worry,” he said. “I went to see my doctor this week and asked him to give me some of those little blue pills.”
“You didn’t?”
“I did,” Walt said. “Of course I did. When you’ve wanted a woman for forty years and she finally agrees to meet you at a motel, of course you’d want to be prepared. I wasn’t a Boy Scout for nothing.”
“What did he say?”
“He said no,” Walt told her. “He said I’ve got to underperform before I qualify for help. Sounds like a lot of Main Street business ventures these days.”
“Well, let’s just hope you’re one of those firms who’s too big to fail,” she said.
“Rachel!”
They both giggled like kids.
“Shame on you!” he teased.
“Darling, when you’ve waited for this as long as I have, a woman has got no shame,” she answered.
“I’ll do the best I can,” he promised.
Rachel moved over to sit on his lap. “We love each other,” she told him. “That’s enough to satisfy me.”
She brought her lips down on his. She tasted warm and sweet and familiar. He pulled down the zipper on the back of her dress and drew the fabric slowly down to her waist, revealing a beige lace bra that confined two small, but still lovely breasts. He pressed his lips against one before laying her back against the bed and discarding her dress completely.
“You are so beautiful, Rachel,” he said. “Inside and out. And I have been in love with you all my life. I just hope I can do justice to the way I feel.”
She ran her manicured nails along the front of his shirt before tugging it over his head.
“I’m happy just to hold you in my arms,” she told him. “If we can’t make the earth move, well so be it. I always thought sex was a bit overrated.”
“Oh, really?” Walt commented, smiling. “With a little luck, perhaps I can change your mind on that.”
The Friday night before her big Saturday opening, Andi stayed up late perfecting her banner. It was a six-foot piece of canvas that she’d cut from an old camping tent she’d found in the garage. With the help of stencils, she’d put on one word in bright red letters. BIKINI. She was going to hang it at the top of the existing sign painted on the front of the building overhang. It would cover up the word Plainview, making the sign read: BIKINI WASH & WAX. Once the paint dried, Andi used the steam iron on the back side of the fabric to make the lettering further adhere to the canvas. She didn’t expect it to last forever, but she did need it to survive a rainstorm or two.
The most problematic part of the whole banner plan was how to hang it. She couldn’t really figure out any way to attach it to the bricks, so she put a grommet in the top two corners and decided to tie it with ropes to the rafter tails of the roof. She wasn’t totally sure that would work, but it seemed like the most reasonable solution.
Andi draped her finished product across the dining room table and admired her handiwork. It looked good. It was eye-catching. And catching eyes appeared to be the major objective of her business plan.
She let out a little puff of disgust.
“Mom would be so proud!” she commented facetiously.
She would have undoubtedly been shocked, Andi thought. Then again, maybe she wouldn’t have. Maybe she would have said, “Hey, go for it.”
The truth was, Andi admitted to herself in the silence of her parents’ home, she didn’t have a clue about what her mother had thought about much of anything.
Bitterly she recalled her last conversation with her mother. Or, at least, she recalled being on the phone. She remembered her mother’s voice, husky with exaggerated breathing.
“You need to come home,” Pop told her, when he got on the line.
“I can’t get away right now,” she’d explained. “It’s all crazy here at work. Nobody goes out for lunch, ’cause they think they might not have a job when they come back.”
“She’s very sick.”
“She can’t be that sick,” Andi had insisted. “It’s like two days ago she had a really bad cold.”
“And now she has pneumonia,” Pop answered. “I’m looking at her, Andi. I think you’d better come home.”
“Sure, Pop,” she’d said. “I’ll come home.”
Andi could remember how annoyed she felt. The stress she’d been under had been tremendous. She’d been putting in long hours every day and more on the weekend. And now she’d agreed to spend four hours on the interstate. She worked the rest of the day. Went home, showered, packed and grabbed some dinner to eat on the road. It was a little after eight when her cell phone went off. She saw that it was Pop and heaved a big sigh before putting a smile on her face to answer.
“Hi, Pop. I’m sorry I’m running late. I should be driving up to the door by, maybe, 11:30.”
There was a long paus
e. “Okay. Okay.” His words were very quiet, almost stilted.
“Pop?”
“Andrea...sweetie, your mother passed away about.. .about fifteen minutes ago.”
Standing in the dining room, more than six months later, the memory of those words still had the power to make Andi feel sick to her stomach.
She took a couple of deep breaths and then pulled out one of the dining chairs and sat down, wearily holding her head in her hands.
Why were you so wrapped up in yourself? Why wasn’t there more time? Why didn’t you leave that day as soon as you hung up the phone? And the ultimate of guilt-inducing questions. When exactly did you plan to get to know your mother?
Andi heard the key turn in the front door lock. She heard her father tiptoeing through the living room.
“Hi, Pop,” she said.
He startled at the sight of her. His brow immediately furrowed with annoyance. “Are you waiting up for me?”
“Waiting up? No.” The suggestion was ludicrous. “No, I’m working on my banner for the shop. And I’m sure I couldn’t sleep anyway. My stomach is full of butterflies and my brain is racing in overdrive.”
His face relaxed and he nodded. He stood beside her chair, assessing her handiwork. “It looks pretty good,” he said. “It’s definitely not professional work, but I think it will do very nicely, at least until you scrape together some cash for a real sign.”
“Thanks,” Andi said. She was grateful for his praise and for the vote of confidence. He’d not suggested that she might eventually have to pay for a real sign, he spoke as if she would. Pop was always on her side and she needed him there.
She glanced up to tell him just that. To thank him for being in her corner every step of the way. Then she noticed something that distracted her from the words in her head.
“Pop? You hair is wet.”
He stepped back slightly. There was a wariness in his expression. “I...uh...I had a shower at the gym.”
“The gym? I thought you were at bingo tonight?”
“I was, but...uh, some of the guys got bored and decided to go shoot some hoops. So, I went with them.”