by Pamela Morsi
After the unexpected visit of Tiff’s ex-husband, the buoyant mood of the afternoon had been spoiled. They continued to work and talk and smile at the customers, but the atmosphere was chilly, even in the hottest of the afternoon sun.
Jelly had gotten so fixated on what had happened that Pop finally had to take her home. She kept repeating over and over that “it’s time to get that perp off the street.” And she needed to “call the D.A. for a warrant.”
The constant repetition of this negative litany was making things worse. She could see it on Tiff’s face. And there was just no explaining to Jelly.
So Andi was glad to see them go, though the help she’d gotten from her family had been critical to the work they’d managed to get done.
Andi couldn’t recall having ever been so tired. Her arms ached so much it was hard to drag a towel across a car hood. Her back screamed in protest every time she bent over. And her legs were so exhausted, she was unsteady on her feet.
When she began turning cars away at 5:30, she did it without the slightest sense of regret. She’d lost sight of her business model and her need to make money. All she cared about was closing down on time and going home.
Tiff and Cher-L obviously felt the same. As soon as the last car rolled off the lot, both of them were putting on their cover-ups eager to head for home.
Andi was hot and sweaty and couldn’t bear to drag on her coveralls. She found one of her dad’s old workshirts hanging on a nail outside the bathroom. She slipped it on over her swimsuit. It didn’t come down much further than her thighs, but she did feel covered. Buttoning it up, she ran her hand across the name embroidered above the pocket. Wolkowicz. She wondered if her father had been proud of her today or if he’d been embarrassed. Her mother would have been embarrassed, she thought. Then, immediately she shook her head. She didn’t have a clue what her mother was like, what she wanted or believed in, she didn’t know a thing about her mother and now she never would.
That rumination caused Andi to tear up. More evidence of how tired she was. She blinked away the emotions that had drifted to the surface and tried to get on with her business.
She didn’t think her brain was sharp enough to even count the receipts taken in, let alone compare it with the tickets. She just stuffed everything in a bag and stowed it in the safe. Tomorrow was soon enough to celebrate their success.
The tip jar was another matter. The three women counted it together. Their plan that morning was equal thirds, but acknowledging the help they’d gotten from Pop and Jelly, they split it 4 ways, allowing those two to split their quarter. That seemed equitable to Andi, especially since Pop and Jelly weren’t drawing any wages.
Everybody was happy to have some actual cash in their pocket.
“I’m just so glad we’re not doing this again tomorrow,” Cher-L said. “I’d planned to go out tonight and now I can even afford it, but I’m just beat. I’m going home and going to bed.”
As Cher-L left, Tiff was gathering up her things. Andi walked over and gave her a hug.
“Thanks for working so hard today,” she said. “I just want to tell you that I think you’re a good person and a great mother. Caleb is lucky to have you.”
Tiff nodded, apparently not trusting herself to speak.
“See you Monday,” Andi said.
As Tiff went out the door, Andi eased her aching body down on the bench at the back wall. She needed to change from wet sneakers to dry ones for what felt like the longest walk home ever.
She put her head against the wall and closed her eyes.
Or maybe, she thought, she would just sleep right here, sitting up.
She heard the door open again and assumed it was Tiff.
“Did you forget something?”
“You’re actually a difficult woman to forget,” a male voice answered.
A startled surge of adrenalin shot through Andi as her eyelids snapped open and she sat up straight. Pete Guthrie stood in front of her.
“Don’t sneak up on me like that!” she said angrily. Her heart was pounding.
“Sorry,” he said. “The door was open.”
Inexplicably and embarrassingly, Andi felt tears gathering in her eyes. Exhaustion, unexpectedly jolted by fear, had pushed her emotions, already close to the surface, over the top.
She couldn’t cry. Women in business don’t cry. Or if they do, they don’t stay in business very long. She steeled herself against it.
“Oh gosh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Pete repeated.
He sat down beside her and put a comforting arm around her shoulder. That just made it worse.
She would not cry! She would not cry! She insisted to herself as she squeezed her eyelids tightly closed. A lone tear escaped and trailed down her cheek.
Stupid, stupid, girly-girl reaction, she reviled herself.
Then she realized that high school hottie, Pete Guthrie was right next to her. He was warm and smelled good and had a muscled arm around her. Andi knew exactly how to send her emotions in an entirely different direction.
She pulled away slightly and looked up at him. His expression was one of friendly, gentlemanly concern. Andi decided to wipe that look right off his face. She snaked her arms around his neck, and planted her mouth right on his.
The chemistry of kissing was something Andi had learned in college, both through practical experience and textbook research. It was a human conditional response that produced a surge of hormones and an exchange of pheromones.
Andi’s intent was to send Pete some of hers. She was caught off guard with the quality and quantity she got in return. Perhaps it was the exhaustion or maybe the emotion, but kissing Pete Guthrie felt strangely like an overdue homecoming, all new, different, yet completely familiar and welcoming. More than just welcoming, it was stimulating. A tiny spark within her developed into a cloud of sexual combustion that flamed up with an almost audible whoosh of intensity.
Suddenly neither of them could quite get enough. Andi moaned deep in her throat. He sucked in breath through his nostrils and pulled her more tightly against him.
“Wow,” she said, when they separated.
“Wow yourself,” he answered.
She pulled away and moved down the bench, putting a little bit of safe distance between them. She leaned back once more against the wall and he did, too. Andi was very surprised at her reaction. Where was that exhaustion she had felt? The sadness that had made her cry? Her whole body was now wide-awake, the blood humming through her veins like a taut violin. The heaviness that had weighed on her all afternoon had vanished.
“I don’t know what that was all about,” she said finally.
“Me neither,” Pete answered. “I guess I should apologize, but I warn you, it’s going to be really tough for me to drum up any pretense of regret.”
His honesty was so close to her own reaction that she laughed.
“I’ve had a really tough day and I’m so tired, I don’t know what I’m doing,” Andi said, adding, “That’s my explanation. What can you come up with?”
“Well,” he said, thoughtfully. “I haven’t had sex in like a year. That’s a pretty good excuse, I think.”
“Sex? I’d forgotten about sex,” Andi answered. “But I’m beginning to remember.”
Their laughter slowly tapered off into silence. They continued to sit there, quietly, companionably. It was nice.
Pete finally spoke. “You said it was a tough day, but with all the traffic over here,” he said, “I’m guessing you had a good number of sales.”
“Yes, we did,” Andi told him. “That was what was so tough about it. A few more days like this and I’m done for. I worked my butt off.”
He nodded. “I saw your butt earlier today,” he said. “Very nice.”
She grinned at him, amused. “I didn’t know that you were funny.”
“I didn’t know that you were a girl,” he replied. “I guess that makes us even.”
“I was never much of a girl,” she said.
“All the girls were somewhere fixing their hair and doing their nails. While I was hanging out down here drinking soda pop and listening to guys complain about their drive trains and transmissions.”
“It probably saved you a lot of grief,” Pete said. “I understand that hair and nails stuff gets pretty tedious day after day.”
“I guess we shouldn’t knock it if we haven’t tried it,” Andi said.
“I was married to it...for a while,” he answered.
“How’d that work out?”
He gave an oversize shrug. It was a gesture both comedic and self-deprecating. “Apparently I’m a better supermarket manager than I am a husband,” he said. “Or at least I think that I am. My father might disagree.”
“Ah...your father,” she said. “How is the great public servant?”
“Not too happy,” Pete answered. “That’s actually why I came down here. Not that I wouldn’t have come just to share that great kiss, but I did have other motives.”
“Hmm, well, I don’t know if I’m disappointed or relieved,” she teased. “What’s up with Alderman Guthrie?”
“He’s out to get you,” Pete said. “Some of his constituents have been giving him grief over this place, so he’s maneuvering for a way to shut you down.”
“Why am I not surprised at this?” Andi asked rhetorically. “He didn’t give me any of the details,” Pete said. “But I talked to Officer Mayfield. Apparently my dad is attempting both to band the downtown merchants together against you and to have your business deemed ineligible for this zoning code.”
“Ineligible how?”
“He’s trying to say that you’re a sexually oriented business,” Pete told her. “Like a strip club or an adult video store, the city can zone you away from churches and schools and residential neighborhoods.”
“I’ll fight him,” Andi declared. “I won’t just give in. He’ll never win that in court.” But even as she said it, she could hear the defeat in her own voice. He wouldn’t have to win in court. He could just hire a handful of lawyers, get a couple of legal actions filed and delay her until she ran out of money. She couldn’t afford to go to court. She didn’t say any of this to Pete. Maybe Mr. Wow-he-sure-knows-how-to-kiss was on her side, but blood is thicker than kissing partners.
“I need to go home,” she told him instead.
He nodded, though she sensed it was a little reluctantly. “Go ahead and lock up and I’ll walk you to your car.”
“I’m sort of car-free,” she joked. “I couldn’t keep up the payments, so now I’m on foot.”
“Then I’ll drive you home,” he said.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Just doing my civic duty, ma’am,” he said. “I can see that you’re nearly dead on your feet. I wouldn’t want you to collapse on the street wearing just a shirt over that skimpy red bikini. For the sake of public decency I’d better drive you home.”
She made sure the building was secure while he walked over to the Guthrie Foods parking lot to get his car. Her muscles still ached and she could hardly stoop or bend, but she felt surprisingly alert and alive and optimistic. Intellectually, she knew that was wrong-headed. If Hank Guthrie and the other downtown business owners were allied against her, they’d find a way to hurt the business, to shut it down, to shut her out of her opportunity. But somehow Pete’s support loomed large. If Pete was on her side things couldn’t be so bad.
Had he said he was on her side?
No, she didn’t remember him saying anything. But she did remember the feel of his lips. Andi couldn’t stop herself from smiling.
His car pulled under the overhang. She was surprised at his car choice. He drove a sensible, nondescript sedan. Somehow that just didn’t mesh with the flashy, high school dreamsicle that she still remembered him to be.
She headed to the passenger door. He raced around the car and grabbed for the handle just as she did, actually covering her hand with his own.
“I think I can open my own car door,” she told him.
“I think my mother wouldn’t want you to,” he answered.
Andi shrugged and gave him a facetious sigh of resignation. “Well, okay, we wouldn’t want to upset your mother.”
He handed her into the car. She couldn’t help but feel uncustomarily elegant, even in a man’s shirt and a skimpy swimsuit.
“Where am I headed?” he asked as he took his seat behind the wheel.
“Jubal Street, between 11th and 12th,” she answered.
He pulled out onto Fifth and headed in that direction. He glanced over at her.
“What?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“You have a kind of faraway look,” he clarified. “What are you thinking about?”
She was thinking about him, the nearness of him, the scent of him. That was not exactly how she chose to answer.
“I was just imagining myself as one of the popular girls that were always in your car in high school.”
Pete sighed. “Are we back to talking about high school again?” he asked. “High school memories are the bane of small-town existence.”
His words were spoken with such drama, she chuckled. “What do you mean?”
“Everybody else in the world gets to move on with their lives, to grow and change,” he said. “But not here where people still remember you from high school.”
“We’re all shaped to some extent by things that happened in our teens,” she said. “That’s not unique to small towns.”
Pete shook his head. “Maybe not completely,” he said. “But in big cities, you almost never work with the same people who knew you in high school. You don’t have to do business with them or have your children grow up with their children. In cities, who you are is just whoever you grew up to be. But in small towns, you can never run away from your adolescence. If you were Pizza Face at fifteen, you’re still called Pizza Face when you move into the assisted living center.”
“Well, that’s a depressing thought,” Andi said.
He nodded. “Yes, it is. I think if all those city dwellers who fantasize about moving back to the simpler life in small towns had any idea how long memories are here...well, they’d start holding on to those crowded subway lines for dear life.”
Andi laughed lightly.
“And it’s not just our generation,” Pete continued. “All the bad blood between my father and yours dates back to some teenage jealousy that my dad hasn’t been able to get beyond.”
“Really? Pop never talks about high school,” she said. “Or really anything about the past. He never even talks about my mom. And I know he’s got to miss her so much.”
In the dim light of the dashboard she could see Pete nodding.
“This is it up on the left,” she said. “The place with the truck in the driveway.”
He pulled to a stop on the street in front of her house.
Andi reached for the door handle, but Pete got out and rushed around the car to open the door for her once more. “I’ll walk you to the door,” he said.
“Why? It’s twenty feet. I think I can make it on my own.”
“I...uh...I thought I might kiss you again.”
“That’s probably a really bad idea,” Andi said.
“Yeah, I’m sure it is,” he agreed. “But I’d still like to.”
He was beside her as Andi made her way up the front walk. He didn’t take her hand or touch her in any way, but she was completely aware of his nearness. She shouldn’t kiss him again. It was way too dangerous to kiss him. She quickly discounted that thought. The kiss they shared had to have been a fluke. Kissing wasn’t that good. It was just kissing and it was probably better for her to kiss him again and realize it was ordinary than to carry that memory around to taunt her every time they ran into each other.
At the bottom of the porch steps, she stopped and turned to face him. She slid her arms up around his neck and he bent down to encircle her waist with his hands. There was no fumbling, no bumped noses, t
heir lips found each other perfectly in the darkness as if they’d been doing this for a lifetime. It was hot and sweet and amazingly passionate. Andi didn’t want it to end. She ached to be closer to him, pressing herself full-length against his body. His arms held her tightly, stroking her. Andi’s knees were turning to jelly and she leaned heavily against him.
Their mouths separated as they each gasped for breath. He should go. Andi knew that. She needed to unclench the grasp she had on his shirt and send him away. That’s exactly what she needed to do.
“Let’s sit down,” he said.
“Yeah,” she agreed.
Pete seated himself on the top step. Andi seated herself in his lap.
Suddenly he grasped her hips. “Don’t wiggle!”
“Sorry,” she answered, recognizing that was exactly what she’d done.
She heard him whispering under his breath.
“What did you say?” she asked,
“Nothing.”
“It sounded like Q-tips, cotton balls, cuticle remover.”
“Aisle Twelve,” he explained. “I’m getting a grip on myself by forcing myself to visualize Aisle Twelve.”
That really made her laugh. They started kissing. Once they started, it just seemed crazy to stop.
“I should go,” he said against her throat.
“Uh-huh,” she agreed.
“We’re not thinking straight.”
“No, we’re not.”
“I’m going to leave now.”
She nodded. “In a minute, just a minute.” Andi wasn’t quite ready to give up this moment, this feeling.
He ran one long finger down the buttons on her shirt. “I want to look at you,” he said. “May I look at you?”
They both fumbled to get the buttons undone. He reached for the string at her back as she untied the one on her neck. Carelessly she tossed away the expensive triangles of red material. In the darkness she looked at him looking at her.
He kind of whistled under his breath and then added, “You’re beautiful.”