The Bikini Car Wash (25 page)

“Am I included in that ‘us’ equation or are the children of your ‘marriage of convenience’ not that important anymore?”

Pop’s brow furrowed and gave her a look very familiar to her childhood memories of disobedience.

“Andrea Katrine!” he scolded. “I expect better than that from you.”

Andi was duly chagrined.

“Sorry, Pop,” she said. “But I…I feel like my whole life has been turned upside down. I always thought you and Mom had a perfect marriage and now I find out you never loved each other. You were both in love with other people.”

“I did love your mother and she did love me,” he insisted. “There are different kinds of love. For us it was just different.”

Andi nodded unconvinced. “The kicker to that, Pop, is that different means inferior.”

“No, it does not,” he said. “Different is just that, different. Think of you and Jelly.”

“What about us?”

“Which one of my daughters do you think I love?” Pop asked. “You, Andi, I’ve urged to flight. Go out, discover the world, find yourself. I’ve cheered on as you left home. I let you build a life in Chicago that had nothing to do with me. And when you threw it away to come home, I gladly welcomed you in. I’ve stood beside you as you’ve made choices and I’ve let you make them, even when I didn’t agree. That’s all proof that I love you.”

“I never doubted that you love me, Pop,” Andi said.

“So what about Jelly?” he asked. “I have kept her at home with me from the very first. There were people who thought she should go away to an institution when she was just a toddler. I wouldn’t let her go. She’s never been out on her own. Never given a chance to make a life away from me. I never let her drive. Never encouraged her to date. When her sheltered workshop closed, I could have allowed her to move
into a group home in another city far away, but instead I took her to work with me, made her my assistant on a volunteer job. And that’s proof that I love her.”

He put both hands on the kitchen table and leaned forward.

“So let me repeat the question,” he said. “Which of my daughters do I love?”

Andi just looked at him. There was no need to answer. Of course he loved them both.

“I loved Rachel, so I had to let her go,” he said.

He pulled out a kitchen chair and seated himself. Andi followed his lead.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever had your heart broken,” he said. “As your pop, I really hope not. Because it is awful. The pain was so fresh at first that I couldn’t bear to be in the same town with her. I couldn’t stand by and watch her marry another man. I joined the army as an escape.” He closed his eyes and swallowed hard. “Paul and Ella, all they wanted was to get married and live happily ever after. But they loved me. So Ella waited and Paul followed me into the service to keep an eye on me.” He shook his head. “That didn’t work, of course. I got sent to Germany and he went to Vietnam. I can’t tell you the guilt I felt when he was killed. It was partly penance that brought me home to face your mother. I wanted her to revile me, hit me, to tell me how much she hated me for tearing her apart from the man she loved. But that’s not what happened. We shared our grief and we opened our hearts.”

“You said you married to make the best of it,” Andi pointed out.

Pop nodded. “We did. Maybe we could have just stayed friends. Maybe our hearts would have healed and we would
have both found other people. But I don’t think either of us were ever much into maybes. We enjoyed our life together. We were blessed by you two wonderful girls. I have no regrets. And Ella certainly never expressed any.”

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 neigh
bors, put up with his holier-than-nobody father and be able 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.”

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.”

Pete nodded. “They’re just not. And there’s nothing I can do to change that.”

Hank nodded. “I guess I’d better get going,” he said, rising to his feet. “I’m having an early lunch with a young lady. I met her in Merchants and Citizens Alliance for Morality. Kind of a stubby little brunette, but nice curves. She’s thirty-seven and only been divorced about eight weeks.”

Pete raised an eyebrow. “Have a nice lunch, Dad.”

As his father walked out of the office, Pete picked up the plan-o-gram once more. He’d just glanced down at it when an unexpected noise brought his attention back to his father. In the hallway, Hank stumbled. Pete’s first reaction was surprise. His dad was a natural athlete, strong and sure-footed. It was on his lips to tease Hank, make a joke about his misstep, when he realized his father was clutching his heart and falling.

Pete was out of his chair and across the room in a flash and managed, somehow to catch his father before he hit the floor. His eyes were wide, his face ashen.

“Miss Kepper!” Pete called out. “Call 911!”

The woman stepped out of her office for one instant. Just long enough to give a startled scream and then she was on the phone.

“Where am I? I need to get to the store,” Hank said.

“You’re at the store, Dad. We’re going to get you an ambulance.”

“Maddie? Maddie, is that you?” he asked.

“No, Dad, it’s Pete. Mom’s in China, remember.”

“I need Maddie,” he said. “I need to tell her something.”

“You can tell her when she gets home,” Pete assured him.

His father moaned.

Miss Kepper came running out of her office. “The ambulance is on the way,” she said. “I alerted Phoebe to wait at the front door and direct them up here.”

“Good,” Pete said.

She knelt down on the other side of him with the ease of a girl. But the concern in her expression accentuated the lines of age on her face.

“What happened?” she asked Pete.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “Maybe it’s a heart attack.”

“I have an aspirin in my purse, aren’t you supposed to take an aspirin?”

Miss Kepper didn’t wait for an answer but rushed to her office, returning momentarily with a glass of water and a small white pill.

Pete raised his father into more of a sitting position to make it easier for him to swallow the aspirin, but it quickly became clear that he was not going to be able to do it. He choked and gasped and water ran out the side of his mouth.

Miss Kepper crushed the pill with her thumbnail and spread the dust on his tongue.

He seemed to appreciate that and opened his eyes.

“Is that you?” Hank’s voice was strangely weak as he reached out a shaky hand.

“Yes, it’s me,” Miss Kepper answered, clasping his fingers in her own. “I’m here, Hank. I’m right here.”

“I have to tell you,” he groaned out.

“Don’t try to talk, save your strength,” Miss Kepper said to him.

“I have to tell you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry things didn’t work out so well for you. You know that I always loved you.”

“Yes, I know. I’ve always known,” Miss Kepper told him.

His father made a strange sound, part choking, part moan. Pete tried to raise his head a bit so he could catch his breath. He was looking straight into his father’s eyes when the light went out of them. The dark widened pupils that had viewed the world for sixty-six years narrowed to tiny pinpoints and saw nothing at all.

“No! No!” Miss Kepper screamed. “Don’t leave me!”

Pete said nothing as he held his father in his arms.

The funeral of Henry P. “Hank” Guthrie, III was held at Plainview United Methodist. It had to be delayed for several days as Pete’s mother made her way from the wilds of southern China to the Midwestern landscape of Plainview.

But she did arrive, arrangements were made and the service was held in a reverent and tasteful manner.

Andi attended with Pop by her side. The church was filled to capacity and they were lucky to slip into a seat near the back. She glanced around and spotted the Joffees near the front. Rachel smiled and waved. From the corner of her eye, Andi thought she saw her father wink at the woman. She hoped she’d just imagined that.

In attendance were people from virtually every civic organization in town. His buddies from the golf course were there. As were several members of his college football squad, Cornbelt Conference Champions of 1965. And four rows of
Guthrie Foods employees were seated directly behind the family pew.

The eulogies went on forever. There were stories about his childhood and growing up in a busy grocery store. Remembrances of parties at the country club and Rotary projects. Mayor Penny Gunderson-Smythe gave such a glowing review of Hank’s accomplishments as alderman that it almost sounded like a campaign speech.

Through it all Andi watched Pete, or what she could see of him, seated at the front with his mother.

Madeleine Grosvenor Guthrie was a chic and attractive widow in a suit of plum-colored tweed. Pete was beside her, looking unaccustomedly formal in a dark suit. Sitting with them, instead of among the employees, Miss Doris Kepper was adorned in unrelieved black.

There were songs and Bible readings, candles and prayers and afterward they all filed out to reassemble at the burial.

Andi and Pop decided not to go to the cemetery. Pop needed to pick up Jelly and get to St. Hyacinth’s for the lunch delivery. Andi asked him to drop her off at the car wash. Tiff was covering it. And having worked the place alone herself, Andi knew it was tough.