The Bikini Car Wash (7 page)

“Of course they did,” Andi agreed, unsmiling. “But I guess they failed to mention that a venture could be rejected for no reason except a creepy old alderman takes a public affront at having his bias pointed out.”

Pop shook his head and tutted. “I know you’re feeling like it was all unfair,” he said. “But you knew it wasn’t going to be a sure thing. They call it ‘granting a variance’ because it’s asking for an exception. You had to know from the outset that you may not get it.”

She didn’t answer. She had known it, of course. But she hadn’t really considered it. A business, any business seemed better than a empty building. It was unreasonable that the council couldn’t see that.

Andi sat, stewing, as her coffee turned tepid and her oatmeal congealed.

Jelly got up from the table, her breakfast unfinished, and raced to her room. In a minute she was back with one of her stuffed animals. She set it on the table next to Andi.

“What’s this?”

“It’s Happy Bear,” Jelly told her. “He smiles all the time. We have to take smiles wherever we can find them.” Her sister’s earnestness was endearing. “Maybe you should keep him with you today,” Jelly added.

Andi picked up the nearly ragged pink-and-purple bear. He had patches of missing fur, a clumsily mended right leg and one eye was completely gone, but his bright red, velour grin was completely intact.

“For a smiling guy, he looks pretty beat-up,” she pointed out to Jelly.

Her sister shrugged. “Sometimes I have to hold him a lot,” she admitted solemnly. “And the washing machine is hard on everybody.”

Andi eyed her sister’s very serious concern and forced a smile to the corners of her mouth.

“Thanks, Jelly,” she said. “I’ll borrow him from you. Just for today.”

Jelly sighed with relief and smiled cheerily as if that settled everything.

Andi piddled away the morning, doing nothing constructive and allowing her thoughts to go over the council meeting again and again. Trying to make it all come out differently. It didn’t.

As Pop and Jelly left for work, Andi aimlessly surfed the Internet. Finally she got up from the couch and went into the kitchen to fix herself something for lunch.

Happy Bear was still sitting on the table where Jelly had left him. Andi grimaced at the sight of the big, red smile on the creature’s face. For an instant she envied Jelly. Her world was so much simpler than Andi’s own. And she could find such happiness in small things.

That thought was immediately followed by a more truthful assessment of reality. Life was far from easy for her sister. Much of the world was shut off from her as too risky and unsafe. And there were so many things that she could never understand, but that impacted her every day of her life.

Andi straightened her spine. She was going to stop feeling sorry for herself and get busy getting on with her life. She went up to her room and dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. She pulled her hair up into a casual ponytail and put on a pair of well-aged, comfortable sneakers. After finding the keys and leaving a note on the refrigerator, she headed out the front door.

The car wash building still needed to be cleaned up and the supplies still needed to be sold. She might as well get busy at that. She had nothing better to do.

The seventeen-block trek actually lifted her mood considerably. When the sun is shining and the breeze is blowing and there is a scent of crab apple blossoms in the air, it’s hard to remain pessimistic. Something would come up, Andi assured herself. Something even better than the Coffee Stop. And it would be something that Guthrie and son couldn’t stop. She just needed to keep herself open to the possibilities.

Arriving at the corner of Grosvenor and Fifth Street she unlocked the door on the little building. It was better than it had been, but there was still plenty to be done.

Andi used a five-gallon jug of rust inhibitor to prop open the door, adding both light and ventilation to the inside. She began sorting and shifting. It was heavy work but, surprisingly, Andi welcomed the exertion. It made her feel like she was accomplishing something. And today, she really needed that feeling.

Andi glanced up as a shadow darkened her doorway.

“Hey, girl! I thought it might be you in here.”

At first, she didn’t recognize the woman. But the sound of her voice brought recognition.

“Oh, hi,” Andi said. “You’re the waitress from Connor’s Diner.”

The woman shrugged. “No, this week my sister is the waitress at Connor’s Diner. I’m just unemployed Tiff McCarin out walking the streets.”

With a smile Andi noted her conservative suit and sensible shoes. “That’s not quite the streetwalker outfit,” she said. “Even in Plainview.”

Tiff laughed. “Yeah, this is my disguise. I’m like a hunter in a duckblind. Camouflaged as I look for jobs.”

“I don’t think you’re going to find one here,” Andi said.

Tiff nodded. “That’s what I understand. Isn’t that just my luck? I finally know somebody who’s opening a business and it gets closed down before I even get a chance to beg for work.”

Andi nodded sympathetically.

“Well, you look nice,” she said. “Did you have interviews today?”

“Just one,” Tiff answered. “And when I showed up, they told me that they’d changed their mind about filling the position. So I guess I got dressed up for nothing.”

“My pop says that ‘nothing is for nothing.’ There’s always something good that comes out of everything.”

Tiff laughed. “He may be right. I passed my ex-husband on Hager Street and he was so stunned to see me looking good, he walked into a light pole. That alone was worth the extra effort with the makeup.”

Andi laughed, only because Tiff was laughing.

“I guess he hasn’t seen you lately.”

“Only from a distance, I guess. We have a six-year-old son,” Tiff said. “He goes with his dad every other weekend. But Gil, that’s my ex, he just parks at the curb and Caleb meets him at the car.”

“I guess that’s one way to keep things civil.”

Tiff agreed. “No talking means no arguing. At this point that’s about all we can do for Caleb.”

Andi nodded.

“What about you?” Tiff asked. “Divorced?”

“Never married,” Andi answered. “Now are you going to tell me how
lucky
I am?”

“You get that a lot, I bet,” Tiff said.

“I think it’s supposed to make me feel better about my drastic fate.”

“Does it?”

“Truth is, I’m just getting used to it. In Chicago, being twenty-eight and single makes you an up-and-comer, free and on the town. But I get the feeling that back here in Plainview it means you’re an old maid.”

“Yikes, I bet that does smart a bit.”

Andi nodded.

“You just haven’t run into the right guy,” Tiff told her.

“There may not be one,” Andi said. “I’ve got my standards set way too high. My parents had this perfect marriage, I want one just like it.”

“Nobody’s marriage is perfect,” Tiff pointed out.

“Yeah, I keep telling myself that, but I think theirs must have been,” Andi said. “They always got along, they were both
very easygoing. Even with raising my sister, which had to be stressful, they never seemed to lose their balance.”

“That does sound good.”

“I asked Pop about it once and he told me that marriage is like any other contract—if both people aren’t willing to abide by it, then it’s not a deal at all.”

Tiff nodded. “I sure hear that,” she said. “Wish my ex had cooperated. I’m not sure which is worse, being an old maid or having a failed marriage.”

“Oh, I think old maid has got to be worse,” Andi assured her. “At least you caught a husband, even if he managed to wiggle off the hook.”

Tiff chuckled. “You may be right about that,” she said. “I guess it goes to show that a lot of the free advice you get around this town is worth exactly how much you pay for it.”

Andi nodded agreement and Tiff changed the subject.

“So what’s the problem with your business here?” she asked. “What’s so dangerous that the city council wouldn’t let you sell coffee?”

Declining to go into personalities, Andi made it simple. “We don’t have the facilities to comply with the rules for a food or beverage business,” she said. “So we can’t open anything that serves food and drink.”

Tiff nodded. “So what can you open?”

Andi shrugged. “Nothing, I guess,” she replied. “We have to get approved to do anything different. And truthfully, I don’t think I have any friends on the council. I think they would just as soon I stay at home and let the people in the business community come up with the new business ideas.”

“I thought new blood was always supposed to be good.”

Andi shrugged. “New blood maybe, but maybe not any new ideas from the Wolkowiczs. We never did fit in to the country-club set.”

“So what’s next?”

“I’m cleaning this place out and sorting this stuff,” Andi said. “I’m hoping I can sell it all on eBay.”

“You want some help?”

“You’re all dressed up,” Andi pointed out. “And besides, I can hardly afford bus fare, so I sure can’t pay for help.”

“I’ve got my car parked down at Conner’s with all my clean laundry in the back,” she said. “I’ll go change into shorts and a T. I’ve got nothing to do until Caleb gets out of day camp. It would be nice to feel like I’m working even if I don’t get paid.”

A few minutes later Tiff was back, wearing Daisy Dukes and eager to help. Andi hadn’t realized how much she needed an extra pair of hands until she had them. The two women managed to move everything to one side of the room so they could clean the floor. With mops from the storage closet and plenty of soapy wash water, they proceeded to do just that. The two worked well together and the accomplishment seemed to lift the mood of both of them. But they were ready for a break when someone else showed up at their door.

“What’s going on?” a young woman asked as she peered in at Andi.

“Just cleaning up,” Andi answered.

The young woman, whose hair was strangely blue-striped, squinted into the darkness of the building.

“Tiffany Crandall? Is that you?”

Tiff straightened, assessing the newcomer. “I used to be,” she answered. “I’m Tiff McCarin now. Who are you?”

“I’m Lisa Craven’s little sister, remember me?”

Tiff eyed her more closely. “Cheryl? I wouldn’t have recognized you. The blue-haired stripes are really…eye-catching.”

“Thanks! My name now is Cher-L. I changed it, too.”

“Cher-L?” Tiff repeated it as if it were a question.

The girl nodded. “Cool, huh.” She spelled it for them, including the dash. “My mom named me Cheryl which is just like an ordinary loser name. So I gave it meaning. I’m Cher-L, because that’s who I am. I share L.”

“You share L?”

“Yeah, L,” she answered. “L is like all the good things, love and life and laughter. It’s a name that really means something. It’s like a stage name.”

“A stage name?” Andi repeated. “Are you an actress or a singer?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that really,” she answered. “I’m just getting myself prepared…you know…to be famous or something. You never know, right?”

Andi and Tiff shot glances at each other.

Tiff murmured a tepid agreement, Andi focused her attention on the mop.

Cher-L didn’t seem to note the lack of enthusiasm. She walked into the middle of the floor and turned slowly in a circle as if taking the whole room in.

“I like this place,” she said. “It’s got good
qi,
you know, in kind of a funky way.”

“Uh…it belongs to my pop,” Andi said. “I’ll let him know you approve.”

Cher-L promptly seated herself atop a plastic barrel of wax concentrate, crossing her legs and allowing one high-heeled slide to dangle perilously from her foot.

“I’ve walked by this place a million times in my life,” Cher-L said. “This is the first time I’ve seen it open.”

“Andi and I are just cleaning it up,” Tiff told her. “She’s going to try to sell these old supplies on eBay.”

Cher-L glanced around and nodded. “I guess if people will buy a piece of toast that looks like the Virgin Mary, they ought to buy boxes of old car fresheners.”

Andi wasn’t sure she liked equating the two.

With the shared hope that if they ignored her, she might go away, Andi and Tiff both became very focused on cleaning the floor, the mop boards, the expanse of wall beneath the windows.

Cher-L accepted the silence, but slowly she began to kick her foot. As if keeping time to music in her head, the tempo picked up until the movement was almost staccato and very annoying.

“So what are the plans here?” she asked.

“Plans? We have no plans,” Andi answered.

“Come on, you’re cleaning up for some reason,” she said. “You must be opening up something.”

Andi shook her head. “No, nothing,” she replied.

“Nothing? Nothing at all?” Cher-L gave her head a small shake as if to signal she would not have her question put off so easily.

Andi didn’t really want to go into it again, but she heaved a sigh and tried to get her reply short enough to tweet.

“I wanted to open up a drive-through coffee shop, but last night I was turned down for a variance, a zoning change.”

The brow beneath the blue-striped bangs furrowed. “A
zoning change? I thought people were either ‘in the zone’ or ‘zoned out’.”

“This is a little different,” Andi said. “It’s the way cities and towns manage growth. They can limit certain kinds of businesses in some places.”

“Sounds unfair to me,” Cher-L said.

It
felt
unfair to Andi, but she kept that to herself.

“So they won’t let you open a coffee shop.”

“No.”

“So what can you open?” she asked.

Andi sighed heavily and shook her head. “I haven’t a clue. The only thing I can do for sure is open it up as what it’s always been, a car wash.”

“So,” Cher-L responded. “Then open a car wash.”

Andi stopped mopping long enough to look at Cher-L. Life was so easy when you didn’t understand much about it. “I can’t make any money with a car wash,” she explained. “That’s why my father had to close the place years ago.”

“People still get their cars washed,” Cher-L pointed out.