The Bikini Car Wash

by Pamela Morsi

  Rachel raised her head off his shoulder and eyed him askance. “I wasn’t there,” she admitted. “But I wouldn’t trust Hank Guthrie farther than I could throw him.”

  Walt chuckled. “If you were mad enough, you could probably throw him pretty far.”

  “That man is a slimy lowlife,” she insisted. “He’d screw up her plans or work against them behind her back, just for his own entertainment.”

  Walt wasn’t so certain. “You just don’t like him because he cheats on his wife.”

  As she shook her head, a lock of dark hair, frosted with silver, escaped the confines of her neat matronly updo.

  “Why Madeleine Grosvenor gave that man thirty minutes of her life, let alone thirty years, will always be a mystery to me,” she said. “But I’m not talking personal, I’m talking business. There’s not a soul at the Chamber of Commerce that doesn’t keep a wary eye on Guthrie.”

  “I’ve never heard anybody say anything,” Walt told her.

  “And you won’t,” she answered. “He’s powerful enough that nobody openly speaks against him. But he’s earned his reputation as a snake in the grass.”

  “He’s a pretty arrogant type of guy. I’ll give you that,” Walt said. “But he’s been so blessed and he’s so successful. I can’t help but think that a lot of the distrust is based on jealousy.”

  She shook her head, but at the same time she smiled broadly.

  “That’s one of the things I love about you,” she said. “You’re always determined to see the good in people.”

  Walt raised an eyebrow. “You think I’m naive?”

  “No, not at all,” she answered. “Naive implies an ignorance of the cruelties of life and an innocence of that experience. The way you think is not based in either of those. It’s more as if you choose to only see us mortals in the best possible light. And that really sort of pushes us to live up to your expectations.”

  “I’m no saint, Rachel,” he said. “Just ask Father Blognick.”

  She waved away his words. “He may know your every sin. But I know you better than anyone else.”

  She placed her small hands on either side of his face. “Now kiss me you idiot,” she said. “I’m not willing to wait all day.”

  Pete was standing at his corner office window, a cup of coffee in one hand and a Mallomar in the other, as he watched the rain come down. He tried not to let the gloom of the day weigh down on him.

  The big news in the weekly Plainview Public Observer was about the huge expansion of Superbuy, Guthrie’s competition out near the interstate. Two adjacent businesses in severe financial trouble had given up their leases to the national chain and they were inexplicably making their store bigger, just as Pete was belt-tightening his operation day by day. It was frustrating. It was disheartening. And it didn’t matter how many times he told himself that it was a global economic crisis, it still felt like a personal failure.

  He watched the city bus pause at the Grosvenor Street stop. Someone emerged beneath the cover of a pink flowered umbrella. There was something cheerful about bright florals on a dark gray day. He watched as its bearer moved along the sidewalk. It was only when she turned up the driveway of the former Plainview Wash & Wax that he realized it must be Wolkowicz.

  He rolled his eyes and muttered under his breath, “Great, Peterson, another reason for you to feel guilty.”

  Why had his father pulled that reprehensible trick on the woman? First he double-crossed her dad on the sale of the property and then he deep-sixed her coffee store plan.

  He took another bite of his Mallomar.

  His phone rang, but he let Miss Kepper get it in the other room. He needed to get a little more psyched up before he talked to anyone. The Mallomars helped.

  The intercom on his desk beeped.

  “Mr. Guthrie, it’s your father on line one.”

  Pete groaned aloud. He stuck the last of the Mallomar in his mouth and walked across the room to sit behind his desk. He finished chewing and swallowed before forcing a smile to his face. He picked up the phone.

  “Morning, Dad,” he said. “I can’t talk long. I’m still going over yesterday’s numbers. What’s up with you?”

  Hank didn’t bother responding to his pleasantries. “Have you seen the news about Superbuy? Damn it, boy! How could you let us get blindsided by this?”

  Pete reached for the bag of Mallomars at the edge of his desk. He listened for fifteen minutes as his father criticized virtually everything that he’d ever done. Pete was not unaccustomed to this and he’d acquired the helpful ability to listen intently while removing his emotions. He’d learned the skill from watching his mother. And he’d had many years of practice on his own. Pete listened as if it were someone else’s conversation and he was just an observer. As an observer, he could only marvel that the man who could never remember to show up for award ceremonies, birthday parties or parent-teacher conferences had such a steel-trap memory of his son’s every misstep, slight or momentous. From his failure to make the All-Star team in Little League to the story in this morning’s newspaper, it was all, to Hank Guthrie’s thinking, evidence of his son’s innate inferiority to his father.

  “It’s just like marrying that little tart of yours,” his father blathered on.

  Pete was immediately sucked back into the moment. There were places where his father’s opinion was off-limits.

  “No!” Pete stated firmly into the phone. “My divorce and my ex are not your business. Don’t even go there. You’ve made such a mess of your marriage, you can’t give anyone advice on that score. Besides, all that’s history. It doesn’t have anything to do with the store.”

  The sudden push-back shocked Hank into momentary silence. Unfortunately, it was only momentary.

  “I don’t give a damn about Minx or your marriage,” the older man said. “But both say a lot about your character. A man who lets a woman run around on him, that’s a man who’s not in control. And if you’re not in control, then somebody else is controlling you.”

  “No one is controlling me,” Pete said. “And I am controlling the store. You are not controlling the store. So why don’t you stop calling here and acting like you are.”

  Pete slammed down the phone. He immediately regretted it. Losing his temper was losing control.

  Still angry, he got up from his desk and headed out of his office. Down the hallway, Miss Kepper’s door was open and he glanced in just long enough to see her face. Her expression, one of disappointment and distress, was to be totally expected. Her loyalties were divided. She was always on Pete’s side, but she loved Hank.

  “I’ve got my phone,” he said simply and moved on quickly, leaving no time for discussion.

  He walked down the drab hallway to the stairs. His mood immediately lightened as he entered the light and activity of the store. He liked the store. He loved Guthrie Foods. He had since he was a kid. He enjoyed the energy and the feeling of accomplishment. He’d thought that managing the store would be like working in the store. But, of course, it wasn’t always. Pete wasn’t afraid of hard work, or hesitant of making big decisions. But some days the responsibility for all these employees, for his customers, for the community and to his family heritage, weighed more heavily than others. And the time spent trying to save three cents on a product or two minutes out of a workweek, turned out to be the most frustrating and the most important. It was always the one thing that only he was in a position to do.

  He remembered to smile and nod at the cashiers as he passed.

  He stopped to help on checkout three.

  “Cody, I think we should put the box in like this, upright,” he said. “It gives the sack a more open form and that makes it easier to pack.”

  The young man nodded as he allowed Pete to help him.

  The new bring-your-own-reusable-bag policy was a great money saver and good for the environment. But with carryalls of every shape and size, bagging had become more of an art than a science. In a solid-bottomed tote, the b
est place for the eggs was on the bottom, as long as the stuff on top was not too heavy. But if the sack had just seams or curved out, the eggs went on top, just like they do in plastic store bags. In the past, a bagger might have been free to utilize a near infinite number of store bags. Today, if the customer brought in three bags, they wanted their groceries to fit in them, and without being so heavy that they couldn’t easily lift them out of their car.

  Most of the baggers at Guthrie’s were easily able to adapt to these changes. For Cody, a young man with Down’s Syndrome, inconsistency was a challenge. But he tried hard, was quick to apologize when he messed up, and was a favorite among the cashiers.

  Pete made his way into the aisles. He greeted people he knew, answered questions for shoppers and picked up trash as he went through the store. Finally, on the far end of Aisle Nineteen, he located Harvey, the stock crew supervisor. He was a weathered but wiry employee who’d been with the company all of Pete’s life. He was working alongside the two guys and one woman on his team. Nearby a grocery cart was loaded almost to capacity with items being cleared off the shelf.

  “How’s it going?”

  The older man shrugged. “This dang trail mix sure didn’t sell,” he answered.

  Pete nodded, picking up the package.

  “The price is off for the kind of demand we get,” he agreed. “It may be more organic and healthy than the stuff in the bags, but it looks the same. Folks just won’t pay a dollar more to try something that only might be better.”

  “They should have introduced it for the same price,” Harvey said. “Then once people tried it, they could slowly move it up to cover the costs.”

  “Yeah,” Pete agreed. “They probably did that in other markets and thought they had built enough reputation to just show up here. Our folks just don’t eat as much of this grazing stuff as they do in California.”

  Harvey laughed. “It’s ’cause we get to wear our coats all winter,” he said. “We look stout anyway, we might as well eat what we want.”

  Pete began helping him clear the shelf. The end displays on each aisle were the most active product areas in the store. Each month merchandisers paid for the prominent placement of their products. So last month’s merchandise was out and new things were brought in. It was labor-intensive for stockers, but it was very good for business.

  “I’d bet you’ve got something better to do than follow me around today,” Harvey said.

  Pete shrugged. “I know you’re down to a bare-bones crew,” he answered. “If I don’t help you, I’d need to take someone off the checkout line.”

  Harvey nodded.

  Pete had avoided layoffs by not filling positions that came vacant, and by hiring part-timers. It helped to keep the store profitable, but it made for heavy strains on productivity.

  “You know I’ve been thinking,” Harvey said.

  “That’s always dangerous,” Pete pointed out.

  The older man grinned, adding to the joke. “I do it so rarely it doesn’t pain me much.”

  The two men chuckled together.

  “Maybe we could cross-train more of the staff,” Harvey said. “If we could get most everybody competent in more jobs in the store, then we could utilize whoever is on the clock.”

  Pete nodded, hearing the man out. Cross-training was often fraught with push-back from employees. The extra effort required to learn a new task was frequently resented. And there often existed an entire hierarchy, in the minds of some workers, as to which jobs were acceptable and which jobs were beneath them. Pete did all he could to counter the latter mind-set, showing by example his willingness to do whatever needed doing. He was just as quick to fill in for a cashier as he was to do “cleanup on Aisle Nine.”

  “I haven’t said anything,” Harvey said. “Because I know your father was a true believer in specialization, but—”

  Pete cut him off. “My father is not running Guthrie Foods.”

  Harvey’s eyes widened and Pete realized that he’d spoken more sharply than he should. He forced a wide grin to his face to counter his tone. “And times are a lot different now than when my dad ran the store.”

  The older man nodded slowly. “That’s right,” he said. “Times are different.”

  “I certainly think it’s an idea worth looking at,” Pete said.

  “We could start small,” Harvey said. “We wouldn’t want to go storewide the first day. Just test the waters, see if we can get it going.”

  “Let me think about it for a day or two,” Pete said. “And we’ll talk again.”

  “Okay. Sure, think about it.”

  “And I do appreciate your input,” Pete continued. “We need everybody in the store to be thinking about how to make things work better. So…so thanks.”

  Pete continued to help with the end displays for a few minutes before he was called to the loading dock to haggle with a driver who was a day late and half the order short.

  By the time he got that sorted out, he only walked through the produce department before he was called to the checkout. He subbed for the front end manager while she took an early lunch. He cleared up over-rings and ran down uncoded prices for an hour. He didn’t mind that. He wasn’t so thrilled about the personal check that failed the scancheck. The scancheck was a fraud prevention system. Its compact reader could electronically verify the validity of an account and rate the risk of it at point of sale. That was good news for the retailer. Not always such good news for the customer.

  Pete was called to register five. When he stepped up, the cashier handed him what amounted to a worthless piece of paper.

  “It’s a code three,” she told him.

  Pete nodded at the cashier and then turned his attention to the customer. He didn’t know her, but he figured she was about his age. She had two quiet children eyeing him and a third, a gooing cheerful infant, was strapped into the shopping cart.

  “There seems to be a problem with your check,” he said quietly.

  Neither the mom nor the kids looked surprised.

  “Maybe, you…ah…do you have a credit card?”

  “It was declined,” the cashier told him.

  The woman looked cornered, ready to bolt. The weight of her humiliation created a heaviness in the air making it hard to breathe.

  Pete glanced at the grocery bags already loaded into the cart. She was buying bread and milk, peanut butter and diapers. If she’d had a six-pack of beer or a carton of cigarettes, even a frozen pizza he might have been able to fault her. But he knew that if he had three kids and needed to feed them, he didn’t know what he might have felt compelled to do.

  He hesitated only a minute before scrawling his initials next to the amount on the check.

  “Give me a copy of the receipt,” he told the cashier. She quickly printed it out and he stapled the two pieces of paper together.

  “Is this your current address and phone number?” he asked the customer.

  The woman’s “yes” was almost inaudible.

  Pete nodded. “We’re going to hold this,” he told her. “When you get some cash together, you can come pick it up. I’ll give it to Miss Kepper. Her office is up the stairs over there.”

  “Okay,” the woman said. Her voice was still tentative.

  “Great,” Pete said, feigning an enthusiasm he didn’t feel and smiling broadly at the kids. “You have a real nice day. And thank you for shopping at Guthrie’s.”

  As the young woman hurried out with her kids and her groceries, Pete knew he would probably never see his money. And even if he got paid, the family would most likely never shop here again. No matter how gently a situation like this was treated, it always left a bad taste in the mouth.

  When the front end manager returned to her post, Pete went over to the deli section and asked them to fix him a sandwich. As he waited, he stood near the windows, watching the rain. It was no longer an angry torrent, but a steady, gentle gift to his landscaping.

  When he heard his name called, he turned
back toward the counter and noticed the light was on inside Wolkowicz’s car wash. She was undoubtedly still there. What on earth was she doing? Suddenly, he was very curious to find out.

  “Meggie, may I have two sandwiches today?” he asked the woman behind the counter.

  Chapter 8

  ANDI DIDN’T KNOW what she was doing. That was a very unusual experience for her. Typically, she made certain she knew exactly what she was doing. Every move she’d made in her life had involved research, list making, spreadsheets and risk analysis. Even when she might be making a mistake, like leaving the city to move back home to Plainview, she hadn’t allowed herself to get by without weighing the options and the outcomes. Life was too crazy not to plan ahead.

  Today, she had no plan.

  She’d rejected out of hand Cher-L’s suggestion of a wet T-shirt and thong car wash. That was an idiotic idea, not even worthy of consideration. She was definitely not doing anything like that. Still, she’d had the lights and water turned on in the building, and she had made no move to try to sell the stored supplies. Today she was looking at the equipment. Her father had always treated his equipment as kindly and gently as he treated his kids. But this gear had been lying around for almost a decade. The good news about not having a conveyer or an automated brush system, Andi decided, was that an old compressor that attached to hoses and wands wasn’t all that complicated. The vinyl was leaky and there was a bit of rust on everything, but nothing was irreparably damaged.

  She began cleaning the metal using one of Pop’s old tricks. Dousing it with cola then scrubbing it down with aluminum foil. It worked pretty well.

  An aging blue Taurus pulled up beneath the overhang. Andi glanced up curiously and saw Tiff emerging from the driver’s seat. She was wearing cropped jeans and a scoop-necked T-shirt, her long blond hair was loose and hung down to the middle of her back. She walked around the car and opened the back door. A towheaded boy in shorts and a hoodie muscle shirt emerged. He was carrying a video game and hardly glanced up as his mother directed him toward the building.