by Pamela Morsi
Pete could see her face now, framed by a faded Pacers cap, and he recognized it. She was one of Wolkowicz’s daughters. In high school Pete and his buddies had called them “the retard twins.” There was the “math retard” and the “retard retard.” Though he hadn’t seen her in years, this was obviously Ms. Math, looking very much like she always had. Geeky, skinny and wearing men’s clothes. What was her name? The question bounced around Pete’s brain. It was a guy’s name that could be used for a girl. Billie or Jamie? No it started with an A.
“You’re...uh...you’re Alex, right? Alex Wolkowicz.”
“Andi,” she answered, a steely annoyance evident in her voice. “And you’re Pete Guthrie, just like you said. Though I wouldn’t have recognized you. I guess all those Mallomars have finally begun to catch up with you.”
Pete was startled. How could this person, whose name he hadn’t been able to recall, remember his addiction to Mallomars? He decided to ignore that question in favor of something more pertinent.
“Where did you get this key and what are you doing inside here?” he asked. “Your family may feel attached to this place, but we own it.”
“Nope,” she answered. “Sorry, that’s not true.”
“Yes, it is,” Pete answered. “It happened years ago. I was away at college...maybe you were, too. Your father sold it to my father. Ask him.”
“I did ask him,” Andi answered. “He says that your father never paid him and so the deal never went through, the deed was never transferred. We’ve been paying the taxes and so...and so it’s ours.”
Pete was surprised. And when it came to things that he ought to know, he really didn’t like to be surprised. He was sure his dad had made a deal. Surely he wouldn’t have just dropped it. He scanned his memory for some piece of evidence supporting what he’d always thought was, in fact, true. Nothing immediately came to mind.
“Well, if what you’re saying is correct, and I don’t know that it is, I’m sure it was an oversight,” he told her.
“Yeah, oversight, I’m sure that’s what it was,” Andi replied, her tone ripe with inexplicable sarcasm. “It makes total sense that the high and mighty Guthries would completely overlook a regular guy like Walt Wolkowicz.”
“Excuse me? The ‘high and mighty Guthries’? What in the devil are you talking about?”
“You wouldn’t have pulled a crappy business trick like this with one of your cronies from the country club,” she answered venomously. “Because my pop’s a decent hardworking guy who would never be any threat to you, you were totally free to treat him shabbily. Well, I’m not about to be as generous to you as he would. Get off my property!”
3
IT WAS THE middle of the afternoon and Walt was in a hurry. They’d finished all the lunch deliveries at Meals on Wheels and he’d brought Jelly home. He’d planned to make a quick getaway, but his daughter had plans for laundry.
“This is Wednesday, wash day,” she said, incredulous with his suggestion that it might wait until tomorrow. “It rhymes, Pop. My wash day is Wednesday. That’s the rule.”
Walt knew better than to try to go against a “rule.” By necessity, in his daughter’s life the three Rs were not reading, writing and ’rithmetic, all of which were beyond her grasp. Instead, her life worked due to regimen, routine and rules.
“All right,” he agreed. “Let’s get your laundry started, but let’s hurry.”
“We don’t hurry, Pop,” she reminded him. “We take our time and do it right.”
With a sigh and a quick glance at his watch, he followed her downstairs without argument. Argument was futile. Arguments were for people who could change their mind. The reality of his daughter Jelly was that her mind could not, would not, ever change.
“I peg her IQ at about 50, maybe a little higher,” the old family doctor had told them. “You can look at her yourself and see that she’s totally vacant.”
Walt had looked at his perfect little three-year-old with the big brown eyes and had not seen anything vacant about her. She was pretty and sweet and quiet. No, she was not like her sister, Andi. In that doctor’s office Andi would have been into everything. She was curious about everything, climbing everywhere, and nothing in the room would have been safe. Jelly sat there, perfectly dressed with a bow in her hair. She wouldn’t cause a problem for anybody.
“We can’t always predict these outcomes. Adulthood is a long way off,” the doctor continued. “But I’d say you’ll be lucky if she’s self-feeding and potty trained.”
He heard his wife, Ella, gasp. He glanced over at her. Her face was pale, stricken. All he could think to say was, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I asked you to marry me. I’m sorry I got you into this mess. But it was not something a husband could say. He kept silent.
“It’s up to you, of course,” the doctor continued. “What I recommend, in cases like this, is to send them to a state institution. They usually don’t live all that long anyway and it’s harder if the family gets attached to them.”
“We’re already attached to her,” Walt told the man. “We’re not sending her anywhere.”
The doctor shrugged. “A lot of the new thinking is that they do better at home with their families. And the law says now that they can’t be kept out of public school. So if you want to take her home...well, just do the best you can.”
And they had.
Downstairs in the laundry room, Jelly set her basket of dirty clothes on the floor and immediately began sorting the whites and the colors.
Walt opened the cabinet above the machine and retrieved a couple of plastic measuring cups and a bottle of detergent.
“How many loads do you think you have?” he asked rhetorically.
With a furrowed brow, Jelly assessed her laundry pile critically.
“About twenty,” she answered.
Walt glanced at her dirty clothes and set two measuring cups on the counter. “I think you can make it all fit in one load for whites and one for colors,” he said.
“Okay,” Jelly agreed.
Walt poured the correct amount of detergent in each cup. Jelly had real issues with portion. Whether it was overfilling the milk glass, permeating the house with perfume or having an inch of sugar in the bottom of a cup of tea. If some was good, more was better. Walt had mopped up the laundry room too many times to allow her to pour her own laundry soap.
“One of these for each load,” he reminded her. “Just like on your chart.”
The chart he indicated was a homemade poster attached to the front of the washing machine. It showed seven blocks of color, red, yellow, blue, green, orange and purple, lined up left to right. These were interspersed with stick pictures of washing fundamentals. The colors matched up to splashes of the same color on buttons, dials and doors of the washer and dryer. A big black arrow on the left indicated where to start. And sitting atop it was a brown-haired girl magnet, representing Jelly herself. Moving the magnet through the steps would keep Jelly on task.
“Remember to look at your chart and follow your colors,” Walt told her.
Jelly gave him a long-suffering look, more typically seen on the face of an average teenager.
“I know how to do it, Pop,” she said. “I follow the chart. I don’t need your help.”
“Okay,” he said. “Just concentrate on what you’re doing. I have to go out to an appointment. Andi will be back soon, but I don’t know exactly when.”
Jelly nodded.
“What do you do if you hear something ringing?” he asked. It was a test question.
She answered smartly. “I can answer the phone, but don’t answer the door.”
He gave her a thumbs-up. “I’ve got my cell, so call me if you need me. What’s my number on your speed dial?”
“You’re number one!” she answered in the cadence of a pep rally.
Walt couldn’t help but grin at her. “Good girl.”
“Okay, Pop, don’t worry,” she said.
“I won’t,” he lied.
He took the stairs two at a time and rushed toward the front door. At the hall tree he stopped to grab his keys and hesitated a moment to glance at himself in the mirror. His face, he thought, was awfully grizzled from working outside all his life. But he still had most of his hair. He was not as muscled as he once had been, but there wasn’t an ounce of extra fat on him.
He noticed the edge of his collar was slightly frayed. He ran his thumb over the flaw. Maybe he should buy some new shirts, he thought to himself. It had been years since he’d bought a shirt. Ella always did that for him. He would never have bought one like this, he realized. It was a pale tan color with a very small brown stripe. His favorite color was blue. Maybe he would buy himself some blue shirts.
He stopped that train of thought abruptly.
“If it’s about what color shirt you wear, you’re doomed already,” he told the mirror.
Shaking his head, he walked out the front door.
In the narrow driveway of the home he and Ella had purchased shortly after they married, his old truck awaited him. He kept the 1985 Ford in top condition. There were still a lot of them on the road. When he’d taken on meal delivery, he’d agreed to sport a decal on his doors. The truck was clearly identifiable as St. Hyacinth Senior Service Meals on Wheels. Every person in town who knew him would recognize his truck.
Walt climbed inside and carefully backed out into the street. He checked his watch again and winced. But he made it out to Fifteenth Street pretty quickly. He caught the light at Baltimore Avenue and turned left down Ridley Boulevard ahead of the Village Transit. He made it to the parking lot of the branch library where he locked the truck and ran to the bus stop, just in time to step on the Mainline to Mt. Ridley.
He showed his Senior Pass, but the driver didn’t bother to look at it, just acknowledged Walt’s familiar face with a nod.
Walt didn’t want to be recognizable, but there was no help for that. He glanced around the bus and didn’t see any faces that went with any names he knew. Relieved, he took a seat near the back door and watched the summer street go by. It was a busy thoroughfare these days with houses and sidewalks. When he’d driven this road as a teenager it had been a narrow lane that cut through a grove of trees. It had been well-traveled on Saturday nights as it led to the notorious Lovers Leap Overlook. The four of them crowded onto the bench seat of his ’39 Chevy pickup. Paul, his best friend, could sometimes borrow his dad’s car, but more often they were in the pickup.
“I don’t mind,” he’d teased the girls. “The less space you can put between us, the better.”
The girls were both their “steadies” and could take a joke well enough not to be offended. Besides, Walt was pretty sure that even in those days, when nice girls waited until they had a ring on their finger, they hadn’t wanted much distance either.
Remembering it all had him smiling by the time the bus reached the end of the line. The entrance to Mt. Ridley Park had changed considerably over the years. There was certainly no driving up to the overlook. Big metal balustrades guarded the drive and those entering were funneled through a ticket booth. Five dollars for adults, two dollars for children, Walt got a dollar off as a senior discount.
He walked slowly down the main pathway for several minutes, cautiously on the lookout for familiar faces. There were very few people at all in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon and none that he worried might know him.
Walt reached a set of rocky steps that ventured off into the trees. The sign above it read Alternate View Trail Dead Ends. He glanced around one last time to make certain he hadn’t been seen. Then he hurried up the steps and disappeared into the trees.
Andi considered Wednesday to have been a fairly productive day. The more she thought of having her own business, any business, the more she liked the idea. She had tossed and turned the night before, too excited to sleep. The prospect of finally doing something had her humming with optimism.
Her enthusiasm lasted through her crowded bus ride downtown and accompanied her arrival at City Hall. But after a long wait in an uncomfortable chair, her impromptu meeting with Mr. Gilbert, at the city’s Code Compliance Office, had been full of pluses and minuses.
Mr. Gilbert was a big, happy gregarious man who seemed to love meeting people. But he was less enthusiastic about the intricate web of laws, regulations and ordinances, the enforcement of which comprised his job.
After some lengthy hemming and hawing, an inordinate amount of clicking around on his computer screen and a couple of consultations with the huge ledger books laid out on a crowded table at the far end of his office, he had this to tell her. “I’ve got some good news and some bad news.”
He delivered the line in the cadence of a late-night TV comedian.
“Okay,” Andi said. “How about the good news first.”
“We’ve looked at that building in our overall downtown plan,” he told her. “Structurally, it seems like it’s in good shape. It was built in 1919 by a reputable construction firm. It was, we think, the very first purpose-built gas station in the city. There were some grocery stores and other businesses that sold gas on the side. But this place on the corner of Grosvenor and Fifth Street was most likely the first of its kind in the city.”
“Well, that’s interesting,” Andi said.
Mr. Gilbert nodded. “Which is why the city has it on the historic preservation list.”
She nodded.
“The building itself appears sound,” he continued. “And it’s been kept up-to-date with electrical wiring and sewer drains.” Andi nodded. Her father had told her as much the night before.
“Then what’s the bad news?” she asked.
Gilbert’s face screwed into a pained expression. He obviously did not relish being the source of negative news. “The property has a lot of limitations,” he said. “It won’t work for most retail. I was thinking maybe it would be a good site for a minimum employee service business.”
“A minimum employee service business?” Andi repeated. “What exactly is that?”
“A kind of one-man operation,” he answered. “Maybe a watchmaker or a shoe repair.”
Andi bit her lip as she tried not to roll her eyes. Watchmaking and shoe repair were not exactly the kind of cash cow she had in mind, at least not in the last hundred years! She managed not to say that.
“I was thinking of something more in the line of a drive-thru coffee place,” she told him. “You know, commuters grabbing a quick double-cream mocha latte before they get to the office.”
Mr. Gilbert frowned. What he thought of that as a business prospect he didn’t say. But he did understand its ramifications with city code.
“A place like that would fall under the statutes for restaurant operation,” he told her. “You don’t have nearly enough parking for that.”
“But people won’t be parking,” Andi explained. “They’ll just be driving through.”
“The ordinances require parking anyway.”
“But I won’t need parking.”
“It doesn’t matter if you actually need it,” he insisted. “It would still fall under the food service guidelines, so you’d still have to have it.”
“That’s crazy?”
“No, it’s city government,” Mr. Gilbert explained.
Andi couldn’t tell if that answer was meant as sarcasm or not.
After several more minutes of unfruitful discussion, the code compliance officer finally gave her the wiggle room she needed.
“You can go to the city council and ask for a variance,” he said.
“How do I do that?”
“You present a business plan and ask to be put on the agenda. You go before the council and answer questions. If you can make your case, they have the discretion to exempt you from specific regulations.”
“How quickly can I do that?”
“Council meets every two weeks,” Mr. Gilbert said. “The next meeting is on Monday, but that doesn’t give you enough time to put anything tog
ether.”
“Of course it does,” Andi assured him. “I can put together a proposal this weekend.”
She left the city offices feeling buoyed and headed over to the car wash. Her mind was already at work formulating the written presentation. However, once she arrived at the building, the amount of work she encountered dampened her enthusiasm tremendously.
Her father’s deal with Guthrie involved both the building and the contents, so Pop had stacked everything left over from his car wash business neatly inside, boarded up the windows and locked the door. Now, years later, that had proved not to be the best idea.
She walked through the dank, dark little building, not quite as big as her bedroom. The place smelled moldy and dirty. It was going to take time and elbow grease. Since she was the one who was going to have to come up with both, there was no excuse not to get started.
In the closet that functioned as a unisex bathroom, she found her father’s old coveralls still hanging on the hook on the back of the door. She smiled when she saw them. She’d once had a pair just like them. Car washing had been her after-school job. Maybe not as teenage glamorous as flipping burgers or taking tickets at the movie theater, but she’d enjoyed it. There was something very satisfying in making an old grimy car shine like it was brand-new. Recalling that, she told herself that cleaning the building, making it nice and new would surely give her a lot of the same sense of accomplishment.
With a huff of determination, she changed out of her good clothes into the old coveralls. Her dad was not a big guy, so they fit, more or less. A glance in the bathroom mirror indicated a fashion look that was significantly less than stylish and attractive. But it kept her good clothes from getting ruined by the accumulation of dust and dank in the place. And who would see her?
The implied answer of “no one” changed abruptly an hour later when Pete Guthrie showed up at the door, acting like the King of Plainview and talking to her like she was a criminal.
Andi was right in the middle of sorting the leftover supplies. There were cases of soap and wax, gallons of undercarriage rust prohibitors and sealed boxes of interior fragrance options. She’d stacked all that aside, hoping that she might be able to sell it for some start-up money. She then just began attacking the boxes of vending machine supplies. The ancient crackers and ten-year-old candy bars would simply have to go to the dumpster. So she was in a less than congenial frame of mind when Pete arrived on the doorstep, looking clean and sharp, tanned and attractive in a way that he hadn’t been, even in his high school heartthrob days.
