The day he met with Tommy to turn down the manager’s job, he was relieved. His fiancé didn’t seem to care much. Bea was happy. Henry Lee told him he should do whatever the hell he wanted and not pay any attention to anyone except his fiancé. If she didn’t care, then it was all on him and his choice alone. For his own part, Henry Lee said, he was happier Bill was staying one of them.
The winter so far was particularly cold and dreary. Before he’d been busted, while Bill was just a regular student, there had been many times when he and his fiancé had gone together to some of the things she went to. Many of them, like mime, made Bill uncomfortable. Anything touchy-feely put Bill ill-at-ease. Some of them piqued his interest as a writer and he was able to sit somewhere off in the distance and observe. More than anything else, Bill liked that.
Those days, the days of he and his fiancé doing things together, were over for now. What replaced them was his working all the time and paying off their debts. His hope, even without the manager’s salary, was to have the car paid off before the beginning of spring and then to be able to bank the money being deducted from his paycheck. His hope was to have enough money to be able to finance a new apartment wherever they moved to. That discussion, where they were going to move, was a difficult one. The most logical choice was to go straight to New York where his fiancé could pursue her dancing career. The safest choice was to move up to Cleveland where she could get a job teaching dance and choreographing then use that as a stepping stone for the move to New York.
Bill could not see it then. In fact, Bill would not see it for many, many years. But hers were kind of high-class choices. He had no choice at all. Wherever they went he would work in the kitchen and support them while she pursued her career.
They had had this discussion several times. Bill was the logical one. He reasoned that he could always write but a dancer had to dance while she was young. Looked at from this perspective, there was very little choice for Bill although at any moment she could have told him no, that they would find a way for both of them to pursue their careers. In retrospect, Bill would think later, maybe she did say these things and maybe he just wasn’t open to hearing what she had to say. Maybe what stopped him from becoming a manager also stopped him from pursuing his career. Maybe, he would think later, he was just plain afraid.
Bill got better and better at meat cutting, better and better as a line cook, more experienced as a prep cook. Lorraine hung around as a waitress. Having to support two daughters, she had little choice. Lexi, Norma, and even Victoria left and were replaced by new girls. The new girls were just girls, just waitresses. Most of them were a little older than Bill and most of them were eager to work there because the waitresses there made really good money. They had to work hard and they had to put up with Drenovis, but such was life. Those days, no matter where they worked there was always a manager like Drenovis, someone in power looking to get into their pants and having no reservations about using position to do it.
When all was said and done, after some 25 years in kitchens, at least Bill could say he never used his position to get in somebody’s pants. He could also say that he rarely pursued a waitress. What he actually did was wait for them to pursue him and then either accepted or not.
Coming Right After Mother’s Day
