The menu called for a nice, thick cream of broccoli soup which Mary started as soon as she got upstairs and finished her coffee. Bea sat longer than usual on her stool sipping her coffee and reading the racing page in the Dispatch. She asked Bill if he wanted to place a bet or if he wanted to play a number. Bill did not play the horses, but he did play the numbers for both himself and Mary. Those number bets would end up in the hands of Robert who would hand them to Mr. Bowman. Robert was the numbers runner, why he had been busted in the first place and how Bill had met him when Robert was on his work detail. Mr. Bowman ran the game. He was the money man.
By 10:00 AM just about all the work for the day was done. The snow had settled into a flurry pattern and the streets were well plowed. More than a foot of snow had fallen. The University was on a delayed opening schedule, so morning classes were canceled. Bill had still not heard from his fiancé. He tried to call home several more times but to no avail. She could have called the restaurant, but there were no calls for him. Any call would’ve been forwarded to wherever he was at the time.
Bea met Bill downstairs while he was straightening up some things in the storeroom. He had brought up everything Mary needed for the rest of this day and for tomorrow as well. He and Henry Lee were about to start grinding meat for hamburger and making the patties and the bleus. She snuggled on him from behind while he was bending over straightening up a stack of stewed tomatoes cases. He’d had to move the stack in order to get to some things that should have been rotated forward but were not. It caught him by surprise when she goosed him, so much so that he almost dropped the case of tomatoes in his hands.
“Goddammit,” he said. “What the hell?” He turned to see it was Bea. She was already chuckling, her throaty chuckle, and she was reaching out to take a more intimate feel of him.
“So you slept at Mary’s, huh?”
“It kind of seemed like the best solution given the weather.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet. Where were her kids?”
“They stayed by her mother. Don’t ask me anything else cause I don’t know nothing.”
“I suppose all you did was go to sleep.”
“No,” said Bill. “We got high. We took some Quaaludes. I took a shower and then we went to sleep.”
“And that’s all you did?”
“Nope,” Bill said. “We slept, we got up, we cleaned all the goddamn snow off my car and we drove here.”
“So I guess you got some left for me,” Bea said.
“Some what?” Bill asked.
“Some something,” Bea said.
“I always got some something. But I got to help Henry Lee make the hamburgers. So maybe we could meet sometime later.”
“You putting me off boy?”
“Not at all darling. I just got some stuff to do.”
“Well I need some salad dressings,” Bea said. “Want to help me carry them upstairs?”
Bill could see no way out of it. So he finished straightening up while Bea watched him work. Then together they carried up the gallon jugs of salad dressings that Bea needed for her station. When he had helped her put them into their place, he checked the steamship round and checked to see that Mary had put in the baked potatoes. The potatoes were not in yet. He washed them and put them into the convection oven. Then he told Mary all she had to do was turn the oven on when she wanted to.
“What you doing, boy?” Mary asked.
“Going down to help Henry Lee make the hamburger. You want to get high come on down.”
A moment later Mary joined Bill and Henry Lee in the meat room.
