Bea got more and more bitchy. Mary got more and more needy. Bill started getting bored. He wasn’t bored with Mary. He was in love with her. He was in love with her and he was in love with his fiancé. This was a conundrum, to be sure.
Bea’s bitchiness stemmed from the fact that she was losing control. The loss of control was not in any one given area but just a general malaise that rose in her and spread throughout.
As she became more bitchy she became more demanding in all regards. She demanded that Bill go downstairs with her at all different times, usually for no reason. She demanded he carry up the silliest little things for her, even at times when he was occupied doing other work. The more Bill and Mary cared for each other, the more mean Bea became.
Tommy saw what was happening. He didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to see what was happening. Tommy saw it. The waitresses saw it. Mary saw it and told Bill that she would talk to Bea about it. Bea didn’t want to hear anything and told Mary nothing was wrong.
Sooner or later, it had to come to a head. Sooner or later there had to be some sort of catharsis, as it were, or a catastrophe. Mary told Bill that in their discussions she asked Bea if she was having the change of life. Bea almost smacked her.
Arlene and Bill did get together, but not the way either of them thought it would happen. Per their original conversation about it, Bill had thought they would have arranged a time and a place to actually meet. Given that he was busy with Mary and of course his fiancé, he thought that was going to take some planning and not be as easy as it might be for someone who was unattached. But that’s not the way it happened at all.
It happened one night when the business was unbearably slow, several weeks after they had that moment in the kitchen. Arlene had only worked nights two more times. This night was the third.
Bill was sitting out on the milk cases where he always sat. Jimmy and Grandma had left about fifteen minutes earlier than usual. Arlene and Lexi were the two girls working and Lexi was early girl. Bill had already fed the waitresses and given that there were no orders but it was still early, he had nothing to do but hang out. It was too early to start any cleanup.
Bill had called home and told his fiancé he would be on time, a good thing, he’d decided, since with her studies and her busy schedule centered around UDC they had not been spending much time together. Unlike Bill, his fiancé was a clearly-focused, no bull shit lady. She knew what she wanted and was unafraid to go after it. She knew how to get what she wanted, knew what she had to do and did it.
Bill was quite the opposite in some respects. He was conflicted, overly cerebral, clearly ADD. He had been taught not to ask for what he wanted, that other people were always more important than him. These teachings would not serve him well, but he would not discover this until later in his life. More immediately, they would serve certain needs of his but not the key ones. And the drugs didn’t help anything, but you couldn’t tell him this.
After Arlene had eaten, while Lexi was still out on the floor, she came into the kitchen and found Bill out in the hall. She sat herself on the lettuce cases, the same ones on which Bea always sat. The stack was lower now since most of the cases of lettuce had been used.
“What’s up?” Bill asked.
Arlene looked down to her feet. “My mother’s really sick,” she said.
