Idle hands make the devil’s workshop.
Even though Mary told them they had a lot of work to do despite the fact that they might not be too busy, Bill, Bea and Mary went about their morning the same as they always did. They went down to change clothes while the coffee was brewing. Downstairs, because Bill was extraordinarily frisky, they laughed and fooled around more than they might have ordinarily done. What this meant, in effect, was that they changed unabashedly out in the hall, goofing around and playing with each other. Both Mary and Bea copped feels of Bill as he changed and Bill copped some nice feels of them both.
Then they went upstairs to have a cup coffee. Bea, like always, sat on her stool and read the racing page in The Dispatch. Bill stood behind her and looked over her shoulder even though he was not interested in the ponies. What he did do, and what Bea purposefully did not stop him from doing, was reach his arms over her and slide his hands into her dress from the top so that he could go into her bra and fondle her breasts. He only did this after Mary had taken her coffee and gone back to her station to start her work.
“Boy,” Bea said.
“Boy nothing,” said Bill. “Boy gonna take as much feeling as he wants and girl ain’t saying nothing but when she wants to go downstairs.”
“Boy,” Bea said again, but she was not protesting. If she had protested, Bill would have quoted the famous line about protesting too much.
When he was sure he had more than started her engines, when he was sure that he had probably flooded her gas tank, so to speak, he went about finishing his coffee and walked back to where Mary was to see what she needed from downstairs. The first thing, the thing that had to be done before he and Bea could do anything with playing, was make sure the round was cut and make sure it got put on to cook. So together he and Mary went into her walk-in and checked to see how much was left over from yesterday. Actually, it wasn’t anything that Bill didn’t already know because he was able to and had trained himself to track all of these things as he worked. What he did do was check how much of the prime rib was left over so that he would know how many ribs he needed to bring upstairs.
Seeing that there wasn’t much round, first thing he had to do before they spoke about anything else was go down and get a fresh one. He did not know if Henry Lee had cut it last night or not because there had not been enough steaks left over for him to have to take a trip to the downstairs walk-in. That had saved him time last night but had left him wondering about whether or not he’d have to cut the round.
What he found, happily, was a round already cut, neatly wrapped and waiting for him. Sitting beside it was the second half, also neatly wrapped and waiting for the following day.
So Bill picked up the tray with the biggest half on it, not that there was much difference between the two because both he and Henry Lee were pros at making sure that the division was pretty good, and carted it upstairs, the tray on his shoulder as usual. Unfortunately, blood dripped from the tray all down the front of his shirt. The blood was cold against him as it went through his shirt, and he knew when he got upstairs Mary would certainly have something to say.
True to who she was and wholly indicative of her genuine concern for Bill, first thing she said when she saw him with the blood on his shirt was remind him of her superstition.
