His fiancé’s graduation came and went. He took time off for the ceremony and then went to work in the afternoon. Mother’s day was now just a week away and before the end of the month Bill would be officially married.
Very officially married.
Which meant he should stop messing around altogether. He honestly didn’t want to cheat, but of course he didn’t rationalize it like that. Just he was becoming a married man and married men didn’t mess around.
He hadn’t read Masters and Johnson.
Lorraine was easy. She fully understood. He and Lorraine would become what they started as, friends. Norma and Lexi were gone. Bea and he had fought out of it. Only Mary was left and Mary would be the one to take the initiative. Just before his wedding (he only took off the weekend for it), Mary took him to The Upper Room and gave him what she’d never given to anyone including Yulie. It was her farewell present and she promised him he would be the only one to have ever that.
Arlene was a different story. He and Arlene had their moments, but they had developed a close friendship. She kept him up to speed on all that was happening with her mother. That was a roller coaster ride. At the time she was most distraught she would seek comfort from him, and he, subjected to his own vulnerabilities, gave that comfort and took his own. It was complicated.
The kitchen started prepping for Mother’s Day, for what they knew was going to be one of the biggest days of the year, if not the single biggest day, the Wednesday before the Sunday. Mary’s prep, for the most part, was nothing special. However, she and Bill, very close together, breaded and maintained triple the amounts of inventory. They made an extra five gallons of Bordelaise sauce and froze it, then kept their regular inventory of the sauce doubled. They made four times the amounts of rice pudding, chocolate pudding and jello on the Saturday before and cooked off triple the amount of cocktail shrimp for salads and shrimp cocktail appetizers.
On and on.
The meat delivery was triple too. Bill and Henry Lee started cutting extra amounts of steaks on the Thursday, building inventory for both stores and making sure to rotate it well so nothing got old. They did not freeze any trays of meat, but made sure they could cover at least twenty-five hundred covers.
Bill and Henry Lee had a good time together in the meat room, a lot of time. Henry Lee worked late from Thursday on and he and Bill cut steaks all day Saturday until they opened for the dinner service.
Conversation was varied but covered everything. Henry Lee asked Bill if he planned to keep messing around. Bill told him no. Henry Lee talked about how in the end it didn’t mean much overall as long as his wife didn’t find out. Bill would discover first-hand that this was not true, not accurate.
Mostly, Henry Lee asked Bill how much longer he expected to be working at Suburban.
Bill had no intelligible answer for this. He and his fiancé had not finalized plans yet. So all he could say was that they might hang around another year, maybe a few months—who knew. His fiancé was looking at opportunities there in Columbus and also up in Cleveland. One thing he made clear was that the longer he could stay there the better he felt.
“I’d stay altogether if I was alone.”
“For real?”
“Well, I can’t get a job in the professional world cause of my record. A man gotta work and this is good a place as any.”
“Better than most,” Henry Lee said.
“I got friends here.”
“Yeah, you do,” Henry Lee said.
