So he was leaving, just about but not quite a year to the day he’d started. He gave Tommy a full month’s notice so he could train whoever was going to be the next broiler cook. The one thing he didn’t want more than anything else was to leave them in the lurch. He swore to himself he wouldn’t do that, and when it was coming time for his last day and they still hadn’t brought anyone in, he called over to Robert and asked him what was going on.
“Ain’t found the right person yet,” Robert said.
“What you waiting for?”
“The right person. But you don’t got to be concerned. Alvin work over there till we do, and the swing guy over here will work for Alvin.”
“I might stay for a bit,” Bill said. “But ain’t got a place since we gave up ours.”
“Nah,” Robert said. “You go on up there with your wife.”
Bill thought about it. “I might ask the landlady if she let me stay a few weeks. I mean it’s furnished. All I’d need is to keep some clothes with me.”
“You don’t really want to go, do you?”
“I got mixed feelings. I’m gonna miss you all. And truth is I’m scared.”
“You ain’t got nothing to be scared of. You a damn good broiler cook and you can cut meat, carve a round and a prime rib. You can do all the prep cooking too. Boy, it’s your time,” Robert said.
Like it or not it was his time. Bill knew he ought not stay. He knew he needed to go with his wife.
He didn’t cherish living with his in-laws. His father-in-law had been against the marriage, the relationship, from the start. He was dead-set against it once he’d learned that Bill had been arrested in a demonstration.
Then, there was the time they needed money for a car. That was a fiasco. Her father had the money and could have easily loaned it to them. But he didn’t trust Bill and wouldn’t give it up.
Bill did borrow money—not from his in-laws—and they did get a car. Why they needed a new one was a good story.
In retrospect, Bill learned a good lesson from his father-in-law. He learned about people and about himself. He learned to be more resourceful because he still needed the loan since he and his fiancé had no money whatsoever. He learned there were some people, even when push came to shove, you simply couldn’t trust. And he learned a little bit about where he stood in the world with people like his father-in-law.
That was an interesting thought in itself—people like his father-in-law. He learned they were a class of people who were different from his people. They thought differently, operated under different sets of values.
They had a ’57 Rambler bill had bought from one of those small street-lots. It was a standard shift on the column, a simple three-speed. But thing about it was it had vacuum windshield wipers. That meant the wiper motor operated off the engine. This didn’t mean much to Bill since he did not know it when he bought the car and it didn’t kick in until that one fateful trip they took up to see her parents and her brothers.
That was the trip it rained all the way up there, up Route 71 North. Pouring rain. Heavy pouring rain.
That was the trip Bill discovered that the windshield wipers worked off the engine and that every time he was accelerating on the highway the wipers stopped because there wasn’t enough power.
That was also the trip the car took on more than inch of water inside, all around, so they were sitting there with their feet in water, his fiancé much of the time, like a nimble dancer, with her feet up.
“You’ll laugh about this someday,” his father-in-law said.
