In light of what he’d been thinking sitting there, Bill immediately felt ornery. He felt horny too, and given everything, he shouldn’t have felt horny, but then he was only 21 years old and that pretty much said it all.
To him, it was a hoot. Before he was a cook, he was no lover, to be sure. He didn’t have a girlfriend until he was a sophomore in high school and getting that girlfriend was a story in and of itself.
Danny Resnick. That was the story. Bill played football in high school and the team was a team on and off the field. Bill and Danny were talking one day and Bill mentioned the girl he liked in his math class. Danny was a big tight end, maybe 6’2″. He had really big hands and long arms. They were with other team people out in the park (the school had a park right across the street where students could go on their lunch hour) and Bill saw the girl. He pointed her out to Danny who told him he’d kick his ass if he didn’t go over and ask her out.
As if that weren’t enough, of course the team members razzed him as he went over. They chanted “Wynn, Wynn, Wynn,” following Danny’s lead, all the way until he got there by her. People in the park thought it was just the football team being stupid. But Bill heard it in the background all the way.
Long story short, she said yes and he had his first and only girlfriend. They stayed boyfriend and girlfriend the rest of his way through high school and only broke up when he went away to college.
Good thing for her Bill would think not once, but many times over the course of his life.
What did he know about girls? What did he know about relationships? What I know about anything, he thought as he was sitting there.
And truth was he didn’t know anything. He was wholly unfit and unprepared for Pam, his first live-with, and he ran from her when it got super-serious and he got scared.
What did he know about his wife? About love? About anything?
So he was an accidental cook, maybe a coincidental one because it was a coincidence with Robert – and that was surely God looking out for him – that caused Robert to go the extra mile first to save him from being fired his first night when he was a busboy (a college graduate busboy) and had the trouble with the customer over the spilled soup, and second for taking him into the kitchen and training him to be a cook.
Now, all the girls, all the waitresses, the kitchen women and here, in this hotel, the laundry girl as well as the waitresses.
Why? One of those sixty-four thousand dollar questions.
Surely it was him in part. He did lose more than 60 pounds and was now a very skinny 135. Girls, so it seemed, liked the skinny boys. But he wouldn’t have known it really because even skinny he didn’t have a lot of girls. He had Pam and maybe two others and that was it.
Until he started as a cook. And by then he was married, well, not quite married but living with his wife-to-be and they were already engaged, if you could call it engaged because they had just agreed to get married, told her parents they were getting married and had set the date.
Ain’t life a bitch? Isn’t that the way things go?
