Things moved along. Time is always time. Time never stops.
In the next days, they all worked hard. Rosie and Edelgarde made sure to have fun when no one else was around. They teased Bill endlessly, sometimes so much so that Bill took one of them to the employee rest room. That was their goal and it worked. They knew it would work, planned on it, took turns.
Maybe, if Bill had chosen one over the other it might have made a riff. But he didn’t choose, they didn’t choose, they were one happy work family.
Bill would learn about work families. Later, when he became a teacher, he would find that some teachers where he worked had work-wives.
Work-wife, what a concept. A work-wife, he’d discover, was a female teacher who was virtually the same as a wife, the same as a spouse. Only difference was that at the end of the day the work-couple went home to their respective legal spouses.
Bill always wondered. He wondered who knew what. Beverly knew her husband was cheating. She did not know exactly how serious the affair was, but she knew she was being played. Bill didn’t think his own wife knew anything, but of course as these things went he could never be sure. All he knew was that his life and the way things were going were so far from what he’d dreamed he couldn’t remember what he’d dreamed anymore, or, if that were not wholly accurate, he could not imagine how far his train on the switched track had taken him from where he’d thought he was heading.
And that was the blessing of being busy. That was the blessing of having a job, working lots of hours and having the hours filled with good, hard work. There was something to be said for not having to think about life, about your own life.
The girls at work were only a distraction. If it were up to Bill, maybe he wouldn’t ever have fooled around. But then he’d been stricken by Mary and actually loved her, still loved her. Maybe, he thought sometimes, he’d always love her. When he closed his eyes and tried, he could remember the day she was bending over reaching into that oven and he’d slipped his hand under her dress from behind and helped himself to his first feel of her.
Woman that she was, Mother Mary, sweet Mother Mary. She didn’t jump. She didn’t get flustered. She didn’t move. She let him have his feel while she finished what she was doing in the oven. Only then did she stand up.
“Don’t start something you can’t finish,” was all she said.
Bill could finish it. Bill knew right away once she’d said that that he would finish it. What he didn’t know was how much he’d enjoy finishing it and finishing it over and over again.
Mother Mary. What Bill didn’t know was how much he would come to feel for her and how deep his feeling would go for her. She’d told him he’d always love his first crew, he’d always remember his first crew. Later in his life Bill would understand that those were true words, real words. Just as he could always close his eyes and recall the smell of the meat sauce his mother made every Sunday, later in his life he would discover he could close his eyes and see the faces of everyone in that first crew, from the special needs dishwasher with the crew cut, Paulie, on up. When he thought about it, he would discover he could recall these people all his life throughout his life.
Ain’t it funny how the night moves.
Ain’t it funny how things connect. This was the very memory chain he would teach in literature and composition courses later on.
