Monthly Story (April '23): The Sandwich Shop

Fiction

August 19, I stopped pretending. I marked the day because I knew what I guess I’d known all along, at least for a few years, but didn’t, couldn’t, tell myself. The day it all came to a head and turned everything around the air conditioning in the shop had gone out. “Overuse,” Roy said but I knew the thing was just old old old and had to eventually poop out and leave us sweating through our t-shirts, which is what we wore in the shop in summer, turning on fans every which way. It was always hot in there and I was the only waitress. That air conditioner never did more than noisily blow a little half-cooled air over about a third of the table area where I spent my time running back and forth taking orders, delivering them, clearing them. Sometimes Roy opened the windows and just blew the air out onto the street where we had a couple of tables. If it was the right time of day and we had the awning rolled out to shade them, those tables were as cool as the ones inside, even near where the air came out of that noisy old fossil. That’s what working there was like. Noisy and hot but pleasant enough I guess because of Roy. Pleasant enough unless Dori, his wife, came in, which she did way way too much for either of us. Made straight for the cash register. Smiled her big fake, caked-on lipstick smile that dropped the instant she turned away. Counted the money in the till six times a shift. Never did a lick of anything else while Roy made sandwiches like a machine. “My shop,” she always said. “My sandwiches.” “I’d pay you more. You know I would,” Roy would tell me, all sympathy, “but she raises holy hell, you know how she is.” She always found something off, something she had to rag him about. Then went through the kitchen, on and on about the health department this and the health inspector that. We looked at each other behind her back. He’d roll his eyes. At first I kept a poker face, didn’t want to get between them. We need our jobs, right, but it used to make me laugh. He’d sigh a big, exaggerated sigh as soon as she wiggled her skinny ass out of there. He’d prop open the door, wave a towel to fan out her aura. At the end of the day I’d wipe down all the tables and counter space, put the chairs up, sweep the floor, mop it a couple of times a week. All this while he set the kitchen right and managed the final count at the register if she wasn’t still hanging around like a bad odor. He let me out the front door to the bus stop and then locked up, went out the back to his truck. I caught the bus home.

My husband would have dinner ready to go on the table when I walked in the door. I’d have to call him before I left work so he could time it. He’d be home from his job when I was only halfway through my shift, spend his time in his garden or puttering around the house fixing cabinet doors that stopped hanging right or changing light bulbs, looking for projects. Then he put dinner together for me. We’d sit at the kitchen table without much to say to each other, but he was, is, a good guy. A real homebody and a good provider. He worked security at the mall and we had a nice little house with a one car garage in the back where he had room for a small workshop. He changed his own oil, did his own tune ups, liked to make a Saturday project of changing the brakes or such with his brother. They’d drink a couple of beers and be at that all afternoon, a game on the TV set he ran an extension cord out for in the background. He always said I didn’t have to work, but we both knew I did and I never liked staying home. We’d been married since I was eighteen and thought I was pregnant. I wasn’t, but there we were, and I got pregnant soon enough anyway with our daughter, who was twenty and already had a little girl of her own down in Texas where her husband was in the Army. I was never too sure about that boy but she went ahead anyway. My husband was good to me. Like I say, he was, is, a good guy. He would have come and picked me up at the sandwich shop every day if I let him. He offered, but I said I liked riding the bus. All those people coming and going. You could tell the ones going home from work with their sagging shoulders and their long faces, the way they sank against the window, their eyes half taking in the city blurring by. Then the people without cars with their grocery bags. Nobody with a car takes the bus to grocery shop. Them and the kids, student with their books, maybe a few black kids making noise in the back seat. I always enjoyed the bus and imagined it taking me somewhere else, maybe to a different part of the country, someplace fresh. At home it was all peace and quiet and everything in order. I looked forward to my bus rides.

And to the days Dori Dear stayed away from the shop. Maybe Roy would have some after-school kid come in and do some of the dirty jobs and I’d handle the register, maybe help Roy on the line where we’d have our private little jokes nobody else would have caught, the side glances at the massive woman from the neighborhood who always bought two of everything and starting eating before she squeezed herself out the door or the so-called artist dressed all in white and wearing a cheap black wig. But who am I to judge? Maybe he had something. You know, an undiscovered talent. What do I know? I was just a 45-year-old waitress in a grubby little sandwich shop with a noisy air conditioner. Maybe that woman had something, too. I mean like, you know, a disease. I liked my job even though my husband kept telling me “You don’t have to work. We are okay. We have enough,” and I’d say, “Yeah, I know we have enough, but I like my job,” and he’s like, “I know, but you could like being home doing stuff you like here and then we could have those few hours together when I come home in the afternoon,” and I was like, ”But I like being out and about, meeting people and having my own money, riding the bus, too,” which I’m afraid he never understood or maybe didn’t want to. “You like riding the bus?” he said, but I ignored him. All those years our daughter was growing up I stayed home to be sure I was there when she came in from school and I could be a lower-income June Cleaver, the perfect TV mom, only in faded jeans and my high school sweatshirt. I’d had enough of that, thank you. I liked standing shoulder to shoulder with Roy, leaning into each other to laugh at some stupid joke, rolling our eyes together behind Dori Dear’s back. “You shoulda been a comic,” he told me, “Yeah, and you could be my straight man,” I told him and we both broke up at how naughty we both took it. Then, explaining something unpleasant about taxes one afternoon, he slipped in, “I’ll give it to you straight” with his eyebrows up and half a wink, so I guess we both knew we were flirting. But it was never just that.

We talked between the nonsense and I knew, like, how they met when he was a high school buddy’s roady because he had a van he bought when he came back from the Navy. He’d load all their amps and mics and guitars and the drum set in the back and then drive between gigs, setting up, tearing down, eventually doing their sound and lights, which meant more equipment to haul around, but he liked it well enough. They partied and he liked the girls. Dori was somebody’s sister. I don’t remember whose. It doesn’t matter. They just fell into step with each other and before he knew it they were married and had the shop, which was her idea and her family’s money they had to pay back. He’d had his fun. And I talked about me and my husband, whose name I should get around to saying, though I don’t know why. It’s not actually important. Ted, anyway. Ted. The draft didn’t get him because of a heart murmur. Don’t ask me how he can work security but not do some kind of army stuff, but they said he couldn’t, which I guess was okay. I’m not some kind of flag waver, USA-USA-yelling idiot, so what do I care about the Army. Blue collar doesn’t mean you are automatically stupid, although it’s pretty obvious I had been stupid enough. We had sex so I thought I had to marry him. He must have thought the same thing. And I was late so I assumed I was knocked up. I couldn’t tell my parents. I’d just turned 18 so we acted quickly. Went to the JP. But then I wasn’t pregnant after all. If somebody counted the months between when we got married and my baby, they’d get a nice respectable 13 months. My mother said, “Well, it’s your funeral.” Can you tell I didn’t exactly come from a happy home?

And you didn’t have to be a genius to see how it was with Dori and Roy. Truth is, I think she was probably the unhappiest woman I ever met, so you can only guess what he must have felt like behind all his clowning around, and he blurted out one day, “Damn, I hate this shop. If you weren’t here…” and trailed off a little embarrassed. He offered me a ride home that evening and I took it. “You don’t need to always crowd onto that old bus all the time,” he said. I was like, “Yeah. I guess it’s not that great.”

So I got home earlier than Ted expected me. I’d already called him to say I was catching the bus, and he was upset that I’d thrown his timing off. He never said anything when I’d pissed him off, we never had fights where you start throwing the china or mean words you can’t take back at each other. Never ever. No yelling and screaming. “Oh, your boss brought you home,” he said as he turned back to check the fish sticks in the oven. “Well, good on him.” I knew that he wanted me to know he meant he could have come and picked me up, that he was always offering, and that I always turned him down. But I also knew that wasn’t really really it. What actually bugged him was that he couldn’t set dinner on the table at the exact moment I walked in the door, that he had it all perfectly timed, and I’d thrown him off. It wasn’t about helping me. It was about his idea of himself as the perfect husband, which always got under my skin. It drove me crazy sometimes how he couldn’t stop fixing this and replacing that around the house, bringing his paycheck home and sticking his hand out for mine, and then parking himself at the kitchen table with the household budget, and insisting on explaining every detail of it to me as if I were still that 17-year-old kid he’d impressed with the used Chevy coup he’d started detailing with his brother. The worst of it came out in the way he kissed me like he wasn’t just kissing me but looking around to see what else was going on. I imagined he was trying to figure out what else needed to be fixed around the house. His mind was somewhere else. I never knew where. Not with me, that’s for sure. He was, is, a good guy, no question. I’m making it sound like I didn’t, don’t, care about him, and that’s just not true. I do. If it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t have had anything. Later, after I did the dishes and he’d relaxed into the television, he turned during a commercial and said, “Just let me know the next time you’re going to be early, that’s all. Okay?”

I said, “Sure,” but thought probably not.

I knew Roy would ask me if I wanted a ride home again, so I made a point of saying, “No. That’s alright,” the next time, but we kept the wise cracks going back and forth like always. “Roy Rogers,” I called him one day. “Hi-Yo, Silver!” he answered, leering to play up the creepiness. “That’s the Lone Ranger, donkey brain,” I told him. “I thought you grew up in America!” He liked to say dumb stuff like that to get a rise out of me and I definitely gave it back to him. But then after he asked me again, I said sure, he could drop me off, only he had to stop around the block so I didn’t have to go through any of that “Your boss, well, good on him” rigmarole with Ted. I must have said something about all that to Roy because the time after that he said, “Let’s take a little drive first,” and we did. I figured he wasn’t in any hurry to run into Dori’s arms. We drove through Kenwood looking at houses we’d never get inside unless we were cleaning them, then around the lake twice. Ted put dinner on the table the minute I walked in the door. He looked at me and said, “How about we go upstairs after dinner. I’ll do the dishes tonight.” I knew what that meant. “Sure,” I said. “Why not.” He could look around the room for something to fix while I got him off. Truth is, by that time, my mind wandered, too. If he wasn’t going to be there while he kissed me, why should my head stick around? From 17 to 45 is a lot of years. Afterwards, he went downstairs and drank a couple of beers as he watched his shows.

You probably think you know where all this is going and you might not be too far off and, yeah, Roy kept offering me a ride home and he made sure the schedule had the two of us closing up the place as often as he could manage it. I wasn’t exactly missing my bus rides home because this taking a ride around the lake talking about whatever came into our heads and sharing private jokes that became a kind of secret language and then climbing out of the car around the block and not telling old Ted, pretending I came home on the bus, all this spy-versus-spy, James Bond secret decoder ring stuff made my blood move a little faster, a new sensation, not exactly unwelcome. Then one evening riding around the lake Roy pulls into one of those little lots that go up to the lake shore where you can watch the sunset and he puts his arm around me and we kiss and when he kisses me he’s not exactly looking out at the ducks, if you know what I mean. He kissing me and he’s not doing anything else. It’s just me and only me he’s kissing and his hand cups my breast and gives it a gentle squeeze then goes away, but he sent a signal with that. We sit like that all cuddled together for a long time and then he drives me home.

At home I say I’ve got a migraine and go straight to bed, but Ted can’t leave me alone. He brings a tray and an Extra Strength Tylenol and he says, “You have to eat something” and “Come on, now. Take this. You’ll feel better.” Very sweet but I know it’s not ever going to be enough. “I need a vacation,” I say, and he says, “Okay. We’ll go someplace,” but I know his idea of a vacation is we go someplace where there’s a golf course. Maybe Myrtle Beach, someplace warm and made for vacationers, but what I mean is that I need to get out of here, go someplace new and maybe find a job and an apartment. It would be the first time I ever had a place that would be all mine, but I can’t say any of that to him ever. “No,” I say. “No what?” he says. “No, not what you think,” I say. “Now let me sleep. I’m not hungry.” His bringing me food spoiled my appetite and I turn over and think about Roy kissing me and I can’t stop thinking what having him inside me would be like. We’re going to do it the next time we see each other. I know we will.

And we do. We’re closing up the shop and we’ve been kind of quiet the whole shift, but we keep finding ways to touch and look at each other, like, with both the question and the answer decided in our eyes, and then he’s locking the front door, not asking if I want a ride home but locking the front door and turning the lights out and turning all the fans off. It’s August 19^th, and I know everything is going to change now. I’ve made up my mind. The air conditioner is quiet for a change, all pooped out, and I can hear myself think. “We’ll have to spring for a new air conditioner,” he said just to have something to say as he came into the back room where I was waiting for him, and we fell into each other like we both know that’s where we wanted to be all day and now his hand went up the back of my T-shirt and unhooked my bra and I was working his belt buckle loose. I straddled his lap on the floor and he took his time. I was the only thing he saw and felt and that’s the way it was each time after that, and he was leaving Dori. We’d both get jobs at Costco. He knew a guy there who could make it happen. “Goodbye to this freaking shop,” he’d say, but none of that ever happened and I could see what a jerk I was. He’d never leave Dori because he was too weak after you peeled away all the talk and all the reckless fun. I didn’t pretend I understood like a nice little girl, but I understand alright. Don’t you worry about that. So that’s why I’m on this bus now. I have a cousin in Albuquerque who said I could sleep on her couch until I get set up there. I’ve never been to Albuquerque. I’ve never been anywhere. I’ve never done anything, but I’m taking this bus anyway and I don’t care. I’m doing this. I’m going there.