customer appreciation

Simone’s divorce celebration took us across the river into Illinois where we had dinner at a steak house that sits next to a small airport where students from our community college are able to get their pilot’s licenses. Dad talked of Fast Jack’s and how business might improve if we were to offer coupons to our regulars while Simone let me drink from her margaritas. Dad didn’t like this, but she insisted. “Oh, let him live a little, Roy.” By the end of dinner I was drunk enough to argue with him about his stupid coupon idea.

“The whole thing just makes us look so desperate, Dad,” I said. “It’ll be embarrassing.”

“I think people will appreciate the fact that they’re getting a free gallon of gasoline every ten times they come in,” he said, folding his napkin back into its original triangle shape. “I know I sure would.”

“But ten visits is a lot for only one gallon. Why not ten gallons?”
“Are you kidding me? We’re trying to make money, Sean, not give it away.”

“But a single gallon isn’t going to make a difference to anyone.”

“You don’t seem to comprehend customer appreciation, son. People appreciate getting something for free – whatever it is.” He looked over at Simone, wanting her to take his side on this. She was a million miles away though, staring out the window behind her to a plane making its way across the landing strip. The plane was veering left and right, it’s back rudder waving back and forth.

“Tell him, Simone,” I said. “Wouldn’t you feel stupid being told that once you come into a station ten times you get one free gallon? One? Wouldn’t that make you feel stupid?”

Dad said to her, “We’re only trying to reinforce a little loyalty here. I mean, there’s nothing wrong in applauding a little loyalty, am I right? A little devotion?”

Simone turned to face us. She was holding her empty margarita glass to her forehead and her eyes were shiny with tears about to spill down her face. “I don’t know,” she sighed. “I guess a little devotion never hurt anybody.”

Dad picked up his knife and fork and cut himself a piece of what was left of Simone’s steak. He leaned over and put his arm around her. I watched the food move over to the side of his jaw as he whispered something to her. Simone grabbed my hand then and squeezed. “Give us a minute, Sean?” I did as I was told. Leaving the table and making my across the steak house, I wondered what Dad might have said to her. I wondered if I couldn’t have said it any better.

Out in the parking lot, Dad’s truck was locked, so I leaned against it and stared across the road to the airport. All of the planes were parked for the night with their noses aimed at the sky. The only other person around was a man in an oil-stained jumpsuit sitting outside of one of the hangers, cleaning his fingernails with a pocketknife. A semi-truck passed by occasionally, stirring up a breeze. Sometimes the air smelled of fuel, sometimes of steak. Above, the moon sat like a stray eyelash in the sky.

Dad walked up to me with a couple of toothpicks. “Get off the Ram,” he said. “The rivets in your jeans will scratch the paint.”

I did as I was told. “How’s Simone? She still crying?”

“She’ll be okay.”

“Yeah, you think so?”

“I go by what they tell me, son.”

The two of us stood there and stared at the line of planes. I had been out of high school for two weeks, a virgin who’d only gotten as far as feeling up a fry-cook at Hardee’s in the backseat of her CRX on a cold January night of my junior year. I wasn’t able to get a date to the prom because Dad had dated so many single mothers in town that everyone at school assumed I only cared about one thing. Not that people were exactly wrong about me though. The way I saw it, Dad wasn’t different from anybody else. You had to take what you could get. Shit in one hand. Wish in the other. See which fills up first. That’s what Dad always said.

I put the toothpick in my mouth. It was coated in cinnamon. “What did you tell Simone?” I asked him. “I mean, what do you tell women when they get like that?”

Dad removed his toothpick, licked his lips. “The less the better,” he said. “But I guess tonight’s my fault. I never should’ve let her come out tonight.”

“She wanted to celebrate though,” I said.

He bent down and checked his Ram for any scratches the rivets of my jeans could’ve left behind. “I told her on the phone this afternoon that she should just take it easy and see how things go, but she wouldn’t listen. Said she’d be fine.”

“She is pretty,” I said. And she was. This one hadn’t wrinkled as she aged, but had freckled. I liked that. Her freckles made her seem warmer than the usual woman he’d bring home. She had this big head of frizzy red hair that looked like she had to attack it with a brush in order to keep in line and her eyes were as green as emeralds and blah-blah-blah whatever. This woman was attractive. A ten. And not a ten on Dad’s scale either, but on mine.

Dad unlocked the Ram and slid the key in the ignition so he could check the clock on the dash. “You think there’s more to my life than just women, son? I mean, your dad’s got more going on than just that, doesn’t he?”

I was a little drunk from Simone’s margaritas, but instead of telling him what I felt was true, I turned on her. “It’s not like you’re the guy who divorced her,” I said. “It’s not like you’re the bad guy here.”

He smiled. “Exactly! I’m the good guy here! Look around us, son. I don’t see anyone else helping her pick up the pieces, do you? I don’t see anyone else around taking her out to eat. You think she realizes this though? Hell No! You know what she just said to me before I came out here. She said, ‘Man was God’s first draft but that woman was the final product.’ Now if that’s not someone hanging by a thread then I don’t know what is . . .”

The door to the steak house opened and the two of us turned to watch Simone make her way across the parking lot. Whatever we had been talking about was quickly forgotten. “Listen,” Dad said, slipping me a ten-dollar bill. “Go to the movies or something. This emotional rollercoaster Simone’s on has its rewards, know what I mean?”

More cash made its way into my pocket due to a new woman in our lives than from what I ever made working at Fast Jack’s. Once I learned how it worked, I’d try to get as much as I could get.

By the time Simone was upon us, I turned to Dad and asked him if I could have some money for the movies. He didn’t think twice. Smiling over at Simone’s puffy eyes and fresh coat of make-up, he brought out his wallet and forked over a twenty-dollar bill. “Don’t spend it all in one place,” he told me.

nice legs, when do they open?

It was always weird seeing Billie again. Not long after Dad and I had brought her back home from Thebes, we only saw her maybe once or twice a year. We knew she wasn’t living in Bicknell, but it’s not like she ever seemed to be living that far from us either. I’d be in the drive-thru at Long John Silvers and wonder if the girl in the car in front of me was her or not. Or, I’d be in Kroger’s and think I’d hear her voice in the next aisle.

One time, she came home late one night crying with the news that Stevie Ray Vaughn had just died in a plane crash. She explained how she had met Stevie once at a Blues festival. Dad waited until she was finished with her story, then got out his wallet and set the money on the kitchen counter and went back to bed. She spent the rest of the night on the couch, but was gone before either Dad and I woke up the next morning. I think Dad always kept a hundred dollar bill secretly folded away in his wallet for whenever she showed up. I could never tell if he gave the money to her as a gift or as a way to get her out of the house because as soon as she got that hundred it wasn’t long before she was out the door and out of our lives for another six months.

It’s not that I didn’t mind Billie showing up out of the blue. Dad and I never said it, but I think we were both relieved when she showed her face – just so we knew she was still alive. But what bugged us was how much space she took up when she was around. She didn’t live there anymore and her old bedroom had been slowly emptied with each of her visits to the point that there were only a mattress on the floor and an old Pat Benatar poster on the walls, but whenever she showed up it was like she had the run of the place all over again. After an hour of her being there, whether it was winter or summer, rain or shine, I’d have to escape to the woods just so I could breathe. Dad would start washing his car, inside and out. I think he preferred the sound of the Dust-Buster than whatever Billie had to say.

After Billie went into the liquor store, I looked in on the Mustang she had flown in on. Behind the steering wheel was this scrawny little bald guy with a full beard. Eyes closed, head thrown back, mouth open, the only thing that made him different from a dead body was that he would occasionally flick the ashes from his cigarette out the window.

Billie came out with four cases of Bud Light in her arms, a brown paper bag wrapped around a bottle, and the unlit cigarette in her mouth. I took the cases from her and followed her to the back of the Mustang. Opening its trunk, she flipped open the lid of a big red cooler inside. The cooler was full of water, some ice cubes floating around, a carton of orange juice and a slice of bologna sealed inside a sandwich bag. Behind the cooler were a rifle case and some logs. She screwed the cap off the bottle in the brown paper sack and drained it into the carton of orange juice.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Malibu,” she said, tossing the sack and bottle into the trunk and drinking straight from the carton.

She offered me a drink and I put my nose to the mouth of the carton. It smelled like sun tan lotion. “No thanks,” I said.

“Suit yourself.” She took another swig. “That’s eight bucks by the way for the half-case I got you.”

I looked around for the green bottles. “They didn’t have any Molson?”

“Nope.”

Bullshit. She had just bought me what she was buying.

“Come on,” I said. “I asked you to buy me Molson.”

“I don’t have change for this,” she said, pocketing the twenty I had held out to her.

“There’s a liquor store right there. Go in and break it.”

“No can do,” she said. “The guy in there won’t open his register unless you buy something.”

More bullshit.

The bald dead-looking guy in the driver’s seat opened his eyes and watched me in his side-mirror while Billie and I stood there at the open trunk of the Mustang, facing one another with all of that Bud Light between us. She let her swoop of hair cover her leaky pupil again. “I’ll pay you back the next time I see you,” she said, and started breaking open the cases and tossing the cans into the cooler.

I picked up my half-case, put it under my arm, and watched her fill the cooler. I could’ve helped her. There were a lot of cans and she was determined to get all three-and-a-half cases in that one cooler. But I figured she had already lied to me twice, let her pack her own cooler.

“You need ice,” I said.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” she said, and closed the trunk.

I watched her move around to the passenger side of the Mustang, get in, grab a lighter from the dash and light her cigarette. The guy she was with must’ve asked her about me because she just shrugged her shoulders and nodded toward me as if to say no, it’s okay. Whatever that could’ve meant. He was still staring at me in his side-mirror and I stared back, not caring how tough or dead he seemed to be. He sat up and started the engine. Billie closed her door and the Mustang backed out with the guy flicking his fingers goodbye to me from the top of the steering wheel. Billie called out to me, “Good seeing you!” I didn’t say anything. I stepped into the empty parking space and watched the Mustang pull out onto the highway. Its bumper sticker read Nice Legs, When Do They Open?