Page 69 - WTP Vol. X #7

I closed up the box and slid it back under the counter.
“Okay, well, sounds like you’re ready. I’ll see you tomorrow then, K?”
“Yeah,” I said. “See you tomorrow.” We hung up.
~
I worked at Black Bart’s for 15 years. Randal needed someone to manage the station since he was
moving to Florida, and he knew me from church. Randal would come by a couple times a year in the beginning, but then five years ago his mother died, so he had no reason to come back to town; after that, he pretty much left me alone to run the place. We did just fine. We’re off the highway a bit, but everyone
in town comes here for gas and coffee and to chat. Marcia knows almost everyone in town; her husband sells tires for a living, so between the two of them they’ve seen every car for a hundred miles.
I like to think I did a good job, but sometimes that doesn’t matter. I got the word two months ago that Randal had sold the station to GasCo. He said in a quick phone call that he didn’t want to “hold the asset” anymore. That meant I was out of a job, and there was no mention of severance, just a tossed out comment that he’d “put in a good word” with GasCo. Paul said GasCo didn’t offer retirement buyouts to employees of former stations, but they’d let me inter- view for the job of Manager; I didn’t feel like looking for a new job, so I stayed on—at a greatly reduced salary, of course.
It wasn’t the best situation, but I didn’t have too many options. I’d planned on running Black Bart’s until I retired, and now I didn’t know when that
would be. But work was four minutes from my house, six minutes from the house I grew up in, and a straight shot down Second Ave to where I’ll probably be buried; you couldn’t exactly beat the location.
~
The changes had been small, but annoying. They took out all the Coke products because GasCo has a deal with Pepsi, which meant we were about to lose the business of every Coke drinker in town. I wanted to say something, but I knew they wouldn’t listen to me. The whole town had become like that. Everything was owned by someone somewhere else. People who used to own stores now worked at them.
“You ready for your first day tomorrow?” Patty asked with a smile.
“I guess. It’s gonna be weird.”
“Do they give you any sort of special discounts?” I shook my head.
“They don’t have to give me free loaves of bread when they’ve got a million stores and a million people they could get to run them for ‘em.”
“Well... I’m sure they’ll appreciate that you know what you’re doing. That’ll count for something.”
“I don’t know why it would,” I said. I could feel myself being a downer so I shut up after that.
Later, I scraped the plates and did the dishes. Patty thinks I do it so she can put her feet up, but really I like to do it because I can turn my mind off. I looked outside—I’d started the deck in May, before we got the news; now it was half-finished and I wasn’t sure when I’d be able to get it done; we didn’t have the money.
When I finished the dishes, we watched TV for a bit and went to bed. Patty had work in the morning too: she’d been part-time at the County Clerk’s office for the last four years, but starting that week, she was back to full-time.
I was tired, but she kept me up for ten minutes because when she thinks I’m nervous, she talks until she thinks she’s made me feel better; it’s cute, but sometimes I wish she’d realize that if having her there doesn’t make me feel better, nothing will.
~
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