"What's the matter?" I asked, instantly withdrawing my hand, bothered by the thought I might have hurt her.
"It's nothing." She told me dismissively. "They're just a little sore."
"Sore?" I asked, remembering uncomfortably what that had meant when my wife had begun to complain of that. That certainly wasn't possible with Nina. If it was, I'd sadly misread her.
"It'll go away." She said. "Don't worry about it."
But the mood was broken for that day. When Dad came home he found us sitting together on the couch watching the Phil Donahue show while we held hands.
I was officially given an offer of employment from the trauma center on January 15. I accepted it later that day. When I went to work at the pizza joint that night I officially gave notice to the manager that I would be leaving his fine employ. He gave one more try at convincing me to stay, offering to make me an assistant manager and bumping my salary to a whole four and a quarter an hour.
"I know the hospital is offering you more than that." He told me. "But I'm offering you a management position. That looks awfully good on the old resume."
I respectfully declined his offer and he took it well. He told me that if I ever found myself in need of a job, that I should see him first. I told him I would.
January 24 was my last day there. I clocked out at 10:00 and turned in my uniform to him. We shook hands and he told me he would miss me. Though I didn't particularly like him, he had given me a job and had helped me earn money for college. I felt I owed him a little bit.
"You know what you need to do?" I told him just before I walked out the door.
"What's that Bill?" He asked.
"Get into pizza delivery." I suggested.
He looked at me strangely. "Pizza delivery? Nobody does that. It isn't financially feasible."
"If you do it right, it will be." I said, "You see, Americans are lazy. If they can get someone to drive their pizza to them, then they'll do it. There are two tricks to this that you need to employ. One, you need to make sure their pizza is still hot when it arrives. You'll need to come up with some sort of insulated carrier for that. Shouldn't be too hard," I assured him. "The technology is out there. The second thing you need to do, and this is hard for a business person to accept, is NOT charge people for the delivery."
He laughed. "That's very interesting Bill." He said. "But you don't know a whole lot about business. How could I NOT charge someone a delivery fee for driving their pizza to them? How would I pay for the driver? How would I pay for the gas?"
"Ahh." I said. "That's the thing. With all due respect, I know a considerable amount about business. It's what I'll be majoring in in college and I've studied quite extensively on my own. If you were smart, you'd listen to my advice. I'm not wrong about this."
He seemed more amused than awed by my speech. "Okay Bill." He told me patronizingly. "Tell me how I can magically deliver pizzas at no cost to the customer and still make a profit on them."
"It's simple." I said. "You hire an eighteen year old kid with a car and pay him four dollars an hour or so. You stipulate that he pays for the gas, insurance, and uses his own vehicle. His main job will be the deliveries but when there are none going on, you can also have him help out around here making pizzas for the regular customers, sweeping up, doing dishes, whatever. You will have to shell out a little cash for advertising to make it known to the general public in your area that you deliver. Your target group is those people that are too lazy or too busy to make food and who don't really want to go out to pick something up. They will be the people that would otherwise have made some hamburger helper or something instead of going out. If they know that they can call your number and have a hot pizza at their front door in less than an hour, they'll do it. Pizza will triumph over hamburger helper every time. When you do your ads you need to put in something like "guaranteed hot and fresh in forty minutes or less" or some crap like that. You also need to put in "no delivery fee". Your pizza sales will go up enough to cover the four bucks an hour that the extra employee makes and will give you considerable profit. Remember, you're snaring people who would not otherwise have come in here and bought a pizza.
That's the key to the whole thing. Your driver will get tips from those he delivers to since the public will feel obligated to give him a buck or so since there's no delivery fee. Your driver is happy because he's making reasonably good money and gets to get out. The public is happy because they don't have to go out and pick up their pizza. And you're happy because your sales are going up. You would do especially well on Friday nights, and on Sunday afternoons during football season. Trust me on this, it'll work and it'll work well."
He smiled condescendingly at me. "Well thanks for the advice Bill." He said. "I'll certainly take it under consideration."
"You do that." I smiled back, knowing that he would do no such thing. Oh well, his loss. In two or three years when the pizza delivery craze hit the nation he would undoubtedly think back on this conversation and wonder why he hadn't listened to me. You can't change the world.
When I stepped out of the pizza parlor I saw that a blizzard had blown in at some point. Cursing I got in my car and drove very carefully home. As I pulled into my driveway I stopped, staring down the street.
A smile formed on my face. In Anita's driveway a late model Buick was parked. A late model Buick I'd once crouched next to as I pulled a coil wire from Anita's vehicle. It was nearly 10:30 at night. Jack Valentine wasn't merely popping by for a visit. He was staying the night. Fate had reclaimed what was hers. And for once I was ecstatic about it.
My new work schedule was both better and worse than my old. I went to the hospital at 12:00 each afternoon, Monday through Friday. I worked straight through until six o'clock in the evening with only two ten-minute breaks. In a way it was an exploitation of labor laws. Thirty hours a week was just under what they had to consider full time and thus pay benefits for. And six hours a day was just under what they had to give a lunch break for. I didn't mind being exploited however, especially after I saw my first paycheck. At six bucks an hour times thirty hours a week minus the miniscule amount of taxes they took out I made damn near a hundred and fifty bucks; a small fortune for a teenager. When I subtracted living expenses from this I put three quarters of it into the computer stocks I was now investing in. I would do this on every subsequent paycheck. My day was coming closer and closer.
Dad too began investing. Like Tracy, once he knew the source of my information he had no problem acting upon it. He diverted all of the money that he had going into savings into the computer stocks. He also freed up some more money from Mom's paycheck and added that to it. When I explained the ramifications of the big play that was soon to come he became very enthusiastic, diverting every spare penny into the investments. Mom questioned this a little but Dad convinced her that I knew what I was doing without actually telling her how he knew this. Since she had seen me obsessively studying all aspects of business for the last two years she had no problem accepting the fact that my foresight was based only on my own common sense.
My new schedule did cut down on my time with Nina on the weekdays. Occasionally she would come over to my house after work and we'd spend a little time together either downstairs or in my room. These were nice times; all times were nice when I was with her, but there wasn't much of an atmosphere for intimacy. Even if my door was closed it felt decidedly weird making out while my parents were home. The most we ever managed was a few deep kisses and a slight dance of tongues.
The weekends however, were now completely free since I no longer had to work on Saturday and Sunday nights. Our ski trips became longer. We would head out early in the morning and drive to resorts further and further away from what we were used to. We trekked all the way up to the very northern fringes of the Idaho panhandle or to the western portions of Montana. We loved everything about these trips; the loading of the equipment in the frigid early morning air, the long drive as we shared coffee from my thermos, the standing in lines waiting for the lifts, the time in the lodge, but especially the long, tired drives home. We would switch off the driving chores but often as not, Nina would end up curled up on my shoulder as we approached Spokane, fast asleep, a contented smile on her face.