B
ennie, we must talk,” Cathy said. She maneuvered her heavy body onto one of the rickety table chairs and patted the seat next to her. At eight o’clock the Monday evening following Thanksgiving, Bennie’s Burgers was empty. Romero had shown up on Friday and announced he’d accepted a job as an oil-field roustabout and Saturday would be his last day. His cousin Juan was available if Bennie wanted to hire him. The proprietor of Bennie’s Burgers had no choice but to take Juan on. He would start Monday.
“Oh, oh,” Bennie said. “This doesn’t sound good.”
Cathy came right to the point. “Bennie, I don’t have to tell you that this place is losing ground. We have to do something to attract a better-paying crowd than teenagers and the coffee and doughnut club.”
“And just how do I do that, missy, without a bankroll and the people to do it?”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about.” She’d provoked a rare note of testiness in his tone. Bennie was about his place of business like mothers were about their children. It was all right for
him
to point out its faults, but no one else better take the liberty.
“Forgive me, Bennie, but if something isn’t done to increase your business, you’re going to go under.”
“We’ll get by. We always have, but… I take it you wouldn’t have brought up the problem if you didn’t have a solution.”
She paid him a small smile. He had come to know her well. “I’d like to propose a few suggestions.”
“I’m all ears.”
She’d hit upon her vision yesterday while watching her grandmother fry corn bread to go with the pot of ham and turnip greens simmering on the stove. Sunday was the only day they sat down together to a meal. Cathy had always been amazed that such simple ingredients and preparation could produce anything as delicious as her grandmother’s “hot-water” corn bread. It was made by pouring boiling water over a bowl of salted cornmeal and stirring until the mixture looked like mush, then dropping it by spoonfuls into hot fat and frying it. The result was a pone-shaped morsel with a crunchy outer crust and soft center that was sheer bliss to eat.
“Your grandfather used to say he’d walk a hundred miles to eat my hot-water corn bread,” Emma had recounted for yet another time. “Fact is, it wasn’t my loving but my cooking that lured that man to marry me.”
“Everybody knows you’re the best cook in the county,” Cathy remarked dutifully, and recalled Trey hoping she’d learn to cook like her grandmother.
Cathy had observed her taking the corn bread from the skillet when the new image for Bennie’s Burgers had implanted itself in her head. “Grandmother, I have an idea to pass by you,” she’d said. “Tell me what you think.”
Emma had listened. When Cathy finished, she said excitedly, “This could be an answer to prayers, Cathy. What do we have to lose? Let’s
do
it! I have a whole month of sick days accrued at the library and can start right away.”
“I’ll see what Bennie says.”
But first, she’d thought, she must work on another flight of fancy.
Finished with the meal, she had said, “I think I’ll take a walk. It’s such a perfectly golden afternoon, and I need the exercise.”
“As if you don’t have enough exercise during the week,” her grandmother commented.
“I won’t walk far,” Cathy said.
Her destination was over two streets, two empty lots down. If Mabel was in her kitchen, she’d see Cathy walk by and wonder where in the world she was going, since there was only one house at the dead end of the road, and not one to attract visitors.
When Odell Wolfe answered the knock on his door, his bushy eyebrows disappeared beneath the overhang of his uncut hair. “Miss Cathy! What are you doing here?”
“I came to see you, Mr. Wolfe. May I come in?”
“In? You want to come inside my house?”
“Yes, please. I have a proposal to put to you.”
Odell Wolfe backed up, clearly unnerved by the word
proposal
.
Cathy smiled. “It’s not what you think.”
“Oh, no ma’am, I wasn’t thinking anything—”
“It has to do with a job offer.”
“A job offer? Who would want to hire me?”
“That’s what I’ve come to discuss with you.”
Cathy would now see what Bennie had to say about her scheme. She launched right in. “What if we expand the menu to include home-style lunch and dinner specials such as meat loaf, fried chicken, roast beef with all the trimmings—that kind of thing?”
Bennie eyed her with a tinge of disappointment. “And while we’re at it, why don’t we serve French wines and imported beer?” He swung a pudgy hand about his dingy establishment. “And why not petit fours and cream puffs?”
“I’m serious, Bennie. Aren’t you getting tired of meager returns and unreliable help?”
“The only way to solve that problem is to sell the place.”
“And who would buy it?”
Bennie shrugged his shoulders, his mouth arching downward. Cathy pressed on. “What if we can find a cook who can provide those home-styled meals and branch out from serving only breakfast food and hamburgers?”
“And who might that be?”
“My grandmother.”
Bennie shot back his chair to accommodate his astonishment. “Emma Benson—cook
here
?”
“She said she’d love to. She’ll be forced to retire from the library at the end of December, anyway, and she’s been worried what she’ll do with her time until the baby arrives. We’ve got it all figured out. We’ll bring the baby to work with us. We can put him in your office off the kitchen. And one other suggestion. I’d like you to hire Odell Wolfe as a dishwasher and janitor.”
Bennie’s jaw fell. His eyes distended. Finally, he stammered, “And… h-h-ow will I p-p-ay these people?”
“You won’t—at least not at first. My grandmother is willing to work for free for a few months. If business turns around, you pay her a commensurate wage with increases as your profits grow. The same for Odell Wolfe. Until then, he’ll work for three meals a day and scraps for his dog.”
“You’ve talked to him?” Amazement filled Bennie’s stare.
“I have. He’s all for it—thrilled, as a matter of fact. Don’t worry that he’ll show up looking like an alley bum. He cleans up nicely. You should have seen him last Thursday at Miss Mabel’s.”
Bennie scraped a hand down his beard. “Well, that all sounds mighty fine, Cathy, but how can we compete with Monica’s Café? She’s got the market cornered on home-cooked meals. This town’s not big enough to support two cafés that serve the same things.”
Bennie was referring to Monica’s Café across the courthouse square. Its draw was based on the claim that it was the only eating
place in town that served “home-cooked meals,” a misnomer in Cathy’s view. Discerning taste buds could tell that the café’s self-touted baked goods, sauces, and gravies were prepared from a box, its “hand-breaded” fish and chicken-fried steak were prefrozen, and its “charcoaled sirloin steak” came with prepackaged grill marks and was cooked in the microwave.
“The only thing ‘home-cooked’ about their meals,” Cathy said, “is that they open their processed foods on the premises. Ours will be made from scratch. We’ll use fresh produce, fresh meats. Believe me, people will know the difference. And second, we’ll change our business hours. Let Monica’s feed them breakfast. We’ll open for lunch and dinner—”
“Hold on just a minute there, sweet face.” Bennie put up his hand like a jaywalker halting traffic. “What about my morning coffee drinkers?”
Cathy sighed, knowing she was about to tread on touchy ground. After the trickle that came in for breakfast, the rest of their customers were men, mainly retired, who lined the counter for half a day to shoot the bull with their cronies and rarely spent more than the price of a cup of coffee and a doughnut. It was a ritual they’d enjoyed for years, and Bennie considered them his friends.
“Bennie, for this to work, we have to close in the mornings in order to give my grandmother time to prepare the food. It will also give you extra hours to work on receipts, to tidy up the place, run errands for the business—all sorts of things that go undone around here because there’s no space in your day to do them.”
“What about the high school seniors? The place won’t be the same to them.”
“True.” Cathy realized she was fooling with tradition. Heading to Bennie’s for hamburgers and fries at lunchtime was a time-honored, long-established custom Kersey High School students looked forward to on becoming seniors that no parent’s argument
against its unsanitary conditions had been able to stem. “But what will you do without their business in the summer?” she countered.
Bennie rubbed his bearded chin, and Cathy could see that her arguments were making headway.
After a contemplative silence, he said, “What do you get out of this, sweet face, besides tips from a minimum-paying job?”
“If things improve, a higher salary and a say in the business, which means I want your guarantee that you’ll listen receptively to all my other suggestions to turn this place around.”
Bennie looked doubtful. “Like what other suggestions?”
Cathy struck while the iron was hot. “The place needs a thorough cleaning. I propose that we close it for one week and give it a good airing and washing from the ceiling down—windows, floors, walls, the kitchen and bathrooms. If Romero’s cousin helps, there will be five of us. Even Mabel Church might lend a hand. Bennie…” She laid a hand on his arm and said gently, “We want this to be a place where people will want to bring their
families
… where couples can come on
dates
.” She left it to him to deduce why currently they did not flock to order prefrozen hamburgers from grimy menus served on tacky tabletops before dirty windows.
“A week will also give us time to contact vendors and vegetable growers and for Grandmother to set up her menus,” Cathy continued. “It will mean a sacrifice of income for those days and may cut into your bottom line, but in the end, I’m confident you’ll see the time as an investment that will pay big dividends. This town
needs
the kind of eating establishment I’m talking about.”
Bennie leaned back in his chair to consider, folding his hands over his food-daubed apron. “I suppose I can afford to close the place for a few days, but…” He looked at her woefully, “I’m to be kicked out of the kitchen when we reopen?”
“You’re to be the
proprietor
!” Cathy said. “You’re to walk around, greet people, make them feel welcome.”
“I don’t have to wear a tie, do I?”
She laughed. “No, but the apron should go. And one other thing…” Cathy paused. The next suggestion would be the trickiest. “Would you consider changing the name to simply Bennie’s?”
She expected an argument, but to her surprise, Bennie said, “I guess I can go with that, too.”
Her heart swelled with the thrill of victory. “You mean you’ll agree to everything?”
He lifted his shoulders. “What else can I do? I don’t have much of a choice, do I? But just so you know, little miss smarty, the deal maker is the part about leaving the baby in my office.”
A
day after Cathy’s proposal, a sign was posted on the front of Bennie’s Burgers: C
LOSED FOR
R
EPAIRS
. W
ILL
R
EOPEN
D
ECEMBER 1
. The labor force set to work. Cars slowed on Main Street to observe the moveable furniture of Kersey’s only family-owned hamburger establishment piled on the sidewalk and a flurry of cleaning activity going on behind the large plate-glass windows. New menus were drawn up and encased in clean plastic folders. Booths, tables, and chairs were scrubbed down to the visible wood. An advertisement publicizing the additions to Bennie’s bill of fare was placed in the local paper alongside the editor’s interview with the owner, who was quoted as saying, “It was time for a change.”
Bennie surprised her with a new sign in the window—N
O
S
MOKING
. “For the sake of the baby,” he explained.
There were naysayers, among them Mabel Church. “Emma Benson, have you lost your senses? You know I’ve never been one to mind too much what people say, but this time they’d be right in thinking that the Bensons have succumbed to the lowest depths possible with Cathy working as a waitress and her grandmother slinging hash.”
“Now, Mabel, that’s not so,” Emma said. “The next level would be begging on the streets.”
“And
who
, pray tell,” Mabel went on, “will want to eat food from an eatery with Odell Wolfe in the kitchen?”
“Those who want to eat my hot-water corn bread.”
When the place reopened, a curious stream of customers were greeted with fresh scents of recent cleaning and table displays of poinsettias in honor of the season. Emma’s prediction to Mabel proved correct. Baskets of her hot, crunchy corn bread—“manna bread”—came standard with every meal and alone drew patrons who had never before been inside Bennie’s. By the end of January, the ledger books showed that the formerly named Bennie’s Burgers had enjoyed the best fiscal month in years.