“Some. Are you thinking about the roof?”
“Nobody should go up on the roof,” I said immediately. “Nobody!”
They examined the problem from the inside. I propped open the front and back doors, threw open the coolers, and removed the most offensive items from them. On my way back from the dumpster, I stopped to glance at where I’d hung up the dumb dixie cup hat from my uniform. I had been away from here long enough that the sight made me feel nostalgic.
This wasn’t the time to romanticize the past, not when the present smelled so nasty. I went and wiped off one of the tables and sat down to make a list. If Max was serious about getting this business going, he had to be quick. In a few short weeks, the Woodsmen team would start summer practices at their nearby facility. The food we served to them and their fans during that brief period carried us for the rest of the year.
But there was so much to do before he could reopen and I didn’t think he had any idea of what he was getting himself into. Maybe seeing the multitude of words on my screen would somehow convince him that he was biting off more than he could possibly chew. He had always complained that he had a sensitive jaw, sohe couldn’t open up his mouth very far to eat. I believed that he was similarly constricted in his work ethic.
If he did manage to fix the building, turn on the utilities, and convince our supplier to sell to him, then he would need employees. He would also confront the biggest issue that I could see, one that his fiancée’s money couldn’t solve: Max would be the one running the kitchen and he didn’t know how to do it. No, there was no way that he would be able to handle this.
I heard them talking in the back, but since they didn’t yell like my dad always had, I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then they joined me in the dining room and Shane looked grim.
“The roof is sagging because the wall isn’t supporting it,” he stated. He continued with a litany of other physical issues with the building and I typed those into my phone, too, then turned the screen to show Max.
“How are you going to deal with all this?” I asked him.
Before, when confronted with any obstacle regarding his business concepts, he’d had only one response. For example, when he hadn’t been able to immediately find a large enough building to rent for his moon landing experience, featuring genuine outer space rocks and an anti-gravity environment? He’d stopped looking and given up on the idea. When I had suggested that he would never be able to get enough qualified coaches to introduce sepak takraw to northern Michigan, he had written off all ball-based sports. Basically, if he encountered any hardship at all? He quit.
“Do you have the items in order?” he asked as he glanced at my list.
“Like, in order of what’s the most important thing to do?” I wondered. “It’s hard to say which one I’d start with.”
“No,sequentially,” he corrected me. “That means—”
I remembered his fiancée defining words for me and I liked it even less coming from him. “I know what it means,” I said. “The problems are presented in no particular order. Also, there are a lot more that I didn’t even write down, such as the fact that the parking lot is still a mess from the ice and plows last winter, so it’s going to need new gravel. Dad lied for at least a year about cleaning the grease trap, too. That has to be done. Will we need to be reinspected by the health department before opening?” I paused. “That’s not all, Max. Should I keep going?”
“Walk around and write down everything you notice,” he ordered.
“I think that would come better in the form of a polite request,” Shane told him. “She’s giving up part of her day off to come help you and you should be gracious.”
My brother did show a little grace, by blushing. “Thank you, Molly.”
“I’ll be really glad if you do this,” I surprised myself by saying. It must have surprised him, too, because he stared at me.
“Why?”
“Because you were right when you said that it’s our legacy. I think it’s pretty amazing that our family was able to hold onto this place and not even Dad could mess it up.”
“Mom didn’t do great, either,” he said.
“And neither did you,” I pointed out. “Neither did I. I should have said, ‘We have to clean the grease trap because if we get inspected, we’ll fail. I should have seen what was happening with Mom’s bookkeeping a lot sooner.” I looked at the familiar cinderblock walls and noticed that the menu needed to be repainted, too. “There’s a lot of misery attached to this place but I never thought it had to be that way. I always imagined how fun it could have been to work with the brother I loved so much and my funny sister. If we’d had a father who didn’t yell and a mom who stood up for us, it would have been great. You could do that with your family, Max. You don’t have to be like Dad and you don’t have to be the same guy you were before, either.”
I’d said enough to make him mad, and that happened. “Are you fucking finished?” he asked me.
“Time to go,” Shane said. He glanced at my brother. “I’d say good luck but I don’t think you deserve it. Good luck to your fiancée instead, since she’s taking you on and you’re an ungrateful jackoff.”
Max glared but he didn’t respond as we walked out into the parking lot, which probably needed to be re-graded. Before I started the truck’s engine, I added that to my list of problems and then I did send it along to my brother. “I bet he’ll leave right behind us,” I mentioned as I turned onto the road. I glanced inthe mirror but there was no movement yet from Walter’s. “Any minute, he’ll book out of there.”
“I don’t know. He seemed pretty serious.”
“There’s just no way,” I said. I talked through some of the items on my list, not only the physical stuff they’d reviewed but also things like staffing and the outdated equipment. And then there was Max’s personal work history, which was—
“He seems to want to try,” Shane broke in as I was recounting the failure of my brother’s bathing suit swap plan. No one had wanted a used, stretched-out suit and anyway, the business would have been severely limited by seasonality in an area where our beaches were inhospitable for two-thirds of the year.
“I’ve seen guys make major changes in their lives,” he continued. “I was scouting one.” He reminded me about the community college player he had seen in Indianapolis, a guy he’d had his eye on not only due to his football skills but also because of his persistence and tenacity. “He’s a few years older than everyone else because he missed so many days in high school that he couldn’t graduate, and he spent all that time messing around. But not anymore. He’s really trying and he may get there.”
I thought of the things that could go wrong, stuff that Shane himself had told me about. An injury, for one. That guy also could have fallen back into the bad influences that had distracted him before. Maybe he had a hidden, degenerative condition that was slowly robbing him of his sight…
