Vache d'or / Cash Cow

This is the first part of a serial short story. I have broken it up at random moments. Enjoy. And be sure to write any comments you have.

Charlene Carlson divorced her husband after twenty-five years and two adult sons, Jason and Benjamin. Then her ex died. Did that make CeeCee a widow? Frank didn’t care whether she was a widow or divorced. A virgin, even. That would have been a bonus, but then she wouldn’t have had the insurance money because her ex hadn’t changed change his beneficiary before he died. His new wife screamed at the insurance company, at the sheriff, at God. It didn’t do her any good. The law was the law.

Dawn, the ex’s trophy wife, was younger and cuter than CeeCee, with blonde hair and perky breasts. She could touch the tip of her nose with her tongue. Frank would have liked a go at that tongue, but the insurance policy was signed and sealed and the insurance company already delivered. Anyway, he met CeeCee first. He liked her red hair, pouty mouth, and deep cleavage. Too fair to tan, she didn’t have turkey skin yet, and he’d deal with that when it happened. If he were still around.

CeeCee’s older son Jason got a chunk of the insurance too, or he wouldn’t have been able to give Frank an overpaid job in his new deli. The store should have been a Cash Cow, but Jason had a couple of nose problems. First, he had no sense of smell. He couldn’t tell what meat was going off, what was totally gone. He couldn’t smell mice in the back room, and he didn’t know the evergreen air freshener he stuck in the toilet overpowered the whole fuckin’ deli. Worse, Jason snorted coke. He paid for it with cash he stole from the till, if he could steal from himself, so there was never a profit, and vendors dunned him for the arrears, and the sales tax guy was on his tail, and the health inspector, the sales tax guy’s brother-in-law, was screaming for a pay off or he’d shut the deli down by finding mouse turds in corners of the little kitchen in the back. And he could.

So Frank became Jason’s Do-Bee. Or rather Jason’s Don’t-Bee. He hired himself as General Manager, Overseer, CEO, Foreman: “Jason, you need you in the kitchen,” Frank told Charlene’s son. “No one can make those ribs the way you do.” Frank kissed the ends of his fingers and threw the kiss into the air. “Oh, my God.” Jason preened, and coke got him through a hundred pounds of ribs each day.

Or “Jason, a salesman’s in the back. Can you take care of these orders? You always know what we need, and we sell everything you buy. I have customers out here, now. Old Mrs. Hermann likes the cut of my brisket.” Frank winked. “She keeps coming back.” He flirted with all the hennaed senior widows buying just enough thin-sliced pastrami for their lunches. Funny how blue rinses had gone out of style.

Frank hired a cute young gal with a sensitive nose and gave her the mission of making sure the deli smelled better than clean when she finished her scrubbing before the deli opened every morning. He added a rotating password to the cash register and reconfigured the combination on the safe every couple of days so Jason couldn’t pilfer. “Somehow we kept ending up short. I think someone figured out our system so I changed it,” he told Jason.

Frank made bank deposits daily, moved the deli out of the red, started paying debts, and finally showed a profit. Jason still snorted coke, but he paid for it from the muscular dystrophy jar on the counter and from Frank didn’t know where else. Or want to know.

(to be continued)