Mandy
Amanda just left to go to her mother’s funeral in Wisconsin. Her mother was 72 years old when she passed. I’m sure it will be an interesting funeral, especially since they hadn’t spoken in over 15 years. Amanda didn’t get along well with her family. After the divorce, they wanted her and the kids to move back home, but this was the only life her children knew. For them to move from a moderately large city to a small dairy town in the dells of Wisconsin would have been too much of a change for the kids. So she stayed on in Buffalo, and remained estranged from her family.
She came here in the early eighties, when she was in the Air Force. She was stationed in Niagara Falls, and that’s where she met Wayne. He was in the AF Reserve, and she was on the active duty side, in a more or less clerical position. Within six months of meeting him, she was pregnant, and was medically discharged. Mandy was torn about that because on one hand, she wanted to stay on and retire from the military, but on the other hand, she couldn’t bear the thought of an abortion. They were married, and a month later, Gina was born. Two years later, Wayne Jr. was born. She didn’t have Kristen until five years after that: it was after we had our affair, and for all we knew, Kristen is my daughter. No paternity tests were done. Wayne and Mandy just assumed Kristen was theirs.
Wayne was a bit of an asshole. He franchised an overnight mail service at the other end of the plaza, while she waited tables at the bar. The way their schedules worked, he tended the store during the day, and she tended bar at night. That way, they didn’t have to pay for a baby-sitter, except for the odd occasion when they actually went out together on a Saturday night. It was well known that Wayne had a thing for all the girls who dropped off packages for delivery. There were at least four times that I know of that he paid Charlie, the OB-GYN who stopped by the bar, for his services. The services weren’t for Mandy, but for the 19 and 20 year-olds he “left packages with”. Everyone wondered how many parcels were christened before they were picked up to be overnighted somewhere across the country.
I met Mandy in the summer of my junior year at school. I had picked up a part-time job cooking at the bar to help pay rent. It was mostly short-order stuff done on a flat top, a cold well and three fryers, with an occasional steak thrown in. Lots of wings and finger foods, but you had to expect that from a bar in Buffalo. Fridays were hell, with everyone stopping by after work and all the kids coming in from the University to party. It was highly stressful, with lots of food going in and out. I worked part-time, and she worked full-time. Fridays were the only day that we worked together, as I worked the two days she had off. That’s when we saw each other, mostly.
She was a good-looking woman with long, blond hair, and bright, blue eyes. She had a wide, beautiful smile with perfect teeth that she flashed often. Her voice was . . . beautiful. Most people thought they heard Canadian in it, and incorrectly figured she had dual citizenship or something like that. However, I knew it to be the accent gained from being of Norwegian descent, and being a native of the upper Upper Midwest of the country. She was fairly thin, with not much topside. Mandy always used to joke that the kids sucked them dry and that’s why she had such small breasts. I always joked with her that more than a mouthful was a waste.
Occasionally, I would toss French fries at her, dropping them into the gap between her breasts. If she wasn’t on her way to a table with a tray full of food, she’d throw it back at me with a light rejoinder about me throwing food at her. If she was on her way to a table (I wasn’t fussy about how busy she was when I threw them) she definitely said something when she came back. I’d quip back something to the effect, “You keep bitching about how small they are. I’m just doing my part to help fatten them up for you.” We had a playful relationship with sexual overtones, but nothing happened between us for the first year or so that we knew each other.
One Friday night, she was in a particularly sour mood. She wasn’t responsive to any of the remarks that I made, and kept swearing under her breath. The other girls were avoiding her like the plague. It was a pretty busy late August night, and I figured it had something to do with her monthly cycle and left her alone. I had too much work to do, with all the food that I had to cook and trying to get out with time enough to have a beer or three.
Toward the end of the night, after the busboy was sent home, she came back to the dish area with a tray overflowing with plates and glasses. I saw her go by out of the corner of my eye as I scraped down the flat-top. Seconds later, there was a loud crash, and her voice echoed through the kitchen, “God-damn this fucking shit hole . . .” I ran back, expecting the worst. There were broken plates and glasses all over, and she was leaning against the wall, crying. I put my arm around her, and she buried her head in my chest. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . .” was all she kept saying. Pulling my gloves off, I cupped her head in my hand.
After a few minutes letting her pout on my shoulder, I asked, “What’s wrong? You’ve been in a shitty mood all night”
“It’s Wayne. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“OK, then, you go back out and take care of the dining room. I’ll clean this mess up, let’s get out of here, and we’ll go for a couple of beers at Molly’s when we’re done.”
She sobbed, sniffled, and wiped her nose on my apron. “Great,” I said, smiling, “now I gotta get a clean apron.”
“That’s OK. I’ll make it worth your while,” she said, smiling as she went back out to the bar.
We got to Molly’s, had a few beers and shot some darts. I let her beat me a few times, and after she complained about that, I trounced her handily two games in a row. I didn’t bug her about what was going on with Wayne, and she didn’t volunteer anything. We just talked about work like you always say you don’t want to do when you go out, but always wind up doing. By the end of the evening, we shared about a case of beer between the two of us, and had three or four shots of Crown Royal each. After the bar closed, I was walking her out to her car. I lived down the street, and was going to walk home. She asked if she could come over and talk. I had no problem with that, especially since I was really attracted to her, and was quite drunk.. She were pretty hammered, too, and I didn’t like her driving home in that condition.
When we got to my place, she let it all out. She was on her way to work when she realized that she left her book (the stash of money she always kept to make change at the beginning of the night) at home. So she turned around and flew home. When she got into her house, she went to her bedroom to find Wayne and a pretty young coed going at it in her bed. What happened next was not pretty, but suffice to say, it must have been an interesting sight seeing a half-naked 22-year-old running down the street. She threw him out, too, called a friend to babysit, and came to work.
We talked until the sun came up. As it peeked into the window, she got all bent about her kids and insisted on going home. We hugged, and as we pulled away from each other, she grabbed me and kissed me. It was a long, slow, passionate kiss, with our tongues twirling about each other as I grabbed her and pulled her close to me. Her arms and hands wandered around my upper back and head as she pulled me down closer to her, and my hands grabbed her butt while our pelvises ground together. After a few minutes, we pulled apart, and she left. Needless to say, it was a little hard for me to go to sleep that night, pun intended.
The next week, she was in a much better mood. We joked, I threw my fries at her, and everything seemed back to normal. It was a busy night, with a lot of families out shopping for school supplies and the like. This week, where were no mishaps, fortunately.
Towards the end of the night, feeling a little randy, I asked her, “Hey Mandy, do you know what the difference is between an elephant and a blow job?”
“Is this another one of your stupid jokes? No, of course not.”
“I’ll tell you what, we’ll go out tonight for a few beers, and after that, you can give me an elephant,” I said with a wide grin.
“You are such a pig!”
“Yeah, but you love me, don’t you?”
“We’ll see about that.”
We wound up going out that night and tying one on. Mandy insisted on driving me home, and one thing led to another, and she wound up spending the night. It was strange, sleeping with a married woman. I had never thought about marriage, and had only been in a few serious relationships at that time. Somehow, I knew that being with her was wrong, yet, there was something right about it. After a while, I dozed off, tired of the moral dilemma and happy that I was with Mandy. When I woke, she was long gone. She left me a one-word note: “Thanx”. Over the months that we saw each other and slept together clandestinely, I became convinced that we were more meant to be with each other than she and Wayne were. Nevertheless, we were very careful about not letting anyone know about our affair.
It continued for about a year and a half, until I finished school and had to move to Rochester for a job I shouldn’t have taken. It was about a week before I left that Mandy found out she was pregnant with Kristen. While we were always careful to use condoms, there was the rare occasion when one would break. We never knew if it was actually me who was the father, as I said earlier. I have to admit, though, when I moved back to the area, people did comment on the resemblance Kristen bore with me. I don’t believe anyone ever knew of our affair, but I don’t know what would have been talked about while I was out of town. For all I know, Mandy told everyone about us after her divorce. No one ever said anything about it, and I don’t really care. Nowadays, Mandy and I go out occasionally, and can do it publicly. She never re-married, and since I am now divorced, too, I don’t have the conscience-rending dilemma of dating a married woman on the sly.
I’ll miss her while she’s gone, not that I’d admit it to her. I’d have gone with Mandy and the kids, too, but her brother and sister really don’t like me. Her brother really, really doesn’t like me. I could never figure out why, because I was in Rochester when the divorce happened. I hadn’t seen Mandy in over a year at that time, and I didn’t meet Steve until after I moved back to Buffalo. Maybe she said something to him about me that he didn’t like; I just don’t know. Regardless; she’s there, and I’m here, I won’t see her for a week, and I just have to deal with it.
It’s funny, though. Every time I see Wayne, the thought always pops into my head, “So, how does my dick taste?” I doubt he knows about Mandy and me, and I’m sure he doesn’t care. He’s still an asshole, and still plugging co-eds, though not as many as he did in his heyday. And he is absolutely forbidden to be in the state of Wisconsin.
