This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between the characters described in this story and a real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental. All of the characters described as having sex in the story are over the age of eighteen. There is no graphic erotic content in the story, so if that's your thing, you'll be disappointed. As always, I welcome constructive comments and criticisms. Enjoy.
CASSIE'S COURTSHIP
It was late. I was closing the shop for the day when the car pulled into my lot. It was an ancient Toyota Corolla, battered, paint fading and a body beginning to rust. Steam was coming out from under the hood, indicating either a burst hose or a hole in the radiator. As it pulled closer, I could see there was a woman driving and what appeared to be three car seats in the back seat, each of which contained a child.
The woman shut the car off and got out. "Ma'am," I said, "I'm closed. I can look at your car tomorrow, but I've sent all of my mechanics home and I can't do anything about your problem this evening. If you'll leave the car here, I can take a look at it tomorrow. Might be nothing more than a hose, but it could be the radiator. Either way, I'm not going to be able to fix it tonight. Do you have someone you can call to come pick you and the kids up?"
The woman looked at me quizzically. "Kevin? Kevin Henderson? Is that you?"
"That's me. Do I know you?"
"It's Cassie Wilson. We went to high school together."
Cassie Wilson. The girl who was every high school boy's fantasy. The cheerleaders' captain, girlfriend of the starting quarterback. The queen bee. The girl who had made my life a living hell for the last year and a half of high school for the sin of asking her girlfriend Anne Marie Grant to the Christmas dance. The girl who had conspired with her little coterie of bitches to plot a phony acceptance by said girlfriend, followed by the embarrassment of my arriving at Anne Marie's parents' home in a suit I'd had to buy, corsage in hand, to be that the girlfriend had gone to the dance with her steady beau. It had taken about thirty seconds the following Monday for the story of my being dissed to make the rounds of the entire school. I was sufficiently chastened by the experience that I never tried to date again until after I graduated and went into the Army.
I'd heard that Cassie was back in town. While I'd gone off to the Army, unable to afford college, she'd gone off to State U, repeating her high school experience as Queen Bee in a much larger setting. She'd married the starting quarterback there. He'd been not quite good enough to make the pros and had gone to work for his father's investment advisory firm. They'd had three children. According to the SEC investigation several years later, he and his father had followed in the footsteps of Bernie Madoff, running a Ponzi scheme, albeit on a much smaller scale. He'd also cut a wide swath through the women at the firm. When the dust had settled, the father and the son were off to jail for an extended stay, the firm was bankrupt, and the Feds had seized virtually every asset the father or the son had, leaving both wives penniless in their respective divorces. According to my youngest sister Amanda, who kept up with the happenings around town far better than either her older sister or I, Cassie was living with her mother in a trailer. The ex-husband had invested Cassie's parents' retirement for them. They'd lost everything. Her dad had died shortly after the losses were realized.
"I remember you, Cassie. I hear things aren't going so well for you. Judging from the condition of this car, things are going very badly indeed."
And judging from the state of the clothes she was wearing and the lines on her face, plus the fact that she'd lost at least fifteen pounds from her high school weight, I could see further evidence that Cassie Wilson had fallen a long, long way down from atop the pillar where she'd once stood.
She looked at me with tears in her eyes. "Do you still hate me for what the girls and I did to you in high school?"
"Hate you? No. That would mean giving a damn. I just don't think of you at all. You're a ghost, a phantom, a dim and distant memory from the past that isn't worth resurrecting. Hating you would require effort I don't care to waste."
"Can you fix my car?"
"Can you pay me to fix your car? From what I hear, you and your mother are living in a trailer somewhere on her social security and a welfare check. That isn't going to do much to fund auto repairs."
"What are we talking about? How much?"
"Well, given that the car won't pass inspection with the tires on it, the radiator appears shot, you have at least one headlamp out and from the sounds the car was making when you stopped it, your brakes are also shot, I'm guessing a thousand to fifteen hundred for a car that isn't worth that much if all of that was fixed. Plus, you shouldn't be driving the thing with kids in it. It's unsafe at any speed except parked."
Now she began to cry in earnest. "What am I going to do? I can't get a job. No one around here will hire me because so many people lost money with my ex-husband and former father-in-law. Mom and I barely get by. We skip meals to feed the kids. If it weren't for school breakfasts and lunches, they'd go hungry, too. But without this car, we have no way to get to the store or get to mom's doctors. Or to a job, if anyone will finally hire me."
"Sounds like you have a problem. Why should I care?"
"Can you at least give me and the children a ride back to mom's trailer? It's too far for them to walk and I only have two bucks in my wallet."
I looked in the back seat. There were three sets of eyes looking back at me. Two of the children were little boys, perhaps six and four. The third was a little girl, maybe two.
My mother has always said I was a soft touch. And I guess I am. When I went into the army, I trained as a mechanic, taking every course I could, because I hoped someday to go to college, become a mechanical engineer and design cars. I thought the more I knew about how engines worked and transmissions worked, the more insight I'd have in trying to improve them.
What I hadn't counted on was my father's stroke. He'd owned the shop for almost as long as I'd been alive. Starting with a single bay in an old gas station out on the edge of town, he'd expanded several times, ultimately ending up with five bays and a team of mechanics working for him. All was going well until a lifetime of cigarettes and cheap booze in the evenings had caught up with him. Instead of re-enlisting, I'd been summoned home to take over the shop when the stroke paralyzed him. The second one, six months later, killed him.
That left me responsible for my mother and my sisters, both of whom desperately wanted to attend college. Somehow, I'd scraped the money together to get both of them through community college and the local state university. Bev, the older sister, had graduated with a nursing degree and was now working at a local hospital. Amanda, the younger sister, had become an elementary school teacher. Both were married, Bev to a doctor she'd met at the hospital, Amanda to a fellow teacher. Bev had one child, a boy named after my father.
My mother had inherited the shop. I managed it, as well as performing as a mechanic. I had two administrative staff: a bookkeeper who did all of our billing and accounting, and a service representative who was our intake person for all of the vehicles we were engaged to repair. Since dad's death, I'd focused on growing the business, landing several contracts to service local municipalities' vehicles, the school district's bus fleet, the local trucking company's fleet, several wholesalers' fleets and the heavy equipment for two local construction companies, in addition to the usual retail customers.
Sally, my bookkeeper, was about to depart on maternity leave. She was married to one of the more successful young lawyers in town and she had given me a heads up that she probably wasn't coming back. I'd miss her. She'd been the only woman in the shop and had always been cheery and upbeat. The customers loved her, too.
"I can give you a ride home. Let's get the car seats into my truck and you can give me directions. I'll give you my card and you can call me around noon for an estimate of what your car is going to need to be roadworthy again."
"Thank you. I don't know how to repay you."
"Just pay the bill when I fix the car."
We got everyone loaded into my truck and I began driving toward the trailer park. "So, Cassie, what did you study in college besides cheerleading and football players?"
I could see her glowering at me out of the corner of my eye. "I'll have you know that I graduated cum laude with a degree in accounting. If I hadn't married Bobby, I'd have gone to work for one of the big four or for somebody like McKinsey."
Now that was interesting. An accounting degree and no job. And no job prospects. A possible solution to my about to be without my bookkeeper problem?
"What kind of job are you trying to land?"
"Anything that would let me use my degree. I'd take an entry level job with a firm. I'd even take a bookkeeping job, just to get some experience and a reference."
Hmmmm. This might work. The question was, how would my customers react to having Cassie Wilson keeping my books and doing my billing? And how would I handle the social pressure, let alone the family blowback. My mother, Bev and Amanda all had long memories. My sisters had pledged revenge against Cassie and her friends if the opportunity ever arose. They would not be pleased and as the owner of the company, Mom had the ultimate decision making authority about hiring and firing, although she generally deferred to me.
I'd have to approach this carefully if I wanted to take a chance on Cassie. But the prospect of having her as my underling, vulnerable to my abuse after the years of high school torture, was juicy enough for me to at least contemplate it. The role reversal would be sweet, even if only temporary and especially if she turned out to be unable to do the job, allowing me to fire her.
We arrived at her mother's trailer. It wasn't the worst piece of crap mobile home in the trailer park, but it was very close to the front of the line. How did they cram five people in there? And what did these kids do for fun. The ground around the trailers was bare dirt and there wasn't a single bit of recreational space or equipment in sight. I was beginning to feel sorry for the kids, if not for Cassie and her mother. They hadn't been abusive or mocking. They were just small, poor and had to look forward to lives that would place them permanently behind the eight ball.
I offered to help Cassie carry the car seats into the trailer. From the looks of the trailer park denizens I'd noticed driving in, they were not something you'd want to leave outside. They'd be gone and pawned in a heartbeat.
There was almost no place to put them in the trailer. The one room that passed for a living room was covered with kids' toys. There was a ratty sofa and a battered arm chair, the latter occupied by Cassie's mother, whom I barely recognized.
"Can you get a ride to the shop tomorrow to pick up your car once we repair it?"
"Maybe. I'll try, but I can't be sure. The neighbors aren't too friendly or helpful. They think we look down on them because we don't get drunk or do drugs and because I haven't been willing to date any of the guys."
"Let me know when I call with the recommended repairs. If you can't, I'll have one of the guys run over and pick you up. It's not that far."
"Thank you, Kevin. And Kevin, thank you for not telling me to get lost. I wouldn't have been surprised if you had and you'd have been justified. I've learned a lot the last few years about what a bitch I was back in high school. I wish I could do it over again and do it differently this time. I really am sorry for what we did to you back then."
"Water under the bridge, Cassie. Water under the bridge. Now, have a nice evening. Nice to see you again, Mrs. Wilson. I'll call you once we know what the car needs."
I got into my truck and drove away, shuddering a bit at what a dump these people were living in. We'd never been rich, but we'd been solidly lower middle class growing up. I had never had to deal with the kind of poverty and apparent shiftlessness I saw driving in and out of that trailer park that evening.
When I got home, I started dinner, then called my mother. "Hi Mom. You're not going to believe who pulled into the shop looking for help this evening."
"Who, Kevin?"
"Cassie Wilson. And her three kids."
