Joe College: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

risk taker who’d chucked his job as assistant manager of a Path-mark and gone deep into debt to buy the lunch truck and route from a guy who was calling it quits after thirty years in the business. You could see how excited he was by the uncharacteristic boldness of his decision, how proud he was to finally be his own boss, to own a truck with his name on it. He spent entire weekend afternoons washing and polishing it in our driveway, making that black-and-silver lunch wagon shine. His high spirits manifested themselves in the very name of the truck, which had previously gone by the more prosaic moniker of Eddie’s Breakmobile. If people were going to call you the Roach Coach anyway, he’d reasoned, why not beat them to the punch?
    It wasn’t hard to see what had defeated him. Running a lunch truck is grueling, thankless work, marked by long hours, low profit margins, and constant time pressures. If a company’s coffee break is at 10:15, you’d better be out in the parking lot at 10:14, open for business. Nobody wants to hear about the traffic jam or the flat tire that held you up, though they’re more than happy to give you an earful about the sludgy coffee or how you supposedly shorted them on the ham in yesterday’s sandwich. It starts to grind you down after a while.
    By late June I knew the ropes well enough for my father to start
taking Fridays off, leaving my parents free to spend long weekends relaxing at their campground near the Delaware River. (They loved it there, though Camp Leisure-Tyme always struck me as a grim parody of the suburban life they were supposedly getting away from, trailers lined up one after the other like dominoes, all these middle-aged couples watching portable TVs inside their little screen houses.)
    My first day in charge, hustling from one stop to the next, singlehandedly taking care of the customers we usually split between us, I carried in my mind a comforting image of my father crashed out on his hammock in the shade of a tall tree, empty beer cans littering the grass below. The following Monday, though, he confessed that he’d been a nervous wreck the whole day, unable to do anything but deal out one hand of solitaire after another, mechanically flipping the cards as he tormented himself with elaborate disaster scenarios involving me and his precious truck.
    Cindy asked me out on a Friday morning in early August, the third day of what turned out to be the worst heat wave of the summer. It was only ten o’clock, but already the thermometer was well into the nineties. I felt wilted and cranky, having awakened at four in the morning in a puddle of my own sweat. She worked in an air-conditioned office, and I could almost feel the coolness radiating off her skin.
    “Poor guy,” she said. “Looks like you could use a cold one.”
    “A cold two or three sounds more like it.”
    “Why don’t you come to the Stock Exchange tonight? A bunch of us hang out there after work on Fridays.”
    “I just might take you up on that.”
    “Great.” She smiled as though she had a question for me, but then decided to keep it to herself. “I’ll keep an eye out for you. Come anytime after six.”
    I drove through the day in a miserable heat daze, stopping every now and then to soak my head in the spray from someone’s lawn sprinkler. When it was finally over, I took a shower and fell asleep on the living room couch for a couple of hours. It was close to eight
by the time I finally made it to the restaurant, and Cindy was alone at the bar.
    “I thought you stood me up,” she said, not even bothering with hello.
    “Where’s everyone else?” I asked. “Wasn’t there supposed to be a bunch of you?”
    “They left about an hour ago. Jill’s brother invited us to a party down the shore.”
    “You could have gone. It wasn’t like we had a date or anything.”
    She nodded slowly, trying to look thoughtful instead of hurt.
    “I see them all the time. I thought it might be nice to be