The Bikini Car Wash Read Online Free

home with Mom. Now that it was too late, Andi really wanted to be able to feed the family the way they’d always been fed. She wanted to cook.
    How hard could it be? she’d asked herself. She’d explored her mother’s recipe box and found it to be full of unhelpful secrets, like “dash of complement spices” and “cook to cloudy.” She was determined to fix at least a few of the dishes that were her mother’s specialties. And this was one of them.
    “Dinner!” she called out. She got no immediate response. With a long-suffering sigh she went down the basement stairs.
    When they were still kids, her mother had sectioned out the laundry area from a place she called the rumpus room. With its worn furniture, television and Ping-Pong table, it was still the most likely spot to find members of her family any time of the day or night.
    Her sister was sitting on the couch cross-legged, elbows on knees with her face in her hands. An open photo album lay on her lap, but her eyes were glued to the TV.
    “Jelly, turn that off and go find Pop. Tell him it’s time for dinner.”
    Jelly’s brow wrinkled and she looked at Andi with confusion. “We’ve still got perps,” she answered. “We don’t eat until after all the perps are caught.”
    The perps, or perpetrators, were the bad guys on Jelly’s favorite cop show, Law & Order . Without the ability to tell time, Jelly relied on cable programming to let her know when to eat, sleep and wake. Preemptions and changes in the schedule could cause great upheaval. As could apparently, a casserole being done too early.
    “You’ve seen that one a hundred times,” Andi told her sister. “Remember, that’s the one where the ex-wife tried to frame the new wife to protect her son.”
    “I know,” Jelly said. “But they haven’t caught him yet.”
    “Believe me,” Andi told her. “It always turns out the same way.”
    Jelly seemed skeptical.
    “Go out in the garage and get Pop,” Andi insisted. “I’ve fixed a great meal and I don’t want it to get cold.”
    Andi headed back up the stairs. She’d set the table exactly as her mother had taught her. The same plates, the sameflatware, the same meal, it was almost the same. But almost, of course, is never quite good enough.
    It was nearly ten minutes before the three of them were finally seated around the table, the way families were supposed to be. The way they would have been if her mother was still there.
    Her father, at age sixty-six, was still good-looking. He was of average height and described himself as “wiry.” His hair, once dark brown, was now mostly gray, and it started a bit further back on his forehead these days. He was quick with a laugh or a joke, unfailingly generous to his friends and neighbors, and completely at ease with Jelly and those he called her “like-minded friends.” Walt Wolkowicz had married late in life. He and Ella, Andi and Jelly’s mother, had thought it might be too late for children. But they had been blessed with twins. If the reality of those daughters had ever been a source of grief to them, they never said. Her parents had had the perfect marriage. They were true soul mates, two halves of one fused history. Totally in love every day of their lives.
    Andi had wondered, more than once, if her inability to find any man she could really settle for was because her parents had set the relationship bar way too high.
    “You don’t have to fix these meals, Andi,” her father told her. “Jelly and I have gotten used to eating light in the evening.”
    “I wanted to do it,” Andi assured him. “You two need a healthy home-cooked meal.”
    “The food at the center is very healthy,” Pop assured her.
    Her father, long since retired from his small car wash business, was a volunteer taking lunchtime meals to elderly persons stuck at home. Pop was the driver and Jelly deliveredto the front door. It was a good job for both. The church charity that ran the service provided them with a