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I followed Cheryl calmly from the dining room, into the great room, up the stairs, and into her bedroom, the door of which she slammed behind her. I knocked on it gently.
“Off wiv yer,” she moaned.
“No,” I replied, “I’m coming in.”
She was sitting on her bed, her head buried in her hands, sobbing. I sat next to her and put my arm around her. This was a new Cheryl for me. She was always the strong one, the one who comforted me, the rock on which the family relied on. She was the rock in my life, for so long, I didn’t know she could break down like this.
“You really were in love with him, weren’t you?”
“Aye,” she said, “Oi didn’t want ter be attached ter a man, never I did. But ‘e were so kind. I went further than I wanted, I did.”
“Kelly told me once,” I said, “You can’t fail if you don’t try, but you can’t win if you don’t try, either. When Suzie brought her father to that meeting, I didn’t want to ever fall in love with someone ever again. If I didn’t love anyone, they couldn’t betray me. Except Rachel made me fall in love with her. I know what its like to lose the person you love, Cheryl.”
“This is the second one, i’n it?” she sobbed, “Oi cracked on through the first, nearly killed me. Oi don’t know if Oi can do it again, lovey.”
“Who the heck was the first?”
“Yer,” she glared at me, “It were bloody yer, yer nitwit!”
“You never lost me,” I said defensively, “I am here for you, I love you, always.”
“Oi knew yer luv me,” she said, “Yer luv Kelly more, Oi couldn’t ‘ave done for yer wot she did. Oi knew Oi couldn’t. Oi luvd yer, so ter save yor life, Oi ‘ad ter let yer go.”
“My god, Cheryl,” I said to her, “If you had just told me-”
“Bollocks,” she roared, “Yer was roit too messed up ter listen ter anyone, roit, yer was. I ‘ad ter beat the chuffin’ stuffin’ out o’ yer just ter cop yer ter go on a trip wiv ‘er, and yer know it. Yer almost killed ‘er that trip, remember, luv? She were the bloomin’ only one who ‘ad a chance o’ getting through ter yer, and she did. It were worth it, it were, it were, it-”
She was trying to convince herself, and I shut her up by kissing her very passionately on the lips. She threw her arms around me and held me and kissed back. It was a kiss from our distant past. A bit like the first one, on this bed, one December, nearly 32 years ago. We were different people then, it was a lifetime ago.
She was a lot younger then, and a lot hotter to trot, but she was no more beautiful. Her beauty radiated from the inside, as it came from the goodness of her soul.
“You have me, Cheryl,” I said in her ear, “You’ve always had me, you’ll always have me, I love you, have always loved you; you have always been one of the great loves of my life. We will get through this together.”
“Yor dad meant the chuffin’ world ter me, Johnny,” she whispered back, “I don’t know if I can make it.”
“We all have each other,” I said, “We are a family, and we will make it together, you taught me that yourself. Now lets go back to dinner; this is Thanksgiving and we should all be together.”
We walked hand in hand back to the dining room. I talked to Jason and Samantha about how she was, they all agreed to make sure there was always someone with her while I was gone on my trip.
We spent that night on the farm, and Kelly told me to spend it with Cheryl. It was a cold night, and we were both wearing wool flannel pajamas. It wasn’t sexy, it wasn’t meant to be. I just held her to me as we slept. It was the truth, I did love her. It was really nice sleeping next to her for the first time in many years.
Friday morning was back to farm work, as we all were working overtime to get enough product ready for the store on Saturday, to get the store back up and running. We hadn’t quite been anticipating quite as big a run on our store that Thanksgiving, so we weren’t quite prepared for the shear amount of stuff we had to take to the store. We had enough to fill both Sprinters and a Metris cargo van, so Saturday morning we got up before dawn, loaded them to full, and set out to Fargo.
As soon as we got the store stocked and loaded, I told Nick he was going to be running the store for the day, and I went home, and Kelly and I called Josh into the living room; Rachel came with him and insisted on sitting next to him. I think they were worried it was about them; but that was not what this was about.
“Josh,” I said, “Your mom and me are going to be taking a trip. We will be back before Christmas, but we don’t know more than that at the moment. I need you to run the Fargo end of the business while we’re gone.”
“I’ve got exams, and classes,” Josh said.
“Well,” I said, “You can take your exams, and go to your classes. They are in town, after all. You can take your mom’s car to class, and man the store in your off hours.”
“Its a lot of work,” Josh said, “I need-”
“I need your help,” I said, “You don’t have to ride herd over everything perfectly. For now, John is going to do the supply runs while I’m gone. Nick knows how to run the store, you just have to manage him to make sure he is doing a good job, and to make sure nobody is stealing.”
“I haven’t completed college yet,” Josh replied, “I don’t know enough about managing a business to-”
“I have never even gone to college,” I said, “And I think I manage the business just fine. You’re a damned bright kid, Josh. You have both of our intelligence, and your mothers cleverness and dispassion. You have no idea how proud of you your mother would be if she was here, son. I want you to learn our business, more than learn what they teach you in college about how to run other businesses.”
“I think I have more to learn,” Josh said.
“You always have more to learn,” I agreed with him, “If you want to finish college part time, I think that’s great. But I need you to manage our store, Josh.”
“I can help,” Rachel chimed in.
“You do have school,” Kelly piped in.
“Its a waste of time,” Rachel said, “I already have studied everything they were supposed to teach us this year. All the kids in my school are so damned stupid. I feel like I’m wasting my time. I hate it.”
“Aren’t most of your classes in the afternoons and evenings, Josh?” I said.
“Yes, most of them.”
“Well then it’s easy,” I said, “Rachel goes to school, you run the store, pick Rachel up from school, take her to the store, and then go to your college classes.”
“I don’t want her to slack on her school work,” Kelly said.
“For god sakes, Kelly,” I said, “They are our children. If they can’t successfully work 12 hours a day, I’ll eat my shorts. If they want to work this business together, they can work this business together.”
“I feel like I’m being dropped into the pool to sink or swim,” Josh said,
“You are,” I said, “Except you are a really good swimmer, and John is a good lifeguard. I want you to walk in knowing nothing. I want you to see things with a totally fresh eye, Josh. I want to come back and have you argue with me about how I’m going about it all wrong. Then we can sit and discuss which one of us is right or wrong, and change things to make them better. I trust you to do a good job, and once we reconcile the differences, I trust you to do a fantastic job.”
“Any rules I need to know?”
“The customer is always right,” I said, “To their face. No matter what. And frankly, in the back room, they are still always right. The customer is why the business exists, and that is the first and biggest mistake business owners make. If you start hating the customer, its time to close shop.”
“What if they are wrong?”
“Then apologize to them for your inadequacy, honestly,” I replied, “Tell them you are really sorry that you can’t do what they want. If you start telling them off, the only thing other customers hear is you yelling at a customer. They assume you are the one who is wrong.”
“What if we are going to lose money on the sale?”
“We lose money on about 15% of the things we sell, Josh.”
“Why?”
“Imagine you have a pound of meat, and it costs us $1.50 a pound to raise, butcher, and process it into that meat, okay? Now, imagine it has been sitting in the butcher counter for two days priced at $2.75 a pound. How much money do I lose if I sell it for $1 a pound?”
“Fifty cents, obviously.”
“How much money do I lose if I throw it in the trash?”
“Gotcha.”
Like I said, he was a bright kid.
Kelly and I started packing for the trip. We were going to take the Fintail. I wanted to go to a lot of places we couldn’t go by train, especially Hornell, and possibly Corning. You remember the 1968 Mercedes-Benz 200D Fintail, right? The one that couldn’t get out of its own way on the road? Well I restored it completely, and also modified it extensively.
During the years before we started the store, I had very little to do with my free time, so I used the tools in the barn to work on my mother’s old car. I had taken out the old OM621 four cylinder diesel, which was entirely inadequate for the road, and the old four speed manual was way too limited in its ratio range. I took the engine out of a wrecked 1984 300D, a OM617 3-liter 5-cylinder turbo diesel unit, and installed that in the engine bay, and backed it up to a 5-speed manual transmission from a later European 240D.
The engine made 123bhp and 184 ft-lb of torque, an increase of 69 hp and 97 ft-lb. Or, basically more than double. Instead of sometimes being unable to hit 60mph at all, it could do it in a bit over 10 seconds, and instead of going 70ish flat-out, I actually got it up to 103 on the highway one night. It wasn’t fast, by any means, but it was capable of maintaining decent speed on the highway.
I had the seats completely re-sprung, and replaced the totally disintegrated horsehair seat pads with new foam ones. I welded in new metal to replace all the rusted panels, rebuilt the entire suspension and steering components with OEM parts from Mercedes Classic, and upgraded the wheels from 13” to 15”, which improved the handling immensely. Most importantly I had installed a radio, a Becker Europa, with an aux-in for Kelly’s iPhone’s music list. The car drove even better than new, and was in practically new condition.
It drove quickly, handled competently, and went down the road with the aplomb, stability, and solidity one expects of a Mercedes-Benz. It would be an enjoyable and fun cruiser for our trip, and it returned about 25 mpg in highway use, so it would be fairly economical, too.
I had left the farm-side of the operations in Jason and Samantha’s hands. Cheryl had stepped back from running that end of things a long time ago, when I started actively managing the businesses, and Jason and Samantha were the ones I had normally delegated day-to-day operations of everything to anyway. It might seem strange that I mention them as a couple always, but thats what they are.
In the nearly 32 years I had known them, they had been so damned close, it was almost crazy. I mean when I first came here, 10- year old Jason and 8-year-old Samantha would finish off each other’s sentences. They would communicate by looking at each other. They seemed to intuitively know what the other was thinking. The whole Mahoney family was really close, but they stood out as being very close, even in that circumstance.
When they started being lovers about 10 years later, it wasn’t really a shocking thing to have happened, even though it took Cheryl a while to figure it out. When Samantha turned up pregnant with Jared, it was ... well, I wasn’t particularly surprised. That they loved each other the way they did was obvious, and it was the kind of bond that would have destroyed both of them if we had tried to break it.
They were the very model of a perfect fairytale married couple. They never seemed to fight much, mostly because their minds seem to run on the same track side-by-side, so they had nothing to really ... disagree over. They didn’t seem to have hard patches, and their kids were amazing. Jared, Violet, Kevin, and Serena had all been home schooled, were still home schooled, and Jared was already working on the farm, in charge of the machinery.
Jared’s girlfriend of several years, who worked at the feed-store, was almost part of the family by now. Linda Kriegman was her name, and she was fine with the way the family was. Violet was not much of a student, but she was already helping out on the farm whenever we let her. Actually, that was the only problem in the whole thing; Lenny hated Violet, and vice versa. I wasn’t entirely clear on why.
Kevin and Mary got along ... a little too well for my taste, actually, but they were still little kids. Serena was still basically a baby, although everyone was beginning to suspect Samantha might be pregnant again. She was still a hot red-head, although very much in the North Dakota plaids-and-jeans farmers mold. Jason was a bearded and baseball cap stereotype in the same mold, actually. They looked like an amazing couple.
We set out from Fargo early Monday morning. We were driving in that comfortable silence happy married couples can manage in situations like this. Rachel had been a fan of a doo-wop group of Jewish boys who, for some reason, had a thing for African folk music. They had a version of Solomon Linda’s Mbube (Lion) called “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, with English lyrics, that hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1961.
She had a LP from the group, containing that song, and a number of folk songs, mostly African or Christian, oddly enough. Among the songs on the album was one called “Jamaica Farewell”. Kelly had developed a liking for the group from listening to the LP, which was kept in the locker in Chicago. She had a bunch of the songs from the album on her phone, including that one, and it started to play on the radio.
Down the way where the nights are gay, and the sun shines daily on the mountain top, I took a trip on a sailing ship, And when I reached Jamaica, I made a stop
But I’m sad to say, I’m on my way, Won’t be back for many a day, My heart is down, my head is turning around, I had to leave a little girl in Kingston-town.
That, of course, took me back to a trip Rachel and I took, years ago, on a tramp freighter. We worked it for a couple of months, I think, but the part of that trip that stood out to me was the time we had in Kingston, Jamaica...
We’d been together for a while this time. We even had a farewell weekend, this time at the fascinating Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, a landmark architectural edifice which launched the entire architectural style of Miami Modern, or MiMo. But this time, somehow, as we were saying goodbye, we hesitated, embraced, and went in to Goldstein’s Prime Deli, and started plotting another way to make money.
It was early in our travels, 1989, and it was not the last time an intended end to our togetherness got prolonged. It was the first, and it was the longest. We ended up going into Miami itself, and got hired as seamen onboard a Caribbean tramp steamer called Marvelous Manatee, and off we went. I was hired as the assistant to the engineer, Rachel worked as the cook.
While we moved a lot of barrels between the United States and various Caribbean islands on the Marvelous Manatee, our main stock in trade was delivering boat loads of used American market cars to the islands. We generally returned with coffee, liquor, and fruits. The ship was quite old; I had initially thought it was a Liberty ship- it looked like one- but I know almost all of them were well out of service by 1989. The big diesels in the engine room were always needing work, hence why the owner- who was also the skipper- needed both an engineer and an assistant.
It took forever to load and unload the Marvelous Manatee, so our port calls were generally on the longer side. She was a slow ship- the reason it was named after the sea cow. Rachel and I shared a cabin, with fairly narrow bunk-beds, one of our conditions for hiring us. They wanted to hire us; we wanted $55 a day- for both of us. It, of course included room and board, so it was $55 in our pocket for use on whatever we wanted.
The Marvelous Manatee itself was about 600 feet long, 80 feet wide, with a draft of 31 feet. It was an older ship, unquestionably on its last legs. The budget for Rachel’s work as cook was quite small, and she mostly made things like stews and chowders. It wasn’t a luxurious life, but we were making decent money, and we were together.
My job was quite hard; the Marvelous Manatee had two gigantic Diesel engines, built by Caterpillar, they were extremely old, possibly original to the ship. They were so worn out, and in such poor shape, there was an odds on chance that we were only running on one of them. More than once, actually, we’d be dead in the water, running on neither. Fortunately, the water in the Caribbean is sufficiently calm that being dead in the water was usually not a safety issue.
But day or night when we were in transit, I was often called to assist with repairing the damned engines, the generators, the water maker, and a bunch of other systems that were well past their useful life.
I suspected the skipper bought the Marvelous Manatee for something close to scrap money, and was intent on trying to make a career as a tramp steamer with this bucket of bolts. The ship was almost 30 years old, rusty, creaky, and ready for the crusher. But it was a job.
Anyway, thats not really what this story is about. We pulled into Kingston harbor one morning, loaded with about 400 barrels for distribution on the island- barrels are a unit of shipping for people, and Jamaicans living in the United States often send barrels of items to their relatives in Jamaica, because products are much cheaper off the island than on. That’s true for many Caribbean countries.
The bulk of our cargo for the island was used automobiles from the American market. Clapped out big Chevies and Fords that would have trouble fetching $1-2000 on the American used market could sell for up to $7-8000 on the Jamaican market and we had a contract for carriage from an American-side buyer of used cars and a Jamaican-side operator of a car sales business. We had about 250 cars for this run. Our ship was not a Roll-on-roll-off ship; the cars had to be rigged, lifted out of the cargo compartment using one of the ship’s cranes, and swung over the side and laid on the quay. Since we were only ported on the port side, only two of our four cranes could be used, and it took time to rig them for pick up.
When we pulled in, our engines and systems were in fully functional form, for once, and the skipper gave Rachel and I the day off. While we had been taken to a few different Caribbean islands already on this trip, we had never been to Jamaica before. Anyway, we asked a local dock worker where we could experience a bit of local flavor, and he recommended the Kingston Crafts Market on Port Royal street. We walked out of the car quay, and turned right on Marcus Garvey Dr.
It was about a two mile walk; we didn’t want to spend our money on a local bus. The way the song describe’s Jamaica you would almost think that Kingston was some kind of shanty-town island city like one imagines in the poorer islands, like Haiti. Kingston, though, is mostly a modern city, with sky scrapers, a functioning and effective public transportation system, and the hallmarks of a successful former member of the British Empire.
However, it is also a city with an immense amount of crime; Jamaica has one of the highest murder rates in the world, just below Afghanistan, and right above Iraq. The illegal drug trade is a major factor. It is a major transit point for a variety of hard drugs, and remains a source for its prized Jamaican marijuana. In addition to the hard crimes, it also is a hotbed for the common Caribbean tourist island crimes: pick pocketing, confidence scams, fake merchandise, and sex trafficking.
As I mentioned before sex trafficking comes in a variety of flavors, and thus in a variety of levels of bothering me. If a woman, looking to make money, wishes to sell herself, of her own freewill, I have no problem with it; its not my kind of thing, but its also not my business. Organized businesses, it depends on the amount of freedom and protection the women (or men) working there have. Sex slavery, if it operates on a level where we feel we can do something about it, the operator might find they have a short life expectancy after meeting us.
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