Chapter 43

Dan went to the pizzeria early in the morning to make sure that everything had been done correctly the night before. The place was its usual sparkling clean, and nothing was out of place. He felt a thousand times better after just one good night’s sleep. He checked the sales figures and found that they had been good.

Dan started up his computer to enter his daily sales figures into it. He grumbled about the slowness of the machine as it started. He took the time to start a pot of coffee. Going back to the table, he started his business software and grumbled about how long it took to load. He went back to the pizza drink station and poured a cup of coffee.

After taking a long sip of hot coffee, Dan went to work with the bookkeeping aspect of his business. He entered the sales figure for the previous day and then brought up the sales record in a graph. The pizzeria was now averaging four hundred and seventy five dollars of business a day and the average was still climbing. He realized that within the first three months of business, he had passed his break even point and gone well beyond it. Considering that he wasn’t even paying himself minimum wage, the books looked really good.

After looking at the numbers for a few minutes, Dan went into the back kitchen to fetch his pad, on which he kept his business to-do list. He added an entry to call Mr. Harrison about his business. After adding the entry, he went to work making the pizza dough. It would take about half an hour to mix the ingredients and then he would have some extra time to get the rest of the store ready for opening.

Dan puttered around the pizzeria getting it ready to open. He took his time and enjoyed his work for a change. When he was finished, he went to the front of the store realizing that it was still twenty minutes to opening time. He stood at the front door and just took a moment to look at what he had created.

Feeling good about what he had accomplished, he said, “It sure is a nice little place.”

He went back to his computer and looked at the numbers. They were pretty good and he decided that he could afford to pay himself more than two hundred and fifty dollars a week. Idly, he brought up the calculator and punched in some values. When he hit the equals sign, he stared at the figure.

Sitting back in his chair, he said, “I’ve been working ninety-one hours a week? No wonder I’m tired.”

Shaking his head, he calculated how much he was earning an hour. Staring at the figure of $2.75 an hour, he said, “I definitely deserve a raise.”

The bell over the door rang as Vicki entered the pizzeria to start her work day. She dropped her stuff off in the back kitchen and went out to set up for the morning. The coffee was already made, but she started another pot. The pizza station was already set up for business. That little task usually took ten minutes of her time.

Vicki said, “You already got the ingredients out.”

“Yes, I got here a little early this morning. There’s not much for you to do,” Dan said with a smile.

Thinking that he was working too hard, she looked over at Dan ready to tell him that he needed to cut back a little from work. He looked a lot better than he had the previous morning.

She said, “You’re looking better today.”

“Thanks,” Dan said. He wondered how bad he had looked if just one good night’s sleep had such a remarkable impact on his appearance.

After looking around, Vicki didn’t see anything that required her attention. Having nothing better to do, she said, “I guess I’ll have a cup of coffee until we open.”

“Go ahead,” Dan said, knowing that at ten there would be a sudden line of people at the pizza station. A lot of the people working at the other stores in the strip mall came over at opening time for coffee. It was a brisk little bit of business that had caught Dan completely by surprise. For a while there was no business in the morning until someone had discovered that he had coffee. The next day there was a line of people waiting for him to open. He added a note to his to-do list to see if there was some sort of morning snack that he could add to the store to complement the coffee sales.

He brought up the work schedule on the computer and looked it over. it. While Wednesdays had started out as the worst night of the week for pizza sales, the pizza and movie concept had allowed him to increase the sales that night. He gave away a bottle of soda with each pizza that night if the person showed a bag with a movie rental. The manager of the movie place had told him that it had increased his Wednesday night rentals as well.

The next two slowest nights of the week were Tuesday and Thursday. Those were the nights that he was going to start taking off. That would be pretty easy with Sandra and Kevin working those two nights. Summer was coming and that meant that Tom would be back in town. He was looking forward to spending a couple of evenings talking with his friend. He wondered if it would be possible to take a Sunday or two off that summer to make it to the lake.

The door started ringing as people came in for cups of coffee. Most of them brought their own coffee cup. Dan looked up and went to the pizza station. As Vicki handled the purchases, he talked to the customers. It was a quick ten minutes of business, but it had added about twenty dollars to the day’s sales. Once the line had disappeared, he went back to work on the pizza dough.

As the machine kneaded the dough, he thought about the morning rush. He felt that he could actually double the sales if he found something that people would buy to complement their coffee. He wondered if they would like blueberry muffins. He’d have to investigate that possibility.

It was two o’clock in the afternoon when Sue stopped by the pizzeria. Dan looked up from his mopping and said, “Hello, Sue. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you.”

“Ann tells me that you haven’t been taking care of yourself,” Sue said dropping into a chair near where he was working.

Dan nodded his head and said, “I’m going to do a little better about that from now on.”

“Somehow I don’t believe that,” Sue said with a smile. She remembered the night when he had worked despite being so sick that he couldn’t see straight.

“I’ve scheduled two nights off a week,” Dan said. He looked around the room and realized that he had only mopped half of the room. Deciding that the other half could wait, he put the mop aside and went over to the table where Sue was seated.

Sue shook her head and said, “So I guess that means you’ll only be working a hundred hours a week instead of a hundred and twenty.”

Dan laughed at the comment about how many hours he was working. The truth was that he had been a little surprised by how much he had been working. He said, “No. It takes me down to seventy five hours a week.”

“That’s sick,” Sue said with a sad shake of her head. Of course, she wasn’t one to talk. When she was really into her art she would work that many hours in a week.

“Well, I’m trying,” Dan said shrugging his shoulders.

Sue smiled at him and said, “Try harder.”

“Okay,” Dan said. It was actually good advice. He said, “I gave myself a raise.”

“Oh, how much?”

“I doubled my salary,” Dan answered. He figured that five hundred dollars a week wouldn’t kill the pizzeria. It would still be profitable at the current sales level.

“Twice nothing is still nothing,” Sue said thinking that her financial situation had changed significantly since she had met Dan. The demand for her artwork had skyrocketed and she was now selling paintings for twenty thousand dollars each. She still wasn’t able to keep up with the demand.

“It’s not that bad. So what brings you out this way?” Dan asked.

“Two things. I was worried about you, and there’s a little place not too far from here that I was thinking about buying,” Sue answered. She was planning on moving out of her apartment into a house with a separate building in the back for a studio.

“You’re moving?” Dan asked surprised.

“Well, my artwork is really selling, and I have to do something with the money I’m making,” Sue said. The taxes were about to kill her since she didn’t have that many business expenses. She didn’t have to pay for models, either, as they paid her.

“I’m glad to hear that things are going well for you,” Dan said.

Sue shrugged her shoulders and said, “They are going well. It turns out that I’m very popular among the corporate crowd. They like to hang real portraits of themselves in the lobbies of their buildings.”

“After your picture of Kim, I’d think that they’d be afraid that you’d show the avarice in their faces,” Dan said.

Sue laughed and said, “Well, there have been one or two commissions that I turned down because I just didn’t like the people. Most of the businessmen that I meet are actually pretty nice people.”

“I thought you believed that big business was the root of all evil,” Dan said.

Sue shrugged her shoulders and said, “There are a few sharks out there that that give the rest of the businessmen bad reputations. They leave a swath of destruction behind that takes good honest men years to correct.”

“I imagine that you’re right,” Dan said. So far the most powerful businessmen that Dan had met were Mr. Derkins and Mr. Foreman. He thought that both of them were good men.

Sue shrugged her shoulders and asked, “So how is your business going? Will I be painting your portrait for an office lobby anytime soon?”

“The business is doing well, but I doubt that I’ll ever be a corporate type,” Dan answered.

“You never know,” Sue said.

Dan said, “Ann’s business has really picked up. She’s done four murals since that article in the New York paper came out.”

“Yes, she was telling me that,” Sue said. Ann had gone from barely scraping by to actually earning a decent living almost overnight. She was charging fifty dollars a square foot for a mural. A ten foot section of a wall was four thousand dollars. It sounded rather expensive put that way, but it was actually a bargain. She’d like to see someone purchase an eight foot by ten foot canvas painting for that price.

Knowing that Sally and Ann had been talking about moving into a house before Alison returned for the summer, Dan was interested in Sue’s plans to move. He asked, “Where are you thinking of moving to?”

“There’s a place about three miles from here that looks like it will be perfect. I’m going to go home and think about it before I make an offer,” Sue said.

It was a middle class residence in a typical middle class development, but she had liked the house. She had really liked the mother-in-law house that had been built in the back. It would make a perfect studio after a few modifications.

“Maybe I’ll see you more often,” Dan said.

Sue laughed thinking about how busy both of them had become since the beginning of the year. She said, “I understand that Sally and Ann are thinking of moving.”

“Yes,” Dan said, “They wanted to move before Alison comes back from school, but I don’t think it’s going to happen that quickly. Alison is returning in a week.”

Sue shook her head. She was still trying to figure out that relationship. She’d be able to understand it if Alison was bisexual, but she wasn’t. What kind of relationship consisted of two bisexual women, a straight woman, and a straight man? She didn’t know and figured that the relationship didn’t stand much of a chance of succeeding. That was particularly true when the straight woman lived separate from the other three.

She said, “It takes a bit more than a week to move into a new house.”

“I know,” Dan said. He wasn’t looking forward to moving. The effort of moving on top of the work of running a business, required a bit more energy than he had at the moment. He wasn’t quite sure why Ann and Sally wanted to move before Alison returned from school. As far as he knew, there was no chance of her moving in with them.

The pair talked for almost an hour. Sue told him about how Pat and Sally were doing. She brought him up to date on Cathy and Jennifer. The time spent with Sue reminded Dan how much he missed visiting with his friends. After she left, he thought about how he was going to have to make time for Alison and Tom over the summer.

He didn’t have much time to think about it. He had to get the pizzeria ready for the after school rush and he was behind in getting the pizza dough made for the evening. On top of that, he remembered that he was supposed to train Sandra on how to cook the pizzas.

Sandra had come into work ready to learn how to cook pizza. Having worked at the pizza station for months, she already had a good idea what was required. It didn’t take her long to get into the rhythm of cooking and Dan was very pleased with her progress. It was hard to beat her enthusiasm.