I asked Marisol if she could get some tea or something for the ladies, and Marisol said she wasn’t the hired help, which technically, she is, but I guess she meant she wasn’t the kind of hired help that got tea for anyone but me, and she hauled her enormously pregnant body off the couch and stomped off.
It was Dad who came back with the tea, and by that I mean he showed up with the Rubbermaid pitcher in one hand, and some stacked plastic cups in the other hand. Maybe it’s just me, but is it too much to ask that we show some decent hosting skills from time to time?
Anyway, I was right in the middle of telling the Methodists that I really need a new van, because my bread delivery truck breaks down a lot and I can’t rely on it to get me to my important doctor appointments when Dad came in and he was like, “Whaaaat? What are you talking about Leo, you’ve never missed a doctor’s appointment because of that van.” And I said, “Dad, don’t help me,” but he was on a roll, and he said, “That van has two hundred and fifty thousand miles on it, and she’ll go another fifty, sixty thousand before we run into any big repairs. Hell, you can take that van down to Old Mexico and they’ll get another fifty thousand miles after that. They don’t make ’em like that anymore.”
And then he sort of chuckled, like try and top that one, like he was super proud of the van for having that kind of mileage, and I ask you, in what other instance would a man be proud his old girl had that many miles on her? Which I pointed out to him not too long ago, along with the suggestion he sell the van for parts, and of course Dad got offended. “She’s managed to cart your tush around, hasn’t she?”
I’ll tell you right now, I don’t care if he gets all new insides for that van, I am not arriving at Mile High Stadium in that. I need wheels, and I need them bad, and I swear if I could use my hands, I would have given Dad the Vulcan death grip then and there.
Of course after his speech, no one said anything. Debbie and Barbara looked at each other like they were trying to figure out what to do, but then Gwen said, “That’s a lot of miles, Mr. Kendrick. Maybe if Leo got a new van, you could keep that one around for backup.”
I didn’t know if she meant that she was worried another one of us might get MND, or if she thought a new van would break down a lot, but I didn’t care. I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to kiss her before she said anything, but then when she said that, I wanted to kiss her times ten.
“That’s what I was thinking,” I said, which is not what I was thinking at all, I was thinking about sex, and I said, “Do you have any ideas how to get one?”
Sometimes, you have to lead the horse to water.
Gwen got this little wrinkle between her brows like she was thinking super hard, and she looked really cute, and I could see why Ryan would want her back, although Libby is no slouch in the looks department, but you know how it is, one man’s gorgeous is another man’s meh. Gwen said, “Well, I think a fundraiser. Because those vans are expensive . . . aren’t they?”
You don’t want to know how expensive they are. The problem is the kind of van I need isn’t your average minivan. It’s got to have a lift, so me and my chair can slide right into the back like a rodeo bull into a chute, and then there has to be a way to secure the chair.
I said, “Yeah, they’re a little more than you’d think,” because I didn’t want to shock them, but maybe I should have said something a little more informative, because Deb said, “We could have a bake sale!”
We’re talking at least fifty grand, and that is going to require a lot of muffins. But Gwen got it, because she said, “or maybe a series of bake sales and some other fundraisers.”
“What about a fall festival event?” I asked them, because the wheels were already turning. “We could do one of those dunk tanks.” I laughed at this.
But Barbara gasped like she was going to have a heart attack. “Leo! We can’t put you in a dunk tank!”
I think it would be totally awesome to be able to sit on that little metal seat and then fall into the water, especially since I haven’t actually been in a bath or a pool in like, forever. But I know none of the Dudley Do-Rights in this room are going to let me, probably because I couldn’t bring myself back to the surface and there would be a lot of concern about liability and drowning, and blah blah blah. “No, I agree,” I said. “But we can put Dad in the dunk tank.”
They all laughed, but I was totally serious.
Anyway, we hammered out some great ideas, most of them mine, because that’s what I do: I think. And when the Methodists left, we’d agreed to form a fundraising committee, and I was feeling pretty good, even if we didn’t know who would be on the committee.
But when Marisol was hosing me down later, she said, “You use these Methodists, Leonard. They want to do good, and you use them.”