WAFFLES

IT’S SATURDAY. I got my phone in my pocket and I’m running for the door, trying to slip out like always.

But Ginny’s standing at the stove.

In my way.

She’s got one hand on a hip, a spatula waving in the other. Her bluish-white hair wrapped in pink curlers to match her pink sweatsuit.

She’s damned perky at seven in the morning.

“Waffles?”

The knee-jerk no is about to hit my lips. Then I think about eating dinner with Luis and his mom. And I can’t say no to Ginny.

So I sit.

In a second, she’s got a hot waffle on my plate. The waffle is great but Ginny’s smiling and bouncing around in her squeaky tennis shoes, asking all these questions about my new friend.

“It’s just a project for school,” I say. “No big deal.”

That gets her even more excited.

“A project? Really? That’s wonderful, Samuel! Tell me all about it!”

I can’t stand all the positivity, so I bolt. I jump up and set my dish in the sink. “Thanks for the waffle.”

I head out. But I don’t get anywhere.

I gotta go back inside.

I gotta not be an ass.

I poke my head in. Ginny says, “You back for lunch?”

“Yeah,” I say. “We put in a good five seconds of work and now I’m starving. You got a sandwich?”

“I got a knuckle sandwich, sonny.”

“No thanks. How about another waffle?”

“There you’re in luck.”

I grab my dish out of the sink and by the time I’m sitting at the table, Ginny’s got another waffle ready to go. She takes a seat and I ask her the question.

“What did you and Grandpa Bill do at Boeing?”

“Where did that come from?”

“Just curious, I guess.”

“And did you want to know if I was single when I started out on the assembly line?”

“What?”

“Because I was. And I was a real looker back then.”

“Okay, but what did you do?”

“I would let these couple of curls dangle down below the bill of my hardhat, and your grandfather, a strapping young buck working the crane, would see me walk in every day. He could view the whole factory from up on his perch. He kept an eye on me for months before he had the guts to ask me out for lunch. But he did it. He finally asked me out.”

After a while, she explains that she used to check welds and rivets where the sections of the airplane’s body—the fuselage—came together. It was her job to make sure that the welders didn’t miss any spots and the riveters didn’t screw up any rivets. Bill was the one moving those massive fuselage parts around the factory so folks could put them together. That was pretty much what they did for about forty years of their working lives. That and apparently flirt enough to make everyone in the Renton Boeing plant sick to their stomachs.

“I gotta get going now. Thanks.”

“No problem. Thanks for the chat.”